Is Anna Gunn the One With a ‘Character Issue’?
Brilliant writing and acting on TV series about anti-heroes have made thugs and misogynists of us all — as viewers, at least
This past Saturday, actress Anna Gunn declared she had a character issue in her op-ed in the New York Times. Gunn, who plays Skyler White — the wife of science-teacher-turned-murderous-meth-kingpin Walter White on AMC’s Breaking Bad — was careful to express gratitude for having enjoyed “one of the most rewarding creative journeys I’ve embarked on as an actor.” But, she says with horror, because her role is to operate as an occasional antagonist of Walt’s, she, as a character and as a person, has become an object of scorn. She 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. As the hatred of Skyler blurred into loathing for me as a person, I saw glimpses of an anger that, at first, simply bewildered me.”
There is so much that is disturbing about what she’s experienced, I don’t know where to begin. No. 1: the fact that we have become so absorbed in serial TV that we can barely distinguish the characters from the actors who portray them — which is also a testament to the talents of the writers and the actors who inhabit these roles, so vividly realizing these characters that we can’t believe they aren’t these people. And, No. 2: our skewed sense of morality that develops as we get drawn into these male, anti-hero-driven, cognitive-dissonant dramas — a narrative conceit that has come to dominate high-brow serial TV in the past fifteen years — which has us sympathizing with and cheering for philanderers and murderers and mob bosses and drug lords, and deriding anyone who gets in their way. Not least of whom their wives.
Gunn brings into the conversation Mad Men’s Betty Draper and The Sopranos’ Carmela Soprano. Betty has most certainly been the object of ire — and perhaps rightly so: She is not easy to like, not the way show creator, Matthew Weiner, portrays her. She is immature, narcissistic, prone to temper tantrums. She is emotionally abusive to her children. Neither is Don easy to like, but he is dashing and talented and brooding and charming and we get his tortured back story, so Weiner goes easy on him — that is, until this past season when he makes the decision to have him hit rock bottom. I confess, I despised Betty until recently, even as I felt for her. Being married to an emotionally dishonest, philandering schmuck could only bring out the worst in a person, especially being a postwar, pre-cultural-revolution stay-at-home, ennui-ridden mother of two, then three kids. But at least she summoned the courage to seek a divorce from him and move on with her life.
Carmela Soprano, on the other hand, always had my sympathy — and, I’d argue, the sympathy of her audience, even as we loved Tony. She knew what she was getting into when she married her husband, a mobster who would become the head of family. Though it wasn’t discussed, she was keenly aware that she was living off blood money. So how can I defend someone who on paper is so hypocritical and unscrupulous? Because, once you sign on to watch a series about the mob, you’ve made a decision to suspend judgment and allow yourself to get seduced by the story and all of the players. We witness her maternal devotion, her loyalty to her husband even when she tells him she hates him — and let’s not pretend he isn’t worthy of her hate. Our heart aches when he repeatedly cheats on her, and we want her to leave him, but we see how much they can’t quite live without each other, either. She arguably never appears shrewish, and a large part of it is because he keeps her out of his business.
Gunn’s role is more difficult than both that of January Jones and Edie Falco. Skyler White married a kind-hearted nerd, and for years lived a low-key middle-class life in New Mexico, raising a son with cerebral palsy, and was poised to continue on that path. When we meet her she is pregnant with child No. 2. Never had she expected things to take such a sharp detour into something so unimaginable as meth and murder. Like Carmela, she is fiercely protective not only of her children, but also of her husband, even though both women have declared to their husbands how much they hate them, and have tried to leave them. Like Betty, she’s assertive. But unlike both women, she is a working mother. And she gets involved in her husband’s business, becoming a more active accomplice.
Gunn says Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan told her that he “wanted Skyler to be a woman with a backbone of steel who would stand up to whatever came her way, who wouldn’t just collapse in the corner or wring her hands in despair. He and the show’s writers made Skyler multilayered and, in her own way, morally compromised.”
And the writers did — to a point. If viewers really stopped to consider her predicament — a seemingly mild-mannered husband is diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, and becomes a manipulative, murderous meth manufacturer — they would, I hope, side with her. What the hell else is she supposed to do? She is raising two kids, and for months he keeps his business from her a secret. How could she possibly have imagined that this is what he’s gotten himself into? How could she not be infuriated? Frightened? Eager to leave him?
But much of the problem lay with the narrative conceit itself. It begs us to hate the spouses, and embrace the thug. Every one of these series that relies on it makes us fall in love with the brute, the rogue, the cold-blooded killer. Even Walt, who has become absolutely diabolical, has fans who will cheer him on ’til the bitter end. We can’t help but want these guys to get away with, well, murder.
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