[Thisstorycontainsspoilersforthefourthepisodeoftheseries”Vanitas”[Thisstorycontainsspoilersfor“Vanitas”thefourthepisodeofDaring on AMC.]
We’re going to break the first rule Fight club And we’re talking about Fight Club, which is the (somewhat disturbing) climax and midpoint of “Vanitas.” The audacity’Season one. For starters, it’s based on a real thing.
“This is crazy,” says Billy Magnussen, who stars in the AMC series as tech CEO Duncan Park. Hollywood Reporter. “There were articles about it – there was a secret fight club in Silicon Valley. People were at their desks all day, tapping away at computers – I can see why they had pent-up aggression.”
Duncan ends up in the show’s version of the club as part of his ongoing efforts to get a nine-figure investment from Valley legend Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis) — which so far has only led to Bardolph stabbing Duncan’s hand with a fork and security dealing with Duncan the next time he gets close. Bardolph surprised him with a visit to Duncan’s Hypergnosis office, and was none too impressed when Duncan tried to demonstrate the data mining algorithm created by CTO Harper (Jess McLeod). Duncan wasn’t helped by the fact that he said another executive, Orlando Lee, was about to be ousted from his company – not knowing that Bardolph was Lee’s mentor.
But this didn’t come from the algorithm, Duncan put it together while teasing his therapist Joan (Sarah Goldberg) at parents’ night at school. As a way to get rid of him, she told him about another client, and he figured Orlando might get the shoe. Later, he tells Bardolph that his program is “like combining a quantitative analyst with a psychiatrist,” which is exactly what it does.
It’s such an encapsulation of what seems to be Duncan’s entire soul, that you can almost feel the vein of anxiety he feels through the screen. “It’s a ‘stressful’ personality trait,” Magnussen says with a laugh.
“I think we all suffer from imposter syndrome, and it’s easy to get attached to any character. And it’s exhausting, his never-ending drive, because he just wants to be on top,” he says. THR. “It’s like, at what point does your bank account seem big enough? How much possessions do you need? It’s like he shuts down his reward center or his dopamine center. It becomes an addictive nature — the conflict, the challenges of who he is becomes a dopamine hit. It’s like, life can’t be good if I don’t have problems. It’s like he’s creating them just so he can solve something. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Duncan appears to create another problem for himself by following Bardolph to the fight club, where he initially seems horrified to see the men hitting each other with office equipment and supplies. It gets worse when Bardolph goads him into a confrontation with Orlando, who uses a wire rat like a bat. After taking shots to the face and groin and a kick to the chest, Duncan picks up a keyboard wrist rest and uses it to strike Duncan before wrapping a mouse cord around his neck and making him submit, all while Bardolph stares down.
The moment was a bit creepy and a bit pathetic, which is more or less what Magnussen was going for.
“He wants to approve of everything outside himself, not his soul,” Magnussen says. “If he can prove to Bardolph that he’s good enough, I think that’s what allows him to put his head on the pillow at night. That’s sad. [He wants] This man’s approval is hardly known. Yes, [Bardolph] He’s got a million dollars, and he might be the gatekeeper that Duncan believes can let him into this world. But external approval is all he seeks.
For now, at least, it seems to have worked: Orlando has already been fired from his company, and Duncan ends the episode by celebrating in a cold bathtub. Maybe it won’t last — just before that, his on-and-off lover Anushka (Meaghan Rath) calls a reporter to leak bad news about his overdiagnosis — but Duncan thinks he’s got investment and some respect from Bardolph.
“I think Bardolf realizes that Duncan will stop at nothing, and that is admirable in his eyes,” Magnussen says.
