Credit Michael Desmond/Showtime
Season 2, Episode 9: “Story of My Life”
Through the course of a truly sluggish ninth episode, the main characters in “Masters of Sex” pursue inquiries into their own problems by exploring another’s. Whether by role-playing or channeling someone else’s woes, the characters envision scenarios that apply to them as well, but that are explosive in their potential to cause more harm.
A discussion with a patient, or between two supposed friends, echoes the conditions of another character or another patient in a future scene. This mechanism has been used too often throughout the second season, and by now I’m a little weary of this scene-by-scene loom weaving everyone’s issues and words into a tangled mess.
At times, I want to press fast-forward: Get this over with. Do you feel the same?
And so by the end of this week’s hour, when Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) finally admits aloud to Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) that he’s trying to cure his own impotence through their hotel assignations, the scene presents no stunning breakthrough for Bill nor does it offer a surprise.
It’s anti-climactic (pardon the pun) for even the casual viewer of this series: Obvious clues had been strewn everywhere from hotel scenes when Bill stays dressed to his dogged interrogations of Lester (Kevin Christy), the documentary filmmaker who is unable to perform with women. In other words, no cheering chorus (at least on my part) for Bill clearing up some mystery cloaked in his repressed persona.
On another level, Bill’s revelation certainly fits his pattern of manipulating Virginia for his own selfish reasons: Remember that he demanded they continue having sex as a condition of her employment. He only conceded his impotence after Virginia confronted him about the ramifications of their affair and what that portended for his wife, Libby (Caitlin FitzGerald), his marriage and for the two of them. Neither wants to hurt Libby.
Virginia pushed him out of his comfort zone, the one in which he refuses to call their sexual relationship an affair. When he insists again that they share a higher purpose for studying human sexuality, she retorts: “It hasn’t been about the study in years. When was the last time we noted a session, used a stopwatch? Or added up anything except our bar tab?”
Good questions. We’re all tired of seeing this ruse, as we tally our own hours of watching and waiting. But Bill needs Virginia emotionally. Since the end of last season, when he stood on her doorstep in the rain, he views her as his salvation, as his path to a cure for whatever ails him at any given moment. And we are getting to the point where he recognizes that intimacy with Virginia will take him somewhere new.
All that said, and setting aside my own impatience for something big to happen, this episode delves deeply into Bill’s past and further exposes Virginia’s misgivings about her attachment to him. Perhaps not coincidentally, she is also increasingly aware of a need to treat the emotional/psychological status of patients, not just the physical manifestation of some dysfunction.
In that vein, this episode is still intriguing for its character development. The throwbacks to Bill’s difficult childhood, as told through the entry of his younger brother, Frank (Christian Borle), lend another layer to life stories and give this episode value.
(And yes, readers, Francis Mason is only an alias Bill concocted for him at work; Francis Masters is not a half-brother or a former lover.) Their mother, Essa (Ann Dowd), jokes at a dinner with Frank and his wife and Bill and Libby at the Masters household that it’s not difficult to understand why Frank, a plastic surgeon, would want to show off his older, accomplished brother. And she laughs about their childlike aversions to green vegetables or fish.
Have you ever told a story about your childhood only to have a brother or sister interrupt, saying, “Wait, I did that, not you”? And then the story line changes, memories congeal or blur. Perhaps your mother or father stepped in to remind you that hey, it was your brother who didn’t need training wheels; he just jumped on his bike and rode off down the street; pedaling away free and clear, out of sight, independent.
You thought you owned a memory. Turns out, well, you weren’t so special. That’s what Frank teaches Bill in this episode, although it’s quite more painful a recollection than how you conquered a bike.
On to the straight recap:
A Magical Father Frank invites Bill to a gathering of friends, which much to Bill’s displeasure is an A.A. meeting at which Frank is celebrating an anniversary of sobriety. (Why Frank’s A.A. meetings are in St. Louis, and not Kansas City, where he lives, stumps me.)
Frank stands up to tell a story of his own. (Get it? Time for exposition.) He learned to vanish himself from the family table once his father expressed disapproval of his taking tap-dance lessons or getting a B in biology when his older brother never got a B.
He tells the crowded room, with Bill standing in the back, arms crossed and frowning, that he began to need an assistant to disappear – brandy, scotch, gin, etc.
“It wasn’t until I quit drinking, until my sobriety allowed me this magnificent clarity, that I realized I’d had a teacher all along — my dad,” Frank recalls, snapping his fingers. “The greatest magician of all time. He could make things vanish.”
“His approval. Poof. My mother’s smile. The fun of a baseball game you’d been waiting for all summer. I’d do one thing to disappoint him, blow a line at the Christmas pageant, strike out with the bases loaded, and afterward he wouldn’t let me get in the car.”
Frank relates that his father made him walk home, through heat waves and snowstorms. “Without saying a word, just by his example, he taught both of his boys how to vanish, didn’t he, Bill?” By this time, Bill has left in discomfort. “Ta-da,” Frank says. Bill has vanished, too.
Later, Frank arrives at Bill’s office. And as Betty alerts Bill that Frank Mason is there, Frank seems disconcerted, trying to explain that his name isn’t Mason.
The exchanges between the two brothers are fraught: Who owns this story? Bill argues that he was the one left on the road, splattered in mud by their father’s tires. Bill contends that Frank appropriated his story, his life, to excuse his alcoholism. Frank asserts that he became Bill’s replacement as a target for abuse.
But Bill is adamant – looking up from his desk – that Frank’s memory is flawed.
“Because if I thought that was possible, I never would’ve left you behind,” Bill insists. “No, you were the apple of his eye,” Bill seethes. “He gave you his name. What father skips over his firstborn to give his second son his name?”
Frank replies: “You tunneled under the wall. I went over it. We both escaped.”
“Who did you really think you were in that story, Bill? Me or him?” Frank asks. “He left you and you left me. I don’t blame you for it. I did but I understand now and I forgive you.”
So much for brotherly love, and what a twist on a sibling rivalry – fighting over memories, over who suffered most.
Virginia, Barbara and Vaginismus Virginia keeps visiting the psychiatrist, Dr. Lloyd Madden (John Billingsley), and posing as Barbara Sanderson (Betsy Brandt), who has asked Virginia to help her. He seems suspicious of who she is – what her story is; he doesn’t buy her third-person voice and demands more of Virginia’s sense of shame over her own life.
His attempts to dig deeper in Barbara’s incestuous experiences with her brother prompts Virginia to relive her own grief over Dr. Lillian DePaul’s disapproval of her affair with Bill.
But these sessions also guide Virginia’s efforts to treat Barbara, except that it backfires. When Virginia tries to deploy Dr. Madden’s methods with Barbara, asking her to recall repressed memories of what she said to her brother, Barbara takes those instructions literally. She meets with her brother, and later relates to Virginia that he responded as though they had just been out playing, sledding on a hill.
No regrets. And her brother basically flips the onus on her, suggesting to the anguished Barbara that maybe she initiated their encounters – she was jealous of his friendships with new neighbors, triplets, across the street. She invented ways to lure him to her side, she explains to Virginia, crying that maybe all this was her fault.
Meanwhile, Bill and Virginia have been trying to treat Barbara’s condition in the lab and arguing over whether they can surmount her problems through mere physical remedies. Virginia worries that Barbara’s evident discomfort means she’s not emotionally prepared to move forward.
“Why are you assuming that some emotional breakthrough is going to relieve her physical problems?” Bill asks. “We can offer a practical treatment. Anything else and we are out of our depth.”
Lester’s Lessons “Impotence is a girl’s bread and butter,” says Betty, the prostitute turned office aide. She and Bill find a prostitute who role-plays as a doctor to treat Lester. But he can’t accept the idea that a professional sex expert could alleviate his problems. And in case you dozed off, it’s made quite obvious that Lester’s realizations spur Bill to be more open with Virginia.
“I need just two people figuring it out together, not an expert and a novice, just a man and woman equally matched, even if they both happen to be inept,” Lester tells Bill.
That’s like the blind leading the blind, Bill says.
“Not if they already are a couple, if they know each other’s bodies, have feelings for each other,” Lester counters.
That’s pretty much the sentiment Bill conveys to Virginia in the end-scene, when he implores her to help him overcome his impotence.
Libby’s Liberation Some readers have tried to divine a romantic component between Libby and Robert (Jocko Sims), the brother of the Coral, the former nanny in the Masters household.
I don’t see that, but I do sense that Libby finds Robert’s cause – civil rights – to be something that would give her definition, an outside life. She’s emboldened by the notion that she could find a purpose.
In this episode, she summons the courage to try to be a witness to a beating of a member of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality). While being coached in the CORE offices, she flubs her lines and Robert calls her out on her faulty memory and he discounts her as a credible witness.
“I’m trying to remember the last time something I said mattered that much,” she tells Robert at one point.
Toward the end, she decides to volunteer at CORE, where she is met by a sea of African-American men, who relegate her to ordering sandwiches for them.
Notes and Questions Frank’s wife, Pauline (Marin Ireland of “The Divide” ), sums up a parallel life story to Bill and Libby’s, when she talks about Frank’s alcoholism: “He got sloppy toward the end. The lies. Where he’s been all night, why he couldn’t make love. And then of course there was the visit to the E.R., where he almost died.”
We’re also at a place where Libby is quite close to divining Bill’s secrets. Weren’t you quite uncomfortable with the diner scene, when Libby tells Virginia she admires her pluck, her forward-thinking ways? And Virginia emotes in a way that is so telling by dismissing the notion that she’s courageous.
“I don’t read instructions. I just take things out of the box and I plug them in. To hell with the consequences, to hell with the blown fuses, or the fingers almost lost in a spinning blade,” Virginia says. Yeah, but that leads her to skewering Bill at the hotel over Libby’s overriding influence on their lives.
And lastly, I loved how Lester invoked the sensation of being like William Holden (perhaps that’s why Bill invoked that surname for his alias with Virginia at the hotel) as narrator and victim, splayed out in the pool and remembering, in “Sunset Boulevard.” Lester always seems to have a film reference for any situation.
Who’s ready for whose close-up here?
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