Billy Magnussen and Zach Galifianakis in 'The Audacity.' Ed Araquel/AMC [This story contains spoilers for “Vanitas,” the fourth episode of The Audacity on AMC.]
We’re going to break the first rule of Fight Club and talk about the fight club that marks the (slightly disturbing) climax of “Vanitas,” the midpoint of The Audacity’s first season. For starters, it’s based on a real thing.
“That’s what’s crazy,” Billy Magnussen, who stars in the AMC series as tech CEO Duncan Park, tells The Hollywood Reporter. “There were articles about it — there was an underground Silicon Valley fight club. People were in their offices all day, clicking away at the computer — I can see why they’d have pent-up aggression.”
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Duncan ends up at the show’s version of the club as part of his continued effort to land a nine-figure investment from valley legend Carl Bardolph (Zach Galifianakis) — which has thus far only resulted in Bardolph stabbing Duncan’s hand with a fork and having his security tackle Duncan the next time he approached. Bardolph catches him off guard in a visit to Duncan’s Hypergnosis office, and leaves less than impressed when Duncan tries to show off the data-mining algorithm his CTO Harper (Jess McLeod) built. Not helping Duncan was the fact that the he said another CEO, Orlando Lee, was about to be ousted from his company — not knowing that Bardolph had been Lee’s mentor.
That didn’t come from the algorithm, though — Duncan pieced it together while badgering his therapist, JoAnne (Sarah Goldberg), at a school parents’ night. As a way to brush him off, she tells him about another client, and he puts together that Orlando might be getting the boot. Later, he tells Bardolph that his software is “like if you fused a quant with a psychiatrist,” which is exactly what he’s doing.
It’s an encapsulation of what seems to be Duncan’s entire ethos, such that you can almost feel the sweat of his anxiety come through the screen. It’s a trait in the character that is “exhausting,” Magnussen says with a laugh.
“I think we all have that imposter syndrome, and that’s easy to relate to with any character. And it’s exhausting, his never-ending drive, because he just wants to be the top dog,” he tells THR. “It’s like, at what at what point does your bank account look big enough? How much property do you need? It’s like he’s shutting down his reward center or his dopamine center. It becomes an addictive nature — the conflict, the challenges of who he is becomes the dopamine hit. He’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 seemingly creates another issue for himself by following Bardolph to the fight club, where he at first seems appalled to see guys smacking each other with office equipment and supplies. It gets worse when Bardolph goads him into squaring off with Orlando, who wields a wired mouse like a flail. 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 bludgeon Duncan before wrapping the mouse cord around his neck and getting him to submit, all while staring Bardolph down.
The moment is a little bit chilling and a little bit pitiful, which is more or less what Magnussen was going for.
“He wants approval of everything outside of himself, rather than his own soul,” Magnussen says. “If he can prove to Bardolph that he’s good enough, I think that’s what it allows him to put his head on the pillow at night. And that’s sad. [He wants] the approval of this guy he barely knows. Yes, [Bardolph] made a jillion dollars, and maybe he’s the gatekeeper that Duncan believes can let him into that world. But the external approval is all he’s chasing.”
For the moment, at least, it seems to work out: Orlando is indeed ousted from his company, and Duncan ends the episode celebrating in a cold tub. It probably won’t last — just before that, his on-and-off lover Anushka (Meaghan Rath) calls a reporter to leak bad news about Hypergnosis — but Duncan thinks he’s nailed down both the investment and some respect from Bardolph.
“I think Bardolph recognizes that Duncan will stop at nothing,” Magnussen says, “and that’s admirable in his eyes.”
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