Fleishman Is in Trouble Cracks a Poetic Joke
Jesse Eisenberg references the grandfather of American poetry. But who really uttered this well-known quote about ambition?
If FX’s Fleishman Is in Trouble, streaming now on Hulu, feels literary—because of Lizzy Caplan’s narration, the well-spoken yet deeply realistic characters, or its slow and expert meditation on life’s many disappointments—that’s because it’s based on a brilliant novel. Fleishman, a novel written by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (who also serves as the television adaptation’s EP) was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2019.
The show based on the novel is just as immersive, dense, and allusive as a novel, and follows the life of the eponymous Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg), his wife Rachel (Claire Danes), and their two children. Around the couple orbit Toby’s two closest friends, Libby (Caplan) and Seth (Adam Brody). These characters navigate the inherent shittiness of the grown-up world while asking a series of excellent rhetorical questions:
How do we become who we are? How do we lose touch with who we used to be? Are we in control of our lives? How have love, sex, marriage, and relationships changed in a world flooded with endless scrolling and dating apps?
It’s in this milieu that Brodesser-Akner slips a funny little line about a poet—a line that’s unique to the show and doesn’t exist in the novel.
**Spoilers ahead through Episode 6 of Fleishman Is in Trouble.**
Toby’s Trouble
At the outset of Episode 6 of Season 1, “This Is My Enjoyment,” Toby is learning how to live in the new normal of a single fatherhood he has been unexpectedly thrust into. He is confident, momentarily, that he can craft his circumstances into something not only workable but joyful. Unfortunately, his good mood is soon spoiled when he learns that not only will he be passed over for promotion, a guy he went to med school with will soon become his boss.
As Toby grapples with the ways in which his personal life has impacted his status at the hospital, another young physician, Phillip, approaches him in the restroom and asks for a recommendation letter for a fellowship. Toby asks him why he’s seeking a post outside his initial area of specialty, and Phillip answers nakedly:
PHILLIP: Yeah, I want to be able to run a gastro unit and then a post in admin. Dr. Bartuck says that’s the fastest path to the top.
TOBY: Yeah, is that—is that why you do this? To get to the top?
PHILLIP: (sarcastically) I do this because I’m a healer. I hold life in my—
TOBY: Hey, hey. No, come on. I’m curious.
PHILLIP: “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.”
TOBY: That’s beautiful. Is that a—Is that Whitman? You know what? Whatever.
Toby’s quip is meant to highlight how spiritually hollow he finds Phillip’s commitment to ambition. Over and over again, Toby is struck by how self-interested people are, how siloed-off they are in their own private miseries (the irony being that he is also culpable of these things himself).
As it turns out, Phillip is quoting Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius here, not American transcendental poet Walt Whitman. And that’s the joke.
Whitman is a poet of what you might call the opposite of private miseries: his work is a joyful celebration of the individual as a part of a teeming, expansive humanity. Even when elegizing a president as a more mature poet who was impacted deeply by the Civil War, Whitman is always keen to show how life persists and flourishes and sings despite it all.
But Phillip isn’t quoting Whitman, here. He’s quoting Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. And that’s the joke.
And so when Toby is taken aback by Phillip’s quote about personal ambition, his “Is that Whitman?” wisecrack is meant to make Phillip see how arrogant and selfish he seems. It’s fitting, then, that Phillip is actually repeating a quote attributed to Marcus Aurelius—an emblem of left-brain rationality—and not dreamy right-brained Whitman in this moment. Here, in the middle of a midlife crisis that has left him emotionally and existentially bereft, Toby finds careerism unspeakably harsh.
Toby’s dismissal of Phillip’s career ambitions as somehow different from his own is nuanced and difficult. But at the core, Toby is struggling with the distinction between how we seem and how we are—what’s real? What I want, what I think I want, what I have? Who the fuck am I?
Whitman’s Wisdom
Though we don’t get any actual Whitman here, there is a particular Whitman poem that comes to mind when watching Fleishman Is in Trouble: “Are you the New Person Drawn Toward Me?”
Are you the new person drawn toward me? To begin with, take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose; Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal? Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover? Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy’d satisfaction? Do you think I am trusty and faithful? Do you see no further than this façade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me? Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man? Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?
The show is broadly about the question of who we really are and how we become the person we claim to be. In this poem, Whitman carefully counsels an interlocutor against assuming that he knows who the speaker is. The poem asks us to keep our commitment to our own illusions about who people are in check. Have you ever considered, the poem asks us, that you may not be seeing reality for what it is? Come join me here in the real world, abandoning the isolation of your personal illusions, it seems to say.
This is advice that Toby Fleishman would have benefitted from receiving early and often. And who knows, perhaps his character is deeply well-read in Whitman! But if he had taken the lessons of this poem to heart, Toby’s struggle to understand himself and others in Fleishman wouldn’t be nearly as gratifying to watch.
