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When the Mask Came Off · Infinite Threads with Bob Barnett

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: and time.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to Infinite Threads.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Bob.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday,
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  SPEAKER_00: we talked about the way that television could make us laugh and then
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: without much warning, take us somewhere painful.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today, I want to stay with what happened in those quieter moments afterward.
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  SPEAKER_00: The moments when the character we thought we knew suddenly couldn't keep being that character.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: When the mask came off,
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  SPEAKER_00: I think that those scenes Taught me something very important about people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Most of us have a public version of ourselves,
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  SPEAKER_00: not necessarily a fake one, but just the version that knows how to function.
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  SPEAKER_00: The funny person makes a joke.
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  SPEAKER_00: The strong person says they're fine.
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  SPEAKER_00: The angry person gets louder.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those ways of behaving can become so familiar that even
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  SPEAKER_00: the people around us start believing that that's all there is.
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  SPEAKER_02: Then something happens.
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  SPEAKER_00: The armor fails.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for a moment, we see the person underneath.
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  SPEAKER_00: We already talked this week about Archie Bunker,
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  SPEAKER_00: and I don't want to repeat that whole story,
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  SPEAKER_00: but there's a reason That the image of Archie holding Edith's slipper has stayed
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  SPEAKER_00: with so many people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Archie had spent years protecting himself with royalties, arguments, complaints, insults.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then, Edith was gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: He could argue with Mike.
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  SPEAKER_00: He could complain about the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: He could rumble about almost anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: But he could not argue with an empty bedroom.
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  SPEAKER_00: When he found that slipper,
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  SPEAKER_00: everything that Archie normally used to protect himself became useless.
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  SPEAKER_00: There was just grief.
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  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly,
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  SPEAKER_00: the character
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  SPEAKER_00: who had spent years making himself seem hard looked completely fragile.
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  SPEAKER_00: That scene taught us something that his arguments never got.
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  SPEAKER_00: The angry man was also a man who loved deeply.
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  SPEAKER_00: Those truths had always existed together.
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  SPEAKER_00: We just didn't always get to see both.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think Good Times gave us another unforgettable version of that with Florida Heavens.
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  SPEAKER_00: As we talked about before, Florida was the center of that family.
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  SPEAKER_00: James could be fiery.
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  SPEAKER_00: JJ could joke his way through almost anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: But Florida held things together.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then James died.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a while, she kept doing exactly what everyone expected Florida to do.
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  SPEAKER_00: She took care of the family.
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  SPEAKER_00: She handled what needed handling.
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  SPEAKER_00: She stayed composed and the people around her began wondering why she wasn't grieving.
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  SPEAKER_00: But of course she was.
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  SPEAKER_00: She was simply surviving it in the only way that she knew how.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then she was finally alone in the kitchen.
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  SPEAKER_00: She picked up the punch bowl and the wall came down.
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  SPEAKER_00: She smashed it And then came those famous words, damn, damn, damn.
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  SPEAKER_00: That scene still hits because Florida did not suddenly become weak.
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  SPEAKER_00: She finally stopped having to be strong.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even if it's just a for a moment, then there's a difference.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think television helped teach us that distinction.
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  SPEAKER_00: Strength is not the absence of grief.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes strength is what gets a person through the first few hours
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  SPEAKER_00: until they finally reach someplace safe enough to fall apart.
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  SPEAKER_00: That changed the way I understood strong people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone can be functioning beautifully and still be hanging on by a thread.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we don't always know.
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  SPEAKER_00: We cannot always tell by looking.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then there was Ed Brown on Chico and the Man.
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  SPEAKER_00: This one became especially complicated because real life had entered the show.
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  SPEAKER_00: After Freddie Prinze died, Chico was gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: The series continued and eventually a young boy named Raul came into Ed's life.
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  SPEAKER_00: Later, Raul discovered Chico's belongings.
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  SPEAKER_00: He found Chico's guitar.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed heard him playing it and Ed exploded.
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  SPEAKER_00: He took the guitar and smashed it.
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  SPEAKER_00: On the surface, it looked like anger.
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  SPEAKER_00: But that anger was pent up grief.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed had never really dealt with losing Chico.
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  SPEAKER_00: Raul touched the thing Ed had buried.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Ed reacted the way people sometimes do when pain gets exposed before they're ready.
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  SPEAKER_00: Badly.
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  SPEAKER_00: Raoul thought Ed hated him and ran away.
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  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, Ed found him and had to explain what was really happening.
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  SPEAKER_00: Chico had died.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ed missed him.
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  SPEAKER_00: The cranky old man who once barely wanted Chico in his garage Had been changed by loving him.
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  SPEAKER_00: And now he was grieving him.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's a remarkable distance for a character to travel.
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  SPEAKER_00: And again, the important part is not that Ed's anger became acceptable because he was grieving.
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  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: He hurt Raoul.
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  SPEAKER_00: But once we understood the grief underneath the anger, the behavior made more sense.
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  SPEAKER_00: And because it made more sense, repair became possible.
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  SPEAKER_00: That idea had become central to the way that I think about human behavior in general.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes what we see first is not what is actually happening deepest.
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  SPEAKER_00: Anger can be fear.
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  SPEAKER_00: It definitely can.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've lived it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sarcasm can be embarrassment.
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  SPEAKER_00: I've lived that too.
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  SPEAKER_00: The person who insists they need nobody may have spent a lifetime learning
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  SPEAKER_00: that needing people was dangerous.
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  SPEAKER_00: That does not mean that we should invent tragic explanations for every person who behaves badly.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes people are simply behaving badly.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I think That these television moments trained us to leave room for another possibility.
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  SPEAKER_00: There may be more here.
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  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think there is most of the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: I know not all the time, but most of the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: We talked yesterday about Hawkeye on MASH, too, and he is another obvious example.
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  SPEAKER_00: His mask was humor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hawkeye could turn almost anything into a joke.
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  SPEAKER_00: For much of the series, that was one of the things that made him so entertaining.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it was also how he survived.
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  SPEAKER_00: The show gave us glimpses of that long before the finale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Hawk's Nightmare, Hawkeye begins sleepwalking and having disturbing dreams.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sidney Friedman, the psychiatrist, comes to help him understand what is happening.
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's breaking firm.
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  SPEAKER_00: All the jokes of the world can't completely keep it outside.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's such an important picture of what people do.
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  SPEAKER_00: We develop ways of coping.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes those ways work for years until they don't.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then everybody around us may be surprised.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was always the funniest.
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  SPEAKER_00: She was always so strong.
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  SPEAKER_00: Or he never seemed bothered by anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: You may have heard some of these.
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  SPEAKER_00: But maybe they were bothered.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the mask was simply very good.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that's what these shows taught me.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not to distrust the face that people show us, but not to assume it's the whole face either.
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  SPEAKER_00: A person can genuinely be funny and still be hurting.
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  SPEAKER_00: Someone can genuinely be strong and still need help.
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  SPEAKER_00: A difficult person may have tenderness inside them that appears only in places
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  SPEAKER_00: where they feel safe enough to show it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Human beings are not contradictions that need to be solved.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we're just complicated.
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  SPEAKER_00: And story lets us see that complexity in a way ordinary life doesn't always allow.
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  SPEAKER_00: In real life, the angry stranger may walk away before we ever learn what happened to them.
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  SPEAKER_00: The funny coworker goes home and we never see the silence afterward.
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  SPEAKER_00: The strong person holds everything together so convincingly that nobody thinks
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  SPEAKER_00: to ask whether they need someone to hold them for a while.
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  SPEAKER_00: Television Gave us access to the private room.
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  SPEAKER_00: We got to follow the character home.
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  SPEAKER_00: We saw what happened after everybody else left.
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  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that changed everything that we thought we knew about.
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  SPEAKER_00: Such good writing in some of these programs, guys.
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  SPEAKER_00: Looking back now, I think that those moments
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  SPEAKER_00: They taught me that when somebody behaves in a way that I don't understand,
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  SPEAKER_00: there may be more information than I have.
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  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean that I ignore the behavior.
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  SPEAKER_00: It means I stay curious about the human being.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think curiosity is one of the things that keeps empathy alive.
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  SPEAKER_00: The moment we decide we completely understand another person, we stop looking.
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  SPEAKER_00: These shows, these shows kept making us look at the dim.
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  SPEAKER_00: Archie was more than his anger.
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  SPEAKER_00: Florida was more than her strength.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Ed Brown was more than his bitterness.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Hawkeye was more than the joke that he was about to tell.
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  SPEAKER_00: The mask wasn't necessarily false.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was incomplete.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe all of ours are.
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  SPEAKER_00: We all have the version of ourselves that knows how to get through the day.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then there are the quieter parts.
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  SPEAKER_00: The frightened part.
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  SPEAKER_00: The grieving part.
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  SPEAKER_00: The part that still remembers being a child.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe one of the most compassionate things we can do for one another is to remember
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  SPEAKER_00: that those parts probably exist even when we can't see them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we'll finish this week by looking at what all
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  SPEAKER_00: of these stories may have been doing to us as viewers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because television did more than show us other people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it turned the screen into a mirror.
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  SPEAKER_00: We thought we were watching Archie, or Ed,
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  SPEAKER_00: or Florida,
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  SPEAKER_00: or Hawkeye,
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  SPEAKER_00: and every once in a while,
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  SPEAKER_00: if we were paying attention, we recognized something of ourselves.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Guys, I think this is very,
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  SPEAKER_00: very important,
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  SPEAKER_00: and I don't know how much you all saw these kind of things,
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  SPEAKER_00: but shows like M.A.S.H.,
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  SPEAKER_00: Good Times,
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  SPEAKER_00: All in the Family,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Jeffersons,
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  SPEAKER_00: Shows like these,
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  SPEAKER_00: the writers put in the effort to make you feel and know these characters so much,
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  SPEAKER_00: and then they put in what's real about us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not every writer saw that, so not every show has that.
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  SPEAKER_00: I recommend these shows we've been talking about highly for those reasons.
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  SPEAKER_00: Norman Lear was absolutely wonderful about this, showing us the humans inside.
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  SPEAKER_00: I love you all very, very, very much.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I need you to do.
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  SPEAKER_02: Go out there and pass that on, okay?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Later day or soon.
• 14:42
  Bye-bye.
• 14:43
  [music]