Creepiness by Adam Kotsko

Author:Adam Kotsko
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781782798453
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2015-02-27T08:00:00+00:00

Faith the size of a mustard stain

Claire is not the first wife in the “high-quality TV drama” genre to administer a humiliating handjob. In fact, she is not even the first wife to administer a humiliating handjob to a man who is dying of cancer. That distinction belongs to Skyler White of Breaking Bad, who does the honors in the show’s pilot. It is intended as a birthday treat for her husband Walt, who is presumably sexually deprived due to his wife’s advanced pregnancy, and so in contrast to Claire’s, it would count as a generous gesture—if not for the fact that Skyler continues to work on her laptop the entire time, barely even acknowledging Walt’s presence in the room. In her own way, Skyler is performing her dominance just as much as Claire was with her cancer patient, but Skyler’s detachment from the act makes it somehow even creepier than Claire’s.

From the beginning of the episode, Walt seems doomed to live out his life as the kind of pathetic non-entity that Claire sees in her lovelorn security guard. He is utterly dominated by his wife, ignored in his work as a teacher, and degraded in his second job at a carwash. By the end of the episode, however, Walt has received his diagnosis of terminal cancer and started down the road to becoming an infamous drug lord. Having cooked his first batch of crystal meth and survived his first run-in with dangerous criminals, Walt comes home, bends his (very pregnant) wife over the kitchen table, and aggressively mounts her from behind. He’s sending a clear message to his wife: “You thought you could impersonally manage my sexuality, but I’m the one in control here!” And as a good pervert, he is implicitly adding, “and you like that, don’t you?”

This is Walt’s first counterattack in a power struggle with his wife that will mark the rest of the series. And Skyler’s palpable enjoyment of the brutal encounter with Walt provides the first indication that this is a power struggle in which Walt will be ultimately victorious. (Indeed, it is hard not to see Claire’s handjob as a deliberate reference to Breaking Bad, making it clear that her marriage is also a high-stakes power struggle—and also that she is not another Skyler White.) As the series goes on, Walt’s abuse and manipulation reduces the once strong and proud Skyler to a shell of her former self, unable to protect her children from Walt’s influence and constrained to go along with his criminal activities even as she hates herself for it. While she enjoys short-term tactical triumphs not entirely dissimilar from Claire’s, Skyler is ultimately fighting a losing battle. By the show’s final episodes, she has no option other than impotent acting out, most notably when she appears to attempt suicide in the backyard swimming pool in the middle of a family gathering.

It is clear that the writers set up Skyler’s plot trajectory as a way of showing how Walt has become

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