Breaking Bad by Lara C. Stache

Author:Lara C. Stache
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Traditional Roles

Skyler is eventually written out of the Boys Only Club because her story is centered within the home, a traditionally female-focused location. Toward the end of the series, Vince Gilligan comments that he does not understand why viewers go against Skyler to side with Walt: “She’s got a tough job being married to this asshole.”[6] This quote reinforces Skyler’s role as Walt’s wife, where her job is to be married to the monster. It also suggests something about the way the writers approached her plotline in relation to Walt; Skyler represents the home, which encompasses the children and the marriage. In gender research, men are viewed as having a voice, place, and location outside the home, in the public sphere. Women are traditionally viewed as having a voice, place, location within the home (the private sphere), where they tend to be the primary caretaker of children, partner, and home care (even if they also work in the public sphere). In Episode 1.1 (“Pilot”), Skyler is visually and circumstantially domesticated. We learn she recently quit her job to stay home and work on her writing career (a bygone plot point by Season 2); we see her make a birthday breakfast for Walt complete with veggie bacon spelling out “50”; and, she is pregnant, which could not symbolize her role as a mother any more clearly. She is the nurturing caretaker for her family, virtually barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen the first time we meet her. If we interpret Skyler’s role within the context of the home, then there are a number of consequences to this characterization that may suggest why she is so hated by many fans of the series.

The first consequence of centering Skyler’s story within the traditional role of the home is that her main goal is to protect her children and keep the home life in harmony. Walt’s goal within a traditional male role means he takes on a dangerous job that requires lying, miscommunication, and lack of availability (emotionally and physically). All of Walt’s actions affect the home and, thus, create incompatible goals between Skyler and Walt. Skyler’s plotline makes her role the catalyst for a lot of the family drama. In the first season, she protects Walt’s health by making him turkey bacon (Episode 1.1, “Pilot”); she believes communication is the key to a healthy marriage (Episode 1.2, “Cat’s in the Bag . . .”); she confides in Marie with a “hypothetical” story about Walt’s drug use (Episode 1.3, “. . . And the Bag’s in the River”); she breaks down crying at a family dinner shortly after she finds out Walt has cancer (Episode 1.4, “Cancer Man”); she stages an intervention with the family to convince Walt to fight to live (Episode 1.5, “Gray Matter”); she convinces Walt to attend cancer family counseling sessions (Episode 1.6, “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”); and she is responsive to her husband when he wants to have sex, even if that occurs in the backseat of a car, at a school, while she is pregnant (Episode 1.

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