Rethinking Skyler White

Skyler is a good wife, actually

“Everyone dies in this one.”

— Walter White, watching Scarface with his family

WARNING SPOILERS

One way to read Breaking Bad is that it’s a tale of a man breaking out of the confines of his domestication. In this telling, Skyler, his wife, is at least a feature of his emasculated prison, at worst a warden. Walt, of course, breaks out of this prison. He breaks bad. Cancer reinvigorates what he once had and lost: his will to power.

I was a Skyler White hater when Breaking Bad first came out. And when I rewatched it a decade ago. Get out of the way, woman! You’re ruining it! I was what Emily Nussbaum called a Bad Fan, fine, I admit it. Cuff me, hood over head, shoot me out back — I deserve it.

But now I’m a fat old dad, a decade into married life, four kids deep. And on rewatching last summer, Walt’s fatal pride is all the more pronounced. As is the ultimate redemption of them both.

Walt’s path to ruin is so compelling because you see all the off-ramps. He was so close to getting away with it. But Walt just can’t help but get back on. The man who dons the emperor’s crown is not the same man who can renounce it. He goads Hank back to the hunt, unable to let Hank believe the mighty Heisenberg was the piddling dead Gale. He has more money than he knows how to spend — before choosing to cook for Gus directly. He could have accepted Jesse and Mike’s proposal to sell the methylamine and walk away with $5m. But by then Walt’s not in the money business. He’s in the empire building business.

But that’s all gone when Walt meets Skyler for the final time. He is in the sunset of his life, broken amidst the ruins of his empire.

Rays of light fall on her, cut through the blinds, and she looks up to her man. She’s a suburban New Mexican Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman, raw and vulnerable in defeat. Angelic even. Her affection is gentle, tragic rather than angry. Here in the ruins of her family, in the endless hell of the fallout of their grand criminal enterprise, she meets her man, who dragged her into destruction. He gives her a ticket out. First, the phone call he knew was bugged by the cops, where he played the abusive husband and mastermind. And now, the location of Hank’s remains, something she might use to bargain with the prosecutor. He lets go of his pretense and compulsive lying. He confesses to her: he did it for himself. He liked it. He was good at it. He was alive. He assumes her sins in his final sacrificial arc. There is grace here between them. A deep lingering matrimonial love. The remains of their covenant. After all, isn’t every marriage a conspiracy?

Skyler too was complicit. This hell is also of her making. This moment is not just his redemption, but also hers.

Skyler does not have clean hands. She facilitates Walt’s criminal enterprise. She sics her goons on Ted. When Ted falls and gets knocked out, she visits him in hospital. He won’t say anything, he reassures her. At first we think he’s being paranoid. Then we realise he read her exactly right.

But the moment Skyler really breaks bad, is when she urges Walt to kill Jesse.

“We’ve come this far,” she tells Walt. “For us, what’s one more?”

What’s one more. She’s all in.

What more could any man want from his wife? For all her faults, is Lady Macbeth not the best wife in all of Shakespeare? Do the Macbeths not have the best marriage? Ok, so she loses the plot towards the end, but show me a wife…

Skyler cleaved to her husband, transforming into an image of him. She facilitated his empire with ruthless competence. She made mistakes within the terms of their marriage — such as her infidelity — but given the shock of finding herself married to the greatest drug kingpin in the Southwest, one who has endangered her family, perhaps some brashness is understandable. In the end, she adopted her husband’s worldview, stood by her man, and suffered the destruction of their world wrought by his megalomania.

What more could a husband want?

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