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| Skyler White (Anna Gunn) sheds a light on our society’s misogyny. |
It isn’t rare to see an actor or actress to take to the op/ed pages to pen support or disdain for political issues and candidates or to come forward with personal stories to enlighten and advocate. The actor or actress, however, typically speaks as an individual, removed from his or her fictional life.
However, Anna Gunn (Skyler White on Breaking Bad) took to The New York Times opinion page to tackle an issue that brings the fictional world that Skyler inhabits into Gunn’s personal world. She weaves in the cultural causes and implications of the vitriol directed at Skyler’s character, at Gunn herself, and at certain kinds of women in our society.
In the beautifully written and poignant
“I Have a Character Issue,” she describes how she expected, and even understood, that her character was not going to be well-loved at first. After all, she is Walt’s antagonist, and Walt is the protagonist–the greedy, depraved, meticulously drawn anti-hero.
In her analysis of the horrible response Skyler received from
Breaking Bad fans (including Facebook pages that
we’ve written about at length), Gunn briefly touches upon her fulfillment in playing the role, and her fear for her own safety when online threats and death wishes devolved from using Skyler’s name to actually singling out Anna Gunn–the real person, not the character she played. Her focus, however, is that this response to Skyler is part of a much larger problem in our culture.
Gunn writes,
“My character, to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women.”
And with that, she nails it. Feminists have spent a great deal of time suggesting that the hatred of Skyler White (and other notable anti-heros’ wives) is rooted in misogyny. Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and writer, acknowledged this in a
Vulture interview last May.
He said,“…I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple.”
For those of us who already knew that, this was a refreshing sound byte. However, there is much more to audiences’ reactions to Skyler, and Gunn’s piece takes that simple reflection on misogyny and unpacks it, giving meaning to our reactions to the fictional world as being indicative of our society as a whole. And she’s right.
Gunn says,
“…I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”
The Skyler White Rorschach test has certainly revealed a great deal of hideous, blatant misogyny and hatred toward women who don’t conform.
Gunn’s New York Times op/ed breaks through a glass fourth wall. Not only is Skyler White one of the most complex female characters on television, but Gunn also uses her real voice in a national publication to lend force to the idea that the hatred and violence directed toward her character, and toward her, reveals much more about our society than most would be willing to admit.
Art imitates life. Life imitates art. And how we feel about that art tells us a great deal about ourselves. In the case of how much hate is directed at characters like Skyler White, it’s no wonder that the work of women’s equality activists–whether they are fighting for proper representation in the media or working for pro-women legislation–is not nearly done.
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Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.
sad that she ever felt the need to do this. but i think this is so eloquently said. i agree with her points. i don’t know why female characters bear the brunt of the venom