HBO’s Barry & the Inevitability of YouTube Masculinity
At its core, HBO’s Barry has a tumultuous relationship with media. With its setting of a Los Angeles full of artistic climbers and the hook being a hitman in an acting class, it’s only natural for the show to cross points of tension with the film industry. But what was perhaps only meant to be a punchline to establish who Barry was in season one has now become one of the great antagonists of the show. Film, television, theatre… the stories within Bill Hader and Alec Berg’s story apply as much friction to the ensemble of characters as any various hitmen or military-industrial traps.
The shows initial meet-cute after all isn’t between Barry and Sally Reed. It’s between Barry and acting. In chasing a new life for himself, Barry Berkman is chasing self expression. And the person he opens up to at first isn’t Sally. There’s no profession of love or adoration. It’s Cousineau. He wants to be a better man. He thinks Cousineau could show him how.
Barry Berkman wants to be a hero. Barry Berkman wants to be loved.
Instead of Cousineau acting as a foil to Barry’s father figure & death liaison Fuches, Cousineau reinforces Barry’s self loathing, learned helplessness, and desperate need for a better story. At every turn Cousineau, at times the entire acting class, and CERTAINLY Sally make it clear that Barry’s value lies in what he can appear to be and what he can do at the behest and with the guidance of others.
Cousineau and Sally arguably use the idea of artistic expression and their own warped ideals of creative courage, to use Barry’s traumatic past and relationship to violence as fodder or mana for their own careers and persona. Gene Cousineau is a man who wants to be important and acknowledged. Sally wants to be adored and have power. Like Barry, both Gene and Sally want to be the hero of their stories, no matter how dishonestly they need to represent those stories.
His All-american-white-male-ness gives Barry an appeal that Gene and Sally can’t take into an audition with them. They resent his standard issued military masculinity because they can’t have it. Barry’s proximity to it promises different things to the pair of them. For Gene, he becomes a mentor and savior to a Vet, a genius who turned a bumbling tool into an artist. For Sally it is a more legitimized masculinity than the kind that hurt her and his successes don’t hurt her because in her mind Barry is a small minded fraud, not a REAL actor. In the context of the performing arts, Barry grants both Cousineau and Sally relative status without threatening their idea of their own artistic merit.
Whether they’re projecting onto him to define who they are to themselves OR disrespecting his boundaries and mocking his discomfort while pushing him to turn his distress into fuel for their performance, their treatment of Barry is juxtaposed to the reality of who he is. How dangerous he is, what he is capable of. In the sanctity of creation- adult thespian delusion- it’s okay to abuse and be abused for the sake of the art. These rules were established in this acting class (and in the real world) before Barry ever stumbles into it.
Barry thinks he’s creating a new life but really all he’s doing is coming to heel for a new circle of people. Art is asking Barry to create and so Cousineau and Sally offer Barry something very different from Fuchs. Barry doesn’t even totally know his own story. He knows how Fuches has framed it for him. Now he knows how Gene, Sally, and a conceptual Hollywood want him to frame his story.
He wants to tell a better lie. He wants less to feel guilty about.
In the final ongoing season of Barry, a quiet story is unfolding, especially within the time jump establishing episode 5 “Tricky Legacies.”
Barry Berkman has moved on from telling his story. He wants to create a new one. Enter a new antagonist that Barry thinks is his friend, YouTube.
Barry’s idea that the real world, education, and accountability can be replaced by his laptop, by YouTube videos predominantly speaks to the modern world’s greatest weapon in keeping its weapons of masculinity sharpened. Without Gene Cousineau, without Fuches, without military service, with the life of a hitman, Barry still won’t connect with the world. Still won’t risk being vulnerable. Still won’t take accountability. He receives Christ via an algorithm and teaches his son third hand from second hand youtube videos about U.S. presidents and romanticized stories about his own violence. It is crucial that his son not leave the bubble and be exposed to other children, other fathers, and real school. It’s not just about being in hiding. It’s been eight years. They’re established as other people.
Meanwhile, Sally is in hell. For Barry, she is replaced by their son, John. Sally can no longer reflect back to him the hope, the fantasy, the ideals he sought after. He is no longer her protector. He is barely a partner. She is and she isn’t held hostage. Schrodinger’s victim. A role Sally thought she wanted but that she now resents. It is a mirror of her life in LA. She has aged out of the role of ingenue, of damsel in distress, for Barry. His violence has sullied her too now. He needs a new line of purity and what can Sally offer compared to YouTube sermons?
But Sally is not entirely without agency in this. Her toxic tendencies have followed her too. Sally is a fear motivated character, perhaps more than any other character. In episode 4, Sally faces all of her greatest enemies — consequences for her actions, run of the mill superhero films, a woman prettier and more desirable than her by Hollywood standards, and the reality that she isn’t what prestige directors want, even in non-prestige work. As a survivor of domestic violence with arguably emotionally abusive parents Sally’s admiration of Barry’s violence and need for the kind of co-dependence and traditional gender division that he can offer feels real to her. But it’s hard to imagine that if Sally were offered a role in Mega Girls or met with more flattering offers for work that she would have called into the darkness after Barry and given her life away.
As Emily, wife to Clarke, Sally finds the ultimate performance. It would be much easier for Sally to dye her hair, but no. She sits at her vanity and applies her makeup and a wig to get ready for the show. In Emily, Sally has accent work, relationship study, and with her son arguably her very own IP. She taps in and out of being a mother, allowing Barry to yell action and cut as he sees fit. The moment where Sally’s accent slips and her wig is pulled off is when she is nearly strangling the local loser who finds her desirable, an attempt perhaps at claiming an agency Sally is scared to admit she wants or to perpetuate violence, a thing Barry no longer days. A thing maybe Sally misses. She felt safe with Barry because he knew how to be worse to people. What good is he to her now?
Acting is the only way Barry has ever had agency and now he’s stepped up as director of his own life. Like Sally, this role isn’t real for him, though in an echo of how infuriatingly easy things sometimes came to him back in LA, he seems to take more joy in it and doesn’t struggle with it as Sally does. From calling his son to sit on the swing instead of the stairs for a heart to heart to continuing his monologue without realizing his son has gone off to play baseball with some local children, Barry is committed above all things to the story he is writing.
It is unsurprising that in this created world and the poorly structured sanctuary Barry is attempting to provide for John he has allied himself with YouTube. Barry is, ultimately, just some guy. The first half of the show sees him genuinely try to change but when he fails he becomes a worse person than he was before. He discards self awareness, growth, and the discomfort of accountability and hard work to play pretend. He is pretend married, he has a child for the sake of healing… something he probably can’t define. But Barry is, essentially, an incel- or at least he is composed of the traits commonly found in diatribes and manifestos bred from incel, MGTOW, MRA, etc culture.
Barry understands that pain and suffering go hand in hand with experience. But he is unwilling and unable to hold himself responsible for any of those experiences or how his response to things outside of his control create suffering not just for himself but for those around him. He, like too many men and boys, is looking for a singular presence to offer him redemption and absolution. He is ready to be an evangelist for anything and anyone that tells him he’s a good person. The Barry Berkman who wanted to be loved has died. This is now a Barry Berkman who wants to be labeled a hero and a good man, as a prize for the hurt he has felt, while ignoring entirely the hurt he has caused.
Barry’s story is ending for us and it is ending with Barry as the alt right pipeline personified. He has long been on the path of the ever toxic masculine skewing algorithm. Maybe it goes back to the original sin in the show’s timeline, killing Chris Lucado for violating the sanctity of his role as hitman and relationship to Fuches, murdering a family man and a friend instead of disposing of the people actually putting him in danger. Maybe the path to hell was marked again and again by his tinier betrayals of NoHo Hank’s friendship. Maybe there’s no hope for someone reborn while taking a life, particularly if that cluster of emotions is met with someone like Fuches. Whatever it is, Barry is no longer trying to escape the harm that violence and rigid masculinity have caused him. He is looking to make excuses for it and YouTube will abide.
