The Umbrella Academy, A Nuanced Take on Abuse That We Need (Patreon)

So there’s this comic I really like, and I read it a long time ago but I know I really liked the way it reconfigured the superhero genre to show people’s powers not as advantages but as big problems in their lives, and created these really interesting familial relationships that just feel incredibly real, and had something going on under the surface that I couldn’t quite explain at the time. It’s been a slightly surreal experience watching the Netflix adaptation, knowing more or less what happens, having a vague shape of an idea of the story and hoping that this adaptation will live up to my expectations, while not entirely knowing what those expectations are.

Here’s the brief outline: Billionaire Reginald Hargreeves kidnapped bought adopted seven children who were born under really bizarre circumstances all on the same day in 1989, and raised them in his mansion training them and experimenting on them to draw out latent superhuman abilities. 30 years later they are drawn back together to investigate his death and to try to prevent the oncoming apocalypse. The living children are Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Five and Vanya. Their brother Ben died when they were all quite young in a way that is never directly explained in the show. Vanya, seemingly without powers, has never been a part of their superhero team, but over the course of the first season, the siblings come to understand that not only does Vanya have powers, but she is the cause of the looming end of the world.

The little interactions of Umbrella Academy are fascinating, and gripping, but also totally unimportant. The developments of the plot, the secret society of time travellers hell-bent on ensuring the apocalypse happens; the mystery of Hargreeves’ death. None of it matters but it remains eminently binge-able. The televisual equivalent of a page-turner. The Umbrella Academy is fascinating because it’s about a family of children who grew up with an abuser. You want to know what happens because you care about Klaus’ sobriety, about Allison’s relationship with her daughter, about the other siblings overlooking and ignoring Vanya.

Hargreeves, their adoptive father, was a horribly abusive parent. His attempts to make them all extraordinary not only pushed them too far and demanded too much of them as children but made them all uniquely emotionally troubled. This is where I’d usually like to come in and try to read a piece of media like this as a point-for-point allegory, because the powers all the children have interplay with and reflect the effects of their abusive upbringing, however The Umbrella Academy is a type of artistic work that resists being read so straightforwardly in really pleasing and interesting ways. Not only does it contain minutiae of plot details that are essentially meaningless to the deeper point of the work, but the allegorical function of the superhero framing actually doesn’t link up one-to-one with a sort of “what really happened”. You can’t, or at least you can’t in all cases say “this fantastical thing was really this”. It’s not that straightforward. It’s complex, it’s nuanced.

Before we get right into it let’s make a couple of distinctions.
The word abuse is, in my opinion, useful to people who want to understand and overcome something that has happened to them that they would consider to be “abuse”. It is helpful for victims of abuse to be able to look for resources and methods for coping with abuse, and if someone does not want to view something that happened to them as abuse, despite others seeing the same thing happening to them as abuse, then that’s okay.

I’m going to be referring to the ways that the children in this story were mistreated as abuse in order to discuss identifiable patterns of abuse and their effects on individuals, but I wouldn’t want to dictate the use of the term for others.

Secondly, I think there is a tendency when talking about topics like familial abuse to flatten the subject to the simplest perspective that seems to help most. A tendency to say “there is a clear bad guy, and if you side with the bad guy you are bad.” 

It's a tactic that isolates toxic elements to prevent them from doing harm, which in actual cases of abuse is often actually advised by psychological professionals. In terms of someone's actual experiences I wouldn't criticise this tactic at all or blame people who employ it.
However, when talking about fiction media, we are by definition, not talking about the experiences of real people. When a story takes a look at these issues it is looking at them in the abstract, perhaps to make something people can relate to, to help understand their own situation. It therefore contains high potential for being fraught, for upsetting people who feel like it relates to their situation. It feels natural therefore to want to isolate and remove a piece of media that might seem to side with an abuser, or paint them in a light where they could be said to be “in the right”, but in some cases, in this specific case at least, it excludes a really helpful and nuanced perspective.

So now let’s talk about The Umbrella Academy, and its nuanced take on familial abuse.

The seven children in Umbrella Academy represent different types that a child from an abusive household can become. In real life, the types aren’t so separated - someone watching the show is likely to relate to multiple characters, see themselves represented in more than one of the siblings. The siblings bare isolated and exaggerated versions of these characteristics, and the superhero framing serves to exaggerate and parallel those characteristics.
Luther is the superhero strongman, the golden child. Hargreeves originally designated him the leader of the team and Luther played by the exact rules that Hargreeves set out, because he could - because he succeeded at that game. He was always good at being what Hargreeves wanted, and carried on playing his game, living with him and abiding his rules even after everyone else had left, and eventually he gets fucked up by it. Luther goes on a mission for Hargreeves and nearly dies, and Hargreeves saves him using a serum that transforms him, makes him monstrous. After that Hargreeves views him as a personal failure, and sends him away to do busy-work on the moon, and Luther, who still sees the world through his lens, really believes he must have been sent there for a reason. Luther is coded as the oldest sibling even though they are all the same age.

Diego is the perpetual second best, never quite as good as Luther according to Hargreeves’ framework. That’s why as an adult he’s the only other sibling still trying to be a superhero, but rather than still being in the team, he’s broken away and severed all contact. He’s still playing Hargreeves’ game, trying to be the best, but in isolation, having identified the harm Hargreeves was doing to them all. Luther and Diego are an interesting reimagining of like, if Superman and Batman were brothers? Luther is the big buff superhero, and Diego’s power is almost comically niche: he throws knives real good.

Allison is where the super powers as personality traits metaphor really comes out hard. Allison’s power is a verbal mind control manipulation whereby she tells people “I heard a rumour that…” and whatever she tells them she heard becomes true in their mind. Allison is, in a word, manipulative. Through another lens though, she’s someone with a dependency on a certain behaviour, where that behaviour is both something that her abuser told her gave her value, and something that is essentially a survival mechanism. It’s also explicitly stated that she’s gotten herself everything in life since then through this thing. This same thing is a big problem for her now - she used her power on her daughter because she didn’t know how to keep her under control, and it ruined everything. This is a place where the story abandons point-for-point allegory in favour of something that feels more like what it’s alluding to. The thing that she could have aspired towards that her abuser said gave her value could have been being skinny, or attractive, or simply twisting things to make it so she always seemed to come out on top. The thing that she used to get everything she wanted in life, and maintain that value she was given according to the abusive rubric, could be manipulative use of sex appeal, or a self-medication, and the way that it translates to her controlling her daughter means that it might be that she developed a relationship to medication where she thought giving her daughter sleeping pills was okay, or it could have been something else entirely, but the whole point here is that the allegory really isn’t one-for-one. The common thread is manipulation. Allison has been made extremely manipulative by the environment she grew up in.

Klaus is an addict, and he is constantly close to death. He is shown escaping into drug addiction as a way of coping with his connection to death. His connection to death, of course, is that he has a power. He can commune with the dead, and channel them. In a flashback Hargreeves is shown locking Klaus in a dark room alone to try to force him to conquer his fear. Rather than providing a supportive environment, Hargreeves tried to throw Klaus in at the deep end and it drove him to his substance issues.
Five is an incredibly detached and patronising character stuck in the body of his thirteen year-old self after first getting stuck in the future and growing old in the post-apocalypse. It is, however, questioned by the family, and even by Five, whether any of this ever actually happened - time travel can make you go mad. Five is a person who has grown up before his siblings, despite being apparently no older, and it is worth questioning how much he ever really developed. Lots of kids raised in stressful, oppressive, or abusive environments have to step into the role of an adult before they are ready. Even after it is revealed that his time travel really happened, we learn that he spent decades in the sole company of a clothing mannequin. Even with the time travel, even if he did grow old, we don’t know how much Five ever actually grew up. The constant contrast of Five’s appearance (as a 13 year-old boy) and his snarky, condescending manner is reflective of the idea of someone who had to grow up fast to deal with an oppressive situation, but didn’t necessarily mature.

Ben isn’t really fleshed out as a character - he died when he was quite young, and most of his screen time comes from him talking to Klaus, the only person who can regularly see him. He is however, pretty upsettingly, also a common type. It is not clear how Ben died. Nobody wants to discuss it, and they all know, so none of the living siblings ever say anything. Maybe Ben was killed on a mission, maybe in an accident, or maybe he killed himself. However it happened though, one way or another, Hargreeves killed him.

Vanya is the most interesting, complex and nuanced type of the set, the main focus and driver of the first season, and frankly, the reason that I made this mini essay. Vanya has been convinced from an early age that she doesn’t have powers, that she can’t be part of the team, that she’s ordinary. This isn’t true - Hargreeves lied to her, kept her in the dark, made her think this. The reason is, it turns out, that she had a power he was afraid of. He was keeping the truth from her because when she first demonstrated her powers, it was destructive, intense, and dangerous. He kept all his notes on her in a journal that eventually falls into the hands of Leonard Peabody, a man obsessed with the Umbrella Academy, who works his way into Vanya’s life and manipulates her for his own purposes. He knows how to make her do everything he wants because he has the journal. In terms of on the nose metaphors… he has the handbook literally written by her abuser. He has the abuser’s manual…

Now here’s the thing: this is the part of the show that you might reasonably understand to  be saying that Hargreeves was correct. He kept her from knowing about her power, even using Allison to make her forget, and when she eventually found out she was actually a huge danger to everyone… so isn’t Hargreeves right to stop her from knowing about her abilities? 

No.
Hargreeves put Vanya under enormous pressure when he was trying to test her abilities, gave her a stressful and upsetting environment to try in, and then when he was scared of the destructive response, shut her down and pushed her down for the rest of her life. As demonstrated with Luther, he absolutely cannot handle failure, and his reaction to it, just like his reactions to everything else, is abusive and harmful.

There are things in this show that come together beautifully, as I’ve said, not as a one-for-one allegory but as a general feeling reminiscent of the thing they’re alluding to. A rephrasing of what happens in a scene tells you what the show is trying to get at better than any attempt at reading the metaphor.
In the scene where Vanya is imprisoned by Luther in the sound-proof chamber to stop her using her power, and Allison has damaged vocal chords, they are debating the future of the family, what to do as a group. They are arguing in a confrontational and aggressive way, and the voices of the two women of the family are literally silenced in this scene.
In the scene where Allison as a child uses her power to convince Vanya she’s normal, she is telling Vanya a “rumour” that becomes true in Vanya’s head that she isn’t special at all.
So when we look at Hargreeves, and Vanya’s power, we should really look at it as a very on-the-nose description of what’s really going on. You see, Vanya’s power is sound-based. Things resonate inside her. When Hargreeves is trying to train her he is destructive, and aggressive, and it resonates inside her and she does something destructive too. So he, unable to handle a failure that he see as his own failure, shuts her down, and excludes her from her siblings’ success, forever.

The way that he treats Vanya leaves her perfectly open to someone down the line, who has the abuser’s handbook, to make her act destructively again.