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spiritual (or existential) vacuum in which God is simply absent. It is
within this spiritual vacuum that nineteenth century naturalism arose and
helped push Christianity aside. Unquestionably, it is this vacuum that
contributed to the rise of the Third Reich and the Communist states. This
vacuum helped set the stage for existential philosophers like Martin
Heidegger, who argues that within the context of a universe without
order, meaning, or God, one can live a truly meaningful life only when
one recognizes that all life moves toward annihilation. Dr. Viktor E.
Frankel, Holocaust survivor and author of Man’s Search for Ultimate
Meaning, certainly has this existential wasteland in mind when he
comments,
[T]he fact remains that in America the existential
vacuum is more manifest than in Europe. As I see it, this
is due to the exposure of the average American student
to an indoctrination along the lines of reductionism. To
cite an instance, there is a book in which man is defined
as “nothing but a complex bio-chemical mechanism
powered by a combustion system which energizes
computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining
encoded information” (96-97).
And it is this vacuum in which the characters of Breaking Bad seem to be
living.
Consider the implications of living in a world in which the
human being has been reduced to nothing more than a bio-chemical
mixture and a world in which God is absent. In the apparent absence of
the moral absolutes and eventual Judgment associated with God, why
shouldn’t Walt White allow Jesse’s heroine-shooting girlfriend Jane
Margolis to choke to death on her own vomit — particularly if Jane
stands in the way of Walt’s continued partnership with Jesse? The after
effects, most notably the mid-air collision that rains human debris down
on his own house (including two bodies), may occasion Walt some grief
and a twinge of guilt, but if there is no God, if heaven and hell do not
exist, then surely Walt is right when he assures the school assembly that
things could have been worse and that the best thing anyone can do is
simply move on (“No Mas” 3.01). And if there is no God, if there is no
meaning or order to the universe, why shouldn’t Walt White use any
means at his disposal — and this, of course, includes living a lie to the
fullest and killing almost anyone who stands in his way — to build a
rather short-lived empire that the series’ writers compare to the world of
Ozymandius, the ancient king who built his kingdom oblivious to the fact
that both he and his empire must perish and be forgotten?