With Sally’s Visit Home, Barry Season 4 Nails a Key Aspect of Abuse

By Michael Boyle  |  April 17, 2023 | 10:17am
Photo Courtesy of HBO
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With Sally’s Visit Home, Barry Season 4 Nails a Key Aspect of Abuse
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More than anything, the two-part season premiere of Barry Season 4 is interested in origins. It not only gives us a surreal flashback to Barry as a child meeting Fuches for the first time, but it also follows Sally (Sarah Goldberg) along as she heads back to her hometown. We’ve heard a lot about Sally’s old life back in Joplin—we know she had an abusive husband named Sam, who we met for a few episodes back in Season 2—but we never actually got to see any of it.

So once it becomes clear she’ll be spending the first episode of Season 4 with her parents, it’s a huge deal. You can tell a lot about a person by observing their parents for a few minutes, and this is particularly true when it comes to fictional characters. Sally’s mom (played by Romy Rosemont) and dad (Michael Dempsey) only get a handful of scenes to make an impression, and throughout this episode you can feel the writers trying to squeeze as much insight into Sally’s backstory as possible. Everything they do and say is meant to tell us something crucial about how Sally ended up the way she is.

Straight away, Sally’s mom makes a bad impression. One of her first scenes features the two in the car together, where Sally has a panic attack over the realization that her long-term ex-boyfriend once murdered her acting teacher’s girlfriend while Sally thought he’d spent the night sleeping right beside her. Sally’s mom is apathetic, treating her like she’s just a child freaking out about some random trivial thing. It’s almost a funny scene, as Sally’s panic attack is very dramatic and her mom seems so tired of her already, but looking back at it after finishing the whole episode, it doesn’t feel funny at all.

The second red flag is when Sally shows her parents the first episode of her TV show. Not only does her mom not show any excitement over the show or offer any sort of congratulations to Sally for her accomplishment, but she immediately gets on Sally’s case for mentioning her ex-husband by his first name. “I can’t believe you used his name,” she says, as if Sally has committed some vile, unpardonable act. “Now I’m going to have to call the family and let them know all about this.”

It’s an attitude a lot of real-life victims of abuse are painfully familiar with: Sally’s mother is giving the feelings of the abuser far more consideration than the actual victim’s. Even under the guise of fiction, without using Sam’s full name, Sally being open about her abuse is a far bigger crime to her mother than any of the things Sam actually did. If you’ve ever been on the internet while an abuse scandal unfolded publicly, you’re probably at least a little familiar with this tone and approach, but it’s even more disturbing when you see someone do this to their own daughter. Sally tries to get her to remember her perspective: “The guy put his hands around my neck and choked me,” she says. But her mother cuts her down yet again. “Right,” she responds, “and the boy in L.A. is a murderer.”

Because the show is called Barry, not Sally, we’ll likely never get any actual flashbacks to what Sally’s childhood was like, but after this scene we don’t really need to. So much of what makes Sally so high-strung and defensive all the time, not to mention so susceptible to relationships that turn abusive, is laid out for us in this scene. In the face of overwhelming evidence of Sam and Barry’s misdeeds—in Barry’s case, all she needs to do right now is Google his name—Sally’s mother still dismisses all the pain her daughter went through. In her mind, Sally’s just a drama queen, and the best course of action is to just not acknowledge her constant bids for attention.

But the best moment in their scene (and the most infuriating) is when Sally tries to ignore the cruelty of what her mother’s doing to her and simply lay it out straight: “I need your help,” she says, and it’s clear she’s doing everything she can to stay calm. Her mother responds, coldly once again, “I can’t respond to you if you’re going to scream at me.” Then Sally does start screaming, and her mother walks away vindicated.

If you were to look at this scene without any context, unaware of the sheer extent of how cruel her mother’s words are, Sally might come across as a straightforwardly hysterical person here, and her mom looks like a respectable person doing her best. It’s so easy to see how someone can look at this and think Sally’s the one being abusive, even though her mom is the one who’s coldly, methodically pushing on every single pressure point she knows her daughter has. It’s a trick abusers are great at pulling off, and it’s a big part of why victims have such a hard time being believed. Abusers know how to appear calm and rational; they know how to set up the rules of a situation so they end up the winner no matter what.

So, what does this all tell us about where Sally goes from here? Well, we know her storyline with Barry clearly isn’t finished, and it’s her interactions with her father throughout the premiere that give us a good idea why. Sally’s dad isn’t a jerk, as far as we can tell; he’s loving and supportive, but also doesn’t seem to have any idea how to relate to Sally, nor does he seem to know how to handle (or to even understand) the dynamic playing out between his wife and his daughter.

In other words, Sally’s dad is a lot like Barry when he’s not taking his frustrations out on her like he did in “limonada.” During Barry’s nicest moments, like in this week’s conversation between him and Sally at the prison, Barry loves her unconditionally and says whatever he thinks will make her happy, unbothered by the fact that he’s grasping at straws.

In even darker terms, Sally’s parents basically take the role of Sam, just split up into two. Whereas Sam would abuse her and then shower her with apologies, Sally’s mom abuses her and her dad swoops in after to fix the situation. It’s a similarly toxic dynamic, one that Sally’s likely had to put up with since birth. No wonder she’s such a mess.

The reason I’ve always loved Sally, even though she’s certainly not a great person overall, is that Barry has always understood that a victim of abuse doesn’t need to be perfect for the abuse they’ve gone through to be real, to be worthy of condemnation. Sally engages in abusive behavior herself to people she sees as beneath her, but the show doesn’t use this to invalidate the severity of what Sam did to her.

Yet even as Barry has understood this, the world within Barry does not. That’s why Sally’s meltdown at Natalie at the end of the last season—and her genuinely atrocious handling of the meltdown’s aftermath—was so depressing to witness. It’s easy to imagine Sam finding the video and feeling vindicated, of Sally’s mother seeing the video and taking all the wrong lessons from it. In the eyes of the world, the leaked video of Sally undermines everything she’s ever said about being a victim of abuse. It undermines her whole show, to the point where as far as her former agent’s concerned in the premiere’s second episode, her career as an actress is basically over.

Even the fact that Sally’s boyfriend turned out to be a serial killer is a strike against her. It’s easy to see how this news could have saved her career; a more empathetic public reaction might have been something like “oh, she was dealing with a murderous boyfriend behind the scenes? Maybe this helps explain why she was acting that way in that video.” But Barry takes the more realistic route: the public has already decided she’s a terrible person, so this news is just further proof of how evil and manipulative she is. Sally is repeatedly asked in the premiere how it’s possible she couldn’t have known, and is blamed for the fact that she hasn’t left him. (The fact that she actually did leave him, several episodes prior to his exposal, is never acknowledged.) It’s not quite the same as blaming an abuse victim for not leaving an abusive relationship, but the parallels are there.

In a world where people expect perfection from victims of abuse, Barry has always been comfortable with the messy reality that victims can be just as flawed as everyone else. Sally has never been anything close to perfect—even Sarah Goldberg agrees Sally has got one hell of a dark side—but Barry doesn’t expect her to be. As selfish and spiteful as Sally can act at times, when it comes to this specific issue, the show itself has always cared about her far more than the rest of the world would. Her agent may have (understandably) given up on her, but as far as Barry seems concerned, there’s nothing wrong with us still rooting for Sally Reed.

Michael Boyle is an entertainment writer for /Film, with bylines in Paste, Slate, Mic, Digital Spy, and more. You can find him on Twitter at @98MikeB.

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.

 
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