Kyle MacLachlan’s subtle fear and gentle smile made him perfect for Fallout
(Ed. remark: This post discusses Hank’s storyline throughout season 1 of Fallout in detail.)
Supervisor Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) laughs. When we first see him enter Fallout — Amazon Prime Video’s smash TV adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game series — he rides his bike under the desk with his daughter Lucy (Ella Purnell) while enjoying a black-and-white Western. Daddy shit. But behind his grin on the sidelines of a football game, Hank hides a bloody secret. And since he is played by Twin Peaks‘Kyle MacLachlan, I knew it.
Actors like Tom Hanks and Ted LassoJason’s Jason Sudeikis are great all-American dads, but only MacLachlan knows how to turn a handsome American man into a warning shot. His most memorable roles – including those in Show girls, Blue velvetAnd Sex and the city – are all undermined by clearly capitalist American aggression, a deep need for excess and domination. His characters all possess a lion’s desire for carnage, though they look as if they’ve never hungered for anything messier than a key lime pie. The Fallout games similarly exploit your expectations of glossy patriotism and patriarchy to reveal their insidiousness, so who better than MacLachlan to deliver the disillusionment?
There was a time in American history when the media preferred men to look humbly at the ground, preferably with an ax in their hands, and, ideally, grateful for the hot cereal nestling in their bellies. “If you have no honey in your pot, take some in your mouth,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in his 1753 almanac full of maxims: Poor Richard corrected. “He who understands the world best loves it least.”
The developing country valued sloppiness and, as Lucy often mentions, Fallout, those who followed the Christian Golden Rule of “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But once the US was established, becoming John D. Rockefeller was the whole point of getting a job in America. “Rockefeller is reputed to be the richest man in the world, and he is certainly the most powerfully suggestive personality I have ever seen,” wrote philosopher William James in a 1904 letter. “Superficially suggestive of nothing but goodness and conscientiousness, yet accused of being the biggest corporate villain our country has produced.” It is these principles that define Fallout’s Vault-Tec, and its secret need to become the monopoly of all American monopolies.
The archetypal MacLachlan character takes pride in walking this path; Unlike poor Richard, he loves the lying and cheating world because it was made for him. He is white and upper-middle class, and he has a strong stomach for domestic disputes.
But just as it took a few years for American values to shift from self-preservation to barbed-wire individuality, MacLachlan’s characters initially had few ulterior motives. In David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue velvet, MacLachlan played Jeffrey Beaumont – a good student from North Carolina – who understands his whiteness, his masculinity, his untouchability as innocence. He hides in a nightclub singer’s closet out of fascination with both the mystery surrounding her life and her womanhood, but then he is stunned and furious when she finds him. That character, together with his (according to to Lynch) adult counterpart, Special Agent Dale Cooper, in 1990, wants to be helpful, not scary. Moreover, he is very horny.
Sex ultimately corrupts MacLachlan’s character, but only in the sense that sex is a kind of power he can provide. After a student with a sweet face becomes a man in a suit, he understands that – with his warm attitude And stacks of money – he’s as unstoppable as an earthquake. And although he seems sane at first, he quickly seizes that power. This brings him in line with hotel entertainment director Zack Carey, who plays MacLachlan in Paul Verhoeven’s 1995 erotic cult classic. Show girls, and who has comically luscious hair. When it gets soaked in his impressive backyard pool, it completely obscures his eyes, like a pair of sunglasses, and Zack looks as eager as a puppy to kiss the naive dancer Nomi (Elizabeth Berkley).
She finds him as trustworthy as he seems, and begins to rely on him to handle her business: satirizing the showrunners’ attempt to prostitute her to businessmen and helping her find an understudy spot for the big role to secure. But his eyes are always too sharp; he looks at Nomi as if she were meat to be skewered. Finally, he drops the curtain and skewers her.
“Your father killed your mother and then killed himself,” Zack spits at NomiHis hair completely covered one eye, making him now menacing and ragged. He lists her arrests and intimidates her into reporting the rape of her best friend. He puts his hand around her neck and then forces her to face him, his open mouth as wide and dark as a prison cell.
Photo: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
Photo: Murray Close/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
Image: Primevideo
Kyle MacLachlan as pictured Blue velvet (top left), Show girls (top right), and Fallout (bottom).
MacLachlan uses the same dizzying bait-and-switch as Supervisor Hank, holding himself with the effortless calm of a brick building… until he can’t recreate it anymore.
Initially, Hank presents himself as a conscientious leader for his loving Vault Dwellers. Their mission, he reminds them, is to repopulate the irradiated, lawless surface world with their well-bred American values. “I sometimes worry that the mean old one (Wasteland) will change us instead. But then I look at my daughter,” he says at Lucy’s wedding reception, his voice shaking with presidential conviction, “and I’m not afraid. I feel heap.”
MacLachlan most famously transformed a noble man into an American abomination Twin Peaks. In the series’ first arc, Dale Cooper is a carefree leader worthy of a Rockwell painting; he’s cool in a crisis, as long as he gets coffee and cherry pie. But the third season, 2017 The return, empties your tenderness for Coop by giving you his sloppy, murderous doppelgänger Mr. C. to propose. Is that the man you’re looking for? Well, this is the man you deserve.
He is not a demon possessed; he’s Cooper finally ensnared by the kind of physical and sexual domination he’s always avoided as an FBI agent. Because MacLachlan presents Cooper’s lightness and darkness as inseparable, the 1991 finale of Twin PeaksSeason 2 is still unforgettable. When Mr. C announces that he needs to brush his teeth, and then smashes his face instead in the bathroom mirror, part of you wants to keep believing that this is Cooper, that everything is okay. You want to look past the bright blood he’s enjoying so it can fill his fixed eyes and grinning mouth because maybe he just had a bad dream.
Image: Showtime
It is important that so many of MacLachlan’s characters are rooted in the mid-century American brand of masculinity. In the 1950s, where the retrofuturistic Fallout imagines culture lasting forever, America began to develop a unique relationship with sex and gender. In part, that’s because sexologist John Money coined a new term: “gender role.” It must be assessed “in relation to (…) general mannerism, behavior and attitude (…); content of dreams, daydreams and fantasies,” he wrote. In the same year, a Advertisement from 1955 Instructed women that they could torture their husbands by placing them in an iron maiden, or by feeding them “the same hot cereal every morning.”
Supervisor Hank copes well with repetitive meals; Vault 33 seems to feast almost exclusively on two slices of Spam and a scoop of mashed potatoes. In contrast, Vault-Tec’s American dream that he believes in reflects 1950s masculinity in the way he assumes his right to control, especially over his wife and children. MacLachlan skillfully reframes this malevolent need as the friendly face of a concerned father. But, as many MacLachlan characters are destined to do, the composite Hank eventually panics.
At the end of FalloutLucy discovers that Hank is an envoy of the Vault-Tec Corporation, existing solely to repopulate the surface with his favorite group of corpo-born babies. He even dropped a nuclear bomb to secure this future, wiping out Shady Sands and turning his estranged wife – Lucy’s mother – into a brain-dead mutant, skin peeling off her skull like wallpaper.
When Hank explodes in anger at Lucy’s wide eyes, which insinuate that he has done something horribly and unforgivably wrong, MacLachlan’s performance is truly chilling. “Look at me!” he barks as if injured and shakes the bars of the cage in which his rival, Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury), confines him. His mouth is wet and desperate and looks so much like Show girls“Zak, or Sex and the city‘s Trey MacDougal, who couldn’t get hard unless he watched unrealistic porn. MacLachlan makes it impossible for you, and for any other character, to resist the fact that these charming, beautiful men are actually huge disappointments. He plays them carefully at first, like an elusive snake with a pattern like grass, so that you want to spend more time watching, waiting to see if you can figure out his heart. But if you’ve waited long enough, MacLachlan makes it clear: there is no pot of gold. This is the truth of being all-American.
Just as that reality alienates you, it forces MacLachlan’s characters to confront the lonely situation they have, in many cases, created for themselves all their lives. Once MacLachlan reveals Hank’s true intentions, the former Overseer is left with no defense and no other options. He just sighs and grabs his cell bars, overwhelmed by the fact that his plan has failed. His devotion to his employer meant nothing; it could not keep him from being cursed by his violent ambitions.
In 2024, the state of the “all-American man” is contested territory. It feels like proof that capitalism – with its false promises and endless greed – can ruin its favorite believers. It’s a depressing, inescapable reality, and it permeates a post-apocalyptic show like Fallout. At least MacLachlan makes it entertaining.
Fallout season 1 is now streaming on Prime Video.