I recently started watching Barry. The dark comedy HBO series stars Bill Hader as Barry Berkman, a hitman who catches the acting bug while visiting LA on a job.
Though roughly half the show is set in and around Barry’s Studio City acting class—taught by third-rate Svengali Gene Cousineau (a very primo Henry Winkler simultaneously channeling two of the original Arrested Development’s best side characters, Gene Parmesan and Barry Zuckercorn, the latter of whom is played by. . . Henry Winkler)—Barry’s drama ignites among Chechen mobsters, Bolivian drug cartels, crusty LAPD detectives, and the man that I think of as Barry’s agent, assassin-wrangler Monroe Fuches (played by character actor icon Stephen Root). Whether they’re aspiring thespians or contract killers, the conniving, venal, and mercenary people surrounding Barry are most kindly described as colorful. It’s not a question of if but to what profound depths his friends, coworkers, love interests, and acquaintances are self-involved. The killers all have main-character syndrome, while the would-be actors marinating in professional rejection would probably have a body count, too, if they thought it would get them a pilot.
And then there’s Barry. In the midst of the machine gunfire and Stanislavskian histrionics, the tall, slump-shouldered Hader is often stoically silent, if not totally dissociated. An ex-Marine who left Afghanistan behind to make a living killing the “bad guys” queued up for him by Fuches, Barry’s emotional repression and soldierly deferral of agency prime Barry’s (re)viewers for conversations about trauma and toxic masculinity (a phrase Barry himself learns from Sarah Goldberg’s Sally, the struggling actress who has no idea what actually brought him to the City of Angels). And those are conversations to be had; if I had the energy, I’d pitch around to write about war criminal Barry as a white feminist fantasy of a “good man” in honor of season 3, which was delayed, as everything was, due to COVID-19.
But I don’t have the energy. Instead of pitching, I’m getting high and watching Barry, doing my level best to avoid feeling seen. And it’s true that, other than our lazy eye, Hader’s surprisingly butch Barry and I have little in common, physically or otherwise. As Barry scales the walls of his PTSD, however, his mutedness feels familiar. There I am, in a hoodie with my mouth agape while people around me talk about things that don’t matter. Searching for purpose in a pool of guilt. Existential dread without focus, because too much is dreadful to pick just one thing.
Who’s self-involved now?
I’ve written about burnout before. I’ve been feeling it again lately, but not for any specific reason. This is an ambiguity that I resent.
But this time around, I’m going to do something about it. I think a little vacation is in order. So this post is to inform you that DAVID will be on hiatus for the month of March. And really, it’s past due! Since January of 2020, I’ve churned out weekly writing on sex, gender, friendship, family, pleasure, pain, people named David, film, TV, art, books, and queer discourse at least once a week, on top of all this other junk I have to do, like sit in my apartment and write bullshit for my boss, ask you to subscribe to support our mutual aid fundraiser, and remind my fellow Brooklyn residents that we’re not paying our gas bills to protest the massive fracked gas transmission pipeline that Nat Grid wants to run from Brownsville to Bushwick.
So. Vacation. Toward the end of the month, I’ll have some news for you about my forthcoming novel and GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY, but otherwise, the goal is radio silence.
Until April.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial. Preorder their second novel, X (Catapult, June 2022).
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