Until recently, I had never seen Breaking Bad. Now I have seen every episode. Thanks to the publicity surrounding its final episode, the internet, my non-traditional viewing habits and the quality of the show, I now know what all the fuss was about. It was a good show, and I am glad I watched it all. There should be more shows as good as Breaking Bad. And if I ever have to cast the part of a loser who transforms himself into a ruthless crime lord, I will try to repeat the trick pulled by the makers of Breaking Bad. They made an inspired choice, when hiring a guy who used to be the comic dad from a family show about schoolchildren. The character of Walter White is excellent. Combine his presence with a plot that crosses two popular tropes – organized crime drama + nerds using science to do crazy shit like blowing stuff up – and you have all the factors needed for success. I salute the makers of Breaking Bad. They made a product of a very high standard. And yet, it was not made to the exceptionally high standards of Walter White, central character, demon chemist and manufacturer of 99% pure methamphetamine. Unlike Walter, they allowed one significant pollutant to spoil their product. And that was the character of Walter’s wife, Skyler.

I will admit that, from the very outset, I disliked the character of Skyler White. I assume that was the intention of the show’s creators. Walt is a downtrodden nobody, bullied at work and in the home. Skyler is portrayed negatively from the very beginning, before Walter begins his own bad behaviour. Skyler is the wife of Walter, the show’s protagonist and central character. She is his most enduring antagonist, not in the sense of being a genuine obstacle or opponent, but more in the sense of being a constant irritation. By the time I reached the final episode of the penultimate season, I had to ask myself a simple question: “am I the only person who finds the character of Skyler to be jawbreakingly annoying?” So I googled. And learned I was not alone. Far from it. Which was a relief. It seems that very many people enjoyed the show, but found the character of Skyler White to be grating. But I also learned something else, which worried me. In short, I learned something about myself. Anna Gunn, the actress who played Skyler White, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times which explained why people hate Skyler White. She wrote that:

[Skyler is] a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women.

…

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.

I thought about this, and worried about the misogyny of society and whether I was suffering from some deep-seated anger issues that needed to be addressed. After giving this a lot of thought, my conclusion is: what a load of fucking bullshit.

Going back to what I felt about Skyler’s character whilst watching the show, I found her to be a badly-written, superficial and contradictory character. The writers did not give her consistent motives. She makes no meaningful choices. She primarily exists to create a faux-tension by impeding Walt’s stepwise transformation as a character. That makes her the worst possible thing in entertainment: a dull character.

For most of the series, Skyler’s character exhibits hardly any depth given the very large amount of time she spends on screen. Mostly she complains about her husband, to her husband. There is little variety or dynamism to the character. Compared to Walt, who deals with various criminal characters as well as his family, Skyler hardly interacts with anyone but Walt. And she does this over the course of 62 episodes. Complain, complain, complain to her husband, and not much else. For 62 episodes. In that sense, she is not an interesting character and her presence drags on the storytelling, instead of augmenting it.

To be clear, my dislike of Skyler White has nothing to do with her being a woman, and I have given this far more thought than any sane person should have to. We live in a topsy-turvy world where everybody is constantly being accused of thought crime, even when they dislike a fictional character. I find myself being defensive about my alleged misogyny, guilty by associating myself with other Skyler-haters. Maybe some of them are misogynists; I do not speak for them. And yet, it is cheap and silly to suggest that Skyler White is especially loathed because there are so many misogynists. Only a poor artist blames their audience for not liking what they see.

With that in mind, I will analyse what is annoying with the character of Skyler White, and why this can be separated from the immature emotional need exhibited by some men – and by some women – who superimpose their personal and political anxieties on a badly-written fictional character.

To start with, let me share one insight about who Skyler White reminded me of, an epiphany I had whilst watching the second episode of the fourth season. Skyler White reminds me of Oliver Hardy. Yes, Oliver Hardy, from Laurel and Hardy. The fat one. This one:

Now, before anyone jumps to any ridiculous conclusions, let me state that the actress Anna Gunn does not look like Oliver Hardy. But there is a resemblance between the character of Skyler White, and the character perfected by Oliver Hardy. They are both pompous, self-absorbed oafs. Neither exhibits power, or guile, or wit, or intellect. They do not laugh at themselves. They are self-important, whilst unimportant. And they both spend most of their time picking on the only individual who is willing to tolerate their boorish behaviour.

Only one thing saves Hardy, turning his character into a comic creation: the comeuppance. Everybody likes to see an insufferable overbearing twerp receive their comeuppance. It makes no difference if the twerp is male or female; I favour equality in this regard. Hardy’s character is redeemed solely because he is routinely kicked up the bum, or has his hat set on fire, or suffers the slamming of pies into his face. None of these things occur to Skyler White. She just cruises on, with no comeuppance. So watching her character is like spending many hours of Laurel & Hardy setting up all the reasons why you should dislike Hardy, but without any of the comic pay-off. That failing is especially noticeable in Breaking Bad because, at its best, it delivers dry humour that complements the heated drama.

When one character seeks to dominate another character, I typically side with the underdog. This is natural, and common for audiences. From the very beginning, Walter White is established as an underdog. The creators did this knowingly, so the audience would side with him. They then proceeded to change the character, a small step at a time, to make him an oppressive, ruthless criminal kingpin. Hence the genius of the show, and why it works so well. The audience is encouraged to side with Walt, and then their loyalty to Walt is tested, blurring the line of when their sympathies should turn against the central character.

Siding with the underdog is the same basic psychology that drives audiences to empathize with Stan Laurel, or Charlie Chaplin, or Rocky Balboa, or countless other screen heroes. Like many children, I felt the same desire to support the underdog even whilst watching cartoons. In Tom & Jerry, I found myself desperately wanting Tom to defeat the obnoxious and over-confident Jerry, although he never did. I wanted Wile E. Coyote to not just chase Roadrunner, but to catch the infuriating, beeping bird. It did not matter who was supposed to be the weaker of the pairings. By repetition, we all soon learned who was the loser, and who was the winner, and it is natural to sometimes want the loser to win. As a 6 year old child, I sided with the clever and amusing ‘bad’ characters, not because they were bad, and certainly not because of some twisted form of sexism. I empathized with them because they hatched clever plots, and they strove, and they were funnier and were more interesting than their unassailable opponents. There is no need to call on crass gender politics to analyse antipathy to Skyler White. Yes, the character is a woman, but more importantly, she is boring. She is unimaginative. She lacks charm. And she acts like she is accustomed to getting what she wants. Here is the phrase that Skyler White uses more than any other:

“I need you to…”

What kind of person would ever use this phrase? What kind of person uses this phrase over and over? A generous reading might say the character was needy, or insecure. But when the phrase is repeated with stunningly regularity, as it was during the earlier seasons, I am forced to believe the character is selfish, bossy and intent on manipulating others into serving her wishes. In the early seasons of Breaking Bad, Skyler White’s character routinely put her needs ahead of others. She expected them to behave in ways that satisfied her. This included disputing Walt’s right to die from cancer, in preference to suffering the discomfort of treatment.

However, bizarrely, Skyler’s bullying streak has since been forgotten by Anna Gunn, and others, who want to emphasize she is ill-treated. I would agree that Skyler is ill-treated by the end of the final season. But the Walter White who mistreats her in season 5 is not the meek and hen-pecked Walter White who submitted to her wishes in season 1. So there is a problem in justifying Skyler’s recurring faults as being provoked solely by Walter.

In many respects, Skyler becomes a much more interesting, and much less annoying character during the final season. In this, I see the hands of the show’s creators. Maybe they were sensitive to the need to do a better job, after seeing the hostility provoked by their repetitive use of Skyler as the anti-Walt shrew. I also suspect that, as Walt became more dominant, they found it easier to place a greater variety of opposing forces against him. In the beginning, Walt is oppressed by his wife, his bosses, and the kids he teaches at school. His life contains so little joy that he would prefer to die, rather than fight his cancer. All he has left are a few tiny shreds of pride, and he feels that even these are being wrestled away from him. By the end of the show, Walt is a different man. He is powerful, and resourceful. He learns not just to fight, but to win. In so doing, he is constantly challenged by an ever-larger army of opposing forces. There is the DEA and his brother-in-law, his volatile former drug-cooking partner, and a truly vast array of criminals. In such circumstances, the creative brains behind Breaking Bad could relieve Skyler from the need to provide as much resistance to Walt. But by then, the die was cast. Unlike Walt’s descent into evil, Skyler’s transformation from nagging housewife into genuinely interesting character is never explained by any events on screen. She just becomes more interesting toward the end of the final season, and the audience is forced to imagine that they are now seeing what she was ‘really’ like all along, even though that side of her personality had never been presented on screen before.

Anna Gunn is right, in a sense, that the character can become a test showing the prejudices people have about gender. Her mistake is that Ms Gunn reveals her own irrational prejudices, not mine. Breaking Bad never went to sufficient trouble to show that Skyler White is strong, or that she is ill-treated. The negative aspects of her character were established before their supposed justification, and the strength she finds in the final season is contradictory, because it appears like magic, from nowhere. If the audience believes Skyler White is consistently strong, and ill-treated, that is because of the prejudices they bring to the show, from outside the show. Or they have simply forgotten how the character behaved in earlier seasons. I expect that many who detected misogyny amidst the antipathy to Skyler White only started to watch the show in order to see what made the Skyler-haters so angry. If so, they arrived too late.

In short, there is not enough in the show to justify Gunn’s description of her own character. Skyler White simply does not do enough, and does not suffer enough, to be credibly summarized as a strong character, or an ill-treated character.

Of course, it is possible to over-analyse. Some writers have ‘tics’ and ‘tells’, like poker players. Their mannerisms can be repeated too often. The writers of Breaking Bad used the phrase “I need you to…” with preposterous regularity, though that tic also calmed down in later seasons. If you break down the scripts carefully, I believe everybody would agree with me. That particular phrase featured too often, and was sometimes used by other characters too. The tic reveals that a fiction is just an illusion – that creative people make facsimiles of real life, and their creations may be flawed. The phrase was used as a quick way to force emotional intensity. Hence, Skyler used it a lot. It was overused, in this series. If the tic was pointed out to the writers, they may have revised Skyler’s dialogue, to give her greater variety. However, the audience must judge a character based on what is actually presented on the screen, not on how we want characters to be presented. And as presented, Skyler White is mostly a grinding, nagging wife who keeps talking about her wants, needs and fears and rarely shows much interest in anyone else’s. It would be wrong to ‘infer’ some inner psychological activity that is not manifest in the words or the actor’s performance. So if Anna Gunn did not act something, she has no right to be upset that people see less in her character than she wanted them to see.

To be fair to Anna Gunn, she will not be the only person who projects themselves into a fictional character. But this is nothing new, or unique to the character of Skyler White. Is there any actor so naive that they think audiences do not project their personal emotions into the fictional scenes that are presented to them? People side with underdogs because they feel themselves to be underdogs, and they side with heroes because people want to imagine themselves doing good.

Even more peculiarly, Anna Gunn was surprised that some people confuse the character with the actor. This has happened for as long as actors have acted. It is to the benefit of some, who play loveable characters. They may receive free drinks, smiles, or pats on the back. Other actors suffer as a result. Those who play villains and ‘hardmen’ may face rudeness, abuse, and even violence. Anna Gunn conflates the specific reasons why people dislike Skyler White with the general observation that some audience members cannot differentiate between actors and characters. I am sorry for her if some foolish people transpose their dislike of Skyler White into a false antipathy to the actor. But this human failing does not justify wild claims about societal antipathy towards all women. Drawing such conclusions is reckless and unwarranted. They are no more justified than suggesting an incident where a soap actor gets punched in his face signals that society must hate attractive young men.

Having recently watched all the episodes, I can recall many occasions where the character Skyler White behaves in ways that are loathsome. Consider the following:

• As a birthday ‘treat’, she masturbates her husband whilst browsing the internet.
• When her husband is diagnosed with cancer, and expresses a wish to die instead of suffering the discomfort of treatment, Skyler arranges an ‘intervention’ for Walt, with the assistance of her sister and brother-in-law. The ground rules of the intervention, as set by Skyler, is that everybody be allowed to speak their mind, in turn, with Walt forced to wait until last. When Walt argues persuasively that he should be allowed to die in peace, leading his in-laws to sympathize with his point of view, Skyler unilaterally dismisses the intervention. The next day, Walt changes his mind, but there is never any on-screen suggestion that Skyler is grateful that Walt will undergo treatment.
• Walt becomes distant and secretive, and Skyler fears he is having an affair. Skyler starts a new job, and seeks comfort from the boss. She reveals that she feels guilty for not feeling happier about the positive results from Walt’s cancer treatment. The following day, she deliberately knocks her pens on the floor, in order to get the boss’ attention and draw him into her office. She then suggestively impersonates Marilyn Monroe, sexually flirting with her new boss in front of all his other employees. Whilst knowing her boss is a fraudster, Skyler eagerly starts an affair with him. Walt tries to make amends for his failings as a husband, saying, “honesty is good – don’t you think?”, to which Skyler bitterly responds, “I fucked Ted,” as punishment.
• Skyler calls the police and tries to have her husband thrown out of the family home. She is frustrated in doing so because Walt has not actually done anything to Skyler that would justify police intervention.
• Skyler threatened Walt by saying she will hurt herself in order to make it appear that he was violent to her.
• She goes against Walt’s wishes, and refuses to allow her son to have an expensive car, on the basis that it will ruin the family’s ‘cover story’. However, this same ‘cover story’ – which she invented unilaterally – is sufficient to explain how they bought a business with $800,000 in cash. In other words, she acts like spending $800,000 is plausible, but goes into melodramatic overdrive about spending $850,000.
• After much resistance, Walt agreed to divorce Skyler and signed the papers. Skyler then arbitrarily changed her mind, and dismissed the opportunity to split with her husband.
• Instead of divorcing her husband, when she had the chance, she tells him to his face how she is waiting for him to die.

A foolish person might put forward the following counter-argument: Walt does worse. But that is not the point. Walt does terrible things and is an interesting character. Skyler does awful things and is a boring character. There is no intrinsic battle of the sexes here. Both could be fascinating characters, or both could be dull. It is hard to watch Skyler not because she is a woman, but because nobody enjoys seeing a character who is tediously unpleasant, and goes on being tediously unpleasant.

Some viewers might still want to sympathize with Skyler, suggesting her character faults are all somewhat excused by blaming Walt. But there comes a point where a character has to be the character they are, without justifying every action as a reaction to others. I find I have most antipathy to characters who are needlessly unpleasant, nasty or vicious to other characters who have never caused them harm. The epitome of Skyler’s negativity is found in an episode called ‘Buyout’, which was the 6th episode in the final season. Skyler returns home late, to find Jesse, Walt’s accomplice, talking with Walt. Jesse is a stranger to her; they have never met. Jesse is sorry for intruding on Skyler’s home life. He immediately states he will leave, appears uncomfortable, and he shows no desire to upset Skyler. Walt insists on Jesse’s staying. As instructed by Walt, Skyler prepares a meal, and then all three sit at the table. When taking her seat, Skyler holds a bottle of wine closely, and pours herself a very large measure. She barely touches her meal, and drinks from the glass whilst holding it in both hands. Jesse is visibly very uncomfortable, and he seeks to change the mood at the table. He makes polite conversation, complementing Skyler for the meal she has cooked. Skyler responds by being atrociously rude, making Jesse feel even more unwelcome. Is Skyler’s behaviour indicative of a good-natured and well-mannered human being, or is this the hallmark of someone who is rude and self-important? Whatever Skyler’s justification for being horrid to her husband, she is not entitled to have any opinion about Jesse, a man she really knows nothing about. And yet, Skyler is childish and uncouth, revelling in an opportunity to drag a stranger into her fight with her husband.

Contrary to all the awful things that Skyler does, Anna Gunn claims there are some good aspects to Skyler’s personality. She wrote that:

I enjoy taking on complex, difficult characters and have always striven to capture the truth of those people, whether or not it’s popular. Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, 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.

Speaking as an audience member, if the creators, writers, and actors of Breaking Bad wanted Skyler White to have a ‘backbone of steel’ and to be ‘multilayered’, then they failed. Allow me to briefly list some steely women, drawn from real life and fiction: Angela Merkel, German Chancellor; Christine Lagarde, boss of the IMF; Hilary Clinton, future President of the USA; Elinor Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility; Alice from Alice in Wonderland; Ellen Ripley from Alien; and Catwoman from The Dark Knight Rises. I cannot imagine any of them attending a birthday party, and then walking into a cold swimming pool as part of some ridiculous pseudo-suicide bid in order to get attention. I cannot imagine them making idle threats. They would not go out of their way to be rude to a total stranger, just to punish somebody else. They would not foolishly hand $600k to their lover, only to become flustered when he spent money on a new car instead of paying his tax bills. And they would not strenuously demand a divorce, then casually change their mind when the signed papers are handed to them. Skyler White did all those things, and did them all with the same facial expression that she does almost everything: a wide-eyed stare of hyperbolic intensity. If this is meant to be ‘steely’ and ‘multilayered’, I am forced to laugh at the incompetence of the writers and the actor. Their combined artistic failure best explains their defensiveness. It is understandable that they are upset that their creation provokes criticism. But their failure does not entitle them to brandish their critics as misogynists, any more than an audience that finds fault with a black character must be racist, or an audience that finds fault with a foreign character must be xenophobes.

Let me point out one particular detail which annoyed me more than others. Skyler is rarely seen as being competent at doing anything other than a mother’s tasks. She can give birth, feed the baby, argue with her teenage son, and cook breakfast. Whoop-de-doo for women’s liberation. But we are told she is also a bookkeeper. And, from the pompous way Skyler behaves, she seems to believe she is a good bookkeeper. But she is not a good bookkeeper. In the only scene in the entire series where we might seriously examine her abilities as a bookkeeper, she comes across as totally incompetent.

Before I analyse the particular scene, let me make one simple observation about language. We all know what ‘over’ means. And we know what ‘under’ means. An ‘overestimate’ is an estimate which is higher than the value in real life. An ‘undercooked’ meal has been cooked less than it should. An ‘overheated’ engine has a temperature which is higher than it should be, and so on. So even somebody who knows nothing about bookkeeping knows what ‘over’ and ‘under’ mean. Now let me point out the only significant scene where Skyler’s (in)competence as a bookkeeper is strongly evidenced. The scene is from ‘Mandala’, episode 11 of the second season. I will use red for the important bits.

Skyler: Look, it’s all kinda little dribs and drabs, but right here – take Keller for instance – a couple of hundred dollars here, a few thousand there…

Ted: Dribs and drabs

Skyler: You add it all up though, and with Keller, the revenues were almost 10 percent less than was actually received. This is every quarter for the last two years. When I saw it I got worried, so I checked accounts receivable for other customers. I found six other instances, revenues being under-reported. And I’ve only just started to look into it.

Ted: We have requirement contracts with all these companies. They have to anticipate their needs for their next quarter, and most of the time they over-estimate. So I just let them roll their overages into the next order, and if I don’t, they’ll go elsewhere. Obviously we’ve got… we didn’t go back and adjust the revenue entries. I know it’s wrong from an accounting standpoint, but you can see the money is coming in eventually, you can see.

Skyler: Right, right, but, ahem… I got the old bills of sale and order forms out of storage and to try and sort this out, and most of the time there’s no backup for the reported revenues at all. In a few cases, I found xerox copies with the dates changed.

Ted: Alright, you’ve got me.

Skyler: We’re talking nearly a million dollars of undocumented revenue. What are you thinking?

I know what I am thinking. I am thinking I hope they did a better job of writing dialogue about chemistry then this garbage about accounting. And I am thinking that any half-competent bookkeeper would not be so confused about what is happening here.

‘Revenues are less than actually received’. What does this mean? The only possible meaning is that the company received cash, but reported a lower revenue. That makes sense, if the goal is to commit fraud by reducing the tax bill. Keeping cash off the books would lower profits, lower taxes, and so allow the owner to keep more of the money. And this fits with Skyler saying that revenues are ‘under-reported’, i.e. the number reported in the books is lower than the number that should have been reported. Ted’s reply then makes no sense, and Skyler would know this if she was a real, competent, bookkeeper. Ted says ‘the cash comes in eventually’. That implies the revenue is being reported before the cash is received, although Skyler has just outlined a problem where cash is received and the revenue was not reported.

What is Skyler’s response to Ted’s nonsensical answer? Does she say: “huh?” No. She says: “most of the time there is no backup for the reported revenues at all”. What an idiot Skyler would have to be. She is now accusing Ted of over-reporting revenues. She simultaneously claims to have found under-reporting and over-reporting of revenues. And yet, she is incompetent to distinguish these two different, opposing frauds.

If this woman was a real book-keeper, I would fire her. She is not a real woman; she is a work of fiction, so we should blame the people who are really responsible for this goof. The writers bungled this scene. Skyler started by complaining that cash was being received (real cash! from real customers!) but that revenues were not being reported. Then she ends up complaining that revenues are being reported, but nothing supports the revenues. Well, forgive me for being pedantic, but hard cash is the best possible evidence of revenues from somewhere (which is why money laundering takes dirty money and makes it seem like the cash was generated by an honest business). So why is Skyler finding no contradiction whilst simultaneously accusing Ted of over-reporting and under-reporting revenues? Why would he under-report real revenues (because he received the actual cash) whilst simultaneously fabricating paperwork to over-report the fake revenues from other customers? And why do this in the same set of books?

Either Ted wants to over-report revenues (to make the bank think the business is doing better than it really is, so they do not call in their loans) or he wants to under-report revenues (to fool the taxman into levying less tax). He might even, conceivably, have engaged in a complicated scam where there are the real books, the books to please the bank (with over-reported revenues) and the books to fool the taxman (with under-reported revenues). Yet dumbo Skyler has identified unders and overs whilst looking at a single set of books. Which means she thinks Ted conspired to lose some paperwork here, invent some paperwork there, and so cancel out his parallel frauds, getting him back to the right overall answer!

I do not expect the average viewer to analyse the dialogue in this detail, although I spotted this problem straight away, and I found it very difficult to tolerate the character of Skyler from that moment on. Every time I saw her arrogance about her skill at money laundering (a simple job, involving tallying up fake sales supported by real cash) I was reminded of the basic incompetence manifest in that scene. And I would expect the average viewer would suspect something was amiss with the skew-whiff dialogue in that scene. It does not take an expert to smell the suspicious odour surrounding that scene, or with much of what Skyler says and does in her ‘professional’ capacity.

There are other screw-ups too. In a later episode, Skyler negotiates to buy the car wash. She arrogantly elaborates how she calculated the cashflows of the business. That would be a whole lot more impressive if she had not stated that depreciation was included in the calculation. Depreciation is an accounting cost that has no impact on cashflows. Later still, Skyler helps Ted to fool the taxman, by pretending there is more paperwork than the taxman has already seen. And yet, Ted’s company is already full of phoney paperwork, which has inflated revenues, and so increased his tax bill. If Skyler wanted to help Ted, she should have told Ted to shred the phoney paperwork and stop inflating his revenues. So where others claim to see a ‘strong’ woman, I see a cartoonish character who clearly has never spent a day being the diligent, methodical book-keeper she pretends to be. And who is to blame? Not Skyler White. The writers and the actor are to blame, though they might defend themselves by saying they had no clue about the dialogue they wrote, and spoke, respectively. Even so, this is not a sign of artistic quality and commitment, and the audience is justified in disliking such a shoddily-constructed and poorly-researched character.

Again, there is extent to which is pointless to over-analyse. Skyler is no more to blame for her incompetence with accounts than Walt would be to blame if he made basic errors in chemistry. The fault is with the writers. Even so, an audience can only analyse what is presented to them, not the writer’s real intention. The writers intended for Skyler to come across as a competent bookkeeper. She actually came across as a dunderhead who confused some of the most basic concepts in record-keeping. Maybe some of the audience did not notice. But I would contend that, even if they did not consciously notice the awful mistakes that Skyler made, the relevant scenes did not help the audience to form the impression that the writers intended. In short, the writers screwed up various attempts to show Skyler is a competent person, aside from being a wife and mother.

And I will go further. I would have very much liked for Skyler White to be steely and multilayered. I want women characters to be steely and multilayered, for the same reasons I enjoy those properties in male characters. I hate Skyler White because she is neither steely, nor multilayered. Taken across all five seasons, Skyler White is usually a pathetic woman, huffing and puffing but with no substance to her. She talks a lot, but does little. Far from being a role model for strong women, she is detestable because she is so utterly unable to do anything to control her destiny except by complaining to Walt.

What kind of feminist would think that loathing Skyler White must be an example of misogyny? Feminists should despise Skyler’s weakness and vulgarity as much as anyone. Maybe they should dislike Skyler even more, because she is a stereotype. She is the misogynist’s favourite cliche: an unpleasant, overbearing, stupid, nagging wife. We should blame the stereotype on the people who lazily recycled it, not the people who hate what it represents.

The problem with Skyler White is that the character is clearly intended to balance audience figures in a show which, some may argue, is better designed to appeal to men. Organized crime + nerdy science = content that supposedly favours men. I do not encourage this sexism. Why should a woman enjoy nerdy science less than men? Why should the interests of women viewers be fixated on raising kids, and sustaining marriages, instead of running a drug cartel or laundering money? These are not my values, but these are the values that the makers of Breaking Bad subscribed to, when constructing the character of Skyler White. In my opinion, if you are only throwing in a female character in the hopes of giving something for female viewers to latch on to, whilst the men of the house genuinely enjoy the television program, then you are treating your audience with contempt. The tactic may lead to higher ratings, but it evidences neither artistic nor moral backbone. If they wanted a major woman character, they should have given the audience a major woman character, instead of pouring so much screentime into an insipid, flat, dull, non-entity of a pseudo-woman.

And that is why I hate Skyler White. It has nothing to do with how I feel about women. The actor who played Skyler White was unable to save the character from its faults. She was not responsible for the difficulty of her task, though she was foolish to blame the audience for her own failure. Unlike Walter White’s crystal meth, Skyler White was a sub-standard product. The people who are responsible for that product are not women in general, nor the people who disliked Skyler White. The people responsible are the makers of Breaking Bad. The people who most failed with Skyler White are the show’s directors, and its writers. And most of them are men.

If a stranger walked up to me in the street, with no knowledge of what I have done in my life, stopped me, and said I was exceptional, I know what my reaction would be. I would hurriedly walk away, assuming I was about to be robbed, or cheated. My guess is that most of the human race would react the same way. And yet, there are 314 million people in this world, who would thank the stranger for pointing out the obvious. They would suffer no embarrassment or false modesty, irrespective of whether they became an exception by virtue of birth, or naturalization. These exceptional people are Americans. And whilst Americans already knew I was writing about them, it is important to observe that most other people on this planet would not have made that assumption. On a global scale, most of the human race are blissfully unaware of America’s preoccupation with its own exceptionalism, or exceptionalness, or exceptionality, or however they contrive to express the feeling that the United States of America is special.

Whatever they may think of the USA, most reasonable people would agree that Vladimir Putin is a bad man. His political goals are narrow and miserable: to stay in power, and to make Russia more powerful. There are many downsides to this agenda. But however bad Putin is, he accurately hit a raw nerve with many Americans, for daring to suggest that Americans are not exceptional. As evident from the voluminous responses in American culture, Putin’s comments caused inordinate upset. Politicians, ex-politicians, journalists, talk show hosts… seemingly half of America has risen up to explain why America really is exceptional. And when they do so, many of them snidely point at the other half, implying they do not protest enough. Like a red flag in front of a bull, the Russian leader taunted his long-time enemy, and succeeded in causing a stampede.

This begs a question. If Americans really do feel exceptional, why are they so easily taunted? Why would an exceptional people be so wounded when a manipulative foreign politician dares to say that Americans are the equal of all other human beings? Why do they feel the urge to react so vehemently, and to defend themselves? Human nature, universal as it is, has the answer. Some Americans might not like that answer, which would also be consistent with human nature. Nobody feels defensive when accused of something that is plainly, absurdly, false. If a random stranger screamed about my third leg, I would conclude that he must be deranged. I would not look down to check if he was right, and I would not engage him in a pseudo-rational argument about my two-leggedness. American defensiveness about their exceptional status in human history is not motivated by their unlimited self-assurance about that status. On the contrary, their defensive reaction is prompted exactly because it is a story they have invented for themselves, with scant evidence to support it.

For an example of how America writes its own story, take Peggy Noonan’s defence of American exceptionalism, as published in the Wall Street Journal. To begin with, she uses the old politician’s trick: if you cannot debate your opponent’s argument, just attack the man instead…

Mr. Putin’s challenge to the idea to American exceptionalism was ignorant and tone-deaf. The president had thrown in a reference to it at the end of his speech. Mr. Putin, in his essay, responded: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.” After all, he said, God made us all equal.

My goodness, that argument won’t get you very far in America, and it’s a little worrying that Mr. Putin either wouldn’t know this or wouldn’t care.

On the contrary, I thought Putin’s challenge was far from ignorant or tone-deaf. And it is plain that he does not care about American opinion. So it is odd that Noonan might worry that Putin might not know how Americans will respond. Why would an exceptional people worry about such a thing? Of course, they have nothing to worry about. To an independent eye, it looks as if Putin knows exactly what reaction he would prompt.

I find Noonan ridiculous for suggesting that Putin might have written his comment in ignorance of how Americans would react. Putin is an arch-manipulator of media. And thanks to the flaws in Russian democracy, he has much more experience of manipulating media than any American President will ever amass. Lesser men, when attaining power, might enjoy the good food and privileges that come with high office. Putin is so zealous in controlling his media image that he must stay trim, so he can repeatedly rip off his shirt, in order to reinforce his virile media image. In many respects, Putin is as adept at manipulating media as any celebrity in Hollywood. That Noonan suggests Putin might not understand his media impact, tells us much about both of them. One has an iron control over his image, and he projects his message as he chooses, using brutality when he calculates it will best serve his interests. The other is a delusional wordsmith, expending words to sustain a self-image that is under attack, in order to shelter the fragile sensibilities of her readers.

It seems very odd that any American writer would assume Putin has reason to care what the American public thinks. American voters do not choose who is President of Russia. According to some, even Russian voters have minimal influence over their choice of leader. An intelligent, and impartial reader of Putin’s op-ed would recognize that Putin is sending a message to Russians, and to other nations. He is saying that the USA can be successfully challenged, and undermined. That message came across crystal clear, to everyone outside of the USA. It is an irony, though Putin’s knowing irony, that he broadcast that message via an American newspaper.

The only people who struggle to interpret Putin’s message are the Americans it was nominally addressed to. This is also part of the message that Putin is sending to everyone else. ‘Look at the Americans,’ he is saying, ‘we all know they will get red in the face and start chattering about how exceptional they are, compared to the rest of us.’ He might go on to say: ‘they chatter chatter, but otherwise, they are impotent – so none of us need listen to them.’ This is the message that Putin is sending to everybody. If Americans are not picking it up, it is because they find it painful to listen to. After decades of failed military intervention, and the steady loss of influence and control over previous allies, what can American exceptionalism deliver, in the world we find today? Great differences in technology can sustain exceptional power and influence. Many people find it hard to believe that Britain once went to war with China, and won. The story of that war is that a nation with iron-clad ships carrying big cannons will defeat a much larger nation without them. For a time, the USA had that kind of advantage over potential opponents, particularly with respect to air superiority. Whilst the USA is still the leading military power, the world has moved on, and military superiority confers less advantage than it used to. The war in Vietnam should have alerted the USA to that trend. Churchill said that jaw-jaw was better than war-war. But at this stage of world history, what does America’s ‘exceptional’ power consist of, apart from more and more of the jaw and jaw? Recently, Americans have talked a lot about Syria, but all that talk has not granted Americans the power necessary to intervene, or save lives, or enforce peace.

The phrase ‘jaw-jaw’ was Churchill’s apt way of describing a process that is more haughtily referred to as diplomacy. After nearly a century of being the world’s greatest military power, America should have expertise in the field of diplomacy. So why, after all this time, are Americans surprised by how Russians do diplomacy? To put it succinctly, Russians do diplomacy by being as undiplomatic as possible. They open every dialogue with insults, and only give compliments when the negotiations reach a conclusion. I will not comment if this is a good approach, but it is definitely the Russian approach. They do this to everyone – which is why former Soviet Republics like the Baltic nations have been so keen to join NATO and the EU. Yet Americans continue to be perplexed that when the Russian leader engages in jaw-jaw, he starts by slapping them in the face.

Part of the problem is that American media and culture is normally stone deaf, when faced with foreign criticism. An easy and recurring criticism of American culture and politics is that it is very insular. Americans live in a big country, geographically removed from most others. As such, it is inevitable that Americans will be more insular than other nationalities. The pioneer, outward-looking spirit of an immigrant that moved to the USA in the 1800’s is not going to persist through their family line for eight generations or move. The consequence for American culture mostly blank outs any foreign hostility to the USA. What little gets through is grossly simplified – America’s opponents are evil, and probably deserve to be killed. Hence when Saudis crash a plane into the World Trade Centre, Iraq gets invaded, and that will somehow neutralize the threat of Al Qaeda. Looking back, it seems utterly perplexing that Americans believed this fairy tale, but they did.

The little foreign criticism that reaches the ordinary American is routinely dismissed, treated with hostility and contempt. Even America’s allies know that American media is like this. John Kerry recently reminded Americans that France is their oldest ally. Even the stupidest historian knows that Ben Franklin paraded his racoon-skin cap around Paris because the Americans needed France’s support in their war for independence. Yet, it was not that long ago that America’s brightest and best – politicians, journalists and opinion-makers, were ranting about the names of potato, and demanding they be changed to terminate any francophile association. This is the nature of public affairs in the USA. When America reacts this badly to a disagreement with France, it is inevitable that they will invite the occasional slap in the face from implacable foes like Russia.

To suggest that Putin is unaware of America’s oversensitive culture is laughable. He obviously knows what the American reaction would be. More importantly, he correctly evaluates the likely reaction of many people outside of America – people that America would dearly like to ‘lead’. But then, Putin has own ideas about who should be leading whom.

America is not exceptional because it has long attempted to be a force for good in the world, it attempts to be a force for good because it is exceptional.

This is a nice turn of phrase by Noonan, though it is a little too convenient in its contrivance. Even as somebody sympathetic to the idea that America does more good than harm, I find that the problem with being ‘a force for good’ is that somebody has to decide what ‘good’ looks like. And not every citizen of the world thinks like a voter in Ohio, or Florida, or Nevada. It would be a remarkable coincidence if the average voter in Arkansas really did see the world in the same way as the average victim of civil war in Somalia.

And Americans do not just disagree with other nationalities about what is good for the world. They also disagree amongst themselves. Is Obamacare a good thing? What about the right to own firearms? In such circumstances, it is perfectly natural for the people of the world to question if American policy is always right, and whether the USA is such a surefire force for good as Americans would like to believe. Indeed, the whole point of America’s democracy is that each individual is the best governor of himself, and that authority is pooled only reluctantly, and with many checks and balances. But foreign nationals do not have a vote in American elections, and do not exert much influence on American policy. As such, there is a contradiction at the heart of the theory of American exceptionalism. People need to govern themselves, or the best outcomes will not be attained. America, however hard it tries, could never reliably deliver what is good for other nations, any more than I should be allowed to decide what is good for my neighbour.

It is a nation formed not by brute, grunting tribes come together over the fire to consolidate their power and expand their land base, but by people who came from many places.

It was at this point in reading Noonan’s article that I remembered how Americans can be oddly unaware of what they sound like, to foreign ears. One time I saw an American tourist screaming in the face of a Thai guard at the royal palace in Bangkok. I mention this not because I think he was typical of all Americans, but his behaviour tells us something about the differences between cultures, and the nature of power. The tourist was upset about how he had been treated, though it was impossible to determine what the exact problem was. He seemed physically well (for example, his lungs were very fit) and none of his companions were in distress. The Thai behaved in typical Thai fashion. Embarrassed by the situation, the guard smiled, and did not speak back. His silence further enraged the American, who shouted even more loudly. And yet, there was no problem with hearing what the American was saying. Anyone in a radius of two miles would be able to hear, and the guard was only three inches from his face. What really struck me about the situation was that the American expected his ability to talk (in English) would confer him some power over the guard, in the same way that being rude to a waiter might lead to an immediate response in an American diner. I watched placidly, as all others did, wondering how long the abuse would continue. And all the while, the guard’s rifle hung loosely from his shoulder.

Does Noonan have the capacity to play back her own words, with the meaning unchanged, but with the perspective shifted, so she hears what a foreign audience would hear? To anyone who is not an American, Noonan wrote the following: every other nation was formed by brute grunting tribes who came together over fire to consolidate their power and expand their land base. If Noonan thinks Putin is tone deaf, she should calibrate her criticism by listening to herself.

It is a matter of historical fact that many of America’s settlers moved there to acquire land, power, and wealth. Some wanted other things. Some keenly felt the calling of God. But common ordinary human desires motivated many others. People did not choose to settle and farm in Virginia, the most powerful and wealthy state in America’s early years, because they were uniformly disinterested in land. I do not say this because I disparage human desires. It is perfectly natural for human beings to want things like land, power, and wealth. What is odd is that some Americans believe their ancestors were immune to these desires. America’s current wealth and power is not predicated on Americans having an exceptional lack of interest in accumulating wealth and power. On the contrary, the effective pursuit of wealth and power is why America is so rich and powerful. American settlers grabbed a lot of valuable land from the native American inhabitants of their continent. And over time, the true mineral wealth of that land was discovered and exploited. These are the reasons why America is powerful. Take plentiful resources like land and oil, find a system where people are motivated to create value for each other, and you end up with a powerful nation. Any other explanation of America’s wealth and power would be utterly perverse. Some might suggest any counter-argument must be unamerican. So I believe it is Noonan who is both tone-deaf, and disingenuous, when suggesting that America was built by people who did not seek to accumulate land or power.

There is a deep vein in American culture which insists that they are the plucky underdog, vanquishing more powerful foes. Hence, their war of independence in 1775-1783 is still vital to their identity. But as early as 1812, the USA was instigating war and invading foreign territory. Americans well remember that the White House was raided and burned, but they forget this was a copycat reprisal for a similar attack by their own troops. The modern American historian must go through a series of mental cartwheels to explain why, when American troops attempted, but failed to invade Canada, the Americans did not really mean to grab chunks of land, just like all those grunting tribes that inhabit every other nation. I have no understanding of why it is so important to the American psyche that literally every American military adventure must be interpreted as a battle where Americans were solely motivated by what was ‘good’, in the abstract, even when the evidence suggests American motives can be as petty, political, selfish and prejudiced as those of every other nation that has ever engaged in conflict, by which I mean all of them.

If Americans always fight on the side of good, they may want to reflect on the American Civil War of 1861-1865. By the logic that Americans always act as a force for good, then some of the Americans who fought the civil war must have been fighting against good. And so, we discover it is possible that bad motives might prompt an American to fight, and even to lose their lives whilst fighting. Why is it impossible to extrapolate from this basic observation, to a position that accepts that not every American goal must be truly virtuous?

Whilst America sees itself as a paradoxical underdog, never attacking, always defending itself, that leads to all sorts of confused explanations of American and world history. Take World War 2 as an example. Americans may be aware that Hitler was doing some bad things before he declared war on the USA. And note that Germany declared war on the USA, and not vice versa. Before that moment, some interpret the actions of the US President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as being designed to provoke the Japanese. They argue that FDR used sanctions to prompt the Japanese into striking first, opening the doors for America’s entry into WW2, to fight against the Germans. The thinking is that FDR could only engage in war with Germany if Germany’s ally struck at the USA first. Maybe this is true. Maybe it is false. But why do American historians bother with this theory, if American exceptionalism is a sufficient explanation for America’s actions? As a force for good, the US should have fought against the Nazis, even if Pearl Harbor had never happened. Why did the USA not declare war against Germany sooner, with the moral justification that the Nazis were a manifest danger to world peace? Conversely, why did the US expend resources on fighting Nazi Germany, from the first moment they entered the war, when Germany had not attacked the USA? The myth of American exceptionalism is a grand artistic blur, best observed from a distance. It ignores all the pragmatic and human necessities of why, and when, real people enter into conflict with each other. By so doing, it renders it impossible to come up with a satisfying, and detailed explanation of how and why American foreign policy, and its military intervention, has and does take shape.

To make a new nation also involves the making of new myths. This is natural, and part of human nature. It is required for the bonding of many new tribes in their new homeland of the North American continent. And I think that Noonan knows it, when she continues:

[Americans] coalesced around not blood lines but ideals, and they defined, delineated and won their political rights in accordance with ground-breaking Western and Enlightenment thought. That was something new in history, and quite exceptional.

Unalienable universal rights are often considered a ground-breaking, exceptional idea. Especially by Americans. But at the time that Americans wrote about the unalienable rights of men, some of the men who signed up to the concept were also the owners of slaves. Slaves do not have the unalienable rights of other human beings; they are property, to be bought and sold as their owner pleases. Americans used slaves to make money from the land. This element of American history does not suggest exceptionalism, as much as it suggests the wearing of wistful gloves over the fists of pragmatism. Though eagerly forgotten by some students of American history, there was a genuine debate about whether unalienable rights were given by god to all men, or whether they were only given to freemen, thus excluding the slaves and sparing the new nation the obvious inconsistency between their moral preaching and actual behaviour.

Whilst Americans were talking about slavery, or pretending it did not exist, the practice of slavery was already coming to an effective end in many other nations. This does not suggest that America was exceptional in its actual practice of human rights. On the contrary, the Americans who copied the ideas of others were copying the ideas of others. They did not break new ground, although they did occupy new territory. Intellectually, they were following in the footsteps of earlier thinkers from other nations. And the pace of their progress was not as rapid as Americans sometimes claim. That much is evident from the date of the legal abolition of slavery in the USA: 1865. In the decades before the USA passed the thirteenth amendment – and note how the constitution had to be changed, to turn ‘unalienable’ human rights from self-deception into legal fact – slavery had already been abolished in such diverse countries as Argentina, Cuba, Sweden, Venezuela, Serbia, Mexico, Greece, Estonia… actually, the list is boringly long. Many countries did not abolish slavery because their legal codes had never allowed for the possibility of one person owning another. For example, Russia emancipated its serfs before America emancipated its slaves, even though serfs already had more rights than slaves, because serfs were not legal property who could be bought and sold. And when it comes to securing the rights of all men, America is almost exceptional in world history because it needed to engage in bloody civil war in order to end the practice of slavery. The only other country which went to war to end slavery was Haiti, and that was a war of slaves against their masters, which the slaves won in 1804.

Americans can choose to ignore historical facts if they like, but facts cannot be changed by being listed here, or by being omitted elsewhere. So whilst Americans jaw-jawed about humanist ideals, many other nations had already turned ideals into a living reality. Amongst them was Britain, which in 1834 abolished slavery across the British Empire. Americans are proud of their revolutionary war, and how they won their freedom. They see it as key to their exceptionalism. However, if they had lost that war, American slaves would have been freed 31 years sooner.

Whilst the theory of American exceptionalism is embedded in historical argument, it relies upon the piecemeal recital of only the supporting evidence, at the expense of all evidence to the contrary. And this is why Noonan unashamedly continues:

We fought a war to win our freedom, won it against the early odds, understood we owed much to God, and moved forward as a people attempting to be worthy of what he’d given us.

It is fair to ask, if the Americans were so keen on the concept of freedom, so passionate about moving forward and being worthy of their god, why they were so very slow to end slavery, compared to the rest of the world.

Noonan later points out how President Obama seems loathe to mention American exceptionalism. Obama’s lack of enthusiasm for this particular shibboleth of American culture is often brought up by his detractors. Regorging familiar arguments, Noonan remembers how Obama once compared American exceptionalism to Greek exceptionalism. And this is how she views the comparison:

Asked about American exceptionalism once, [Obama] said sure he believes in it, just as the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. Thank you for that rousing historical endorsement.

It is easy to make an argument for American exceptionalism, if it relies on ignorance of the accomplishments of every other people. Noonan’s mockery relies on the unspoken belief that the Greek claim to be exceptional is obviously inferior to the American claim. But is there no American willing to entertain an argument for the merits of any nation other than their own? And if they did make such an argument, even if it started as a joke, might they not come to question the extent to which America really is exceptional, in the history of this world? I have no reason to argue for Greek exceptionalism, any more than I have reason to argue for American exceptionalism. And yet it strikes me that any student of history should be able to make some extraordinarily good arguments for Greek exceptionalism. The Greeks devised democracy. And pioneered architecture. And jurisprudence. Philosophy. Literature. Mathematics. The Olympic Games. The first university. Greeks were debating the correct forms for tragic and comic theatre when Americans were… well, where were they? At that time, Americans were so unexceptional that there were no Americans. America’s ancestors were spread all over, undifferentiated from the brutish land-grabbing tribal natives of lots of other nations. And if we are not allowed to rewind the clock, and discuss Greek exceptionalism as it existed 2,500 years ago, then why are we permitted to wind back the clock by 230 years, and submit the events of that time as proof of America’s present-day exceptionalism?

I don’t know why the idea of American exceptionalism seems to grate so on Mr. Putin. Perhaps he simply misunderstands what is meant by it and takes it to be a reference to American superiority, which it is not.

Of course Noonan has no idea why American exceptionalism would grate on Russia’s President. We can safely assume that this American journalist, like so many others, lives in an insular world, and writes for an insular audience. It may come as a shock to some Americans, but the excess supply of immigrants into their country is not proof that the majority of the world’s population has a unique admiration for America. Even the students in America’s lowliest schools should be able to validate my maths; Ancient Greek students of maths and logic would have known how to.

Rightly or wrongly, America is despised by very many people across the face of this planet. This is so well known that it is hard to understand why Americans struggle to apprehend the fact. Opinion polls are taken, and the result is that America has many enemies, even amongst ‘friendly’ countries. Large numbers view America as a bully, and whilst they might not pick fights with bullies, their silent brooding ferments even greater resent. Versions of that antipathy can be found anywhere, whether amongst French socialists, Chinese nationalists, or Arab jihadists. Of course the USA has allies too. But whenever the USA has an ally, it is likely that ally must also have an opponent. Thus even America’s allies are part of a process that encourages enmity to the USA. Whenever the USA picks a side, they will offend someone. So Russia’s President is far from alone in feeling the way he does. The real surprise is that any intelligent American would find this surprising. Even if America was exceptional, exceptionalism is unlikely to equate to popularity.

Does Putin misunderstand American exceptionalism? Noonan insists it is unrelated to American superiority. This is disingenuous. Shorn of superior wealth and power, American present-day exceptionalism would look a lot like Greek present-day exceptionalism, or the present-day exceptionalism of any other country that has neither the military nor economic assets to exert influence across the world. Anyone can claim good intentions if they lack the resources to do anything about them. But in a world where only one nation has those resources, it does not follow that their intentions must also be unique.

American exceptionalism is necessarily bound up in American superiority. This much is recognized by the average American, as Noonan tacitly admits, commenting: “some of the stupider Americans have crowed about American exceptionalism a bit too much “” and those crowing loudest understood it least.” Here Noonan finally joins an international consensus, to the chagrin of some of her fellow Americans. But whilst the stupider Americans crow too much, that begs a question that only the wisest Americans would know not to answer. If truly exceptional, what advantage is gained by saying so?