‘Barry’ Is The ‘Breaking Bad’ Of The Los Angeles Acting Class Scene

In Tad Friend’s New Yorker profile of Bryan Cranston during the final season of Breaking Bad, he describes the character arc of Walter White succinctly:

Vince Gilligan, the show’s creator and executive producer, had sold it to the AMC network as “a man who goes from Mr. Chips to Scarface…” But Cranston quietly shifted the arc from good-man-becomes-bad to invisible-man-becomes-vivid.

It might not be the first comparison that comes to mind, but in Bill Hader’s black comedy for HBO, Barry, about a hitman who gets bit by the acting bug, this shift was  a lot less quiet, a lot less subtle. The Barry (played by Hader) that we leave in the finale is so thoroughly corrupted by his LA dream that his original character–a depressed but morally fastidious soldier-cum-mercenary–seems like little more than that: an origin story. An invisible man, making way for someone more real, more fallible, angry, dangerous and yes…vivid. Barry 2.0 is the Heisenberg of LA black-box theater class scene, which is only slightly less depressing than being the Meth King of New Mexico.

Like Walter White, Barry has had to tell himself a fairytale about his work to frame himself as the hero in his own story. Instead of “I’m doing it for my family,” it was “I’m ridding the world of the bad guy”; an extension of his work over in the Marines. But it was a story that, as an audience, we could also believe in, since we’ve all seen this trope before: the hitman with a heart of gold who just can’t seem to get out of the game. We’ve seen it in films like Grosse Pointe Blank, The Professional, and Le Samouraï, and in vigilantes like Dirty Harry and Watchmen‘s Rorschach. It’s almost insidious how Barry, a show about how pop culture can be misinterpreted to fit the needs of the individual, has viewers sympathize with a rich, white murderer whose biggest problem is that he’s so damn good at it. Where have I heard something like that before?

Oh yeah. How I’d love for second season of Barry to have our protagonist and his Macbeth-ian girlfriend Sally Reed perform the “I am the one who knocks” scene. (Though, as far as we know, Gene Cousineau’s syllabus only includes cinematic scenes and the occasional Shakespeare or Mamet thrown in, based on the strength of their film adaptations.) Sally herself is certainly Skylar White-like in her lack of likability. And Barry, now freed from his original moral line in the sand, has proven that he can look out for himself just fine, without the help of his former mentor/slightly ridiculous Heisenberg figure, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root, who seemed to be at least in part channeling an early-era Heisenbergian bravado himself).

What’s terrifying about Barry is watching this character actually get what he wants, accidentally, incidentally, through no talent of his own. Yes, his new life is based on empty praise and the occasional misinterpretation of his performances, but this gives him the confidence and ambition he’s always (and maybe appropriately) lacked before. I say maybe appropriately, because look at what he’ll do to keep it; he’ll shoot, in cold blood, the closest person he had to a friend (on Facebook) and, as the finale implies, carry out the same brutal execution for his mentor’s girlfriend, Detective Janice Moss, on a weekend getaway to a cabin in Lake Tahoe.

It was those final moments of Barry when I realized I wasn’t watching another twist on Macbeth, but an homage to the most famous AMC’s anti-hero who wasn’t an alcoholic ad guy. Maybe it was in the self-rationalization of the season’s last line: after shooting a police officer and slipping back into the safety of his bed with Sally, Barry whispers his promise to live on and narrow “….starting now.” But it was also the whole cookout scene preceding it, which was almost so saccharine that at first read as another one of Barry’s pathetically quixotic daydreams.

Somehow, it seems, the Gods or Fates or Showrunners have decided to turn an extremely benevolent eye toward this flawed character. Until a stray comment of Gene’s about Barry’s “audition” monologue admitting his felonies seem to go over Moss’ head. And there it is, as plain as a copy of Leaves of Grass left for some light bathroom reading.

So we can debate when and where, exactly, Barry Berkman broke bad. Maybe it was when he began killing out of self-interest instead of under orders. Maybe it was during the war. Or maybe Hader’s less interested in Barry’s eternal soul than that arc Friend talks about with Walter White. An invisible man becoming vivid, one terrible monologue at a time.

Drew Grant is an editor, writer and YA novelist living in Los Angeles. Formerly the Arts & Entertainment editor at The New York Observer, Drew also founded the brand’s television vertical, tvDownload. Currently, she is managing editor at RealClearLife.com. Her passions involve watching TV, writing about TV and interviewing people on TV. At Oberlin College, she once taught a class on Twin Peaks, and that’s pretty cool. Previous bylines: Salon.com, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, and Gotham Magazine. Twitter and Instagram: @Videodrew.

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