I'm very much a fan of BBC dramas - they are very well polished and easy to watch, even if the content isn't particularly your jam. In the wake of watching Louis Theroux's Manosphere documentary and award winning Adolescence, and having enjoyed Baby Reindeer, Half Man seemed a good choice.
I'm still not sure it was.
Has anyone read 'A Little Life' by Hanya Yanagiha? Set in NY, it tells the story of four friends as they struggle with substance abuse, sexual assault and depression. People loved this book, but I found it tedious and it's main character, Jude, absolutely intolerable. I wanted to scream at him to get over himself. The book went on for far too long, detailing the most abject depression for the reader. The phrase 'trauma porn' came to mind as it seemed to focus on suffering to emotionally manipulate the reader. It seemed to just intensely escalate the suffering of the character to the point I just felt that it was overdone and failed to land sympathetically. Yes, people suffer terrible things. Surely there's a less relentless, overwhelming way, disproportionate to real life?
I felt this way about Half Man. It very topically - in the light of critiques of the manosphere and toxic masculinity - explore the suffering of men struggling with their sexual identity, abuse, and sexuality. Like Adolescence, this could have been done masterfully, yet I found it to be tedious, repetitive and overdone, and the very unlikeable characters seemed to repeat their behaviours so often that they seemed not real, but charicatures.
The older 'half' brother is violent, manipulative, and brutish, solving his personal suffering with rage and brutality and fear. The younger 'half', although terribly frightened of his brother, is unable to inhabit his true self as a homosexual (although he argues bisexual) man, particularly as he desires his brother's approval and is overly worried about what people think of him.
Over thirty years, the brother's traumas are played out over and over. Feelings of poor self worth resulting in substance abuse and putting oneself in sexually 'deviant' situations, or beating men to within an inch of their lives, both men play out a version of masculinity that doesn't bring either happiness and results in terrible consequences. And despite being told many times, by lovers and family members that they are worthy, it doesn't hit home for either man.
In the end, I was sick of the grunts of performative masculinity, the whimpering of men who could not take positive action to overcome the influence of those they blamed for their lives. But then perhaps this is what toxic masculinity does - it takes the promise of a positive life and turns it into a claustrophobic, cloistering prison of bitterneess, shame and self-destruction. It teaches men that to be vulnerable is weak, that real intimacy is to be suspicious of and that may harm, and that to ask for and recieve help is to be a failure. The half brothers in Half Man totally get this - particuarly in the final scenes, finding it almost a hilarious, cosmic joke they shouldn't have taken so seriously - yet are trapped by it emotionally.
I guess that's the point - I wasn't meant to enjoy watching these men self sabotage. That awful and endless cycle of poor decision, addictive and self loathing is the reality of trauma itself, and who am I to be annoyed by it when that's a lived experience for many? I may have found the experience as a viewer exhausting over illuminating (though many others felt it explored it well) but that doesn't mean it isn't a version of a truth.
I may have been worn down, but then imagine what it is like to be in these half-men's shoes?
Yes, it's undeniably an important story here about masculinity, sexuality, abuse and generational trauma. Whilst I didn't like the characters, I can admit the performances were strong, although perhaps a little overworked and cliche, and the production was polished to the usual degree you'd expect from the BBC.
However, I couldn't shake the feeling that the series repeated itself as a play of depth - like A Little Life, it piled on suffering which took away from the emotional impact. I found myself knowing that the characters had no other option but to die, rather than the more inspiring story of how to overcome their demons. I'm definitely not saying 'get over it', as if that's an easy thing to do, but I was frustrated by the tragic porn of it.
For many viewers, it clearly worked. For me, it simply became another reminder that showing the truth of trauma is not the same thing as saying something deep and meaningful about it.
With Love,.
