The Twelve Tenets of BARRY (And What It’s Not) (Patreon)

I had never seen an episode of HBO’s BARRY until last month. But as of now, I have watched the entirety of it, including the finale. Given the intensity of the subject matter and the shortness of the viewing window, it’s safe to say I feel kinda nuts! But I also have a cacophony of thoughts that will take the form of a twelve part essay on the ballad of Barry Berkman. All of which is formed around central tenets of what this show is (at least I think) trying to do.

With that, let’s get into it.

1. A SHORT, FUNNY, DRAMATIC JUXTAPOSITION

With Barry, it’s almost less about what it is, but what’s not.

For we live in an age of amorphous streaming content. An age where tech companies try to hire eager, cheap, and often inexperienced independent filmmakers (in TV at least) and tout their exhaustive “8 hour movies” when the story itself barely has enough conflict for two hours. They always act as if “more time” somehow enables epic scope, but more often it results in episodes full of plot-blocking filler, all right before something “happens” just before the credits - which is also often a fake-out - just before the app immediately railroads you into another episode because god forbid you ever see a credit. It results in something that feels both bloated and yet rushed; a carefree era where all those tight, five act 44 minute dramas of television yore will now swell well right into an amorphous, rambling hour like it’s nothing.

But please understand that this is not about length. I will happily sit down for a three hour movie or binge watch a great show that I’m catching up on. No, it’s not about the length, it’s about the waste. Because if nothing ever has to be cut down, then nothing ever has to really focus, eith. And this is not even to get into the lack of interesting subject matter in the streaming era, whether it’s a show’s penchant for prequel-itis, as if it connecting the dots to familiar beats is storytelling in and of itself (but that’s a whole other essay). Nor is it even to get into how the algorithm will keep looking for “signifiers” to say what people like even though the algorithm couldn’t tell you what “well written comedy or drama” actually looks like. And wouldn’t you know it, but those are the shows that seem to become hits! It’s almost like they’re analyzing a mountain of data where they don’t understand correlation doesn’t mean cause. Anyway, all of this is to say that things are dire (and it’s part of the many reasons that the WGA is on strike).

But BARRY is the antithesis of virtually all of that. It grounds almost every scene in tension and conflict. It surgically knows how to alleviate that tension either with an action beat, or an off-beat surprise, or a laugh, and sometimes all at once. It's a serialized show, but each episode feels like it’s focused on a singular A to B story that helps us get to the “C” of the overall development. It maintains BLISSFUL 30 minute lengths and 8 episode seasons in a show that could easily have been tempted to go for more. It always scales things down. It keeps scenes tight. It keeps everything crawling along the edge of a knife, always employing the fine art of juxtaposition between these variant emotions to make it feel all the more realized. In generalized terms, this is what TV should be. But the unfortunate reality is that BARRY is an anomaly in the modern streaming era.

Which is an extra shame because it even has a damn lot to say about it.

2. THE OTHER LOS ANGELES

When you picture Hollywood you likely imagine the stereotypes of flashbulbs going off against red carpets, velvet ropes, and long limousines. Or perhaps it’s the sleek buildings with high-powered agents, scrambling PR people, and power lunches. It’s the glitz, the glamor, and everything befitting the culture of want and stardom. What likely doesn’t help is that movies and TV shows love to reflect that image in turn (thanks Entourage). And even when it comes to Hollywood’s uglier underbelly, we’ll get million stories of scandals and forlorn tragedies of ambition that befit this rather tough town. It’s like All About Eve right? Establishments and fresh-faced newcomers are just eager to take you down. This is the Hollywood tha movies tell you about. But there’s another Hollywood that doesn’t get talked about as much.

And it is a much more mundane one.

Because, yes, there are thousands of people who move here “trying to make it” in their respective fields, probably actors most of all. And like the stereotype says, they often end up working stints in bars and waiting tables (because it affords flexibility and covering for each other), but as far as flaming out in despair? It’s not quite tragically grand like that. It’s often a quieter thing. They’re all going on auditions, taking classes, doing background extra work, starring in shorts, or maybe they even get a commercial or two. Maybe they even end up in some low budget independent features (that likely will never get distribution). There are all these people who are working here that you will likely never see or know the name of… And I cannot overstate how much this part of the industry DWARFS the size of the other. Really, there are so, so, so many people working in this other part of Hollywood. And there is a very particular feeling to all of it.

For one, there’s an inherent mix of seriousness AND silliness to it. Because you have a lot of people understanding that they are engaging in work that will, you know, not end up not really being very good. But it’s work. And there is a part of them that understands the nature of this situation, but they often meet the feeling in different ways. People with a good professional sense will come in, not judge, do their best work, and go home. Others seem to use their awareness of the “not very good” part to make glib jokes. Some have to be jerks and act above it all. But some have to go in the other direction and meet this unfortunate reality with a sense of desperation. Some have to take it SO SERIOUSLY. And some get quietly despondent because it’s not the thing they so hoped it would be. But all of them are facing that existential conflict of this reality. Because in these spaces, if you look around the room, there will probably only be a couple people who will be lucky enough to turn all of this effort into a working career, forget fame itself.

Naturally, people deal with these roadblocks differently (though I will say that jealousy benefits precisely no one). But if there is a change, rarely is there some big flame up or singular decision. Often, it just quietly peters out. They’ll find a job doing something else. Or maybe they end up finding out they have a knack for something different, less glamorous part of the industry, whatever else it may be. But that’s not really a bad thing either. These jobs are just as critical and full of professionals who are great at them, but often it’s part of a whole lot of people who have made peace with what they are good at. Maybe others weren’t even that lucky. Either way, the point is that there’s a whole huge part of Hollywood that you don’t know about.

And that’s the world Barry operates in.

For instance, do you know what central casting is? They’re mostly known for hiring all the background actors on big productions. But there’s actually a number of companies like this, not just for filling out big productions, but they also hold open casting for a great number of shorts / low-budget features / commercials, etc. Now, the short film industry used to be a much bigger part of the pre-internet landscape, but they’re still something done in perpetuity. Many make shorts thinking they’ll be the thing that gets you noticed! And sometimes that’s true. But what they mostly are is a (hopefully) small and great place to learn. Specifically, learning what NOT to do based on long held assumptions about what filmmaking would be like. But if it’s something you embark on, I strongly recommend holding auditions in these spaces. Because it’s this way to meet so, so, so many eager young actors on the fringes. Some have great attitudes. Some are stress balls. And some are absurd. Seriously, you have NO idea how weird it gets and how quickly, too. But it’s an important space to see and understand the landscape around you.

The first season of Barry captures all of this so well. It’s not just that it casts a lot of oddball people who actually come out of that world (along with amazing HBO regulars like Bunny Colvin! And The Sopranos’ FBI guy!). It’s also right in the subject matter with the young actors in the class and how they have varying levels of “not awful to very bad.” It also captures this very specific desperate and eager to please mind set. They’re just so hungry to glom onto anything that gets them better or move them up a proverbial rung on the Hollywood ladder. My favorite beat is the party in the first season with them all centering around the “celebrity” who is an actor who is just doing the mo-cap on a big Hollywood project (even there there’s no voice or face). But it should be said. As funny as this stuff is, I try to tell people that it’s weirdly instrumental in building a “sense of purpose and community.” Especially because that group will evolve. One generation of overworked assistants all getting lunch will end up being the next generation of executives. A rising tide lifts all boats and whatnot. And yes, there are people that others recognize immediately as being incredibly talented, the diamonds in the rough. But understanding all this is instrumental and part of the reason to NOT be Gene Cousineau and instead be, you know, nice. You never know how dynamics will change. To wit, I was doing a short a billion years ago and two of the actors both ended up being leads in TV shows, one of whom is the star / creator (and it was a bit part). Time is funny that way. And it’s important to understand the ups and downs of show business (especially as we will see in the Sally arc, but we’ll come back to that later).

What I also love is that Barry captures the parts of Los Angeles itself that don’t get seen as much on screen. For instance, I love how much of the show is set in The Valley. For those who don’t live here, the oft referenced “valley” you see in movies is the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. And while some of the hilltop areas are home to expensive housing, in general, it’s the flatter, former farmland area that was built out of the post-war boom (which was the subject of Chinatown). It was also home to the porn boom in the 70’s (the subject of Boogie Nights). And it is generally cheaper, less regal, and about 10 degrees hotter every single day of the year (it’s land-locked so it doesn’t get the sea breeze). To be clear, some of my favorite places in the whole dang city are there. But it’s often typified by these suburban, less tree lined sprawls and large blocky apartment complexes that were built in the 70s and 80’s. Everything about this space just seeps into the show. Heck, I’m trying to think of what other show is going to be smart by having one of its best episodes called “710N,” a reference to the 710 freeway that goes up from Long Beach, through east LA, and into Pasadena. This is all to say that as someone who lives here, it is absolutely giving you a gander into the more “mundane” part of Los Angeles that is rarely seen on screen. And it is done with great purpose (which we’ll come back to).

By the third season, Barry finds its way into the “Hollywood” that is perhaps a bit more familiar to our screens. That would be the world of agents, meetings, show premieres, writers’ rooms, etc. But I love the way the show stays away from the tired tropes that were endlessly recycled on Entourage (look I l have a lot of problems with that show and will keep pointing out the differences) and finds a way into the jokes you don’t see as often. Sometimes it’s the way that Barry doesn’t know what “a feature” is (along with the fact that everyone keeps insisting on using that word). I feel like this ties into Hader’s habit of having “just the right amount” of obscure references. It’s cops arguing about the plot of Yojimbo to best explain a crime. Or Barry doing a similar collage to the one Thief. And who can forget about Rip Torn’s gun (a sentence I wrote before the finale). But my favorite little industry joke is probably the use of Alison Jones - who in case you don’t know is probably the best casting agent ever and responsible for a billion comedy careers right now - and how instead of playing into any of that reverence there’s just her weird little comic obsession with paring a tall guy with a short guy “because it’s funny.”

Meanwhile, the show hits its most insightful points when taking on modern Hollywood, particularly how it takes on the new streaming era. And HOO BOY do they hit it hard. The depiction of BanShee and its competitors highlights the way they’re programming a ton of stuff in the same demographics, pushing none of it, ignoring relative quality, and barely giving them a chance before yanking forever. The show is canceled and Sally declares with confusion, “it was literally on the home page less than an hour ago” But why would that matter when “the algorithm felt it wasn’t hitting the right taste clusters.” Of course, it also clocks how quickly it can all fall apart. Sally’s downturn is merciless, coupled with her own fault of course, but that brings the narrative to the most interesting Hollywood place of all…

Which is the word problem when industry folks know you’re smart and good at the job, but not sellable, thus not powerful. For many who work in this town, it’s a familiar place. A place where you are in a writers room and trying to make a thing work and some dude is like, “she just wants to get laid… and it's funny.” But the network is just wondering, can she fix all that? And later, post REALLY falling, can she just make the model / star do her level of acting? Much of this comes back to her character’s journey (which again, we’ll cover later), but it’s so much about the spaces of Hollywood that exist in the in between. Which just so happens to be the larger theme of the show in a way. Namely, the way our characters all get stuck between the two competing sides of their natures.

And none of it is simple…

3. A REAL ‘MURIKAN HERO

I am deeply curious what veterans think about this show.

In one way, there seems to be a kind of sensitivity to the experience of soldiers within the larger war machine. It doubles down on the way they are taught to kill. Follow orders. And then how they are left out in the lurch, often without a sense of purpose. It shows the way people look in at that experience, project upon it, and often don’t understand. There’s a real empathy for a lot of this. But in another way, there’s also the blunt edge of satire that runs throughout the entire show. It feels like it’s making fun of the “murika!” sense of hoo-rah and the kinds of meat-head culture that goes along with the worst about it. But the thing about the armed forces is that there are a lot of people who have a certain modern conservative ugliness and project onto military culture without ever having been in the military themselves. And the thing about actual veterans is that they are smart. Whatever they thought going into the armed forces, they came out understanding a lot about their experiences. And they have often been changed and scarred by them. Which is exactly why you should trust that they know the full range of people they’ve served with - along with WHY they served - and they likely know it a lot better than you or I.

Which is why I was deeply curious what they thought - and this reddit thread serves as a pretty good primer - specifically on the thing that makes Barry a real liability from that world. Which again, is a thing we’ll come back to. I just wanted to note the curiosity in general.

4. THE NICE GUYS

For years I’ve heard people talking about the character of “NoHo Hank” and I can’t tell you how exciting it was to see him finally come alive. Because Anthony Carrigan is just phenomenal. It’s not just that he’s incredibly funny, with a sense of comedic diction that’s pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever heard. It’s that it’s a fully inhabited, grounded performance. To put it simply, you believe in the reality of NoHo Hank at every moment. And as the series goes on, you even get to see the subtle variations of how he plays the genuine emotions character, along with the deeper pleas to the audience. In the fourth season especially, you get to see the way he’s grown hollow from betrayal, loss, and mistakes. I mean, there’s something so gutting about a passion-less NoHo Hank. And it’s perhaps telling how much his character represents the modus operandi for the entire show. But establishing that means asking that simple question that may seem obvious:

Why is Hank / the show’s treatment of criminals so funny?

As I alluded to in part one, much of it is the simple art of comic juxtaposition. You see the tough exteriors of all these hardened criminals. But they also get to be real softies. For the show is constantly reassuring those men it’s okay to take down that intense posturing and embrace something more innocent and fun. I know that the “soft tough looking guy” is a familiar comic trope. It’s even a juxtaposition that was done so acutely years before in The Sopranos, though that was a bit more focused on daily regularities of drama. What’s different about Barry is how it is constantly hitting us with the deadpan, yet heightened satirical edge. And yet, it never turns away from that comic reality either. It’s always “marrying the joke” in the best possible way that allows those positive associations to build.

But honestly, much of its success is how Hader really seems to understand getting the exact right references. I mean, it’s everything about the Dave and Buster’s scenes. This is an important skill because it's about tapping into our collective understanding of the mundane in a way that makes us immediately laugh. But either way, please understand that I also think there’s an under-appreciated reality to this, too. Because if you live in LA, guess what? Gang members absolutely go to Dave and Buster’s with friends and family. This isn’t conjecture or assumption. We know what a tattoo with “ALKN” stands for. And similarly, people know there’s nothing to fear in this reality because it’s all just people there to hang out with their loved ones, spend money, and have fun. There is a mundane humanity at the center of this. Something so simple about the human yearning for the “nice and good” parts of life taking precedence. Barry is simply about capturing those extremes and putting them next to each other.

But this invariably brings us to the question of morality. Because, yes, these characters are fun and goofy. But these characters are also routinely committing murder. But the thing about NoHo Hank is that in comparison to Barry, he has a perfect understanding of himself. He has made peace with the obvious juxtapositions. For him, they’re part of the same thing. He is just as peppy and excited to be a badass gangster boss man. It is Barry who is the one conflicted (and in denial of) his nature. In one of the key scenes, Barry is struggling and asks Hank if he is a bad person. The response? “Yeah, badass evil!” Because to Hank, it’s all a good thing. And even embracing the idea that death dealing can be far more civil and peaceful than it actually is, is tellingly at the root of a lot of fascism. But he doesn’t even see any of this. He was brought up in this system. There is nothing outside of it. But by season 3 the show made a move that made all this a little more complex…

5. GAY ASIDES & BEAUTIFUL TREES

So NoHo Hank is gay. Like, actually in the show! It’s text! But before I get into it the particulars, I want to mention that there is this inherent double-edged sword in making *certain* non-conventional hetero things into gay text. To be clear, in the general sense I’m like yes yes more more gimme gimme (and I am absolutely for it in this specific case, too). But there is something equally important that can sometimes get lost, too. Like, we need more shows about straight people who don’t fall into conventional toxic hetero behaviors. Because sometimes it even gets into this whole chicken / egg scenario where it’s like, is Hank an alternative to all that *because* he’s gay? But this is just a general framework of concern when looking at the responsibilities of storytelling. As always, the measure of its success is in the specifics. What is it going to take time to explore? And is it going to handle those explorations well?

What I like is that a lot of the joke disappears and it’s more about the reality between Hank and Cristobal. It genuinely pays attention to their character dynamics, the things they care about, and how they keep (and don’t keep) trust between them. Yes, sometimes it goes to very scary places (the shock collar scene in season three is pretty fucking loaded and kinda messed with me and I’m curious what others think). But I think one of the most telling moments is that they can’t sit still in relative paradise. As gentle and loving as they can be in their way, they’re both products of their families and worlds. Criminal entrepreneurship in their nature. But, of course, it all finally catches up to them. The game is the game. Family is family. And the dream of their own independent world crashes down in heart-breaking fashion.

Now, if you’ve read me long enough you’ll know I have been extremely vocal about the “bury your gays” trope, especially as time has gone on. There’s a simple reason for this. Much like the point of the old Bechdel test, it’s not about passing. It’s about pointing out that every fucking narrative does it. Just time and time and time and time again, gay characters die. And they do it because it makes sympathetic straight people cry. We even get creators that pat themselves on the fucking back for “avoiding” the trope when they just avoiding a certain kind of violence and instead do the same damn thing of having them die by basically having them turn into a beautiful metaphorical tree or something. The reason the trope is a problem is not because there’s some inherent problem in exploring death. It’s because it’s mostly straight creators using it because it makes the audience feel awful and emotional. And for queer people, as effecting and devastating as it can be much the same, it tells the same message again and again: you’re doomed. Even here with Cristobal, it’s always the same story. Your love is doomed. And as much as every piece of media bends over backwards to consider themselves the exception that somehow does the burying DIFFERENT, it’s funny how no one has the courage or know how to actually figure out the dramatic way to go against it.

Anyway, with one giant “that being said,” the thing I liked is that at least Cristobal and Hank’s story was character-motivated. Their ending wasn’t about gangsters being homophobic. Their ending was about their relationship. The Chechens put them both in a hard place and Hank didn’t want to lose Cristobal, so he sold out their dreams without talking to him… and ended up losing them both. Carrigan’s performance is so damn affecting in that conversation scene. It’s like he KNEW this would destroy Cristobal and we see him trying his damnedest to just push through to make it okay. To make him stay. But the fatalistic heartbreak is there. But the other important thing is how much Hank’s uncharacteristic behavior is motivated by his hurt from Barry’s betrayal. He’s right in a space where his life seemingly has no meaning. He feels like he can’t trust anyone. His voice, normally chipper, becomes weighed down and broken. And as the narrative crests to “8 years later” section, he’s putting the shine over what really happened, for the truth is so traumatic and locked inside.

Which crests into his final stand-off with Fuches. But Hank’s ending is not so much that he can’t admit what happened, he basically does it in front of everyone. No, it’s his anger with Fuches’ cruelty and how he made him do this in a way that had no solace. For that, Hank fires and everyone else finds the grips of death alongside him. I will say, it is at least a very personal story about the very real nature of human entanglements. And for this, celebrate what Barry can do surprisingly well. But there’s something about that last gesture of him grabbing the hand of Cristobal’s statue as it pulls out… Yes, it’s emotionally affecting, but it goes back to my point about the “beautiful tree” metaphor. And the way it always ends up in these sorts of depictions of gay love. My point is not that it has some inherent wrongness. Nor that it doesn’t have some element of exception. My point is that it’s what always happens like this. Thus it always feels like this. And in the end, no matter how well executed, it’s always missing the better stories to tell… but for straight people, it’s somehow always the only story.

I wonder why that is?

6. LYNCH. KUBRICK. COEN. HADER?!?

There’s this old adage about cinema, “drama is a close-up and comedy plays in a wide.” It’s a vast simplification that’s also a little bit true. Because the far more simple idea is that the closer we are to something as an audience, the more we are able to emote with it. It speaks to the same thing as one of my other favorite quotes from Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down an open manhole and die.” The point being it’s not about the seriousness of what happens, it’s about the tone of how it happens, along with how close we feel to it. Is it the “me / us” or the “you / them?” This matters because Barry is CONSTANTLY playing with the lines between these two feelings. Chiefly because it is a show about, you know, murder.

During a recent interview on Conan’s podcast Hader said that early on he was pretty adamant that the show not trivialize death. Yes, there are some deaths that happen quickly and comedically. But there are also deaths that are heartbreaking. Along with deaths that are meaningless. And deaths that cast long shadows across the entire series. But most of all, there are a lot of deaths that are confusing, off-kilter and downright weird. But this weird element works precisely because it is the primary space that Barry operates in. We are constantly treated to an array of moments that feel unnerving and odd, to the point I can’t count the number of times people used the word “Lynchian” in describing the feeling of the show. But that brings up an obvious question…

What does Lynchian actually mean?

It’s important because people use it all the time without ever really thinking about it, usually just as some stand in for “weird” films. But if we’re going to get granular, on one level, technically speaking anything Lynch does is Lynchian because he is the one doing it. But it’s also one of the few directorial adjectives that made it into the Oxford English Dictionary. The definition: “Lynch is noted for juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with mundane, everyday environments, and for using compelling visual images to emphasize a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace.” His film Blue Velvet is a perfect example of this. We see the way he shows shiny, happy suburbia with this overblown cadence, right as it all seems to mask the menace of weirdo mobsters getting high off gas masks severed ears in the grass. Barry is interested in the same juxtapositions, but in a slightly more deadpan comic, or at least more modern way. Because his mundane is not the happy, shiny suburbia of yesteryear. But the world of drab carpeted apartments, Yoshinoya beef bowls, and the simple idea of a contract killer working at Lululemon. But please note the way that it doesn’t rest on the delights of irony. Often, they’re barely called attention to signifiers in a way that makes it all the more funny. And at the same exact time, the show goes for the throat, dramatically speaking.

In the same recent Conan podcast Hader mentions his love of old movies he was describing watching Rear Window with his daughters, who seemed half interested at first. But then it got to that amazing moment where Grace Kelly goes into the neighbors apartment, but he comes back and sees her, then he looks across and sees Jimmy Steward AKA “us” looking on in turn. And his daughters gasped. And Hader was so delighted by this because it’s proof that the simplest conflict-driven story stuff is often the most involving thing. It’s a character being stuck in a horrible situation and you can’t imagine how they’re going to solve it as the pressure piles up. Similarly, Barry has always grounded the story itself in these tensions, even if it will sometimes relieve that tension in the oddest of ways.

But it all starts with the fact they’re often taking the action itself incredibly seriously, sometimes in the small ways you never see. For instance, if you’ve ever worked with stunt teams and gun safety before, you learn the protocols and you begin to see the safety choices made by every character ever (specifically, how they hold their guns). And even though it is a “comedy,” the choices in Barry that center around gun etiquette and safety are so dead on. Barry uses his weapons with perfect expertise. Honestly, Hader has some of the best posture and trigger work I’ve seen from an actor. But part of this is a choice. He’s not there to impress anyone. He’s there to do the job. Compare him with his short-lived “partner” in Taylor, the rah rah soldier friend from season one, who holds much of the same correct posturing without half of the trigger safety. This telling you something important. Similarly note the way so many of the gangsters are copying movie postures as they use their guns. And note the way the mother in son, hell bent on revenge, ends with an accidental discharge and the mother injuring the son all the same. Point is that I can’t remember the last time I saw a show that was this incredibly mindful of all the ways guns are used and misused, handled and mishandled. In short, it knows the weight of these things. Which is all part of what makes the ease of the season four Walmart purchases all the more striking.

From here, it may be easy to think that Hader is after some super intense action filmmaking, but nothing could be further from the intent. There is no coolness to be found here (which is part of Barry’s good trigger policy). Instead, it’s often trying to take the coolness and indulgence out of every possible action frame. The violence, like much of the show’s comedic fixations, is often mundane, sudden, and shocking. My favorite example of this is the aforementioned “710N” episode where every person’s attempt to do a cool action thing (like hand off a gun to someone on a motorcycle) is met with certain doom. The action is completely unwieldy, which can often just maximize the simpler, more realistic tensions of how violence feels in real life. In that same highway chase, I was equally struck by the sound design, with the whooshing wind between every car. It may feel like an abstraction, but it’s just more of how it ground in the mundane reality over the action kinetics. And going back to the old adage, all the “comedy” is playing out in these big almost Keaton-eque wides with Kubrickian center-point framing.

I realize I’m making some grand comparisons here and to be clear, what’s happening here isn’t even close to exhibiting the kind of control and intent of those masters. Heck, Hader would probably be the first to admit he’s not even locked in as a director yet. But that’s kind of part of what makes it feel exciting. So many of the choices he makes in Barry feel a tad experimental and drunk off of potential. Which is perhaps something most noticeable in the oddball “ronny/lily” episode that is just going for it with every damn shot whether it works or not. What it may lack in exacting precision, it grounds in knowing what it doesn’t want to be. And more importantly, it understands who the kinds of people are who are going to get the short end of the stick in the violent scenes (like sad sack Detective Loach). It’s a dark, wry sensibility that’s funny in the way that Coen brothers and Kafka are funny. The viewpoint that looks at the sad state of the world and says “oh, there is hope, but not for us.” Which is where we finally start getting to meat of this thing…

Because what the hell is Barry about, anyway?

7. KILL-SLOWSKI

I can’t believe I’m about to bring up another famed art director, but Krzysztof Kieślowski is one of my favorite filmmakers. He was originally a documentary filmmaker in Poland, who slowly crept into features and TV. But it was the Dekalog that largely made him. For they were ten hour long films that were “about” the ten commandments in a rather loose, and often emotionally devastating way. Going along with the success of that was films like Blind Chance, The Double Life of Veronique and ultimately The Three Colors Trilogy. The shame is that he was getting better and better until his untimely death in his mid-fifties. I once took this amazing Polish cinema class and his work can be called “deeply Polish” in that it’s often categorized by this deeply empathetic, but crucially distant eye. All while often aiming at how the simple moralities are not that simple, and yet the consequences from “god” or the universe could not be more clear. This was perhaps best exemplified by the episode from the Dekalog that became A Short Film About Killing, which is probably the single greatest dramatic “iron-manning” of an argument I’ve ever seen in art. For it was so powerful in its simplicity that it actually helped get the death penalty overturned in Poland. There’s a great book on Kieślowski’s art called “Double Lives, Second Chances” by Annette Insdorf and it tackles much of the thematic work I’m discussing here.

To be clear, the cinema of Kieślowski FEELS nothing like Barry. And certainly isn’t plotted like it either. But given what I’ve described, I constantly kept thinking about the similarity of how these similar larger themes appeared again and again. It’s the very same notions of double lives and second chances and the way everyone always seems bargaining with their own personal “gods.” And it’s constantly gripping with the seeming randomness of death and consequence itself. It’s just that Barry has more of an oddball sartorial edge, showcasing that it’s just two radically different ways of looking at the same thing. And just like Barry, Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Killing concerns the wonderment of what society should do with a genuine psychopath. Because he’s the kind of guy we’re introduced to and he’s throwing rocks onto a highway below for no reason. AKA the kind of guy where malice is the point, or at least disconnected from any larger morality. And with that, we have to make one point of comparison clear…

Barry is a dumb psychopath.

Generally, I don’t like using the word dumb. I think it’s both inherently snobby and judgmental and it gets thrown around far, far too much, often by people who falsely equate smartness with morality (and it’s often their own idea of “smartness,” too). But it feels right to use with Barry because there’s this very particular goofy, slack jawed, slow-on-the-uptake vacant way he navigates through the world around him (one which kinda reminds me of Laura Dern’s amazing performance in Citizen Ruth). But again, there is nothing inherently wrong with this. If anything, it often provides him with an easy going bliss for much of the early run of the show. But it even creeps into the dark places of consequence, too. You see the same boyishness in Barry in season four when he’s placed in jail and he can only ask, “Mr. Cousineau, did you trick me?” which evokes something so small and pitiful. But that sheepishness is not Barry’s actual problem.

No, the actual problem is he is also a disconnected psychopath, which another word that gets used colloquially, but textbook definition of psychopathy is “a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.” This reality becomes more and more clear with time, but it’s important to remember that from episode one he starts that way. Yes, he’s more in an intensely depressed, more dissociative state in our initial meeting. Yes, he’s partially being used and controlled by Fuches’ manipulations. And yes, the military exacerbated the issue by creating a reward system for killing around him. But as we learn, all of these things were the outlet for his inability to truly see people as people, along with his disconnected rage. But the first episode of Barry is about opening up THIS particular story, so I ask.. why do we begin here?

A veteran TV writer I knew once had a good way of putting this concern where they were always asking, “why this man, why this day?” As in what is so special about now? Why is THIS the point to begin their story? Why is everything else past and prologue? Well, for our story, this is the day Barry decided to actually want something. Both in his discovery of acting, and more importantly, him seeing Sally on the stairs, this is the fundamental inflection point of his life. For both of them represent an escape from the malaise of horror from the world he’s in. They represent the idea that he can be a normal person with a normal life. And as ridiculous as the pursuit of acting can be, that’s the appeal of it for him: getting to be someone else. But this is also the moment he is committing to a certain doom. For as the Bhudda dictates, want is suffering.

Okay, okay it’s a lot more complicated than that. Especially because that little piece of wisdom refers to “craving pleasure, material goods, and immortality, all of which are wants that can never be satisfied. As a result, desiring them can only bring suffering.” But it’s a rather different thing here. Because Barry is essentially in a state where his depressed, psychopathic rage has an outlet. And he’s literally not seeing what he’s doing in terms of murder, but simply falling into Fuches’ poor explanations about being good guys who are taking out the bad guys. Barry never questions more than this. No seems particularly bothered by it, even if he know society finds it objectionable. And it wouldn’t even really matter to Barry if he was killed on a mission. Heck, some part of him would be thankful (which is precisely what made him a dangerous assassin). But now? He has something he wants and thus something to lose. Which means he has to drop all those things in order to fit in with a new and ordered life. And where life before was a malaise of video games and death, now the juxtaposition of what he is and what he wants bumps into each other with reckless abandon.

But at first, the juxtaposition is more comic. It’s always things like “he has to pull a job and then make rehearsal!” Also it's easier for us as viewers to keep up the illusion of morality because his killing is (mostly) about bad guys in the game, which makes the deaths “cleaner” in a way. But please note that even though Barry truly doesn’t want to do this anymore, he wants to keep it simple as possible and always do his “last job” as he tries to get out. But pick your favorite version of trope, with “blood will have blood” and whatnot (I mean, there’s a reason they do MacBeth in season two). He keeps getting pulled into things because of his past. Sure, Barry wants a conscience-clearing clean break from the things, but as it all gets messier, he realizes just how much compartmentalization doesn’t cut it. So he starts constantly bargaining and using the only skills he has… Which reveals the obvious problem with Barry’s whole life: the only way he actually knows how to deal with problems is anger, coercion, and murder.

Going back to the military reddit thread above in part three, the main poster leaves a comment that sums it up so well, particularly when it comes to Barry’s disconnection: “Barry was getting praised for shooting from a post to see where he got the idea that was okay. When he acted in a way he thought was appropriate to his fellow Marine being wounded, he was met with immediate disgust. Imagine your dog doing something you trained it to do, like hunt rabbits… but at a magician’s birthday show. He didn’t understand why it was wrong there but okay in other situations. He doesn’t have the innate ability to know when someone’s life should matter or not. He’s guessing.”

Thus, all the simple morality works only when it’s simple. But then he will cross those lines so easily because it is all he knows how to do. Which results in the final one / two punch of killing his old army friend who knows too much - and ultimately Detective Moss (now also a friend). I remember the moment these events happened was when we all got the immediate sensation of where the show was going. It was the deep realization of, “oh he’s not getting out of this.” And that his “starting now!” mantra would be used forever and ever. For he’d be perpetually stuck in four stages of grief. It’s all denial, bargaining, and ultimately, anger. There are no second chances when we always retreat into our worst natures.

And with that, there was only one place the show could go…

8. IRONY, LONG GONE

“I miss when this show was a comedy…”

In catching up with the general dialogue around the show, this sentiment seemed to crop up in Season 3 and especially Season 4. To be honest, I get it. Much the same argument came up when The Sopranos became even MORE about the mundane nature of their life, along with the rambling ennui (but that show was so great about taking on its “bad fans”). And sure, I could point out the endless ways that Barry was technically doing all this sad stuff way back when, too, but I get it. Audiences are always talking more about what a show FEELS like. And there’s an inescapable sadness to the show as it has pressed on. The thing about this is it’s ultimately what happens in shows about certain dark anti-heroes. Often it’s what you simply need to do. Where there’s a lot of debate about the relative comeuppance for, say, Walter in Breaking Bad, I’d argue the inky black existentialism and sobering moral reality of BoJack Horseman may be the standard for any show. As for Barry, it’s the same question…

How is it going to consecrate its darkness?

There’s a moment early in season four where Barry is in jail and one of the cops comes up to him and just assumes he’s a good guy, caught in something more. And Barry, who has WANTED to be told this so many times by the people around him, is finally beyond the allusion and just slides right to the angry part of his deeper nature. The “I’m a cop killer” rant sums up so much about the dark heart of what’s really in there. Yes, he WANTS to bottle it all up to do good, often while imagining some ideal life in the future, but it’s naturally unsustainable. Because he cannot become someone new unless he actually commits to “the death of the old self.” Instead, he always lets the massive rage issue back in. Even all the alliances go away, as he will talk to feds on a dime. He doesn’t care about anything but his immediate goal. We even see the specific kind of hurt that NoHo Hank feels in realizing that Barry isn’t the “badass assassin” he always projected him to be, but someone who’d sell out the whole system at the drop of a hat. And right when all the walls are closing in, right when the darkness encroaches, Barry escapes prison and gets away with Sally (we’ll come back to her). Finally, he can start life anew!

Well, not really.

Because the flash-forward episode of Barry, Sally, and their son John, all posed in this new home-life was so utterly heartbreaking to me. It’s called “tricky legacies” and you see all the ways Barry is trying to compensate and compartmentalize as he tries to “get it right” with his kid. He’s turned to the surface level solutions of basic dad-isms, sheltering him from the world, and turning to the all-healing promise of religion. You see the desperate, avoidant psychology of every choice he makes. He keeps telling his son the black and white morality of things (often while doubling back on those things to alleviate his own feelings of guilt). He says “you cant control other people bud, that’s called insecurity.” And yet that’s exactly what Barry is doing at that very moment. But the real problem is he can’t actually be honest with his son, so every conversation exists at this third rail. And for the son himself? It creates this crippling emotional reality. He doesn’t understand why they don’t want him be a part of world. It so absolutely captures what it’s like living in a house where you never understand why the adults in your life are doing what they’re doing and why they are hiding things. It captures the age-old cycles of how adults will try to repress kids right through their old mistakes, which is often motivated by guilt and secrets of the past. Most of all, they’re not even letting him be a person. And for all the “growth” of this new life, of course the episode ends with “we have to kill Gene Cousineau.” After eight years it’s back to square one, because he hasn’t been growing, but avoiding, and it’s all just another thing Barry is afraid to lose. Another “starting now!” moment, which reflects that inescapable nature of so many character’s behaviors on the show.

As Barry returns to Los Angeles, we even see the way he bargains with his new religious identity. He cycles through podcasts as the “thou shall not kill” quickly turns into a sliding slope. It doesn’t matter the reasoning when he’s LOOKING for a justification to do what he’s doing. And when he finds it in Bill Burr’s combo of the old school testament meeting the modern crusade, he has it: “bingo.” Justification achieved. And it’s all as easy as walking into Walmart and buying a gun (as an escaped murderer nonetheless). He will end all of this now. Except it never ends… it only adds up.

… Kind of.

9. CHECKOV’S RIP TORN’S GUN

The adage of “why this man, why this day?” doesn’t just apply to pilots, but finales in much the same way. For Barry, the reason this is the finale is pretty clear. That’s because Barry dies, quickly and surprisingly, shot by Gene, right as he was finally going to give up and turn himself in. It would be easy to say that this is an ironic way for Barry to meet his fate, but in another way it’s the most fitting. Not just because we’ve done the “Checkov’s gun” thing by having Rip Torn’s Gun come back into play (again, its a reference that always made me laugh). But it’s more thematically driven: Barry was killed quickly and mercilessly with a shot to the head, just like so many people he killed along the way. His “oh wow” delivery reflects the shock of sudden surprise. And just like that, all the moral waffling in the world doesn’t matter. What the intent, it’s over. There is nothing more. A simple cut to black. The ballad of Barry Beckman ends as such. Because that’s the thing about death, we don’t get to see the rest of it.

It’s a fitting end for Barry. I mean, how much did he really mean that when he said he’d turn himself in, anyway? Just the night prior he was still in denial (“I don’t think that’s what god wants for me” was such a funny line). Or maybe he was ready. But the fact he died waffling is part of the point, too. As other characters in the show marched toward their ends, they waffled similarly. Gene could have had a much different ending, but he waffled on his peaceful growth (the appeal of Daniel Day Lewis was just too much perhaps). And I already talked about the death of Hank, but it’s the part of him that was destroyed by the lack of civility. Again, his anger at Fuches is less that he can’t admit it, but more that he made him face it. Which actually brings to the character I think gets the most interesting ending out of all of them.

That would be “The Raven.” Which probably starts with the fact that Stephen Root is one of the most underrated actors on the planet. For much of the show’s run, we see the comic desperation as  Fuches is the tired, helpless loser who is always seemingly on the edge of death. It is his stint in prison that transforms him into the steely eyed raven, or perhaps just reveals who he really is: a “man with no heart.” He sees that he is capable of great and terrible things. And part of why he wants Barry, why he tormented him throughout the last few seasons, is because he was hurt by Barry’s abandonment. Because he’s a terrible father in his own right, part of TV’s most toxic mentor / mentee relationship. But now, he tells us as much. He knows his callous reasons for doing so. And he accepts that he is a man with no heart. But tellingly, you hear his voice quivering when gets to that part. And perhaps informs what happens next….

The moment Fuches sees the kid running toward Barry, he lets them be together. Was this his intention the whole time? As in the moment he saw the kid on the phone? Perhaps. I mean, his first question to Hank was “where’s the kid?” after all. And the moment reminds us of the flashback a few episodes prior where Fuches met young Barry. And we can finally put two and two together about his guilt in having guided him wrong in all this. Because the flipside of Fuches’ speech is that he realizes the harm he did to Barry in all this. That it was about his own bullshit illusions of mentoring. And after all that, sometimes the best thing a man with no heart can do.. is slink back into the shadows and leave well enough alone. I’d argue it’s the only real moment of grace in the entire finale… Well, sort of. But that finally brings us to the topic I’ve been dancing around the entire essay.

Because it concerns the most important character in the show…

10. SALLY’S THEME

For whatever reason, I can’t hear the name Sally without thinking of The Nightmare Before Christmas. I just immediately picture that longing, wide-eyed, stitched together girl, always looking at a Jack Skellington as he barely even considers her. This isn’t to say that there is any part of that dynamic that matches the Sally of the show. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. For much of the show’s run is about Barry’s various attempts to woo her or stay together as she focuses on her own preoccupations. In theory, he adores her and supports (until the time he very mmuch doesn’t), but what I find fascinating is that there is so little of them that is EVER on the same page. This not only feeds the core conflicts, but also the larger thematic point the show is really aiming for. Which is why the show fully depends on the execution of her characterization, which often has varying degrees of success,

But let’s start with this: Sarah Goldberg is incredible.

Like holy crud, look at all the places the character goes and she brings all of it to life with vivid acuity. That acting skill is the reason so, so, so much of it works. On paper, she can be just as vain, thin-skinned, and nakedly pursuing her dreams as anyone else. But she’s also incredibly good at being vulnerable. And the way the show finds her deeply empathetic moments, along with the ways that Barry believes in her, fuels so much of the core connection in the viewer. But the thing about watching the entire show all at once is that you get to really really see the fine-tuning of an arc along the way. And while I often see the logic of WHY it goes to certain places of her character. But, especially in the late seasons, some of the turns of motivational cause are… hard to make fully coherent? To be clear, I think the show understands the taciturn nature of some of these flip flopping behaviors, too. There’s a reason that when she says “I’ll go with you,” Barry responds “really?!” as he knew it was a shot in the dark that didn’t quite make sense. But that choice meant the final run of episodes really had to make sense of her reasons, along with her complete journey, too.

Because for much of the run, we understand where Sally’s going. There’s that desperation to learn, get better, and become a star on non-compromising terms. And all the while, she’s blissfully unaware of how deep Barry’s dark rabbit hole goes. But the most fascinating part is in Season three, where she finally starts getting everything she wants. She made a well-reviewed show that got well above 90 on rotten tomatoes and suddenly it hits her - that unhinged laughter is such a telling (and hilarious) moment because the sudden validation hit the deepest possible hole inside her. For so long, she’s been trying to alleviate something so completely broken (and we’ll get to what created that soon. But it gives her the sudden balance she needs. And when faced with Barry’s anger issue, she draws her boundary. It is Sally at her most functional self. And then it starts falling apart cartoonishly fast. From cancellation, to the aforementioned demotion to being a writer in a tough room that she has to “save,” to the utter fall from grace. But she doesn’t want to coast through all this. She wants the unhinged delight of a validation so large that she doesn’t even know what to do with it. Which is perhaps why there’s the equally unhinged jealousy of her former assistant getting a show, too. Cue the infamous rant. Cue life falling apart. Cue complete dissolution of morality and her turning back to Barry to mess with her former agent’s head (another moment I’m not sure I buy completely). Cue getting involved in murder. Cue the entire endgame of the fourth season.

But the first half of season four has two important moments. I can’t tell you how much that home visit matters in fleshing out her characterization. Because her parents are that particular brand of midwestern “nice,” that simultaneously ignores her basic needs on every conceivable level. Her mother literally ignores her panic attack, and is more worried about having to see her abuser’s mother at church than have any concern at all. As for it all coming out that Barry was a murderer, all her mother can offer is sniping “you sure can pick em.” Meanwhile, Dad is just trying to paint everything over with a simple “aw shucks” brush. It’s a parental dynamic familiar to so many people I know. But it’s precisely what allows you to see the exact shape of the hole inside her. You see the reason why there will be no solace here. And you see exactly why so many people run from these kinds of situations to find a way to fill that impossible hole inside.

Namely, it’s the thing that motivates her acting and performance. It’s not just validation, but how deeply she doesn’t want to be this ignored person. She wants to be someone else. She wants to be adulated. Which is why she has to go back to her “real home” in Hollywood and give a second go round even though it’s all fallen apart. Gene gives the one piece of advice for those with their backs against the wall, to do the “only one thing you can do, teach” Which basically gets into that adage I hate about how “those who can’t do, teach.” Why do I hate it? Because it misunderstands that teaching is a skill in and of itself. I mean, there are plenty of amazing “doers” who can’t teach for shit. Teaching is about communicating process itself. It’s about understanding how to construct  arguments and foster understanding and growth within another person’s mind. This stuff is hard. And this “do / can’t” dynamic only happens because teaching is a vastly underpaid job in comparison to “making it” in Hollywood. Seriously, the reason Masterclass gets A list talent to teach their courses is because it actually pays really, really well. So can we please fuck off with that notion forever? Okay thanks.

Anyway, Sally learns she’s not even a particularly good teacher. She’s rightly dismissed by her class for her manipulative, fucked up techniques (which were part of how she was taught), but she actually strikes gold with someone who actually good likes the direct, tough love approach. Thus, she becomes her acting coach and in that crucial moment, even displays how good she is to the director. But it doesn’t matter. The real question is can she accept working in a half-way place in Hollywood coaching the superstar? Or does she need the unhinged, delirious laughter of validation? Notably, it is HERE that she makes the decision to go along with Barry. And hoo boy is it a fascinating one because… it’s a lot to try and buy. So the question I had going into these final four episodes: where was this all going to end up? How is going to account for this? What will the story of Sally ultimately mean?

For much of the flash-forward, we see the show kind of reaching for every possible answer. Sally’s new life is “performance” of ever changing personas. She’s haunted by the trauma of the murder she committed, disassociating, hallucinating, and falling into Alcoholism. Her connection with her son feels almost non-existent, blunt to the point of comedy. But there are still these little tender punctuations of things, like them falling asleep in the bathtub. But once again, she’s fully descending into those elements of waffling through the final string of episodes. So that even going into the finale, it felt like we still had this massive unchecked box with Sally. And it just mattered so much because as I always say, the ending is the conceit. Luckily, the finale is the thing that comes closest to apotheosis with her character.

The initial answer of why she went with him actually comes from NoHo Hank of all people, “let me guess, you were in a bad place, and you felt like he was the only one who could help you? Good luck. I mean it.” There’s a certain roundness to the way these words square things between. After all, they were the two people who were, in their way, closest to understanding the two competing sides of Barry. But I don’t know if it quite covers the totality of it. But it’s enough of a word to move things forward in her progress. She sobers. She tells her young son the brutal truth of their past. And most importantly, she praises him. And she praises him in the way that she was never really praised at all. And after all the gunfire, after Barry denies the appeals for turning himself in, she finally gets the two of them away to some more normal future.

Those final moments tell so much of the story. As the local theater instructor, she gets that ardent praise and ovation from the crowd. But even then she still wonders if it was and asks her son, “it was good, right?” Because there are some holes that never get filled inside. She’s learned so much, no doubt. And has certainly muted her extremes. but still carries her wounds from that time. She says no to the hot dad who asks her out. She goes home alone. .And we’re left wondering if she’ll be okay, much in the same way her son asks the same. They’ve finally achieved a certain kind of comfort with normalcy, but it’s all still right there under the surface. In her final shots, she stares at the flowers in the backseat of the car, much like the kind Barry tried to give once upon a time. And then stares forward, wide-eyed, on the edge of tears, and not quite sure of what’s ahead, nor what was truly behind. As a moment in and of itself, it does somehow line up with the totality of her.

She’s one of the most fascinating characters we’ve gotten to see, but when it comes to writing of her down the stretch, the whole thing I just don’t know if I can quite square it as a properly motivated journey along in a dramatic way. And if anything, I think it’s probably the biggest story issue with the show itself. But I also accept that that messiness is also part of what the show is really after. Because in the end, I’ve come to realize that there are two central ideas at the heart of Barry that matter more than anything else.

Which brings us to the final two chapters…

11. SWAMP THINGS & THE INVERSE HERO JOURNEY

A seeming lifetime ago I was at a live comedy show at the now defunct Meltdown Theater. I was watching Harmontown, which was actually before it became a podcast and was instead just a monthly show where you’d go and listen to Dan Harmon and Jeff Davis go on funny tangents. Needless to say, it’s a complex memory from a different time when I was just so nakedly adoring of Community. But there was one night where Harmon said something that I haven’t really been able to get out of my mind. He was talking about The Hero’s Journey (AKA something I had been yelling about for years in opposition to folks using it as a crutch) and he said something really interesting. It was this idea that heroes grow up in this place of normalcy and safety, they then go into pits and swamps and fight battles, vanquish some creaturesque evil, and return home to the place of safety, having won the day. This is the story of heroes. But then postured the alternative of the inverse hero journey.

What if you’re a creature born in the swamp?

What if you grow up in a place not knowing safety, but always knowing pain? It can be something that makes you so desperately want to come into a world of light, but you only know how to behave in the swamp. You only know how to snap at your fellow creatures and kill and maim. Thus, your “trials” are just attempts to go into the shining light of the safe world and you fail. You try to be and act like them, but you keep using swamp lessons and are invariably rejected. Thus, you have to come back to the relative “safety” of a swamp, which is to say you have to return to the broken, the scary, and the damned… but it’s home. All the while knowing that you are the one that heroes defeat.

Barry is about people born in the swamp. Barry himself is doomed the second he tries to go for the world of light. But all the characters are from their own respective swamps and are all trying to find their various forms of light. But they all fail in much the same way. It would be easy to think of this as purgatory, but really it’s a form of self-perpetuating hell. Chiefly in a way that it reminds me of an Alan Moore story from his run in DC’s Swamp Thing, which brings the two metaphors together.

Forgive me if I get a few details wrong, but it’s from forty years, but there’s this story where Swamp Thing has to go to Hell because he needs some piece of information from a creature he vanquished (or maybe it was Abby herself?). So he meets up with Constantine and there’s this fun little journey they have together where Moore basically points out all these incredible ironies to all the punishments of Hell and the psychologies of the damned. But the very best one comes last. Right when the journey is over, Swamp Thing is wondering how he’s supposed to leave the fires of hell and Constantine deadpans, to paraphrase, “Oh that’s the whole secret to hell, you can just walk out.” No gates, no stopping, no blocking. Everyone is there because they think they have to be.

And nothing is more true in the larger sense. All of these characters could easily abandon their grand designs and just make life really simple by walking away. And yet, it is a show full of characters who time and time and time again are constantly given outs and can’t help but plunge themselves back in. Like Fuches not once, but TWICE abandoning his picturesque farm life to settle a score with Barry. And after all that 8 years of being at peace, there’s Gene still being tempted by the appeal of Daniel Day Lewis playing. That’s the whole thing about their hell. You have to want to walk out more than you want the flames.

But wait? Does Barry actually want the flames? Isn’t he always trying to get out of this life? Oh he wants the flames alright. He’s still full of all those simple, un-complex dreams. It’s just he just doesn’t want to be burned while grabbing them. And to make things more complicated I will mix the metaphor for a second, because it’s the old “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Only his hammer is that of fire and brimstone of biblical judgment. It’s the death he could hurl at any one at second and often does. Which becomes justified in a world where anyone could fire back at any second, too. But that’s the whole realization: Hell is an ecosystem. Whether it’s a war torn battlefield or a gangland beef. Which leads to the sudden realization of another ecosystem that goes with them: of course Barry went to Hollywood.

And, also of course, the ultimate point of the show is to fight that urge.

12. BARRY VS. THE EMPATHY MACHINE

We know that there are people who watch anti-hero shows without much consideration for the “anti” part of it. Breaking Bad discourse was infamous for spawning the “bad fans” discourse that wanted all the power for Walter White and thought Skyler was a drag, blah blah blah. Similarly, I’m sure there are people who want Barry to get everything he wants,, the bad ass cool assassin, or actor, or great dad. And when you hear this sentiment it’s easy to be like, “What fucking show are you watching?!?!?!” The answer is the same one, but with different viewing standards. Because the morality discussion need not apply. To wit, there’s a whole bunch of alt-right dipshits who love watching Homelander on The Boys. It doesn’t matter that the show could not be more clear in its anti-fascist messaging. There are always going to be people who watch TV shows in terms of power. Meaning they want to see characters have power and use it and be the best and get away with everything because it feeds the darkest impulse of indulgence inside them. As storytellers, it’s critical to understand that movies are empathy machines that add to this impulse. Yes, you can tell stories about dark things. Yes, it’s important to even! And yes, you don’t have to moralize them. You can use any level of harshness or irony you may like. But in the end, it’s about how we frame it all. And what really gets said along the way.

Which brings us to the FINAL final ending of the show.

In a small way, Barry gets the Taxi Driver ending. Sure, he dies. And he’s not exactly thought of as a hero. But the blaming of Geen reframes all of Barry’s actions as a “good guy” caught up in a bad system. It shows Barry as who he THOUGHT he was in the pilot. And almost every terrible action he took in the course of the show, that is everything born from his malice, gets pinned on his “murderer,” Gene. Which is hilarious given what we know from the real Gene Cousineau, as buffoonishly different from this hardened performance we see on screen in “The Mask Collector.” It’s not the only huge misrepresentation in the film within the show. It’s the way they tell it as Sally looking at HIM adoringly, as if finally invoking the Sally figure from Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s the  complete removal of her agency, too. Remember, she was the one who gave the “Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" speech (his big moment is that he simply fed her a good emotional cue). The final moments are of his son watching the “story” of his Dad’s life - and the final smile - are terrifying, dangerous, and heartbreaking given the reality of what we know (and seemingly what Sally has tried to keep him from). In one way, it’s much the same way parents can distort the past, obscure, the attempt at placation. But it’s also about the way so many traditional narratives do damage through the empathy machine, and end up either lionizing their subject or missing the point entirely.

By comparison, Barry itself is a messy, tense, odd, exciting, and deeply sad show. One that felt at its most engaging - or confusing - as it explored the seeming accidents of creative experimentation. But looking at that whole you realize something clear. For everything it’s aiming at, whether it’s the dramatic emphasis, the depiction of Los Angeles, the nice guy gangsters, the gay love asides, the oddball direction, the morality of murder, the depths of Sally, or even the inverse hero journey, there is something more important than all of that. And you specifically realize it right there in the final moment of young John watching the standard Hollywood abomination that is “The Mask Collector.” The show knows that the real miracle of Barry is not exactly what it is…

But what’s it’s not.

<3HULK