HBO’s Barry Is A Meditation On Trauma Masquerading As A Comedy
Now it’s time for excellent shows just like it with more diverse casts.
by Dr. Whitney V. Cabey, MD, MSHP, Pincus Family Foundation Pediatric Urban Health Fellow
Are any bioethicists out there watching Barry? It just wrapped its second season, so you’ve probably got a year to binge and catch up. Barry is the other award winning, critically acclaimed half-hour comedy that’s been airing after Game of Thrones on HBO. No, not that one. Perhaps because it’s wedged between two juggernaut shows that are both on victory laps, Barry doesn’t get quite the attention it deserves.
Without spoiling too much, Bill Hader plays the titular character, a hitman who grows increasingly despondent with his career choice. The job leads him to Los Angeles where he stumbles into an acting class that becomes a form of therapy, allowing him to process emotions from a job he can’t talk about, as well as from the experiences that led him to contract killing in the first place. Unfortunately but hilariously, he’s terrible at acting and a savant at killing. The show traces his efforts to break good, so to speak, and in the process goes to serious, touching and extremely unexpected places. It is incredibly empathetic to the main character while never shying away from the implications of the terrible things he has done and continues to do in an effort to change his life.
Basically, Barry offers an all-you-can-eat buffet of moral and ethical questions. That alone should be enough of a sales pitch for anyone who is, like me, both interested in ethics and pop-culture obsessed. However, since I’m a bioethicist and an emergency physician, I want to highlight Barry as a standout among a string of recent excellent meditations on trauma in scripted television. I see trauma daily in the form of injury or assault. But, Barry is showcasing a more insidious form of trauma, the kind that literally gets under your skin, and it is just as bad for your health… Really bad… No really. So as a matter of public health messaging, increased societal competency and destigmatization, increasing awareness about trauma and its impacts is a huge deal.
I’m not sure to what extent the writers room of Barry is making conscious decisions about the ways they portray the impacts of trauma, but they are doing an admirable job showing the risk factors and the physical and psychological manifestations of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. Barry, who was a military sharpshooter before he became a hitman, demonstrates classic symptoms like flashbacks, hyperarousal, and amnesia. He vacillates from complete inability to access his emotions to dissociative rages. It’s accurate, and most importantly, sympathetic. He reminds me of some of my patients when they are triggered. Except for the serial killing part — which I should stress is NOT the relevant violence issue for those dealing with mental health challenges; suicide and self harm are overwhelmingly more important concerns.
Season 2 has brought more depth to the show by exploring different kinds of trauma. Barry, a white cis-gender heterosexual male, develops a relationship with Sally, a woman in his acting class. What at first seemed like another “clueless woman falls for man with double life” storyline quickly turns into an examination of the long term impacts of interpersonal violence, as Sally reveals a history of abuse in a prior relationship. Is it too much of a stretch to think the writers know about studies demonstrating previously traumatized people often have difficulty accurately assessing the threat levels in new environments and relationships?? Either way, I’m here for it.
The television community is participating in the conversation on how to create a more trauma informed society and I’m here for that, too. Barry joins other HBO shows like Sharp Objects and Big Little Lies; Netflix shows like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, One Day at a Time, Orange is the New Black, Jessica Jones and Bojack Horseman; the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and OWN’s Queen Sugar in a spate of critically and/or commercially well received programs that are about trauma or the footprints of trauma. Importantly, many of these shows involve traumatic experiences like sexual assault that are more common for women. Others are tackling well worn trauma-related narratives about addiction and depression through a gendered lens. We are living in a post-pussyhat, #metoo moment. There is an amazing sense of urgency to tell different stories from new perspectives. Additionally, cultural criticism has become increasingly adept in identifying and addressing trauma as a theme. Not only are critics, bloggers and thinkpiecers engaging with the topic in shows that are explicitly about trauma, they’re also calling out shows (ahem, Game of Thrones) that use gratuitous and problematic depictions of physical and sexual violence as routine plot points.
This is all very important work to bring trauma to the forefront of our collective consciousness. Now it is time to make shows that are just as astute but more racially and ethnically diverse. Zeitgeist shows that explore the intersection between trauma and race or ethnicity are way too hard to find. Here’s a test: name a modern American black anti-hero or character motivated by traumatic experience that was not brought to life by Shonda Rhimes or played by Taraji P. Henson (if you think of one, leave a comment). Of the shows I’ve already mentioned, only the Latinx comedy One Day at a Time and the African American drama Queen Sugar have lead characters of color. Yes, Orange Is The New Black has been extensively praised for its diverse ensemble cast, but it, along with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Crazy Ex Girlfriend are first and foremost stories about white women. Both OITNB and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have come under fire for racially insensitive storylines or character developments. As is most often the case, shows like Big Little Lies and The Handmaid’s Tale include minority characters whose race is never embraced in ways that actually inform their character’s motivations or worldview. Even the granddaddy of this modern TV era, critical darling and thesis on institutional racism, The Wire completely ignored the lives of cis-gendered black women in its’ storytelling, portraying almost exclusively as victims.
This functional whitewashing of trauma narratives in popular culture is an egregious error because it unfortunately runs contrary to the facts about traumatized populations in the United States. African Americans were brought to the Americas in a traumatic manner. They were subjected to sexual violence, traumatic separation and genocide. Trauma may very well be written in to our collective DNA and there is now a whole field of thought addressing the persistent intergenerational impact resulting from the original trauma of slavery. Some of those downstream impacts may include continued higher exposures to modern day traumatic events. African Americans experience higher rates of incarceration, interpersonal violence, sexual violence and victimization by violent crime. Transgendered individuals who are racial minorities experience violence at the highest rates of any group in the country. Black and brown people in America could literally write the book (or screenplay) on trauma. When given the opportunity, shows like The Chi on Showtime, Pose on FX, and the cancelled too soon Underground are doing so. However, the list is paltry in comparison to that for narratives about women and racial majorities.
I’m not harping on representation as a matter of quotas or statistical accuracy. Rather, I’m worried that we are missing a golden opportunity to humanize and destigmatize the full spectrum of people who have dealt with serious adversities. Of course television can’t heal all of our cultural ills and it can’t do all the heavy lifting to create a trauma sensitive society. But it is a powerful medium, highly influential in defining and reinforcing how we see ourselves and those around us.
When used for good, television does have the ability to foster understanding and empathy between individuals and populations who have little to otherwise connect one another. Speaking from my experiences, there is just something about following a character’s movements and tracing their motivations, week after week, hour after hour, that creates an intimacy we rarely achieve with real people. We need that level of intimacy with trauma survivors and sometimes it’s hard to achieve in real time. These are people who have experienced the worst and may throw their worst back at others in an effort to survive. Their real stories can be hard to retell given the deep emotional currents that are not always safe to access.
Fiction may sometimes be the best entry point for those who want to understand context, making it all the more important that the face and voices of these narratives are authentic and representative. What would it mean for a show like Barry to have a Black or Latinx female lead and reflect the fastest growing demographic in the US military? I hope we can soon find out.
Dr. Cabey is a health services researcher and emergency physician specializing in pediatric emergency medicine. She is a current Pincus Family Foundation fellow in Pediatric Urban Health earning her MA Urban Bioethics at the CBUHP. Her work focuses on trauma and intergenerational health.
