So under the heading of "a rich pretty woman is complaining, therefore this must be a real problem" the Old Gray Mare Lady has granted editorial space to an actress to whine that her character (a money-launderer, an inattentive & unfaithful spouse, and a raging hypocrite) is not well-liked. And she is upset that, as happens all the time, fans have projected and conflated the character and the actor. Funny how no one complained about that when Christian Bale swanned around acting like Mr Relevant or something in Aurora, Colorado after the shooting. This has long, long been known to be a phenomenon of the acting industry. If you don't want people confusing you with your character, don't be an actor. Maybe she should try having a regular job like just about everyone else does, and labor under the impression of the general public that she doesn't matter. Somehow, I have a hard time believing that anyone who goes into the acting industry and works as hard as she must have to get into TV would be satisfied with that level of indifference and inattention.

But be that as it may, as a fan of Breaking Bad, and a bemused viewer of the other major work on Ms. Gunn's CV, Deadwood, I am kind of disappointed. My problem with her piece is that she commits two egregious, obnoxious and all-too-familiar errors that I often encounter with fans. Firstly, she mistakes characterization, and secondly, she commits two intellectual fallacies of dismissing all criticism by attributing non-apparent motives to said critics and projecting attitudes on perfect strangers, based on their reactions to a TV show. I have certainly encountered my share of the sort of bullshit Gunn is peddling, on the WoT boards. Obviously the only reason I could dislike Egwene, or a viewer could dislike Skyler White, is sexism. We have problems with strong women, you see. Never mind that I don't believe this myself, based on my superior knowledge of me, but I think I have more than made my bones with my defense of other female characters, often on the ground of their having actually done stuff compared to Egwene. So I just want to address a couple of things Gunn claims. I'm not going to go into the sexism of viewers or whatever, because unlike Gunn, I am aware of the limitations of my ability to guess the motivations for what people do or say. But let's look at some of the things she has to say about her character:

Not so much. She does not consistently oppose Walt out of morality. In fact, she is kind of a parallel, a Walter-Lite as it were. The writer of the show contributes to a certain misunderstanding of Walt by often stating that the story being told is the transformation of "Mr. Chips into Scarface." Walter is ostensibly a meek, mild good guy who transforms into a bad guy over the course of the show, and Gunn even helps this idea along in her description of Walt as getting into the drug-cooking business to help his family. On the contrary, the implication with the character is that his criminal persona, often referred to in critical discussion as "Heisenberg" for his criminal alias, has always been a part of him, that he has always had a towering pride, and deeply repressed arrogance and fury over perceived or invented slights. Walter's cancer diagnosis is less of a catalyst than an immunity from consequences, a "get out of jail free" card which allows him to finally give vent to that side of his nature.

The show is careful to torpedo the rationalizations for his criminality early on by having alternative means to fund his cancer treatments arise. It is clear that Walt is living the criminal life because he wants to, because he enjoys it or likes how it makes him feel.

And long before Skyler finds out about Walter, she was already in the red when it came to her characterization. A large part of Walt's delight in "breaking" out of his shell is due to how Skyler and her family treat him - not abusively or cruelly, but dismissively. Walt is clearly an afterthought in the dynamic of the family, Skyler and her sister barely paying attention to him, and her brother-in-law asserting himself as the dominant male of the group. At home, Skyler's idea of a special 50th birthday treat is to grope Walt perfunctorily beneath the covers with one hand, while the other hand and her conscious attention, are focused on an E-bay auction. What attention she can spare for Walt is mainly focused on passively complaining about a chore she wants him to do, and then mocking his inability to be aroused by a middle-aged pregnant woman half-buried in blankets & nagging him. She gives short shrift to his own expressed interests, plainly utterly bored by his speculation about visiting a science exhibit at a museum, and everything she does for “him” for his birthday is plainly what she wants to do, rather than what he wants. She serves him unappetizing “veggie bacon” in the shape of the number 50 (his age). She demands he be home from his two jobs by a certain hour, nagging at him to confront his boss if necessary…so she can throw him a surprise party he clearly does not want or enjoy. And then, there is the combination hand-job / nag-fest, where Walt’s enjoyment takes a backseat to her e-Bay auction, getting a room painted or the opportunity to make wisecracks about his lack of arousal. And when he asks if she is up for intercourse, initially believing the manual-stimulation is mere foreplay, she quickly shoots him down, having the gall to say “tonight is just for you”. In other words, the “tuggie” is all he is going to get, as far as birthday sex goes.

And the idea that this dynamic whereby Skyler dominates their marriage is supported by lots of little details in the early episodes. An interesting datum offered is that Skyler originally quit her job as a bookkeeper claiming she could not stand the fumes in the plant where she worked, four years before the show starts. The fumes story was a lie, and she apparently gave Walt and her sister two different reasons for her quitting, neither of which tracks with what we see of her on-the-job behavior. Meanwhile, Walt who is already a full-time teacher, in the pilot episode, quits his second job at a car wash. Later on Skyler mentions that he worked there for four years – just about the same amount of time she has been unemployed. Apparently, Skyler can quit her job for frivolous reasons, that are not followed up, and Walt gets a second job with humiliating personal encounters and manual labor to pick up the financial slack – and on his days off, he is expected to paint the bedroom for their unborn baby, and follow Skyler’s demands for how he deals with his boss, so that her plans are not upset.

After Walt reveals his cancer diagnosis to the family, Skyler tries to take control and dictate his responses and handling of his situation. She passive-aggressively tries to make her solicitous care of her husband the narrative, and is very unsympathetic to his attempts to ostensibly deal with his problems in his own way. In truth, for a lot of analysis in the first couple of seasons, Skyler benefits from dramatic irony. Her suspicion and "nagging" of Walt are largely excused because the viewers know Walt is up to no good and off cooking crystal meth, and thus Skyler is "right" to be on his case.

Except there is no basis for her behavior. An argument could be made that as his wife she has certain expectations of reciprocal honesty, except it is fairly well established that the Whites' marriage is not of that sort. Before he was a cancer victim, Skyler was largely either indifferent to Walt's needs or interests, or was under the impression that what she wanted was what both of them wanted.

When Walt is abducted by a drug dealer, he excuses his absence by feigning a fugue state brought on by the stress of his situation, which is supported by medical professionals. Yet, Skyler reacts to this in a passive-aggressively punitive manner, repeatedly leaving the house and making a point of not telling Walt where she is going. Again, the viewers know that Walt is in the wrong and has no moral ground on which to stand, but Skyler doesn't! She acts as she does solely out of pique that Walt doesn’t check in constantly with her, and apparently has better things to do than attend on her whims or suffer her sympathy.

You can claim that she was acting on intuition or instinct, that her long association with Walt is telling her that there is something off about his behavior or that he is not telling her the truth. And that would be fine and plausible, and it complete sabotages any sympathy for Skyler. If she is really so attuned to Walt and his ways, then she has not been ignorant of his on-going unhappiness, she has merely been indifferent! She can tell that he is lying about his fugue state and need for solitude, but she missed that he was not enjoying his birthday party one bit, that he was not satisfied or touched by her "romantic" overtures, that he has been going around for years in a miserable, repressed state? Yeah, right. Skyler is the inversion of the classic narrative of a husband or child feigning illness out of envy of the attention being accorded his pregnant wife or mother. Her suspicions only kick in when his cancer becomes the big medical news in the family, and pushes her to second fiddle.

When Walt’s independence becomes too much for her to bear, Skyler calls a family meeting to discuss Walt's attitude and behavior regarding his cancer. She ambushes him with the other members of the family all lined up to remonstrate with him, and forcing him to sit and hear their complaints (because the 15 year old son should have a say in how his father confronts a terminal illness ). When the actual cancer patient is finally afforded a chance to speak on the topic of dealing with HIS illness and HIS imminent death, Skyler becomes affronted when he sways her sister and brother-in-law to support his position. And again, this is a case where the viewers are aware that Walt is not quite presenting his position honestly, but his case is plausible and not entirely untrue. But it's not the response Skyler wanted, so she storms off, apparently forgetting the dictate that everyone should listen respectfully and hear each other out.

When Skyler finally catches a discrepancy in Walt's excuses and begins backtracking various other stories and exposing his lies, she waits until he has recovered from surgery to remove the cancer, then packs a bag, tells him she is staying with her sister for a few days with the kids and she expects him to be moved out when she returns.

That is the kind of behavior Gunn characterizes as "standing up to Walt". This is how Skyler opposes him. She might make cutting remarks, she might make demands of him, but she doesn't actually confront anything directly. The character arc of her introduction to his criminal life is one of an entitled person being forced to reassess her presumed superiority.

And like her husband, Skyler is shown to be controlling, manipulative and so sure of her superiority that she engages in self-destructive behavior because she doesn't stop to think that anyone could behave in any manner but what she wants. Like Walt, she throws away the legitimacy of her excuse for entry into the criminal world. Just as Walt turned down an offer from wealthy friends and former colleagues to pay for his treatments, Skyler eventually turns down the opportunity to excise her drug-dealing husband from her life and that of their children on a similarly flimsy excuse, motivated by pride.

When Walt has enough of her keeping his kids away from him and attempting to dictate the terms of their separation, he simply moves back into his house. Her attempt to have the police remove him founders on her lack of legal grounds to do so. When the responding officer pleads with her to share even a suspicion of wrongdoing, because that would be sufficient to remove Walt, she refuses. Later she brings up the issue with her divorce lawyer who lays out in detail the legal moves she can make and how Skyler herself doesn't need to do anything other than give the attorney the go-ahead to obtain a same-day restraining order. She refuses, not wanting the embarrassment of his actions coming to light, saying that she hopes the cancer will solve the problem without her having to do anything. At that point, she has forfeited any real sympathy for her predicament.

Shortly before the truth about Walt’s drug career comes out, Skyler gets rehired as a bookkeeper at a firm where she had previously been employed. It soon becomes clear that she left four years before after a flirtation with her married boss, Ted Benneke, was taken too far. Walt is under the impression that she couldn't stand the working conditions, her sister believes that she quit to evade sexual harassment, but the friendly rapport she has with Ted, the alleged harasser, belies that, as does her imitation of Marilyn Monroe at Ted's birthday party, which had apparently been a hit among their coworkers during her last period of employment. She keeps up the flirtations, including dropping things when Ted walks by her office, so he'll come in and help her. She comes in on Saturday, wearing a low-cut top, making excuses to be seeing Ted that are as flimsy and transparent as any Walt makes for his clandestine activity. Around the time she finds out about Walt's drug dealing, she also discovers that Ted is cooking the books and falsifying the financial records of his own company. She listens to his rationalizations about protecting his family and company, in a clear parallel to Walt's situation, but when Walt cannot be convinced to adjust his life according to her demands, she sleeps with Ted just to spite Walt.

Whatever you want to say about Walt's activities, he certainly never did anything with the intention of hurting Skyler. He might have been arrogant enough to think there would be no consequences, or indifferent to the reality of them, but he is never remotely suggested to have come as close to infidelity as Skyler has in the past. Any action taken overtly against Skyler is in the aftermath of this chain of behavior. Not justified, but then nothing he does justifies her actions either, particularly after her rejection of a legal solution to the problems Walt brings to her door.

Next Skyler intrudes herself into the plans of Walt and his lawyer to launder the money he has made from his drug business. Not only does she (hypocritically) demand to be involved, she cites her accounting expertise, only to subsequently go online to read the Wikipedia entry on Money Laundering, disproving her claim of knowledge. In lieu of the cover business ventures suggested by the lawyer, she settles on the car wash where Walt used to work to supplement his high school teacher paycheck (by dates given on the show, a job he took to pick of the slack for his wife quitting her own job for apparently frivolous reasons). She determines what she thinks is a fair price for the car wash based on the volume of traffic she observes over a couple of days, and demands the owner sell to her. When the owner, an immigrant who has built up his business and for whom his ownership of the car wash is a matter of pride, declines to sell, she sets about using sabotage and fraud to extort him into not only selling, but at a lower price! All of this, in support of her ego and to maintain the myth of her (non-existent) competence in this area of activity.

From there she goes on to being an enthusiastic participant in the lies they tell her sister, and to further augment her ego, she insists that they pay the hospital bills her brother-in-law sustained on the job. This is in the same season where she remonstrates with Walt for buying their son a fancy car, because they have no viable explanation for where the money came from, and accusing him of trying to buy affection. The hypocrisy and double-standard of her actions is never brought up or touched on.

And through all of this, Skyler handles her stress by drinking too much wine, by repeatedly dragging her sister and brother-in-law into the fights with Walt, and treating Walt with the contempt of a law-abiding citizen and honest woman, rather than a co-conspirator who has matched his sins step for step, and for the same reasons of pride, ego & control. Walt is only worse than his wife by degree, and furthermore, he is reveling in being a criminal. Skyler is not simply the antagonist to an evil protagonist, she is the hypocrite castigating the protagonist, and one who lacks a leg to stand on.

The difference between Walt and Skyler is that the show makes no bones about Walt's being evil, taking care to strip away the facade of the excuses he composes for his actions, yet seems to back up Skyler's own illusions about herself.

What has that to do with what we see on the show? The writers’ intentions notwithstanding, Skyler is a whimpering wreck, who acts spitefully to people (Marie, Hank, Jesse) who are not her increasingly terrifying husband, betrays the truly innocent members of their family, and lets herself eventually come around to being okay with the massive financial success. She doesn't stand up to whatever comes her way, she either makes half-hearted attempts to flee or avoid it, or turns to passive-aggressive behavior and hypocritical assertions of moral superiority. Her illicit paramour, Ted, by the way, ends up in traction in the hospital when the thugs she sends to ensure he conceals her participation in his fraudulent record-keeping go a little too far.

As for the double-standard by which viewers judge Gunn’s character (and other TV harridans, more on that below), Skyler herself applies a double standard. She scorns Walt as a criminal, when her own behavior is a long way from perfectly law-abiding, and not all her criminal activity can be blamed on Walt. She holds his activity against him because of the vague possibility of danger to her family, but allows her brother-in-law to go about in ignorance of said dangers, despite his being the sole family member to ever actually be endangered by his connection to Walt. And she is the only one of the pair to overtly act in a way to harm their family, with her infidelity. On most shows with a similarly ill-behaved male protagonist, the material benefits of his wrongdoing to his family are always narratively balanced and negated by his infidelity to his wife. The adultery of criminal husbands (i.e. Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Don Draper) is practically a trope used to head off the "good of the family" argument, yet people persist in characterizing the adulterous and complicit criminal, Skyler, as Walt's innocent victim.

When they make a TV show about a female anti-hero, we can judge that. Female heroines (in my experience, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, Sydney Bristow) seem to be almost universally good, with their moral failings being something on the order of a weak moment of non-illicit sex with a beta male character. On the other hand, Carmela Soprano & Betty Draper both have husbands whose marital infidelity is used as a preemptive counter to any defense that their activities are in support of their families, as the husband characters would contend. But the adultery trump card only seems to go in one direction, since Gunn & a number of reviewers sympathetic to her position mostly ignore it or blame it on Walt driving her to do it. As for the specifics, Carmela is a lot like Skyler in many ways. All that Gunn is saying with her argument is that viewers are consistent in the type of character they hate.

Carmela claims to adhere to the standards of a lawful society and of her church, whereas her husband rejected society and its morals altogether. He lived by a wrong and immoral and criminal code, but he did not hypocritically (or at least not so obviously hypocritically) hold others to a different standard. The Sopranos even made Carmela's hypocrisy evident by having a psychiatrist explicitly point out the right course of action for her (leave him, now), and demolish each excuse as she offered it. She left Tony at one point, but came back to him (and turned a blind eye to the murder of her friend) in exchange for his subsidy of a self-aggrandizing project of hers (a spec house, instead of a car wash). She goes on a rant at her friend who's a priest, and likes to come watch movies on their big screen TV, telling him to stop pretending to be interested in reforming Tony as an excuse to come to his house and enjoy his luxuries, that he should just be honest about what he wants from Tony and stop pretending he is morally superior. And that's the beauty of fiction, because any real priest who knew Carmella as well as Fr. Phil does would have been ready with the Bible verse stating "before you pick the splinter from your neighbor's eye, remove the beam from your own", rather than slink off in shame, as happens on the show. As for Betty Draper, she might not match her husband's wrongdoing with hypocrisy, but shares his dissatisfaction with the ideal 1960s upper middle class life. The difference between the two Drapers, however, is that she takes out her frustrations and spite on their children, particularly her daughter. Whereas Don's shortcomings as a father lean in the area of neglect, and self-absorption at the cost of their needs, he never actively mistreats them to the degree Betty does. Unlike Don, Betty lacks even positive features or competence to offset the unpleasant aspects of her personality. Don might be a selfish ass and a sniveling, sensitive coward, but at least he’s good at what he does, and made something of himself.

This is a similarity between Betty Draper and Skyler White. Skyler, long used to total dominance in domestic affairs, and her husband taking her requests as law, reacts to Walt’s newfound indifference to her whims by taking out her frustration on everyone else, often subtly using her pregnancy as sympathy bait, to get them to sympathize or obey her as Walt will not. When she nags Walt about an odd phone call he received and tried to conceal, he finally tells her that it was from a former student who sells him pot (and is actually his meth-cooking partner). When she reacts with over-the-top indignation, he sarcastically asks her to leave him alone just once. The very next thing we see Skyler do is stop by the dealer’s house to demand that he stop selling pot to Walt or she will have her DEA agent brother-in-law harass him.

Her behavior in that confrontation is particularly telling. She comes onto Jesse’s property, opening a closed gate, and walking through in the face of his refusal of permission, and demands that she leave his property. She walks up to him even as he is telling her to leave, and when she gets close enough, immediately displays defensive posture, curling her arms around her pregnancy bulge, demanding he back away from her and acting as if he is the one confronting her, as if he is violating her personal space, and trespassing on her home! Anna Gunn might hate the theoretical double-standard of how a woman is resented for behavior that is admired in a man, but in the second episode of the show, her character is taking advantage of and abusing the chauvinistic privileges accorded women. The reason why women are expected to act like “ladies” and be passive and non-assertive, is because they are granted significant immunities and social rights that men are not. The expectation is that they will not abuse those advantages by pressing confrontations just as men will not turn a confrontation with a woman into a physical contest. A man who accosted another as Skyler does Jesse would not be seen as having any justified grounds for complaint if Jesse beat him senseless, and might even avoid legal penalty (see: Zimmerman, George).

Skyler’s dominance of their marital dynamic seems, on short exposure to be a similar case of taking advantage of every traditional social custom that accords a wife deference and at the same time, seizing every opportunity of modern egalitarian mores to engage in extra-domestic pursuits whenever she wants. Skyler can run a car wash, she’s a modern independent woman. She’s a WRITER (modern code for “failed at everything else, using as yet unwritten book as an excuse for lack of production” )! She’s an E-bay entrepreneur! If she doesn’t want to make a living as a bookkeeper because her own behavior has made her job awkward, it is a housewife’s prerogative to not work and to sit back while her husband takes a miserable second job. She can march out and confront people she is annoyed at, because hear her roar! But how dare anyone be ungentlemanly enough to not retreat from her personal space as her delicately-pregnant form advances on him?

If “Breaking Bad” is playing on themes of modern disenfranchisement and lack of power, Skyler White is a perfect embodiment of the clash between implicit custom and explicit change squeezing out people leaving them caught between two sets of incomplete or truncated rules of behavior. Skyler is a victim to some extent, but she is a victim of her own choices, and she is a victim of her superior position suddenly faced with revolt from those she has thought nothing of dominating. Like everyone else on the show, she finds herself in an untenable situation because of choices she made and circumstances she took for granted, and however convenient she, and Anna Gunn, and many viewers and critics, find it to blame Walter White, the truth is a lot more complex, and she could never have been hurt to any large degree without her own complicity.

For some half-witted actress to write a screed in a major newspaper attacking the very fans whose interest and numbers are the only reason the NY Times is remotely interested in her, because their interpretation of her character does not jibe with her own highly superficial and factually inaccurate conception, is just about as obnoxious a bit of entitled celebrity behavior as you can get.