Yesterday I wrote a short response to Anna Gunn‘s New York Times Op-Ed about the negative reaction to the Skyler White character on Breaking Bad. I want to add a couple of points to that today.
Some of the adverse reaction to Skyler finds its grounding in her instantiation of an archetype that I alluded to yesterday: the domestication, and hence taming, of the artist. Walter White is an auteur, a maven who marries science and art to produce the purest crystal meth possible, who worries incessantly, and proudly, about the quality of his ‘product.’ This is a man obsessed, like all good artists are, about whether his vision has been realized, who is capable of endless ‘revision’ and ‘drafting’ to get things to come out just right. His pride may be his downfall, as in when he cannot stop himself from bragging to Hank about how Gale was a mere child compared to Heisenberg, but it is a justified pride: his work is just that damn good. Skyler, however, is no such thing. Remember that in the first season we are told that she writes short stories and sells items on Ebay. The former activity marks her not as creative but as delusional, like all those people who imagine they will write the next Great American Novel, the latter as a not particular edifying combination of a hustler and parasite. Later she becomes book-keeper for Beneke Fabricators.
The contrast is clear: in one corner, creativity, innovation and enterprise, in the other, dull, stodgy, mundane beancounting. And more significantly, the brilliant male artist, bought to heel by the cackling, nagging, domesticity of the home and hearth, his rising star brought back to earth by the dead weight of the home. An old joke has it that one mathematician wrote to his colleague after his marriage, ‘Congratulations, you can do more mathematics now’, but in general, the received wisdom is that the artist’s work suffers after marriage. He is called away from his easel, his desk, because of the calls from the kitchen and the nursery. Skyler is thus the sand in the wheels for Walter’s artistry; she gets in the way of his work. she prevents him from realizing his potential. We are invited to see her as a millstone and barrier.
There is an interesting visual grammar to the contrast drawn between Skyler and Walter. As the show progresses, Walter becomes sharper: he loses his hair, starts dressing in black, speaks with gritted teeth, delivers his lines with barely controlled violence, and his actions follow a trajectory of decreasing compromise (like all good artists’!). His rough edges are smoothed, he becomes menacing, not just in his deeds, but in his appearance as well. Compared to him, Skyler appears rooted in the ordinary. indeed, for a while, she is visibly weighed down with pregnancy, viewed here not as fertility, but rather, as a symbol of the artist’s enslavement.
It is little wonder Skyler provokes such visceral reactions; her character carries the burden of many pernicious tropes.
Samir Chopra 