3 Things to Watch Now That "Barry" Is Over

Posted June 4, 2023 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

It's been near a week since Barry (2018—2023), HBO's "comedy" about a serial killer (Bill Hader) with dreams of becoming a famous actor, wrapped. And many of us are hungry for more. Sarah Goldberg's turn as Sally, especially, has received rightful praise for Goldberg's portrayal of an insecure, traumatized actor whose behavior doesn't neatly align with contemporary representations of survivors of abuse. "There has never been a portrait of trauma quite like Barry's Sally Reed," reads a headline at the AV Club on May 15, 2023. Maybe so, but for those of us needing more complex representations of survivors, where to turn? Here are five films and television shows that provide similarly complex portraits of trauma survivors.

If typical Hollywood cinema finds itself struggling to break out of binaries in terms of character development—good vs. bad, hero vs. villain, victim vs. perpetrator—Goldberg's Sally pushes the limits of viewer expectations and empathy in ways that enrich our understanding of the lasting impacts of trauma. Sally is at turns violent and sympathetic. Talented and vain. Broken and unaware. And mean, as evidenced by a viral video of her calling a colleague a "c**t" in an elevator.

Yet throughout, Sally is shown in a sympathetic light. In the penultimate episode of the series, Sally is a shell of the women viewers knew before. She's standing outside her former acting teacher's house, banging on the door wearing a brown wig, screaming for her husband to come out for fear he's already murdered the man inside. In the chaos, her son, John, attempts to ask her what will happen to them. Sally responds that they’ll just keep doing what they’ve always done. In that moment, Sally experiences dissociation. Where once viewers could hear trees in the breeze, a droning soundtrack, and her frantic speech, now we only hear Sally's slow-motion breaths. She's shot in soft focus, her environment blurring. The colors around her turn gray, muted. The drastic shift in tempo, sound, color, and mise-en-scene momentarily give Sally (and the audience) a moment to both reflect and feel panic. She's derealized.

The idea that Sally is both worthy of our respect and understanding while also needing to account for her destructive tendencies is held with equanimity in Barry.

Why is this important? Because cultural representations of traumatized people can unconsciously condition viewers to expect survivors to behave in predictable ways. Culture might inadvertently set up a "trauma script" that carries sympathy for victims who are wealthy, beautiful, white women done wrong who go on to valiantly fight society's evils without the messy reality of the impact of trauma on everyday relationships. The myth that survivors need to adhere to goodness, purity of intention, or super-human feats of strength to be worthy of sympathy and audience empathy dulls our capacity to hold space for those victims who don't fall into this category.

This is especially true of victims paired with psychopaths. So much of the manipulation that occurs in a psychopathic relationship leaves victims hollow. Such characters are reduced to surface and color: they’re detached, strange, alien, and alienating. And they are no less worthy of healing. When Lifetime movies, true crime miniseries, and slasher films repeat the same story again and again, viewers fail to see the complexities of the survivor's experience.

1. Film: The Swerve (Dean Kapsalis, 2018). The Swerve stars Azura Skye as Holly, a woman with increasingly translucent skin living a life that has grown unbearable. Like many films and TV shows on this list, there's no inciting event that tells viewers why Holly begins to unravel. It's nothing and everything. Her absent husband. Feuding children. A sister who flirts with pathological narcissism. A family who mocks her at dinner. We watch in horror as Holly makes increasingly reckless decisions to—what? Perhaps feel alive. Perhaps to be seen. Perhaps for no reason whatsoever. The lighting of this film is especially powerful in portraying Holly's internal state. Scenes of her in cars, especially, frame her eyes with bright white light while the remainder of her face is left in blackness. She's unknown: to herself, to others. She holds light and dark, and the dark is winning. But without the vocabulary or voice to talk about what's happening to her, Holly is left to act out behaviors that would leave polite society blushing.

2. TV Show: Chloe (Alice Seabright, Amanda Boyle, 2022; Amazon Prime and BBC One). Chloe broke my brain the first time I watched it. I kept trying to "outsmart" the show. I’d seen so many stories about psychopathy on screen that I thought I knew where Chloe was leading me from the opening scene. Thankfully, I was wrong. Becky Green (Erin Doherty) is a lonely, neglected woman living with her mother who becomes obsessed with a rich group of friends via social media. She goes to great lengths to enmesh herself within the group, lying about everything, from her name to her status in society. What begins as a portrait of a stalking, obsessed woman turns into something far more confusing and complex as time goes on. As viewers begin to understand Becky's motivations for her deceit, new insights emerge into her character and behavior. Chloe may not be as subversive as other films on this list (by the end of the film, she's firmly within the sympathetic victim role), but Chloe's willingness to play with viewer expectations momentarily gives us the chance to stretch our empathy when it comes to understanding the behavior of victims.

3. Film: Safe (Todd Haynes ,1995). Before Todd Haynes won Oscar glory for Carol (Todd Haynes 2015), he introduced the world to another Carol: Carol White, a breakout role for a young Julianne Moore. Safe confounded me so completely the first few times I watched it, I had to write a dissertation chapter about it to get my head around what was on this movie's mind. Safe takes place in the 1980s and follows Carol as she grows increasingly sick in response to some unknown contaminant in her environment. At the time of its release in the mid-1990s, Safe was seen as an allegory for AIDS and placed within the New Queer Cinema emerging at the time thanks to the rise of handheld video recording devices. Others argue for seeing Carol as a feminist figure, one who disintegrates when she's unable to live up to the impossible demands of rich white suburban womanhood.

For me, Carol's character expresses that which can't be expressed: dissociation. All the film techniques in the film withhold viewers from Carol's point of view. The camera keeps its distance from Carol throughout the film as deep focus offers us entry into an inflexibly heavy pastel mise-en-scene. Extreme long shots leave Carol nestled in corners, overwhelmed by sofas and plastic plants and bulbous light fixtures. Obstructed camera angles bisect domestic space in near-perfect symmetry, with poles or beams withholding characters from one another. And long takes alienate the viewer from Carol's inner thoughts, the camera hovering behind plastic cellophane or wire window screens whenever we momentarily hear Carol begin to speak. When asked to speak, Carol can barely string together coherent sentences. When I walked away from the film feeling alienated and angry at Carol for reasons I couldn't articulate, I took that as a sign that what I was watching was a character alienated from herself.

Whenever we watch film or television characters that make us feel uncomfortable, challenged, alienated, or upset, that's a great opportunity to ask if the filmmakers are doing this intentionally to challenge our assumptions about what makes a worthy protagonist. I’m glad Sally, Holly, Becky, and Carol exist. These characters help viewers expand their empathy towards the plight of dissociated characters without needing to evaluate these characters’ moral worth. Even the strangest among us deserve safety and love.