Very big spoilers for Half Man ahead…
There’s something disconcerting about Richard Gadd’s Half Man. It’s not the unflinching violence, or the sense of foreboding you can never quite shake off – Baby Reindeer, Gadd’s first series, prepared us for that. Instead it’s the way, as an audience, we feel caught somewhere between reality and a dream.
Take the timeline of the wedding reception scenes that open each episode: however you try to piece them together, you can never get them to make sense. Or the hospital scene; have you ever seen an NHS ward so empty and dimly lit? No patients, no staff, not even a beeping monitor.
In episode four, a show we initially accept as a work of uncompromising realism stops playing by the rules completely when it plunges us into a slow-motion world suffused with ethereal music. Three men storm a barn door; wedding guests gaze calmly – too calmly – from a distance, before police cars and officers arrive with battering rams. Then, bang: we’re back in normal time witnessing an awkward wedding toast. The transition happens so abruptly that there’s no time to process that what just happened doesn’t really add up. Why couldn’t those guys break open the wooden barn doors? How long were they all waiting there so calmly for the police? And wait, didn’t Niall and Ruben go to the barn before the toast?
Dreams do not obey the rules of time, nor do they follow neat and logical storylines; they aren’t generated by the part of your mind that thinks that way. Dreams come direct from the unconscious, the storehouse of your forbidden wishes, unprocessed traumas, and all the repressed material you don’t want to know about yourself. Freud proposed that when you’re asleep your ability to repress all that stuff loosens. As the material bubbles up, it gets twisted and distorted, giving dreams the surreal quality that makes them so elusive to interpretation.
Carl Jung developed this idea further, suggesting that dreams don’t just come from the personal psyche but arise from something more universal, the collective unconscious. Later still, the mythologist Joseph Campbell proposed that the stories a culture tells itself through media like books, film and television can be interpreted as if they were public dreams. In Baby Reindeer, Gadd was able to create a raw emotional drama by drawing on his own life. Half Man, being a work of fiction, can work through personal and social issues more freely. The result is something far more nuanced than another commentary on “toxic masculinity.”
If we approach Half Man like a dream, we can see how alter egos Ruben and Niall represent two unbalanced aspects of a single self. But unlike in Fight Club, where the narrator’s (Edward Norton) alter ego Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) represents some kind of psychotic break, Ruben and Niall are two sides of the same face of a mythic anti-hero that represents our current crisis of masculinity. In a culture where male vulnerability is read as weakness and strength as toxicity, they become split off from each other; their struggle mirrors from the personal what is happening in the social.
This all comes to a climax in the penultimate prison scene in the finale. A brief moment of connection enables Ruben to open up and tell Niall that his father sexually abused him. “It fucks you up man,” Ruben weeps, “it makes you a fucking half-man.” He then expresses something that few can wrap their heads around, “in a lot of ways it’s [also] the closest I’ve ever been with someone. Is this too much?”
“No,” Niall says, “it’s fine.”
But when Ruben speaks the unspeakable – that sometimes, while being abused by his father he would ejaculate – it is too much. Niall shuts him down. This brings us back full circle to the most shocking scene from the first episode, when the young Niall creeping out from under Ruben’s arms and discovers, to his horror, cum in his pants. In this fusion of paradoxical and confusing feelings, in this cycle of abuse, Niall and Ruben are essentially the same, but Niall cannot bring himself to admit it. Instead of meeting Ruben’s reality, and hence his own, he swerves, and they both careen towards their inevitable ends.
“It all catches up with you in the end,” Ruben’s wife Mona says earlier, foreshadowing what’s to come. “Compartmentalising is just taking something from your mind and putting it on your soul.” This is a warning that we should all take to heart. Perhaps the reason why Gadd’s work is so difficult to watch is that he forces us to bear, rather than split off, the bewildering and paradoxical consequences of trauma. It may be among the most uncomfortable things we can do, but the only way out is through.
