Ramy is a show on Hulu about a Muslim guy trying to figure his shit out. If you haven’t seen the show, you’re welcome to come back to this after watching it because I’m going to spoil the hell out of it. If you don’t care to watch it, you’re still welcome to keep reading – who knows if it will make sense or not. Major plot points are about to be spoiled though, so keep reading at your own peril.
What I found interesting about the show is that Ramy is both the protagonist and the antagonist in his own story. He is his own biggest obstacle, and ultimately, by the end of season 2, this auto-antagonist is successful in destroying his entire life. Ramy also exists as the antagonist to many of the other characters as well; the Sheikh’s character begins as stoic, compassionate, and accepting of even the vilest of attacks against him – he is a spiritual powerhouse. By the end of the show, Ramy has broken him, and his demeanour is corrupted into anger and rage. Ramy is manipulative, disrespectful, and self-obsessed. He’s just a really shitty guy.
And yet, much like Humbert Humbert of Lolita, Ramy is the character that we follow for most of the story. We connect with him. We see his needs. We see him struggling with his own emptiness, and wanting to fill it with something pure. We may or may not forgive his sins, but we understand why he committed them. He’s the kind of person that would twist the knife into the mother of his disabled friend, but who would also jerk that same friend off because of some uniquely murderous blue balls (if you haven’t seen the show and are still reading this, well… it was a beautiful moment, what can I say?). He’s the kind of villain that we want to do better because we see him wanting to do better.
Why this turned into a blog post rather than simply a pensive reflection after a season finale is because of how rare this type of villain is in media, and how prevalent they are in real life. Ramy is neither an antihero nor a super-villain. There are plenty of shitty protagonists that professional writers might be trying to write as antagonists, but these almost always fail to walk that tightrope. Rick of Rick and Morty fame is one example where he is clearly abusive, manipulative, violent, narcissistic, etc., and there are those who consider him a villain, but the show has him facing off against cartoonish and extravagant villains that encourages fans to cheer him on. When he’s abusive, it’s funny and the fans will laugh. Similarly with Bojack Horseman of his own titular show, he is even more self-destructive than Ramy with his own manipulative nature and traits of narcissism, but again his role as the antagonist is played for laughs. The villainy of these characters barely registers. Not so with Ramy; I can’t imagine anyone cheering when he cheats on Zainab the night before their wedding, and then tells her about it immediately after taking her marital virginity. His villainy is obvious to everyone.
Real life villains aren’t evil robots from the future or purple Malthusian aliens. They’re people who are so stuck inside of themselves that they forget that other people don’t exist for their benefit. I’ll even change track here and suggest that they’re not even real villains. Ramy does have compassion in him; he is capable of decency and love. He was bullied out of any identity that would have fit his upbringing, and that emptiness haunts him. There’s value in this show because it identifies the humanity in the worst of us, and brings us along to show us the ubiquity of nuance in our worst deeds.
Ramy as a show does not require us to accept Ramy the character. Zainab and the Sheikh are well within their rights to cut him out of their lives for good. Ramy could even be said to be teaching its viewers about the value of boundaries when dealing with shitty people, even if we fully understand what is driving their shittiness. I’m quite curious to see where the show goes next. Another show that had similar rare success in showcasing the nuance of villainy is Fleabag. It had a redemptive arc during its second season that showed growth out of the guilt-driven sabotage the prota-antagonist committed through the first. Will Ramy get his own chance to grow? I suppose its possible. At this point, it’s irrelevant. We can beg the toxic people in our lives to change, but we never know, do we? All we can do is try to understand the full spectrum of their humanity so we can avoid letting hate and resentment weigh down our hearts, and put in appropriate boundaries to prevent ourselves from being hurt further.
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