Barry

[therewillbeblus]

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I suppose the concern comes in at how the potential of how he balances what his mother has sworn to him, and his internalization of the Hollywood fantasy of his father’s life. The natural trauma (not just of a child but anyone who survived it, since I’m guessing by the final act Fuches is not in very good shape if any shape at all after the news of Barry’s death) arising out of the events he was merely a witness to as a child plays into a lot of this too, and definitely for me when the camera cuts to his reactions to the movie.

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Those are fair concerns, and I'd like to also say I enjoy hearing your individual thoughts. I suppose where I land is rooted in the show's interest in exploring subjectivity vs objectivity, the inherent issues in each, and especially the issues in expecting one to overwhelm the other; the resilience in both delusion and shared reality, as well as the problematic toxicity and harm in both delusion and shared reality. Delusion seems inescapable on some level, not only because we have psychological defenses protecting us, but also because we inherently concoct narratives based on our own subjective experience. We live in our own heads, and if we do 'share' reality with others, it's in fleeting moments of connection that themselves contain barriers from 'self' in perspective, traumas, defenses, insecurities, etc.

John certainly retained what he heard from his mother about his father, but he also experienced a loving, attentive, protective father, who was active in his development. His mother also called herself a murderer and a bad mother, and his intervention was to immediately hug her, because even if she was neglectful and problematic, his love for her superseded resentment; her explanations of her misdeeds mattered less to him than her pivotal, caring role in his life. Just as the victims of Barry would not see his transformation from a distance as information that nullifies the harm he acutely caused them, one should not expect John to redefine his relationship to his father based on second-hand information about his past. This returns to the power of subjectivity vs objectivity, and the show's tremendous and risky position at not endorsing one or the other, since both are undoubtedly 'real' and 'true' to each individual. Barry believes he must be good in some way because a part of him is, and he is resilient in fighting his self-hatred and trauma, even if that is objectively causing harm; Sally and Hank and Gene and Fuches all have similar journeys of leaning into destructive or constructive developments based on their own emotionally-driven narratives, some to positive ends and others to harmful ones. The mess (which the show documents so well in its absurd dark comedy) lies in the conflict between these competing perspectives, wills, defenses.

I like how, through all the comically-presented Born Again component of Barry's "reformed" self working in friction with his psychological profile as yet another delusion (albeit, a constructive one!), John gets the opportunity to embody those teachings of Christian forgiveness towards his mother and father. Parents often say that they want to do differently for their kids what they felt they didn't get from their parents, and this is a great, hopeful example of an extreme version of that. Two people fucked up by the world did spend some time aiding constructive development in a child, only at different times - Barry during his formative years while Sally was still a wreck, and then Sally picked up the pieces when she had to during the rest. John will still have his share of problems - none of us escape our formative years without some traumas, and this show has demonstrated that even the most privileged won't be spared - but he chooses love with his resilience. And, alongside all the horrible acts his parents committed over four seasons of TV, they did a pretty damn good job at setting the foundation for him to excel as a good person. Maybe not in a smiley-Hollywood way - it was messy and awful too - but that's how life is. They infused John with a mentality to be good, and their own resiliences bled into his ability to be resilient too, ideally in a more healthy way.

[therewillbeblus]

I liked this piece from Consequence:

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Barry offered little in the way of moral judgment on its characters, beyond the fact that if Barry had realized sooner what he needed to do, he would lived...

None of us are ever really who we say we are, for worse or for better: After all, the “man with no heart” dove on top of a boy to protect him during a firefight. And Sally cries that she’s not a good person or a good mother, but when we flash forward yet again at the end, she seems to have built a nice life for herself far away from Los Angeles, as well as a stable and loving relationship with her son — even if she doesn’t want him to watch Hollywood’s version of his father’s life and death.

Watching a teenage John (Jaeden Martell) watch The Mask Collector is essential to the themes of the finale: The lies become what we remember, in the end, when Hollywood paints them as truth. However, as much as there is to glean from the movie John watches in the final minutes of the episode, and the smile it puts on his face, it’s not the most important scene of the finale. That might actually be Fuchs and Hank’s pre-firefight showdown, as Fuchs forced Hank to confront an infinitely relatable truth: “Admit that you were scared, that you hate yourself, that there are some days you don’t think you deserve to live and the only thing that’ll make you forget is by being someone else.”

That’s the lie that NoHo Hank was living, but this was also the grace Barry found when he stumbled across Gene Cousineau’s class, all those years ago. Barry was, after all, a show about acting, and actors, and what it means to play a role. To build up enough fibs about who you are so that someone else can look at you and see your fictions as fact, maybe even to the point where they actually feel real…

That’s what actors do for a living. But it’s also what we all do, to live in this world.

[Kracker]

"...the only thing that’ll make you forget is by being someone else.”

forget the important scene of the finale, this winds up being the most important line in the whole series.

[flyonthewall2983]

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So incredibly jarring at first I now see the time jump as incredibly effective within the narrative externally because of the pandemic delaying production, one could speculate was also itself an incredible thing to draw inspiration from as much as what the first two seasons drew from.

In becoming fugitives and isolating the family unit Barry and Sally are living out lives marked more by the fear of getting caught as it is raising their son. Sally works a job that requires the minimum of emotional capacity she so freely worked in at Gene’s studio and on the set of Joplin and is maybe more herself (as someone else…) as we see her lurk around absorbing the environment she lives in relatively less pressure (enough so to engage in that weird seduction).

Who this all says she is at the end (her reckoning when taken hostage, I do see that moment when she tells Barry to turn himself in and leaving the next morning as her redemption in exodus) in the car is enough of an obvious cliche of being in the drivers seat, but it feels most apt to me when she looks at those flowers.

[flyonthewall2983]

Hader is on the next episode of Roger Deakins’ podcast Wednesday

[Mr Sausage]

Finally got around to this series. The characters in this show have an It's Always Sunny... inability to move past their own destructive personality flaws.

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Reading some comments here that the characters never really manage to change, I think the lone exception may be Fuchs, which is funny given how often the man gave up literal paradises to pursue his stupid emotional needs. Not only does Fuchs seem to register his actual flaws in his final confrontation with Hank, but his last gesture is to throw himself on Adam, a purely selfless act, and then lead Adam to Barry without seeming to require anything from Barry, including acknowledgement of his selflessness. The whole show Fuchs has needed endless acknowledgement from Barry of some kind or other, and here he does what he was unable to do the entire series: let Barry be.

I mean, prison's fucked him up, true. But he's the only character who seems to've actually learned something and made a genuine positive change to break their destructive emotional cycle. Go figure.