Better Call Saul...For?

It takes a lot to ruin multi-hour genius in the last five minutes.

You can’t spell Mephistopheles without Mephistopheles.

I’d been given an address and a time. Communications prior to the meeting were scant but one thing that was certainly for certain: on some Thursday in September I’d be interviewing Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. After being warned by all and sundry that this was a karmically questionable move that would put me at great risk of, if not actual danger, then at least, spiritual danger, I pushed ahead.

With photographer in tow, I steered a 1967 Chevy that had been emblazoned with the legend ARMAGEDDON ENTERPRISES across the trunk through a misty San Francisco night, finally pulling up and parking at some hillside redoubt and there was no question in my mind: this was the most right of places to be. Specifically, to unravel the mysteries of evil.

Standing in his sunken living room, LaVey padded up behind me on stocking feet for an entrance that was designed to be…theatrical. I laughed, having appreciated the gesture, and with a hale and hearty handshake began an association that lasted until he died.

But there was also this: when we discussed evil, or Evil, or “EVIL”, or any variation thereof we stumbled on a disconnect.

“I’ll tell you what evil is,” he said. “Evil is what doesn’t feel good!”

Not wanting to be disrespectful but fully engaged now in the search of and for this….thing, I pushed.

“A root canal doesn’t feel good but is it evil?”

We went back and forth but I persisted until he copped.

“Well, I’m an atheist, you know,” here following Lou Reed who when asked to explain a particularly difficult career turn to Terry Gross shrugged and said, “hey…I’m just trying to make the rent.”

I was feeling a Munch-like revulsion for show creator Vince Gilligan, the Hays Code, slave moralities and the life American, complete with its electrifying hypocrisy…

So: fine.

But after watching the entire Breaking Bad series, after reading an endorsement by none other than Sir Anthony Hopkins, star of my favorite ventriloquist gone mad flick Magic (“Presto change-o Now He is ME!”), and then following it up with the following offshoots, lastly all of Better Call Saul, I find myself raging against a moral framework and some film work that feels fundamentally and majorly dishonest to me.

In other circumstances I’d let this pass like I let Scorsese’s ham-handed treatment with the running rat on the balcony at the end of The Departed, never a more film-destroying moment than that sop for the feeble — “get it? Get it? Well…oh wait. There’s the RAT! Noooowww I get it!” — but this I can’t. That was two hours and 31 minutes of my life. This Breaking Bad franchise was five seasons, 62 episodes, a sequel film El Camino and Better Call Saul that just finished its six season run.

[SPOILER ALERT: STOP NOW IF YOU’VE NOT SEEN THE END OF SEASON 6]

At war here, in macro terms, is a struggle, very possibly THE struggle between good and more than bad, evil. If the word “evil” makes you philosophically uncomfortable because of its inevitable existence in a moral framework, that’s OK. Like porn and Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s take that he knew it when he saw it, we don’t have to know how to describe it to know what it is. Evil, that is.

Despite my back and forth with LaVey, the closest I got was courtesy of historian Christopher Browning during a discussion at Stanford where he characterized evil as a delight in deliberate cruelty and cited Hitler’s Table Talk recordings as this in action. Hitler’s jokey wordplay around the extirpation of European Jewry is stomach turning in a way that Eichmann’s workmanlike recitation in Jerusalem was not.

Because it speaks of a different level of ownership.

So when one of my favorite stand-up comedians Bob Odenkirk, the titular Saul Goodman, née Jimmy McGill, at the end of the last episode of the last season chooses to cleanse himself in an 86-year-jail sentence over the seven year sentence he had scammed himself toward as an auto-da-fé, or auto-da-love, for his ex-wife, I was feeling a Munch-like revulsion for show creator Vince Gilligan, the Hays Code, slave moralities and the life American, complete with its electrifying hypocrisy around “morality” and yeah, evil.

“The problem is you view ‘morality’ as a trap that makes you vulnerable to immorality,” said my wife. “But extolling the ‘virtues’ of the baselessly criminal because they are not ‘tricked’ by being good is maybe a little…wrong.”

At least I think that’s what she said. I can’t be sure because I was thinking about Yossarian from Catch-22, a book I think about more often than I should.

“From now on I'm thinking only of me."

Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: "But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way."

"Then," said Yossarian, "I'd certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?”

LaVey finally said to me about his grift and his commitment to it: “there’ll be no death bed conversions here,” he grumbled. “Satan help you if it was just that easy.”

We don’t violate any of the religious edicts against “immoral” actions and activities because they have any real intrinsic value. We don’t fuck each other’s spouses willy-nilly because it destabilizes society. So there is a social utility but don’t try to sell me on it being morally superior. But this is coming from a man who believed Paris from the Odyssey was a character of heroic dimensions. He may not have been but what he was? The cat who killed the good, beautiful and true Achilles. So much for superiority.

So excuse me if I believe that Saul Goodman’s final about-face just serves a feel-good function for those “Yeah, but” types who bemoan the normative power of motion pictures and encourage these such like departures from the real on account of a belief that it causes bad behavior. Movies with this kind of canned reality don’t change us. We can and do change them, by being as we are for real, and we can do so honestly and dishonestly, and this last five minutes of all of the time invested in Gilligan’s island of characters and rogues, feels like a concession to, and here’s that word again, the feeble.

Disagree? OK.

Ask yourself the following for shits and giggles though: how would Nietzsche have completed it? Or Genet? Or Jung?

And since this is my spiel, what about ME?

Much simpler to answer. In the great divide between true belief and cynical opportunism, I hold truck with the latter. Not that it’s better. Just more common. Also, quiet belief in your true self and the elemental nature of that thing that you are seems the highest calling to me. Which is why we don’t arrest tigers for murder.

So, in my world, Saul takes the seven-years, lives with how badly he’s disappointed his ex, and like Sylvester with Tweety Bird, continues his doomed chase in the same way that Dante predicted we all would…straight to hell.

Or like LaVey finally said to me about his grift and his commitment to it: “there’ll be no death bed conversions here,” he grumbled. “Satan help you if it was just that easy.”