This article contains spoilers for Season 6 of “Peaky Blinders”.
LONDON — “John was a good boy. Arthur tries. Tommy’s different,” Aunt Polly
(
Helen McCrory) says of the Shelby brothers in Season 4 of “Peaky Blinders.”
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Throughout the stylish BBC gangster drama (which
airs on
Netflix in the US), Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy) is in a league of his
own. Although he’s the second-born brother, the ambitious Tommy quickly takes
his place as head of the family upon returning home to Birmingham, in central
England, after fighting in World War I.
The show’s creator,
Steven Knight, has said that he
sees the show as a western, and Tommy is the outlaw at its center. While the
show has spawned many “Peaky”-inspired haircuts and themed events, Tommy, as
the story’s defining figure, is the character most fans seek to emulate. (In
2020, he was voted the “greatest TV character of all time” by the male-oriented
British website LADbible.)
Although the show has now ended — the final season
arrived on Netflix on June 10 — Tommy’s influence is set to continue, as Knight
has plans for a feature film set during World War II.
From the beginning of “
Peaky Blinders,” when the
show’s characters were still emerging from the shadow of World War I,
masculinity and violence have been inextricably linked. The gang succeeded by
using physical force as well as cunning, not to mention those razor blades they
supposedly sewed into their caps. “The only way to guarantee peace is to make
the prospect of war seem hopeless,” Tommy argues in Season 3.
When “Peaky Blinders” premiered in 2013 in Britain,
it joined a TV landscape littered with male antiheroes: “Breaking Bad” and the
transformation of
Walter White ended the same month that “Peaky” debuted; “Sons
of Anarchy” — with the violent biker Jax Teller at its center — aired its
penultimate season that year; and viewers were six seasons into Don Draper’s
journey up the corporate ladder in “Mad Men.”
Tommy fits in well among these other dangerously and
seductively flawed leading men. Through his character, though, the show has
also explored the impact of battlefield trauma, prefiguring the more explicitly
mental health-conscious TV that we see today.
In Britain, “Peaky Blinders” has received a steady
stream of criticism for its stylish depiction of violence, and last year Nick
Fletcher, a member of Parliament, said Tommy, specifically, was a negative role
model. “These programs make crime look cool,” he said.
Watching a show like “Peaky Blinders” is not enough,
on its own, to lead to violent behavior, according to psychologist Douglas
Gentile, whose work focuses on the impact of mass media. But “the whole time
you’re watching a violent show, you’re rehearsing aggressive fantasies,” he
said in a recent video interview, and the more you watch, “the more
desensitized you become to both media and real-world violence.”
Public conversations around male-perpetrated
violence have shifted dramatically since “Peaky Blinders” debuted nearly a
decade ago. The emergence of the #MeToo movement popularized the concept of
“toxic masculinity,” which broadly refers to a model of manhood that encourages
men to “suppress emotion and mask distress” and can lead to aggression,
according to the
American Psychological Association.
“Peaky Blinders” has undergone an evolution of its
own, focusing less on physical fights and more on the internal battle within
Tommy, said Anthony Byrne, who directed Seasons 5 and 6.
“Violence is very
overused,” he said in a recent phone interview. “Season 4 was all about
gangsterism. I felt like the show had gotten away from what it should continue
to be: the journey of Tommy’s psyche.”
In the final season, for example, Byrne cut a
“classic Peaky Blinders” fight scene featuring Tommy, Arthur, and some
dockworkers. “It just didn’t work and it felt wrong,” he said. “Time had moved
on. Tommy had moved on.”
From the beginning, Tommy has struggled with what we
now understand as post-traumatic stress disorder, stemming from his time in
World War I. In Season 6, he suffers from seizures, with his body reflecting
the inner turmoil wrought from fighting at home and abroad.
This vulnerability is essential reason viewers root
for the character, according to Julie Taddeo, a historian who focuses on
British television. “He can be a very unlikable character,” she said in a
recent phone interview, “but he’s relatable because we now have a more nuanced
understanding of war and trauma.”
We bid farewell to Tommy at a time in which ideas
around masculinity are becoming more expansive, and public figures in Britain
like rapper Stormzy and Prince Harry have shared their own mental health
struggles.
As a result, “our expectations and demands of male
characters have definitely expanded and intensified,” Taddeo said. “We now want
a lot more from these men.”
This has been reflected in shows like “Derry Girls,”
whose central father, Gerry (Tommy Tiernan), is more than comfortable
expressing his emotions as the characters navigate “The Troubles” in Northern
Ireland; “After Life,” in which Ricky Gervais plays a widow whose grief leads
him to consider suicide; and “This Is Us,” in which Randall, the lead character
played by Sterling K. Brown, struggles with anxiety.
Throughout “Peaky Blinders,” the question of
redemption hangs over Tommy. In the final season, Tommy says he’s learning
kindness from his children, and in the closing scenes of the show, he chooses
not to shoot a man who has wronged him. Instead, he walks away.
“Tommy rides in on a black horse and out on a white
horse, so there’s hope for him,” Byrne said. “Where he goes, nobody knows, but
there will be a feature film, so the story will continue.”
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