I don’t usually watch TV shows. My medium of choice is film, and something about the length or sheer volume of TV loses me. But every once and while I’ll give something a try after a long beer-soaked bar shift, and recently a sequence from the last season of Barry caught my eye on Twitter. It was a wide shot of a pair in a barren landscape, with a procession of wedding-suited people rushing towards the camera before the scene somehow shifted to an interior. It was a Fellini-esque motion that caught me off guard, the exact kind of thing I would usually accuse TV, even of the “prestige” variety, as not being interested in. This is an area of moving pictures that I honestly engage with very little, in part because of these, likely unfair, assumptions.
At first Barry was like a TV show, and despite the initial derision noted here I don’t mean that as necessarily negative. Season 1 of Barry is, at least, very well done as episodic media; it lays the groundwork of its formula in the pilot, a hitman who wants to be an actor, and settles in from episode 2 to the season’s conclusion. It was, simply, and again not derisively, formulaic. It’s everything it does within these boundaries that make the show so compelling, the ways in which it bleeds the fiction the characters build for themselves with the reality of their lives and, by extension, the fiction of the show itself against the reality of the media landscape it exists in. It fits nicely with some of the last decade’s most exemplary works of television, like the wincing reality of Nathan for You or the metatextual exercises in revivals done by David Lynch and Mark Frost bending and pulling every expectation in Twin Peaks: The Return in order to build something new out of what has more recently been reclaimed as a nostalgia object.
It’s clear that as it progressed, the show’s driving force both on screen and behind camera, Bill Hader, had The Return and its co-creators’ notion of making one-long-film rather than just another set of programs in mind. While the time jumps and rapid relationship changes that define the final season of Barry have been the focus of professional and armchair critics alike, that acceleration began a whole season earlier. After the limits of relationships are reached and the delicate balancing acts that have held up the drama so far come crashing down with the conclusion of Season 2 (not unlike the solving of Laura Palmer’s murder in the infamous second season of Twin Peaks), everything starts to change fast. The acting class led by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) is abandoned, Barry’s handler and deadbeat father figure Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root) has gone to war with Barry, Chechen mobster NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) has entered into a romantic and business relationship with his former competitor, and, most importantly, Barry’s girlfriend, Sally Reed (Sarah Goldberg), the reason he stayed in the acting class in the first place, has gotten her own TV show.
Season 3 begins a rapid rise and even faster collapse. Reed’s TV show is canceled after the pilot because it didn’t play well with the “algorithm,” and Reed starts into a psychological spiral. This is partly systemic, but Reed’s fate is ultimately tied to her proximity to Barry, whose secret world of violence threatens everything he tries to build outside it. The ghosts of the past have seemingly scarred Barry into the man he can’t escape from being, no matter how far he runs. It’s a similarity to the Great American Genre that’s not lost on Hader.
I have a tendency that often manifests as reduction to, when something visually or narratively bears similarity, declare a piece of media to be a replay of The Searchers. There are plenty of intentional examples (New Hollywood is rife with them), but as a film so ingrained in the canon and therefore a sort of collective unconscious of cinephiles, many of these similarities are incidental. However, there’s a shot in the sixth episode of the third season from a porch in the desert, starkly similar to the porch of the Edward’s house in The Searchers’ legendary opening sequence. It’s more than just a visual reference—it’s the start of Fuches’ obsessive hunt for Barry, one whose deep-seated hatred parallels that of John Wayne’s most notorious characters.
Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is one of American cinema’s greatest protagonists. Edwards is one of the most vile, nakedly genocidal figures John Ford ever put on screen. He doesn’t just straddle the line between civilization and nature like so many Western heroes, but the line between human and inhuman. That titular search is driven by two foils, Martin Pawley’s (Jeffrey Hunter) search for the sister from his adopted Edwards family and Ethan’s hunt to take revenge on the Comanche war chief Scar (Henry Brandon) for the murder of his love. As the film evolves and they eventually find Debbie (Natalie Wood) in Scar’s camp as one of his wives, Ethan’s motivation changes—he’s now out to kill Debbie, someone he no longer sees as of his “blood” and no longer white because of her relations with a native. It’s the stunning moment at the end of the film where he finally captures her and lifts her up like he did when she was just a little girl where Ethan regains his humanity and says, “Let’s go home, Debbie.” Fuches is the obvious parallel to Ethan, both embarking on a years-long quest to kill their former kin, Ethan with his niece and Fuches with his son figure. Like Ethan, Fuches regains a certain humanity when he looks Barry’s son in the eyes, seeing the same eyes he saw in the little kid he met decades ago, and brings him back to Barry before leaving to, again like Ethan, wander between the winds for eternity (While Season 1 was focused on acting out scenes from Macbeth, perhaps the final acts play more with Richard III: “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity/But I know none, therefore am no beast”). Fuches’ story may be a poetic turn of events, but it wasn’t necessarily one the show has always been building to.
The first season wraps too neatly for what has transpired, one in which the actions of the characters seemingly don’t have consequences, or they don’t quite get caught up in them just yet. The investigation into the death of an actor that could bring Barry’s new world tumbling down is concluded in a story not true, but everyone, except the privy few who really know, sincerely believes it to be so. It's a narrative deus ex machina, not one intent on finding easy resolution, but to make a point about how arbitrarily the world functions, how mechanisms for justice (the police) or for truth (the art of acting) may not actually bring them forth. In terms of narrative construction, this is what the first seasons are about, but as the show progresses away from its initial formula, it loses grip with this irony of fate in favor of its Westernly exploration of violence and humanity. That’s not to say the show was never interested in those things, it clearly was from the beginning, but its thematic basis overtook the actual narrative structure as Hader’s interests started to move away from the machinations of television and into the possibilities of cinema. As many have pointed out, the last two seasons of Barry feel so jarring because they’ve lost interest in the medium in which they’re presented.
Perhaps the most criticized part of the final season is the time jump midway through. First presented at the end of an episode, it seems like it could be another dream sequence born out of a hard cut-to-black, until the reality of it is affirmed by the subsequent episodes leading into the show’s conclusions. The surreality isn’t broken until after another hard cut-to-black caused by Barry’s death, which at first seems Sopranos-like before the story resumes as if woken up from a nightmare. While the time jump was divisive to audiences, it’s another feature lifted from The Searchers, although the monumental duration of Ethan and Martin’s journey is often underappreciated by the non-obsessed audiences. Hader’s approach to it is opposite Ford’s however—The Searchers’ ambiguously long quest is noted offhand, it’s jarring for the lack of attention brought to it, whereas the leaps in Barry are jarring for their ellipsis. It’s a nod to the show’s inspirations without being an unthought-out copy.
What isn’t equally Ford-like is the ending itself. Sometime after it’s wrapped up, Sally and Barry’s son have moved to the Midwest, forgetting all about the violence and devastation they’ve escaped. Something that they haven’t escaped is the film made about it all, one which “prints the legend” of Barry’s story, making it seem like he was a determined family man with a history of violence out to stop a massive criminal conspiracy, rather than the cold-blooded killer that he was. In Ford’s films, the lies that built society are exactly that—they serve as foundational myth for what’s been built. This isn’t what Barry is doing, or even trying to do. It’s instead telling a story about how media reshapes complicated narratives into ones that best serve something comforting. It’s an exercise in how Hollywood distills stories from their confusing, conflicting realities into the fictions we’re familiar with. Barry is a series that gets mired by its confusing, conflicting directional shifts as its creator’s interests start to move elsewhere, but maybe in that it still makes its point.