Abhiroop Das
Created by Richard Gadd, HBO Max’s ‘Half Man’ follows Niall Kennedy and Ruben Pallister from childhood to adulthood, as they become half-brothers as their mothers fall in love. However, what makes them go from being superficially connected to sharing the deepest bond that two people can have lies in their varying personalities. Ruben is a man of pure brawn, who rejects subtlety and ponderance in favor of taking life by the throat. While Niall’s sense of indulgence cannot be called weaker by any measure, it manifests in far more twisted forms as he struggles to be honest about his sexual orientation. As the drama mini-series reaches its end with the sixth episode, both characters have a watershed moment, ironically on the day Niall ties the knot with someone else. As it turns out, being half-brothers might not be all that he and Ruben amount to. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Niall Confesses His Love to Ruben at the Tail End of Their Story
While it’s hard to put a simple label on a relationship that is as complex as Niall and Ruben’s, by the end of the show, Ruben does it for us. Brimming with equal parts rage and fury, he asks Niall if he loves him, and at last, we get an answer. When Niall claims to love Ruben, it’s not just a fraternal variety of love, nor can it necessarily be characterized as merely sexual. What it is, however, is an undeniable, fiercely romantic variety of love, which he possibly cannot feel with anyone else in life. Being a writer, he ascribes this love to just about every pore of his body, calling it a thrill unlike any other, which naturally turns into a hopeless obsession. It’s the same hopelessness in his feelings that eventually makes them turn a toxic shade.
Niall’s love originates as much in how he desires Ruben at his worst as it does in how he despises Ruben at his best. Given how low Niall’s life gets at various points in the story, he prefers to think of Ruben as an external factor, a natural calamity that swept through his existence and made everything worse. The most prominent ways in which Niall’s internal manipulation manifests are in his homophobia, which is often self-directed.
For the most part, Niall truly believes he must remain in the closet because the truth might end his dynamic with Ruben, but that turns out to be far from the truth. At the same time, Ruben’s successes in life become a symbol of everything Niall’s not, and it leads to a natural desire to reclaim control over the object of his attraction. Control, in this case, is to drag Ruben down with him, or simply submit to the mutual hurt his self-destructive nature might bring.
Ruben’s Relationship With Niall Was Always a Game of Dominance and Submission
While Niall’s romantic feelings for Ruben are an open secret, we cannot ignore the fact that he was sexually abused by Ruben and Monica as a teen, which likely marks the beginning of his erotic and psychological fixation on Ruben. While it is true that both of them perceive each other as brothers, the statement applies a lot more to Ruben than to Niall. More often than not, he uses the idea of brotherhood as an excuse to exert as much dominance on Niall as he pleases, so long as it fits into the “older brother” archetype. However, following Niall’s confession in the final episode, not even Ruben can hold on to a framework like that, which is what pushes the relationship into an even more complicated space than before.
Though much of the series leads us to understand that Ruben is not the one with romantic feelings for Niall, his possessiveness takes on a new shade in the final fight. It is no coincidence that the entire brawl, starting from the moment Ruben climbs on top of Niall, is meant to resemble having sex. However, even here, the final details point out just how this rendition of symbolic sex is not exactly meant to be cathartic.
What initially sounds like Ruben’s moans and grunts during the act are actually him wincing in pain and hyperventilating because of a stabbed lung. Similarly, when he holds Niall’s mouth down, its sexual connotations are overshadowed by the fact that Niall, and eventually even Ruben, dies. As such, this symbolic consummation of their complicated story can be interpreted as an exercise in highlighting how they were truly never meant to be.
Read More: Is Half Man Based on a True Story? Are Niall Kennedy and Ruben Pallister Based on Real People?
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