Half Man: Not half amazing
Half Man is unsettling as hell to no good end. It is about something so important to talk about, but its obviousness at every turn ensures that it just doesn't matter.
Warning: I will be spoiling Half Man. I took one for the team. I do not recommend going down this path.
I watched Baby Reindeer out of morbid curiosity once the buzz started, and at first I was drawn in. Over time, it ran out of gas before it was over. At first, it was interesting to see how Gadd toyed with ideas about stalking, but as it became clearer that he hadn’t covered his tracks at all in terms of fictionalizing his experience, it led me to wonder if this was worth it. I found myself asking a similar question watching Half Man, his new miniseries.
Everyone loves an overnight success story, and Gadd was showered with praise and awards. So here we are, a couple years later, and Half Man is about the toxicity and codependency of a decades-long relationship between two men, one a timid writer and the other a brash bully. It’s an epic tale of dysfunctional men who can’t find the middle ground between their intense feelings.
Ruben is brash, pushy, and violent. Niall is shrinking, unsure of himself, and unable to stand up for himself. I wasn’t prepared for the ways that the early episodes would take me back to being bullied in middle school. I found myself so frustrated that Niall was so passive, and it was in that moment I had to confront who I was and how hating that gap between who I was and how I was acting yet again. It made me uncomfortable. It made me sad. It was a heavy way to kick off a Friday morning.
It has been interesting to see the lack of discussion of Half Man. Where there were podcast episodes aplenty discussing Reindeer, it’s hard to find any meaningful discussion of this show. I had to do a search to find one podcast reviewing the show episode to episode (truth be told, it’s more summarizing than analyzing).
The Male Loneliness Epidemic is a conversation that should be taking place, but it needs to be more than identifying that it exists and that it’s probably due to screens. So far, it seems like everyone is content to identify it, but not talk about what to do about it.
A show from a celebrated creator with a track record of wrestling with difficult subject matter seems like an obvious point of entry, but ironically, no one is talking about the show. The reviews I found, even when the reaction was positive, were riddled with phrases like “endurance test,” “emotionally shattering,” and “devastating.”
I am not sure we need another cautionary tale, which is mostly what Half Man winds up being, because who’s heeding the caution? Are there men who could be convinced to get away from their dangerous nonsense by this show?
It’s not Gadd’s responsibility to solve the problem, but I expected more nuance. This show takes the easy, obvious path at every turn. Perhaps that is Gadd’s point, that we see this over and over but there’s no attempt to right the ship. And truth be told, I should review the show that was made, not the one I wanted.
Half Man really got to me because I know this terrain. I grew up around (and was caught up in at times) a lot of toxic masculinity. Not in my home, mind you. In this respect, my dad was mostly exemplary. He had friends (my mom and I didn’t like them much, because they showed some signs of toxic behaviors. However, my dad shut them down often). These were guys he could call on to help on a project or just to shoot the shit. I don’t know how close they were, but it seemed healthy on the surface and he demonstrated a partnership with my mother that I seek to emulate, OG #couplegoals.
But in my schools and in my neighborhood, it was much different. I even emulated that in elementary school, careful not to do it when I could get in trouble. I felt the rush of making someone else feel worse to make yourself feel better. There is an addictive component to it. And for boys at that time, the best defense against being picked on was a strong offense.
I left it behind by middle school, but that turned out to be just in time for me to spend time as the victim. In retrospect, it probably should have led me to an apology to someone I bulled, but instead, it led me to dread second hour of eight grade every day. I felt powerless. I hadn’t done anything to provoke these two guys who relentlessly bothered me, from names to chair pushing to throwing things to passing notes about me. In fact, I knew one of them from elementary school, and I thought we were friends, or at least friendly. The teacher, an alcoholic biding his time to retirement, treated the symptom and not the root cause. He would tell them (and me when I did try to stick up for myself) to quiet down, but never tried to figure out what was actually going on, leaving me to sit there and take it.
What was I going to do? Tell on them? Eight graders in Flint schools were supposed to handle their business. I had never had to fight anyone, and I wasn’t sure of myself enough to try. Meanwhile, my self-esteem dwindled for an hour every day in real time. I wasn’t in a position to do much about it but endure it for an hour each day and breathe a sigh of relief when the bell rang. This experience colored the rest of my time at that school. My parents had been red-pilled into thinking it was the only safe school in the city, so a transfer was out of the question. I never spoke a word about it to them. I was in the grip of toxicity.
The fallout continues. This is why I wake up in the middle of the night worried about my son, who has Down Syndrome. Differences are perceived as weakness, and everyone is looking for someone to pick on to save their own face. I worry about kids luring him into misbehavior. I worry about him being picked on. I worry about ineffectual teachers spacing out until the final bell rings. Middle school boys can be terrible, even if they have examples at home that would be appalled by their cruelty.
In retrospect, I see how it affected me. I hated the rest of my years in that school and only found solace when I discovered the all ages music club and seeing punk rock bands with all the other kids who didn’t quite fit. I was lucky to find that scene and those people. The friendships I’ve carried in this life mostly started there. Bear in mind, this was the early 1990s. I was finding new bands by taking a chance on a name that sounded cool in a Touch and Go Records catalog or reading magazines. I had no cool older sibling. I was doing it on my own until I found these people.
But it also made me slower to trust, to remain guarded, and to think less of myself. I still have a tough time not talking myself down, not treating myself poorly, even as I have found a loving, healthy relationship.
Later in life, I found myself in another dynamic where I was steamrolled by someone. When it started, I was out of work, dealing with the impending death of my mother, and running out of money. Sometimes, it was wonderful, but a lot of the time, it was me trying to fit into a box instead of being myself, and that created a lot of conflict. I regret intensely not standing up for myself, for taking what I took for as long as I did. That haunts me even more than anything that happened, that acceptance instead of action. It was debilitating, years of not feeling like I knew myself anymore and hiding away from people who loved me. I think I learned enough from that to not get there again, but who knows?
I knew people like Ruben. They were in my neighborhood, in my schools. Now, I look at someone like him and wonder about the hurt he won’t deal with instead of lashing out, but in the midst of being bullied, it’s harder to generate any curiosity about that. You just want the bullying to stop. Your concerns are focused on what is wrong with you rather than what is wrong with them.
It’s not hard to make a connection between the creeps I saw in the recent Manosphere documentary on Netflix and Half Man’s Ruben. He exhibits all manner of intolerance and protects his own fragile masculinity at all costs, even if it requires him to go to prison. When he does find some success and is able to somewhat settle into an ordinary life, he messes that up, too.
Instead of unraveling the complexities of a relationship that is toxic but seemingly impossible to sever, Gadd takes the easy way out most of the time. The explanations are the most obvious ones. Of course Ruben was abused by his dad, and he feels strange about the arousal he felt during the abuse. No wonder he is hypermasculine and insecure. And of course he has reproductive issues. What an obvious device. Couldn’t he just be a prick who hasn’t learned basic respect? The world is riddled with examples of privileged young men who lose their way or believe they are above the rules. There was no need to pile on the melodrama and explain everything with the easiest answers.
The more interesting content is in the reasons Niall won’t sever ties completely, even though he is afraid of Ruben. I understand how that type of dynamic breaks people down, makes them passive, makes them feel like they aren’t themselves any more. I lived it. Ruben helping Niall as he spirals, even though much of the root cause of Niall’s troubles is Ruben, is an example of the complicated, thorny dynamics the show could have explored. Instead, it is more about rubbing our noses in Gadd’s shit. The class elements of the story are present, but not presented as much more than the setting.
Niall sometimes uses the scraps of power he does have, but he also fumbles those repeatedly, either by overplaying his hand (having sex with Ruben’s wife and impregnating her) or by getting too comfortable with Ruben and assuming he can go “no secrets” with him without repercussions, which ultimately leads to the end of both of their lives.
The thing is, I understand Niall on some level. I made decisions I know I shouldn’t have and I couldn’t even explain them. That’s part of the “magic” of these situations. From the outside, it’s easy to say, “What the hell are you still doing there?” or “Why the fuck did you do that?”. And even when asked, it’s hard to come up with an answer that makes any sense, yet you go on doing it.
At the same time, I understand Ruben, too. Young boys and men are expected to create an identity around their talents, and if they don’t have any discernible ones, or they come from a home where there is strife, economic, physical, or psychological, they are expected to find someone worse off than them and to zero in on them. I don’t agree with it, but I understand the appeal of finding someone lower to show that you aren’t the lowest.
That is precisely why Half Man got under my skin. I didn’t like it, but I also watched it as soon as I had time every week, even though it often ruined my morning. It is a bully, in a sense. I wasn’t wanting to wrestle with these disquieting memories of myself again, but I found myself as inexplicably unable to quit watching it, just as it took me years to finally break out and try to reestablish my sense of self.
It was unpleasant, seeing myself in Niall at times, especially the young version. I found myself angry at young Niall, but really at myself for not coming to the conclusion I should have decades ago: You are worth standing up for, and if you don’t, you will live under thumbs again and again. It doesn’t matter if you try to make it mean less to you, because it means enough to the bully to keep doing it, so it won’t stop until you make it stop.