Maniac Review: A simple answer to complex questions
Patrick Somerville and Cary Fukunaga dive into the deep end of complex human emotions, and it gets messy.
The human brain remains one of the world’s most complex puzzles to date. As technology evolves and our knowledge expands, we are still left with only abstract theories and partial data about the human brain. Our personal emotional landscapes are largely uncharted, which makes a project like Maniac extremely ambitious. Maniac is a 10 episode mini-series on Netflix that is based off the Norwegian series of the same name. Written by Patrick Somerville and directed by Cary Fukunaga, Maniac dives into the labyrinth of the human mind and explores our relationship to our emotions and the traumatic events that we experience. There is a creative appreciation in how Cary Fukunaga and Patrick Somerville are able to allow the audience to visualize complex emotional disorders such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia into complete, fleshed-out worlds. Maniac takes place in a future consumerist dystopia, where the technology appears to have stopped at Windows 95 and the general population is cash-starved. The monetization of human connection runs so deep that you can sell your face and likeness to marketing companies, get free subway rides through “ad buddies”, and literally pay for friends. So basically,everything we already do on the internet. (There’s something unsettling about Emma Stone on a “Buy a family” billboard, like some ancient macabre painting.) The florescent lights and sharp textures are accompanied by dim lighting, giving the world of Maniac a bleak outlook that its inhabitants attempt to mask with hopeful images and bright colors. It is a very disconnected world. Even with all the apartment units and office cubicles stacked on top of each other, the characters couldn’t seem farther apart. Connection is a commodity, and everyone is selling. It gives this world an empty feeling,leaving you wondering exactly what is genuine and what is artificial.
The opening scene is cool though.
The plot of Maniac focuses on Annie Landsberg (played by Emma Stone) and Owen Milgrim (played by Jonah Hill), two broken souls attempting to navigate their issues in a broken world. Both characters encounter one another when they participate in a drug trial through Neberdine Pharmaceuticals, where Doctors claim they have developed a three-step process to deal with personal trauma and find happiness. During the trial, they become connected in their visions when the supercomputer known as GTRA drips some liquid on some wires while she is crying over the death of Dr. Muramoto,who developed feelings for one another as a result of Dr. Fujita installing a neural network inside of GTRA to give her more empathy so that she can be more effective at mapping the test subject’s emotional trauma. That neural network is modeled after Dr. Greta Mantleray’s self-help books, who is the mother of Dr. Fujita’s love interest and creator of this experiment…………you know what? It doesn’t matter. A series of random events caused Annie and Owen to become connected. Through their dreams, Annie and Owen embark on daring escapades that include a ring-tailed lemur heist from a fur store, infiltrating a cult in search of the lost chapter of the Spanish novel Don Quixote, a CIA headquarters shootout, elf quests, and a gritty mob thriller that can best be described as Post Malone gets the lead role in The Departed. What’s impressive is how detailed and elaborate the worlds are in each dream sequence despite thelimited screen time in each vision. Just like levels in a video game, Annie and Owen need each other’s help to complete the objective in the dream sequences.With every completion, the audience sees a part of Annie and Owen’s emotional frontier mapped out. One of the strongest aspects of Maniac is that it’s written and directed to where the audience learns more and more about the characters as they learn more and more about themselves. We experience the journey of self-discovery and the source of suffering through the character’s point of view.
While both Annie and Owen are severely broken individuals,they’re paths to suffering are different. Annie is a rough edged, prickly personality who is coping with the death of her sister through drug addiction. Her mother left when she was young, which makes Annie naturally distrusting towards other people. Her father has isolated himself away from the world after Ellie’s death, only communicating with Annie through a pod-like structure. Annie’s reaction to Ellie’s death is creating barriers and disconnecting herself emotionally from everybody around her. She is extremely defensive, and manipulates other people through deceit, blackmail, and occasionally hostility.Though her exterior is initially hostile, Annie slowly unveils the pain inside her throughout the series. She reveals how she has truly been suffering from her mother’s abandonment and her sister’s death, and she talks about how she puts up barriers and lies to others as a way to keep distance in her relationships. At the end of episode 2, Annie relives the worst day of her life, her sister’s death. It’s an extremely brutal sequence, as we see Annie cut to the core and bring Ellie to tears in an argument, and then Ellie dies in a car accident when a semi-truck clips their jeep. This dream is triggered by the use of the “A” drug, the same drug that Annie has entered the drug trial to procure more of. As more of Annie is unveiled, it becomes clear on why she is going through so much to get the “A” drug. Through use of the “A” drug, Annie is able to relive the day of her sister’s death. As Annie explains, “Every time I take that pill, I have to live through the worst day of my life, just like you did. I have to hear myself say the worst ugliest things I’ve ever said to anyone. And it ends with the worst thing that ever happened. I fucking love it.” When asked why she chooses to relive the worst day of her life, Annie responds by saying,“Because I get to be with her again.” Annie chooses to experience the emotional pain and trauma of that day, so she can be with her sister again. Rather than coming to grips with Ellie’s death and accepting the painful truth, Annie has decided that reliving the day of her sister’s death is less painful than fully accepting Ellie’s death. In this moment, you can see just how emotionally fractured Annie truly is. Ellie’s death, coupled with Annie’s mom leaving her,leaves Annie broken by way of large, sweeping events.
While the source of Annie’s suffering has been the loss of loved ones, by contrast, Owen’s suffering comes from being trapped by his family. Owen Milgrim is the outcast of a wealthy family who appear to have built their empire through lies, greed, and nepotism. Their source of wealth comes from the production and sale of robots that dispose of dog feces. So the foundation of their empire is a literal pile of shit.
Owen is withdrawn and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia.He has trouble deciphering what is real and what is not. He dislikes his family but is still feels obligation to be loyal to them because of their blood, as his family is pressuring him to lie for his brother Jed who is being accused of a heinous sexual assault towards a female employee. Much like Owen, it’s hard to tell which family members are lying about Jed to preserve the family name and which are creating a false narrative to deal with the cognitive dissonance of the truly monstrous nature of their family and the public image. Much like the rest of this world, the Milgrim family uses money to buy Owen’s loyalty,against his persistence. Owen’s dad offers to buy him a nice apartment, and when Owen declines, Papa Milgrim pressures him with a blood oath to break Owen and gain his cooperation for the trial. As opposed to Annie, Owen’s trauma has been slowly building. He mentions one instance where he has a break from reality and screams at his girlfriend in college, but most of his issues are attributed to pressures from his family and exacerbated by his diagnosed schizophrenia. Owen seeks healthy connections, which is why he creates a fantasy version of his brother Jed. The Jed that helps Owen through each dream sequence is the brother that Owen truly desires. Unlike Annie, who chooses to severe connections and isolate herself, Owen is seeking connection but is unable to trust himself to build those connections. For example, the only person in the Milgrim family that shows any signs of compassion to Owen’s situation is Jed’s wife, Adelaide. While it’s clear that Owen does what to develop a more intimate friendship with Adelaide, he doesn’t know how to proceed. At the Milgrim dinner party, he awkwardly pitches the idea that they run away together, and then laughs it off as a joke when she suggests that he is joking. In Owen’s case,his depression has been slowly building over the years, and is stimulated by his schizophrenia and being cuffed to a family that exploits his issues rather then help him.
Neberdine Pharmaceuticals, in a video that looks like it was made for a high school sex education class,tells us that the program utilizes three drugs in three stages: Identify, map, and confront.
After these three easy steps, the participants are “healed”.However, Annie and Owen’s journeys imply that confrontation and acceptance are the first necessary step to healing, and healing is a long, painful journey. To quote Annie, “you are never going to stop feeling this way, you are just going to have to figure out how to work around it.” After the drug trial, Annie speaks with her dad and finally tells him how the death of Ellie and their mother leaving her has affected her.She also talks about the drug trial, and when explaining how Owen kept trusting her when Annie kept giving him reasons not to, Annie’s dad replies “He acted like a friend.” Owen is exiled to a mental health facility after he tells the horrific truth about his brother in the courtroom and effectively cuts ties with his overbearing family. Annie tracks down Owen and breaks him out, and they set off on a new journey as friends. Annie and Owen may never be fully healed from their trauma,but for the first time, you get the sense that they feel a lot better about their situation because they have each other for support. And in the end, that’s kind of the point of Maniac. There’s an astronomical number of topics you can unpack from Maniac, you can dissect every easter egg in every dream, and you can explore every complicated emotional map for each character. And while there’s great value in doing those things, the underlying message I took away was relatively simple: Our emotions and issues can be frustrating and confusing to navigate, but it’s a lot easier if you have people in your life that care.
Dealing with trauma and mental disorders is difficult. There are no easy answers, there are no permanent solutions. The human mind is an elaborate maze with upside down stair cases, trap doors, secret rooms, and all other types of obstacles that are constantly shifting due to pressure from a tragic, harsh world. As a result, an entire industry has been cultivated for decades in search of answers. There’s the Dr. Greta Mantlerays of the world,who have written thousands of pop psychology books, the Dr. James Mantlerays,who have dedicated years of research to creating the right pharmaceuticals, and everything in between. Those options might be helpful in some cases, but you still need people who care that you can talk to. Having those healthy connections doesn’t make dealing with psychological trauma any less painful,but it helps deal with the pain a little easier.
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