Critical Mass

CRITICAL MASS: The Assassin's Creed lives on in the TV series 'Barry' and 'Killing Eve'

Bill Hader in a scene from the HBO series, "Barry" (Courtesy of HBO)
Bill Hader in a scene from the HBO series, "Barry" (Courtesy of HBO)

Two of my favorite TV shows streaming now feature assassins in major roles. (So does John Wick: Chapter 3 -- Parabellum which just opened in theaters.)

There's HBO's Barry, a half-hour comedy that stars Bill Hader as the eponymous lead character, a former U.S. Marine suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who performs contract killings at the behest of his handler, Monroe Fuches (Stephen Root). But after a job takes Barry from Chicago to Los Angeles, he becomes bitten with the acting bug and enrolls in a San Fernando Valley-based acting class taught by failed actor Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler).

As pathetic as Gene is, he becomes something of a father figure to emotionally blank Barry as he tries to divorce himself from violence and become a better man. And, conventions of drama being as they are, he never manages to escape himself -- there's always some loose thread by which he can be pulled back into his wet work by Fuches or Chechen mobsters or simple self-preservation.

Barry is bitterly funny, a dark rumination on the impotence of good intentions. Hader, also the show's co-creator (and presumably the driving creative engine; he has co-written and directed several episodes), demonstrates remarkable range as the depressive, socially awkward but lethally competent hit man as he begins a tentative romance with self-absorbed classmate Sally (Sarah Goldberg).

We identify with and root for Barry despite the show's insistence that he really is a cold-blooded killer. While Barry murders reluctantly, he does murder -- and not all his victims are clear-cut bad guys. At the end of season one, he kills Gene's detective girlfriend because she was on to him. Earlier in the season, he kills an old Marine buddy after the guy suggests he might go to the police and confess his part in a botched ambush of Bolivian drug runners. While Barry is our surrogate, he clearly does not revel in death-dealing.

Contrast him with the impossibly glamorous assassin in the other show we're crushing right now, Villanelle (Jodie Comer) in BBC America's Killing Eve. Like Barry, Killing Eve is in its second season (the second season finale of Barry airs tonight, Killing Eve's on May 26) and could be fairly described as a black comedy.

While Barry is mainly presented from the assassin's point of view, Killing Eve is primarily focused on Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), a British MI5 officer recruited into a secret investigation of a string of murders committed by an unknown killer who turns out to be mysterious Villanelle.

Villanelle in turn becomes obsessed with Eve, and the two embark on an erotically charged tango that has them ping-ponging across the continent -- from London to Paris, Vienna, Berlin and back again. Unlike Barry, Villanelle (real name Oksana Astankova) compulsively seeks attention through her murders, often performing them in a needlessly flamboyant manner. (Even when she's charged by her handler with "making it look like an accident," she manages to send a secret signal tipping Eve off to her involvement in the crime.)

As with Barry, she's deeply damaged, though his damage seems a reaction to the violence he's committed and her violence more a response to some primal wound. (It's suggested she had a difficult childhood and has done time in prison.) Barry was broken by the killings he commits; Villanelle kills because she's somehow broken.

Jodie Comer stars as Villanelle in BBC America’s 'Killing Eve.' (Courtesy of BBC America)
Jodie Comer stars as Villanelle in BBC America’s 'Killing Eve.' (Courtesy of BBC America)

NO REAL-WORLD ANALOG

Stepping back, neither character is likely to have a real-world analog. Anything can be made to look alluring in a TV show, where the mundane and brutally boring parts of life are excised. Contract killers -- who perform on-demand murders for profit, as opposed to serial killers like Ted Bundy who select victims for personal reasons -- do exist, and some of them (we obviously can't know how many) escape detection and capture for many years.

We know about people like Richard Leonard Kuklinski (portrayed by Michael Shannon in the 2012 film The Iceman), mob enforcer Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, and English gangster Jimmy Moody, who is said to have murdered more than 100 victims because they were arrested and charged with crimes, though not necessarily with all the killings they were suspected of committing.

I know a hit man: Larry Thompson, a Louisiana man with a talent for tuning hot-rod cars who has confessed to four murders and has intimated to law enforcement that he has committed dozens more over the years (as well as 33 night deposit box robberies, three armored car robberies, at least one bank robbery and a couple of casual cases of arson). Now in his mid-70s and serving what is essentially a life sentence, Thompson lived for decades under intense police scrutiny and was bold enough to call a newspaper reporter (me) whenever his name came up in connection with a violent act. (Which it often did during the '80s.)

Thompson was tried and acquitted in the 1984 murder of a New Jersey woman at the behest of her husband, a wealthy insurance broker. (I covered the investigation of that case, which became the subject of Joe McGinniss' book Blind Faith.) Though the husband was eventually convicted and sentenced to death for arranging the murder of his wife, Thompson was acquitted. He confessed to that killing in 2016.

He also confessed to the murder of a friend and neighbor, a hunting buddy named Larry Wayne Lester, in June 1988. Under some pretense, he got Lester to drive him to a remote spot off a logging road in DeSoto Parish in June 1988. Thompson wrote in a statement that he then "shot him once in the left side of the head and after he was dead shot him two times in the heart with a .380-caliber firearm described as a Browning 380 auto.

"I left him at the rear of his Cutlass dead. I had left my motorcycle in the woods and after I shot Larry I got on it and rode home, throwing the gun in a creek on the way home."

Police have described Thompson as one of the sharpest criminals they've ever encountered; they feel like they were lucky to catch him after a botched armored car robbery in 2003. They believe that had they not arrested Thompson's son in connection to that same robbery, they would never have learned as much as they have about his crimes.

Just as we wouldn't know about Barry's or Villanelle's had we not witnessed them in our living rooms.

LOOMING LARGE

Assassins figure large in our history and culture. Names like John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan provide something like a rebuttal to the Great Man theory of history -- any pipsqueak in the right place with the right lever might divert events. (See the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical Assassins, which suggests political assassinations are a by-product of American political culture.)

On the other hand, a surgical strike might save millions of lives -- what if someone had got to Hitler in, say, 1933? (The first attempt on Hitler's life may have come as early as 1921 during a brawl in a Munich beer hall during a rally of the newly formed Nazi party. Hitler kept ranting even though shots were fired at the speaker's podium.)

And maybe it is natural for the law-abiding and regulation-oppressed to fantasize about living outside and above the law, perhaps even -- as the Assassin's Creed video game has it -- in a realm where "nothing is true; everything is permitted."

Running down the source of that quote leads us to interesting places.

That phrase appears in Friedrich Nietzsche's works Thus Spake Zarathustra and Genealogy of Morality and a couple of times in his unpublished notebooks. Nietzsche writes that it was the watchword of an Islamic sect called the Order of Assassins which operated from the 11th to the 13th century. (But it is wrong to take it as a summation of Nietzsche's philosophy; in Zarathustra Nietzsche puts this invitation to amorality in the mouth of a "thin, blackish, hollow and outdated" spectre.)

It shows up again in French writer Betty Bouthoul's 1936 novel The Master of the Assassins, which tells the story of Hassan-i Sabbah, a historical figure who allegedly captained the Order of Assassins. As Bouthoul had it, Hassan -- also known as the "Old Man of the Mountain" -- commanded his brainwashed assassins by tricking them into believing he had supernatural powers, drugging them and promising them a paradise in the afterlife. Bouthoul's book was a favorite of Beat writer William Burroughs, who referred to it often in his own books and in interviews.

Then, in 1938, Slovenian writer Vladimir Bartol published Alamut, another retelling of the Hassan myth that shares many similarities with Bouthoul's book. Alamut -- also an allegory about the assassination of Alexander I of Yugoslavia by Croatian and Bulgarian nationalists, allegedly commissioned by Benito Mussolini -- wasn't released in English in 2004, but the Assassin's Creed franchise directly credits it for its inspiration. Every iteration of the myth posits "nothing is true; everything is permitted" as the assassin's motto.

Neither Barry nor Villanelle completely embrace this tenet; Barry still worries whether he's a "good person" or not. Villanelle is highly materialist and, in the main, nihilistic, but forms emotional attachments -- not only to her tracker Eve, but to her handler Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) and even to a 12-year-old boy she mercy kills during a stay in a hospital ward. (Well, he sort of asked for it.)

She can love something and kill it too.

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Style on 05/19/2019

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