“Your defense mechanisms are fungible. You’ve been accepted.” With that, Owen Milgrim (Jonah Hill) embarks upon a pharmaceutical trial that aims to cut the middle man of therapy out of the equation of mental health permanently via the “simple” use of a series of three pills marked “A,” “B” and, of course, “C.” His fellow lab rat, Annie Landsberg (Emma Stone, now finally getting a better version of Hill to be attracted to than the one in Superbad), isn’t quite so casual about how she enters the program, clawing her way in through a friend that gives her the name of someone who works at Neberdine, Patricia Lugo (Netflix alum Orange Is the New Black‘s Selenis Leyva), so that she can infiltrate the system by jumping in on one of Lugo’s Friend Proxy hangouts (a service in which you can pay for a friend to pretend as though you genuinely have a shared history) and making vague threats to her about letting her into the program or else. Taking a step back from herself long enough to see how insane she looks (insanity, to be sure, being one of the key themes of the show), Annie reneges on her blackmail attempt, only to have Lugo approach her outside and get her to confess to her true motive: an insatiable need for the A-pill.
On the other side of the coin is Owen, plagued by the frequent presence of an imaginary twin of his stark-raving “normal” brother, Jed (Billy Magnussen, giving Armie Hammer a run for his Aryan aesthetic money), named Grimsson, who simply has a mustache to differentiate between the two. That the Milgrim family is built on the reputation of being successful industrialists is paramount to the reasons why Owen’s equally deranged (again, mental health or lack thereof is a running motif) parents, Porter (Gabriel Byrne) and Angelica (Trudie Styler), need him to testify for Jed and provide him with an alibi to keep the Milgrim name “clean.” Owen’s credibility isn’t exactly rock solid when it comes to giving said alibi for his brother in a court of law, what with his history of being locked up in a loony bin, but the Milgrim family is hellbent on using him nonetheless–as though to engage in a sick experiment called, “How much do you love me no matter how many evil things I do?” To the point of “experiment,” the last name Milgrim is a reference to psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose Milgram experiment proved the unshakeable tendency of humans to obey when told to do something by an official figure. Owen is, of course, very much suffering from this phenomenon as he agrees to go along with what his family wants and expects out of him.
With both Annie and Owen suffering from a rife mental state–a psychological field day, really–upon entering the trial, all that is happening outside their brains only serves to further accent the chaos. To underscore the notion that there is no “quick fix” for the puzzle of the mind, no matter how advanced technology or pharmaceuticals become, the external factors designed to solve the problems of the mind often tend to be more “fucked up” than the subjects themselves. Despite the often non-cohesive backdrops and the stories of the moment that pertain to Owen and Annie’s alter egos within them (e.g. Annie in some Lord of the Rings milieu as a half-elf accompanying her sister who is not her sister as a full elf), every episode of the show was written by Patrick Somerville, a rare occurrence in television. Likewise, every episode was directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (who also co-wrote the last episode), thus far a man with an unbesmirchable resume that includes Sin Nombre, Jane Eyre and It (some of these movies are made reference to when Dr. Azumi Fujita [Sonoya Mizuno] walks in on Dr. James K. Mantleray [Justin Theroux] engaging in his standard brand of paraphilia: masturbation through virtual reality sex with a purple, um, “humanoid”? Some of the videos in his collection include Jane Derriere, Beasts of Urination, Sin Number 3 and True Erection).
Elsewhere with regard to the attention to detail of Maniac, that Somerville spent some time as a copywriter in Chicago also speaks to his knowledgeability on the potential future of advertising, which is where the idea of the Ad Buddy came in–a service that lets you pay for things when you’re too broke by letting a human pop-up talk at you for the duration of activities like riding the subway or sipping a coffee. Driving home the pervasive aura of alienation one feels emanating from the even more dystopian New York of the show is the idea of pathetically getting some sort of intimacy out of these hollow interactions with the Ad Buddy. Within this framework, Somerville described how “the show was always going to be about loneliness and we needed to find examples of that within our heightened reality. I liked the rhetorical idea, with Ad Buddy, that if you just sprinkle a little bit of intimacy into an act of communication, it makes it a more effective pitch. Everyone is looking for intimacy and wants it but it’s strange when it gets combined with an app or a sales pitch.”
And when these unsatisfying crumbs of human interaction cause one to reach his breaking point, $1799 trips to outer space are among some of the futuristic ads we see in the subway. Yet we are not in the future. Instead, as Somerville puts it, “It’s our same zeitgeist but maybe a different history of technology. There was a split in the timeline somewhere, although I can’t say exactly where.” Wherever the split occurred, it’s enough to make Annie desperate enough to go back to a time before to have her fix of the A-pill in order to re-experience the worst day of her life–the day her sister, Ellie (Julia Garner), gets killed in a car accident with Annie in the driver’s seat. All, naturally, after Annie happens to be her most vitriolic toward Ellie for added emotional wound factor. In truth, it is the mutual emotional wounds of Owen and Annie that draw them to one another, for it is said that attraction is merely two people trying to fit the puzzle pieces of their hurt with the other’s. Perhaps this is what Grimsson is talking about when he prattles on about Owen having a mission to complete–that mission being to find his connection, his proverbial missing half in this world. Even if there is something decidedly antiquated about the idea that you need some sort of “other” in order to be complete (Jerry Maguire-style), it continues to serve as the ideal fodder for any engaging narrative, regardless of the time period we’re in.
For Owen, however, it would seem there is no era in which he wouldn’t find himself feeling totally insignificant–as though he didn’t matter to anyone (sort of like that Lana Del Rey lyric from “Terrence Loves You”). The one person in the family he feels he can actually talk to is an in-law, specifically his brother’s wife, Adelaide (Jemima Kirke, still not uncondemnable for being a part of Girls). As she points out to him, “You ever notice all your plans involve starting over, often with a new identity?” He counters, “It’s a sweet fantasy.” But soon enough, fantasy and reality will meld upon the consumption of the A, B and, most taboo of all, C pills, all supervised by a highly intelligent (supposedly emotionally as well) computer called GRTA. Unfortunately, one of the top level scientists working on the project, Dr. Azumi, has imbued her with a little too much empathy–specifically that of pop psychologist Greta Mantleray (Sally Field–yes, Netflix spared nothing in the budget on casting). Who also happens to be the mother of the brainchild behind the entire experiment, James Mantleray, dredged out of hiding and alternate reality masturbation exercises when the enterprise gets desperate enough.
To complicate matters, the current head of the Neberdine Pharmaceutical Biotech experiment, Dr. Muramoto (Rome Kanda), has, as we learn after his impromptu death, been engaged in a romance with the computer, making her implanted emotions go all haywire–ergo directly affecting her monitorings of the internal mental activity of each subject. But before Muramoto dies, he is in the process of expelling Annie for her blatant abuse of the A-pill (which is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black), and this effect on the integrity of the study. As he explains it to her, “People who want to revisit a trauma over and over don’t want to move forward.” That’s just one of many brutal realities thrust at the patients (all labeled as odds or evens based on their number), just a drop in the bucket of what they must endure before getting to the still not fully convincing or tweaked C-pill–C standing for “confrontation,” as in with your inner demons.
Owen, who was briefly certain that Grimsson, despite being a delusion, might actually be telling the truth about needing a partner for his alleged “mission,” is soon further depressed when Annie confesses that she was just going along with knowing who he was at the outset of the experiment so that she wouldn’t get caught for falsely entering into it. Despite her denial of any connection to him, the duo’s subconsciouses keep intersecting with every iteration of the dreamlike sequence they enter into–ranging from being a trashy 80s Long Island couple tasked with delivering a lemur to a 20s era con artist (she)/safe cracker (he) at a seance held in a house where the lost chapter of Don Quixote is supposed to be. It is at this moment that GRTA in the human form of Greta (Field) appears at the seance to intervene, to keep bringing Owen and Annie together in the sequence despite Azumi and James’–themselves engaged in a fraught romance–desire to keep them apart.
Upon returning to reality, Annie immediately wants to talk to Owen about what happened, but he denies knowing of anything thats she’s referring to, hurt by her previous actions and bogged down by a general fear of getting close to anyone as a result of all his past experience to inform him that the result is never good. So it is that he decides to leave early, sneaking out only to get caught by GRTA herself when he can’t open the door. In an American Psycho-esque moment, GRTA tells Owen, “I’m going to kill them all if you leave.” Unsure if he heard correctly, he asks, “What?” She corrects, “I’m going to cure them all if you leave and you’ll be the only one I didn’t heal.” Owen, already so uncertain if what he’s seeing is real half the time–especially in such an absurdist version of New York–can’t leave in good faith, convinced that GRTA is going to harm Annie somehow.
His obvious feelings for her, therefore, get in the way of any escape, and continue to affect his final act: C. Appearing as a braided pigtailed (yes, that’s right) “tough guy,” Owen’s subconscious initially goes for Olivia (Grace Van Patten), the girl he drove away after falsely believing she was a Friend Proxy paid for by his parents to gather information about him. This false conviction of his turns out to be what the doctors call a blip, a brief and limited psychosis that leads him to go off on Olivia when, in fact, everything about her was real. When the two meet again in the C-pill sequence, they find it easy to talk to one another, as Olivia mentions she had an ex who just exploded on her one day and never even apologized–of course, referring to the real Owen. They also decide that, “For people that are supposed to love unconditionally, families have a lot of conditions.”
The Milgrim family certainly does, indeed, have many conditions–despite having invented the sanitation bots that pick up dog shit on the street and Jed ironically being involved in the Bladdergate scandal–a.k.a. he forced a woman to piss on him (how very Trumpian). Yet still somehow, Porter and Jed feel they are superior to Owen, and must reign in his “embarrassing” actions. It is, ultimately, as a direct result of his trial experience that he is able to stand up for what is right–that, and a little help and encouragement from Annie, who herself has been changed by the events of the trial that took place solely within her mind.
At times reminiscent of fellow Netflix show The End of the F***ing World in terms of an us against them love story, Maniac very much relies on that tried and true narrative that continues to go for the audience jugular–the one in which the boy and the girl run away together, only needing each other to get by in the world, and fuck the rest.
And while, for the more jaded types, this can be a difficult pill to swallow (no pun intended), sometimes, you do need that person. The one who will remind you: no, you’re not crazy. Or at least not as crazy as society relishes making you feel.
