so some of the shit rolled uphill and anna gunn wrote an article about how people talk about skylar:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/24/opinion/i-have-a-character-issue.html?_r=0 I wrote a post which is basically about that just now over on selectbutton. figured I'd revive the topic in BB: End Of Days is on right now. lllleeeettttsssss talking Blab with chris haddaxmskib
here's my post about that:
It's asking more than the writers of Breaking Bad really deserve to treat their insincere inclusion of women in their story as anything other than perfunctory.
You can make an obvious case about how harmful a lot of Walter's behaviour has been, and how increasingly dreadful his personality has become, but it is also correct to observe that the entire story has been designed to make the viewer anticipate the next moment of his ascension to dominance as much as possible. Breaking Bad has always been at least as much about the thrill of breaking out of whatever our inhibiting shells might be as much as it is about condemning the consequences of that process.
That doesn't preclude the possibility of a counterbalancing perspective in the story, which Skylar, along with now Hank and Marie, have provided as the series has gone on. It is confusing at times, though, when you're trying to work out exactly what the show is trying to say. Maybe the answer to that is that it isn't trying to send a simple message, but a lot of people have difficulty comprehending even those in the way they are intended. Some people see the half of the show that gives them a buzz, and become increasingly irritated with the cold shower of morality that occasionally floods proceedings. Some people get worn out with the increasingly campy moments of defiance the writers let Walter indulge in.
I think the problem with Breaking Bad specifically is it wants to have it two ways, without putting the work in that is required. I think it's very good at the Walter stuff even if the show has gone on too long and started repeating itself before the conclusion segment of the show we're in now. It isn't so good at the realistic portrayal of how the people in his life might react, and has always spent far less time on developing that side of the story. This is also the side of the story the few women on the show have been restricted to, with the exception of Lydia.
Skylar was a terribly written caricature in the first season, Marie was basically a joke character. Skylar has been developed since then, but a lot of that has been in contradiction to her earlier portrayal. She doesn't make much sense as a character unless you ignore the first 15 episodes or so. After that, they decided to start trying to do something with her, and that's kind of been working out, but it is difficult to reconfigure her place in the story without either changing the blueprint they laid out at the start, or changing her. They decided to change her, which has gone some way to smooth over the reptitive way she would throw a wrench in the plot or drive it off course for a while. I don't think it really says much about the regard the writers have for women in a story like this though, especially since she's the only major female character on the show. Marie doesn't really count, she's never been central to anything and doesn't really have a personality you could describe if you ignore the abandoned kleptomania nonsense. Lydia is the closest thing to a second woman, and there are some problems with the fact that she basically fits the mould of a crazy, unreliable female!!! - but there is still some mystery to her at this point and she has been written into the story rather than in the way of it. She could go either way at this point, in terms of being a redeeming example of a woman on the show. Skylar has been redeemed to an extent, and it involved jettisoning her initial character, but that was no great loss because she was just a caricature and narrative obstacle entity before.
I think an extreme reaction in defense of the way Breaking Bad has included women in its story is probably not justified. The show was constructed to primarily be about white men, and then it was populated very sparingly with a few women at the edges of that narrative. In a show that is set up like this, I understand that it isn't just a case of fringe idiots twisting things to their nefarious misogynistic perspective when the ugliness inevitably arises. If the show wanted to have meaningful portrayals of all genders in its story, it would've done that. The writers are good at pulling off what they want to pull off. If Skylar and Marie are the fullest representation of women that the writers intended, it shows where their priorities were in devising the show.
It is obviously a pattern with acclaimed TV that the women are sidelined to a large extent because, for whatever reason you want to interpret, writers are much more interested in stories where men have agency and women have less. Betty Draper in Mad Men, though, I think it would be unfair to say isn't developed, or that the writers are more interested in showing Don giving kickass ad pitches. Mad Men has a wide variety of well developed female characters. Betty is the closest thing to the narrative obstacle type in that show, even while she is more, and so she's been a lightning rod for the people who choose to interact with their entertainment in a misogynist way.
The kind of people who incessantly complain about Skylar nagging or being a bitch, etc, without any self-awareness, are the same ones who say those things about Betty. You will get those gutter people no matter what, even in shows which focus on women like Girls and Orange Is The New Black, but I think one of the reasons the response has been particularly ugly with Skylar is that Breaking Bad is a show designed to exclude women from the core of its narrative which then makes what I take to be half-assed attempts to include women by doing what shows about white men do best and using them as roadblocks.
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breaking bad. blabbing blab.