Dexter, Breaking Bad, and the Underbelly of the American Dream

I like television shows where messed up people do good things in bad ways. Lately, however, I’ve been more interested in the cultural fascination with stories featuring Machiavellian protagonists. See, I’m not the only one who likes Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Godfather, The Sopranos, and several other shows where the hero has no problem bending or breaking moral rules when it’s expedient. I’m also not the only Christian. I have brothers in Christ who quote The Godfather with sanguine glee, reminding me to keep my friends close but my enemies closer.

We dig these stories for many reasons. When we see Dexter chopping a serial killer up into little pieces, it satisfies a longing for justice. When Walter White pays his medical bills and provides for his family with the half mil he made after a few days of cooking crystal meth, it satisfies our longing for security and self-determination. We get a little healthy sublimation from these stories. But I think they also teach us something about our cultural values that isn’t quite so healthy.

About ten years ago, I got my first job with a bona fide middle-class salary. I was single at the time, so it felt like I’d hit the jackpot. I went to the grocery store and, for the first time in my life, bought whatever I wanted without looking at the price.

About three months into the job, my supervisor called me into her office along with a couple of my colleagues.

“You’re not going to believe the good news I just heard,” she said. She proceeded to tell us with a toothy grin that our biggest competitor didn’t have enough cash to play their employees.

“How cool!” I said. It felt completely normal to rejoice at the fact that hundreds of people wouldn’t be getting paid. Failure for them meant success for us and, since it was all about the money, celebration felt appropriate.

That night I went home and drank twice as much bourbon as usual. The next morning, I looked at my hungover mug in the mirror and said, “What were you thinking?” I was talking about the job, not the booze. I quit three weeks later.

Though I learned how to shoot when I was still in elementary school, I had vowed never to buy a gun. Statistics show that someone is much more likely to get hurt by a gun in the house than a criminal breaking into the house. But the week my kids were born, I started looking online for the best place to buy a pump-action shotgun. The birth of my children awakened both a love and ferocity I had never felt before.  The prospect of someone breaking in at night and threatening my fragile children gave me an unflinching willingness to blow a hole in another human being.

The look on my wife’s face when I shared my plans to buy a shotgun brought me back to myself. What was I thinking?

In 2008, a major Christian publisher released my memoir, Assaulted by Joy: The Redemption of a Cynic. Since a portion of the book is about having quadruplets, I was hoping to capitalize on the public’s growing fascination of multiples. To my horror and outrage, the publisher released Jon and Kate Gosselin’s Multiple Blessings the exact same week that they did my book. This was before Jon became a playboy and Kate became a pariah. You get one guess at who snagged the multiple-birth chunk of the market.

I told all my friends to go on Amazon and write a review of Jon and Kate’s book that said mine was better. A few of them did. It made absolutely no difference, but I felt justified in trying to screw Jon and Kate if it meant I got my market share. I feel slimy about it now.

What was I thinking?

I was thinking something I’ve been taught my entire life: survival of the fittest. I’ve been taught it at home, at school, and at church. We’ve all heard the same message, and we all fall for it. We’ve learned that security and safety means someone else has to suffer sometimes. What most of us didn’t learn is that such expediency whittles away our humanity.

Dexter, Walter White, Tony Soprano, and Michael Corleone represent the underbelly of the American dream. We route for them because a part of us has bought the same load of Darwinian bullshit: everything is okay as long as you do it to protect your family. But “protecting” no longer means survival; it means ensuring a comfortable future. When we forget who we are and Whose we are, it’s easy to let the ends justify the means. Whenever we circle the wagons and screw our neighbor in order to purchase some peace of mind, we lose a little bit of our souls. That’s the lesson all these dark heroes teach us. None of the men in these stories are happy. None of them are whole. Their power and craftiness serve them only in the short run. That’s what I need to remember, even as my selfish side cheers them on. The means, not the ends, make us who we are.