After watching through Better Call Saul I apparently decided I still didn’t have enough anxiety in my life and subsequently binged through Barry – a comedy series following a hitman, played by Bill Hader, who stumbles into a Los Angeles acting class while following a target and subsequently decides to become an actor. I’m going to discuss the broad narrative themes and arc of Barry but won’t be going into much detail, so this all should be fine for the spoiler-averse. I was initially put off by the show’s premise, as comedies about violence are a mixed bag: They can serve to trivialize violence or to portray its innate absurdity, serve to apologize for those who enact it or to humanize them – and these descriptions probably sound rather similar on first glance, which itself illustrates the problem. Violence is a powerful and complicated thing, and doing it justice is a sophisticated challenge, one exacerbated by the challenges of creating a good comedy.
Fortunately, the writers seem to be aware of all this, and while it is an absurd and over the top show it is also frequently quite thoughtful regarding these topics. Though the initial episodes toy with the question of whether it’s possible for Barry to give up his career and lifestyle to become a good person, this question almost becomes a running gag due to its sheer absurdity. What does it even mean to be a good person? Does it merely mean living an inoffensive life where you don’t do any obvious harm? If that’s all it is, then isn’t that just an easy life? I mean, who doesn’t want to be that kind of “good person”? Is being good merely living the good life? That is, however, the kind of good person most of us are: The goodness of convenience. The goodness of buying products subsidized by distant blood rather than blood of neighbors, the goodness of exported violence and imported goods rather than local violence with localized harms. This is the kind of good person that only relatively comfortable get to be, a goodness that correlates with wealth. The good person is a story we tell over and over to comfort ourselves, to make sense of things, to assure our anxious brains that all is in order, all is correct, that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.
What Barry is really about is these stories we tell ourselves. Los Angeles is the ideal setting for this, a city of dreams where reality blends seamlessly into fiction – BoJack Horseman, another complicated story of a bad person who dreams of being better, uses the setting similarly. The people in Barry’s acting class don’t just seek a skill, but seek stories – not stories as sequences of events, but as structures to make sense of sequences of events. The secondary protagonist Sally, a woman who Barry meets in class and enters a relationship with, has her own complicated relationship with violence: As a survivor of domestic abuse she’s still trying to make sense of her own history, constantly approaching and retreating from violence, struggling to articulate her anger without being overwhelmed by it. Gene, the instructor of the class, has lived a life of narcissism mediated by narrative justification, living in a story all about himself – after all, as Fuches, Barry’s erstwhile handler meditates, “Everyone’s the hero of their own story.”
This truism is appropriate enough, but our actual relationship with stories is a bit more complicated, the roles we cast ourselves into more nuanced than purely heroic. We understand the world through narrative structures, through parable and myth and anecdote – and, while most of us do it by habit, art provides an opportunity to take control of the process. Just as we can use art to shape our own narratives, we can share it with others to help them shape theirs – a process that can be generous or malicious, depending how the practice and practitioner. There are industries built around constructing and controlling these narratives: Arts and entertainment, obviously, but somewhat more subtly marketing, politics, education, and even sometimes the sciences. These fields all twine together, are motivated and weaponized by one another. Barry becomes a killer because of the story of patriotic violence, a hitman because of the story of familial and military fidelity, an actor because of simplistic narratives of redemption and forgiveness… a person always taking action but always at the whims of his story, a story in which he has probably not always been the hero. We also learn to regard others in terms of our story. People get typecast as villains, as love interests, as father figures, as confidantes, even when it doesn’t make much sense, even when the role doesn’t line up with the person.
It’s thoughts like these that make me terrified and suspicious of the power of art. It’s such a tempting place to exist, a warm self-annihilating cocoon where everything in the world becomes hypothetical, every terror an experience, every regret a learning moment. I think it is healthy to spend some time here and impossible never to retreat here; nevertheless, the perspective from inside the cocoon is only helpful when it can sees the world outside clearly. When a story finally emerges from the cocoon, slowly sprouts its wings and flies away, we must take care to see that the stories it reproduces later on do not shape further tragedies, terrors, and regrets. Perhaps, though, a regret or two might not go amiss – maybe that’s the idealistic wish underpinning the show is that somehow, somewhere, there’s a story potent enough and poignant enough to finally instill the wicked with a conscience.
A pen may be mightier than a sword, but it is terribly difficult to aim at the distance at which it is most effective.