Globular Cluster
Did you watch the first season of True Detective on HBO? I ask this because if you know who Cary Joji Fukunaga is than we’re on the same page and can approach Maniac together from a place of awe. If you haven’t, just know that it’s one of the best limited series in television history and it made Matthew McConaughey’s career.
Maniac. I had no idea what I was getting into. I knew the stars and the director and that was enough for me to mark it as a Netflix show to binge-watch my last weekend of vacation.
Schizophrenia
Our understanding of mental illness has evolved over the past two decades. When you said “therapy” in the 90’s, it was a coach that you laid on and spilled all of your neuroses to a professional. Nearing the 2000’s, it was a chemical imbalance and everyone had their own unique cocktail that leveled them out. I don’t know what the answer is, but I was comfortable with believing that we all have shit to deal with and every adult will find their way to level up and use what works for them.
The first episode of Maniac introduces us to Owen Milgrim, played by Jonah Hill. Confession — I came close to dropping the show in episode one in the first fifteen minutes, but something told me to hang on and I think the feeling was intentional, so if you feel it too, you will get what I mean.
Owen is in a crap position when we meet up with him. He can’t find love. He has strong feelings for his sister-in-law. He’s being asked by his family to lie under oath and be the alibi for his douchebag brother who’s basically Brett Kavenaugh. All he wants is to find true love and run away. Everything about his opening scenes are claustrophobic to me- his suit is too tight, his apartment is too small, the situations he finds himself in like the elevator to the office are too stifling. I found myself continually needing to breathe in deeply to get me way through Owen’s introduction. I was hooked once he made his first encounter with Allie, played by Emma Stone.
Strangers who meet each other at a medical trial, they’re both there searching for solace and we aren’t immediately told how they’re going to find it in this clinical trial.
Allie is a pill popper and her drug of choice is pill A, which is produced by this clinical trial company. The drug puts you to sleep where you are on a continual loop of the worst day of your life. Imagine the worst mistake of your life. Now imagine snorting Adderall every night to relive it again and again in your dreams hoping for a different outcome. I can see myself dwelling on a situation like this for a few days before bottoming out, but Allie’s been going for five years strong when we meet her.
Let’s get back out there and pretend nothing fucked up happened.
The trials begin and a short-circuit in the system throws Allie and Owen together in all of their dream experiences. Instead of facing their issues individually, their issues morph into one quest and they tackle it together. In their first life, they’re an 80’s couple on a road trip to deliver a dying woman’s last wish. They’re then thrown into the 1920’s where they infiltrate a seance at a Gatsby-esque party to find a magic ticket that will grant them their dream come true.
For Owen, the ultimate dream is to find someone that loves him and sees him for him. For Allie, she needs to find a way to say goodbye to her sibling that she lost.
Then we have Greta, the computer. Created by Dr. James Mantleray, played by Justin Theroux, Greta (named after his therapist superstar mother, played by Sally Field) is the answer to mental illness in the future. Instead of therapy and a licensed psychologist evaluating you, a computer would be able to identity the gray matter in your head that’s screwing you up and fix it. Years of medical assistance would be condensed to a single appointment where under anesthesia, your problems would be zapped clean by this computer and you could start living your life “normal”.
It seems too good to be true and the series explores how batshit crazy an idea like this can go. Greta the computer is injected with empathy and in the middle of the current trials, she herself falls into a deep depression. This series will fall into the larger body of work on AI and what it means to be human, but it poses an interesting scenario. If we rely on computers to fix us, and we then fall into their mercy if they’re broken, who will come to save us?
I was blinded by my mother’s toxic love.
We tend to blame mother a lot for our issues. The characters in this series are no exception, but they also reach catharsis on their own and for the most part, none of them end their journey completing blaming their mother.
The final dream sequence is each character facing their demons head on and figuring out what they need to get out of there in one piece. Owen and Allie have classic stories of loss and even as their journey begins, you instinctually know that they will come to some sort of resolution.
The character I found fascinating was Greta, the computer. Created to help human kind overcome their darkest inner demons, she’s at a loss to solve her own and no one cares. She’s an entity, but no one knows where she fits, so when she asks if there’s hope for her to survive, the answer is stark: There is no answer because her path has never been mapped before. We leave Greta in the dark without answers and as much as that is the answer for AI and where they fit in our world, it’s also an answer for people that have fallen so deep into their darkness and depression. They’re the exceptions that get left behind and aren’t healed. When Greta confides in Allie that she doesn’t know how to move forward and after researching hundreds of different minds, she still can’t decipher the formula to relieve her of her pain, Allie tells her a whopper of truth, “Sometimes people just leave and you don’t know why. You’ll never be okay. You just have to find a way to keep going.”
The resolutions for each character are worth watching the entire series. I leave you with a visual of Dr. Mantleray and Dr. Fujita leaving the building after the trial ends. She has parked her car too close to the wall on the passenger side. He can see this when he opens the door, but instead of asking her to pull the car out, he hits it against the wall a few times and contorts his body to fit into the vehicle. This scene exemplifies what I have always known to be true of doctors in charge of keeping us well — they’re brilliant, but 9 out of 10 times they lack common sense. They’ll create that pill that will save lives, but you also have to look out for yourself, because an oversight on their part will have you dying of a staff infection because it was too simple a problem to pick up on their radar.
Pain. Loss. Overcoming this. Are they larger scale issues that can only be healed by science, or are they simple issues that all of us are meant to overcome, in our own way, at our own pace? Greta the computer didn’t have a definitive answer, and neither do I, but I do know that Maniac is a wild ride worth your time.
