Why I Can’t Stop Thinking About The Leftovers
It’s been raining a lot where I live. And amid the melancholy one may be susceptible to in such weather, I look out my office window and lament the ever-flooding parking lot. Visions pour in that seem predictable and pathetically first world — all wet socks and upholstery, scored by sounds of the squishy. It is torrential, this storm, and that universal sound the rain makes when it falls from a mile above and connects against glass while you sit in the comfort of an insulated and protected space, it hypnotizes my all-too-willing senses. What follows is a relaxed mode where any negative feelings or guilt are overrun by a Garfield-after-a-tray-of-lasagna state of sleepiness (somewhere, between the rain, the “Medication time” music from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is orchestrated within my over-mediated skull. It is, rather, meditation time as a lethargic concoction of laymen philosophy, nostalgia and curiosity of other potential life paths emerge. I love my wife, but what if Jill-from-4th-grade and I had really made a go of it… That sort of thing).
This is all billions of light-years away from the ever-increasing workload stacking up in my desktop. The explosion of e-mail alerts that must be popping up on my monitor like supernovae, science tells us their light will take eons to reach these new mental shores. It is in this natural state that I find myself these last few rain-soaked days thinking more and more about The Leftovers and less about the inevitability of wet socks in my navy blue Roshe Ones.
I consider myself to be a relatively upbeat and positive person by nature. And The Leftovers is widely considered to be a relatively downbeat and deeply emotional show by most. Perhaps not a natural fit on paper. But this past, final season is pretty much the best thing I’ve seen on television this year and I commit to this declaration even as I come face-to-face with the glory that is Dougie Jones and commands of “Dracarys”. Months after the show aired its final episode, I’m still thinking about it, even by accident, amid the rainfall. When a relative, who knew how much I loved the show, asked what I thought about it’s snub the morning of the Emmy nominations, I told him it should be the focus of next season’s anthology series, American Crime (I was proud of the cleverness of this response and was greatly disappointed it failed to garner a single retweet. I later realized that American Crime had two months prior been cancelled).
I know almost no one who watched The Leftovers. I know many who have never even heard of it. When they ask what it’s about, and I tell them, I notice the processor behind their eyes begin hot-wiring their central systems for evacuation routes. No one wants to contemplate their own mortal existence and all the complicated emotional baggage that can come with that, not when you have Ballers to make you feel better about life (although Ballers must seriously undercut a good portion of egos out there, at least to the degree that men are questioning their own sense of style. I have never cared about fashion, but if I could dress half as good as The Rock does on that show I would at least feel like I could run for President of the United States). This is no snobby declaration as to the quality of one show versus the other, its a fact of life that I identify with the older I get.
For example, Son of Saul is, by all accounts, one of the best films of 2015 and one of the essential films of the last ten years. I am a fan of cinema by a fairly extreme measure and I have not watched Son of Saul because it’s supposed to be a gut-wrenching film about the Holocaust. Life is short and there’s these next six episodes of Arrested Development that I’ve only seen three times. Why put myself through another Holocaust film? Yes, I have that same voice everyone else does when it comes to heavy material. I do not raise my nose at it. I empathize.
When people have asked me what I like about the show, I tend to echo the sentiments of other, more intelligent writers on the subject. I pass on the transmissions of sound, considered takes from the likes of Alan Sepinwall, Matthew Zoller Seitz and Emily Nussbaum. These transmissions are doomed to ring hollow. They are inauthentic because they are impersonal, several spaces removed from their origin — like a game of telephone — and the result is garbled, half-hearted, pseudo intellectual mumbo jumbo about a show daring to explore grief and faith. I cheer-lead their arguments, but I never truly stopped to consider why I’ve responded to The Leftovers the way I have, especially in that first, bleak season.
As the flood pours in, however, and I pass the time fantasizing about building an ark I think I come to the heart of it:
I am, in some sense, lonely. And The Leftovers is about a show that left an entire world of individuals feeling suddenly alone.
Like many of the characters on the show, I am not alone in life. I have a wife who loves me, friends who are always great for a laugh and a family that is nearby, loving and approachable. But in this post-postmodern age, I am lonely because I am sitting in an office staring at a storm, avoiding that which puts food on my plate, strategizing the best way to get to my car, obsessing over the route to which I avoid the most amount of water because it would be a modern inconvenience to get wet. This makes me lonely despite the fact that I am not alone in this thought. I look around my office and know there are people mere feet away discussing this very same thing, developing their own strategies regarding the parking lot the same way generals in old war movies pour over maps with pointers. They consider the terrain: drowning, St. Augustine grass, concrete curbs against sloping pavement leading to muddy pathways below Magnolia coverings. They are simpatico in their desire to stay dry. Yet they all know what I already know: there are no paths that end with dry feet.
So I am not alone in my designs, but I feel alone because my designs are built on social conventions that at this very moment of reflection I honestly do not give a shit about, but know I should. The god’s honest truth is I want to be in the rain and act a fool. Absent of social repercussions, gossip and judgment, I’d likely walk out the office door and instead of recoiling from the flooding of my soles, enjoy the unusual feeling of walking ankle-deep in the rain.
I want to embrace the squish and I feel lonely in this thought. I want to laugh when I inevitably get in my car, sopping wet from head-to-toe and not begin to wonder if I’m having an episode or if I’ve been watching too many Terrance Malick movies. I don’t want to have to explain why I feel the need to do such a thing. I want to perform my own little rebellion in the modern world, for one day, or for, say, fifteen minutes. In this melancholy, I think of what a god’s eye view of my day-to-day life is and I begin to picture a motherboard.
These thoughts are, of course, fleeting. As the storm ends, I can’t wait to go home and watch PTI to see what Tony and Wilbon think about the latest scandal in the world of sports.
The characters on The Leftovers are all stuck, trapped by crumbling belief systems both secular and non-secular. They are traumatized by an event nicknamed “The Departure”, where 2% of the world’s population disappeared without a trace and without any answers. It was always just a metaphor for our own realities, the unexplained that we’ve either successfully explained, waved away or have grown bored with and have lost all interest in; and then also our very real world that is so sufficiently lacking in answers — no different than the one where the entire cast of Perfect Strangers disappear into the ether (all save lead actor Mark Linn-Baker) — that we don’t even know where to begin.
There is something else out there calling to these people, but the transmissions are noisy. The static is not in the message, but in how they receive it. The static comes from within because the message is one they are having trouble embracing: life is a mystery and their belief systems… that they cannot make their family happy, that they are cursed, that the Departure was or was not a religious event, that they can go on with their lives without confronting their own emotional and psychological trauma… those belief systems are shaken.
Our great mystery, our curious existence and our search for meaning is devoid of objective, empirical answers. And the collection of characters on The Leftovers have their once-fixed belief systems so thoroughly fucked with that they lash out or simply pretend that nothing is different, that everything is just fine. The Guilty Remnant, the cultish group on the show that dresses in all white and endlessly chainsmoke (and might be — in our ever-litigious society — responsible for some kind of massive lawsuit involving lung cancer), they get in the face of the pretenders and make them deal with their shit on some level. They are real sons of bitches, this Guilty Remnant, but their eyes at least appear to be clearer. The most significant event in the history of humanity has occurred and they cannot simply move on from it the way the bulk of civilization has, even if it is all stemmed from a pure psychological defense mechanism. Still, morally the Guilty Remnant might be monsters.
Much has been made about the way The Leftovers went, in three seasons, from a polarizing, bleak curiosity to a nearly universally lauded work of art, not to mention a worthy successor to HBO’s tradition of prestige programming. The obvious is that it got better. A lot better. But the truth is I was hooked from day one, the way Sepinwall was, because I had never seen anything like it on television. I understood the criticisms, including those from (then-Grantland writer) Andy Greenwald who, in a piece titled “Smoke But No Fire: Is It Time to Break Up With ‘The Leftovers’?”, wrote:
The single most impressive trait about The Leftovers is its unfailing ability to reach inside my chest cavity and tug. It’s not a pleasant sensation. Often, it’s the opposite. But the show is undeniably wrenching, even as it flirts with boredom and outright badness. As a project, The Leftovers doesn’t have much interest in more traditional television tropes like “pleasure.”
This was a show that fucked with you. And I think when it came along, I needed to be fucked with. I embraced it’s rebellion. This was not a mystery-box kind of fuckery. And it wasn’t the near-sadist streak Game of Thrones deployed on its characters (and by connection) fans. No, The Leftovers brutal first season wasn’t sadist. It did not delight in the terrible happenings, it dared to find meaning in them. And the show cared too much about its characters for it to be accused of depression-porn. It used this platform, the premiere HBO prestige Sunday night spot, to explore both the psychology of those who feel as though they are left behind in a world that does not make any sense and the pain of those who experienced trauma through a loss of some kind. These characters are grieving, depressed and paralyzed.
This is the terrible, paralyzing loneliness that showrunner Damon Lindelof was able to so effectively translate over the stretches of Sunday nights. And his response to this paralysis in the final episode is one of the most beautiful, inspired and emotionally true expressions I’ve seen or read. At some point, I’ll probably write about that series finale in greater detail. Suffice to say, the last season’s triumph is its handling of Nora’s arc (Carrie Coon, by the way, turned in one of the great performances of 2017 here).
Nora was always a spoiler. She investigated false Departure claims. She despised con artists who took advantage of the grieving. After losing her husband and children in the Departure, she grew even more cynical. There is no heaven. There is no Santa, kid. The Easter Bunny is a commercial concoction for sucker parents, idiot kids and the dental industry. Nora’s outward disdain for the sort of lies designed to comfort others only masked her own self-hatred. And at the root of this self-hatred was that tiny but ever-present voice she could not quiet, that she tried her best to swallow deep in the pit of her stomach but learned over and over again that it would not stop coming back up; a voice, her own voice, that still hoped and still wanted to believe in miracles, in fairy tales, in something spiritual or completely fantastic. In the end, Nora hated herself for even dreaming about the possibility of reuniting with her children.
Something happens to Nora during the final season, however, something transformative, exhibited in one hell of a monologue about a beach ball and culminates completely in the final, brilliant episode. Nora’s journey, the skeptic’s journey, is by far the most impactful of the series. As Jerry Maguire said, “We live in a cynical world. A cynical world. And we work in a business of tough competitors.”
This last season of the show foretold (by one character, at least) the threat of a looming flood that could threaten all of humanity. As Damon Lindelof brilliantly sets up in this season’s first episode, we have been promised the end of the world and all things, we have been promised to be saved by all sorts of false prophets, con men and collectives. Nora’s disdain for such people was well-warranted. But just because there are dangers in searching for answers does not mean you abandon your curiosities… even if they seem difficult to define.
So many of us are searching for something that we can’t quite put our finger on and it feels a lot less lonely to grapple with that feeling if you join a community that says, That feeling you’re experiencing, I’m feeling it to and this is why you’re feeling that way. There is a word for the types of groups that claim to have answers to those questions: cult. There are cults that have grown into religions and there are booming cults of all types of ideologies. I recoil at being classified as anything. I may be liberal, but I bristle at being called one because I can’t help but think of all the idiots I know who would claim the same. So my guard is always up in the face of those who pretend to have answers. I very much identify with Nora Durst and I suspect the bulk of The Leftovers audience does as well. Her journey, more so than Kevin Garvey’s, is our journey. At least, that’s how it feels to me. I share with her, I think, a similar arrogance that is mostly absent in Kevin.
The cult at the center of much of The Leftovers, The Guilty Remnant, is all but obliterated at the start of the third season. Lindelof and his team of writers want to blow up the concept of universal answers that can solve everyone’s needs (not that they ever claimed to have real answers). And so the final season is the most personal, character-oriented of the series and therefore the most successful. By focusing on these characters, the show does not need to provide universal truths for humanity. It finds answers in their individuality.
The further we step back, the easier we are to classify: I am a Rivas. I am a South Floridian. I am a Floridian. I am one of those New York-to-Florida transplants. I’m an east coaster. I’m a citizen of the United States. I’m a North American. I am a westerner. I am human. I am an Earthling. I am carbon. We are all carbon. What does carbon have to be lonely about?
Yet the loneliness is there, it’s inherent in individuality. We are all terrible little miracles. We are not Borg (although you genetic twins out there come close). There are things about ourselves that no one knows but us. These can be embarrassing things, incriminating things even. More likely though, they are the seemingly inconsequential; so many seemingly inconsequential bits that over a lifetime become unexpected volumes of ourselves that can never be written or read because they are incommunicable. They pass by because they are so inconsequential we may not notice them and if we do, we are paralyzed by the need to focus on more important things or things we assume are more important.
The characters on The Leftovers feel lonely because they are forced to confront their own unspoken and incommunicable selves and are convinced, as we all are at some point along the mortal coil, that those we love will not accept us for the inconsequential, the embarrassing, the incriminating. And too often they — we — fail to open the infinite cavern of our hearts because the fear that we will never be able to effectively communicate the meme that is us is just too great. Because those to whom we wish to extend those transmissions can never truly channel our vulnerable and open and unique expressions and therefore those expressions will not be reciprocated through love and empathy and true understanding.
In the end, what Nora sought was confession — and after confession — complete and utter acceptance; acceptance to be a hypocrite, to be a liar, to be deeply flawed and to admit that she likes to eat the ears of a chocolate Easter Bunny first. She is granted that acceptance, absolutely, by Kevin.
I am not dealing with anywhere near the emotional baggage of losing a family to an unexplainable phenomenon experienced on a global scale. Nonetheless, The Leftovers makes me feel less alone and more connected for simply wanting to walk in pools of rainwater.
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This piece originally appeared on WinTheDark.
