Faith and Culture: The Leftovers

Tom Carlisle
Aug 8, 2017 · 5 min read

[NB: This article is written from half-way through Season 2 of The Leftovers. It contains very minor spoilers for Season 1, and is written without a sense of how the series ends.]

Justin Theroux in HBO’s The Leftovers

Mysterious ways

Faith, by its very nature, is a mystery. Believers attribute agency to a God that they can’t see, who does things that could be explained away in a whole variety of ways. So, for example, it’s all very well for Christians to, say, attribute their physical healing to the Holy Spirit, but there are plenty of others who would argue that what happened to these individuals is all psychosomatic: there’s a placebo effect, or some kind of psychic suggestion, that has tricked their bodies or minds into acting a particular way. It’s all very well, too, to claim that God is speaking, but you could also easily claim that the ‘words’ given are so vague and nebulous as to be near-meaningless, or that they reflect a desire to believe, or a not-very-sophisticated form of cold reading. The truth is that we live in a strange world, where bizarre things happen on a daily basis: those who have faith in God simply choose to put Him into the equation as part of them.

The Leftovers, Tom Perotta and Damon Lindelof’s HBO drama, dramatizes that experience by throwing the audience into an odd situation and then denying them any answers. If 2% of the world’s population disappeared without any sort of warning or pattern, as happens in the show, it’s natural that people would start looking for signs about why it happened, what it all meant.

You might start to think that what that woman told you this morning, in her counselling session, was true: ‘something bad is going to happen, worse this time than ever before’. Or then, of course, maybe she just told you that every day, and today was the day that she happened to be right.

Maybe the voices that your father is hearing are the voices of some supernatural force, and he’s actually encountering God himself. Or maybe he’s losing his mind.

Maybe that man who claims to be able to heal you with a hug is telling you the truth. Or maybe all he does is a placebo, and he’s the worst of charlatans.

You make up your own mind.

It’s on you

It’s a rare thing to find a television show that trusts its audience enough to let them do that, and that dares to show faith in all its baffling mystery. ‘Faith-based’ films like God’s Not Dead are by definition didactic — they have an explicit point, something that they want to persuade you about. In contrast, The Leftovers is a different beast, more experiential, more like a visual poem. Often it leaves you with just a haunting image or a question and then asks tells you to work it out for yourself. To do that, you’re forced to rely on your extra-textual experiences — what’s happened to you in your life, what your view is on God and the nature of this vast, strange world that we live in.

Watching it, I’m reminded of the ending of Life of Pi, which demands that its audience pick a side (were there animals on that boat, or just humans?) but poses a question whose answer seems to rely on your prior experience. As a Christian, I have always thought that the story happened as Pi first told it, that there was a tiger on that boat: it’s a better story, and one with more hope. The tiger can disappear back into the wild and you can resume your life. That said, the vast majority of non-Christians I’ve discussed the very same story with have always thought that the ‘true’ story was the one with the cook and the sailor. That’s bleaker, even as it’s more real, but there you go. There’s no ‘right’ answer, and that’s the point: it’s about the experience.

And more than that, The Leftovers often seems to mirror a process of disorientation we see in the Bible itself. The Bible is a text that repeatedly refuses to be reduced to a particular focus or concern. You think God is always loving? Tell that to the civilisations he wiped out; I bet the Babylonians might disagree with you. You think God will never ask you to do anything out of your comfort zone? Tell that to Abraham, off to sacrifice his only son. You think God is liberal? Look at Leviticus. You think God hates gay people, trans people, atheists, abortionists? Look at Jesus. If you engage with it, the Bible can throw you into a similar kind of experiential disorientation that The Leftovers dramatises, that can whip you round and demand, ‘do you still want to believe this?’

And maybe you don’t. Maybe the mysteries, the apparent contradictions, are too ludicrous for you. So be it.

The ludicrousness of faith

Faith can be ludicrous. It can ask us to believe things that seem ridiculous — even the gospels don’t deny that. And watching Holy Wayne, who can heal people with his hugs and is played by the guy who was Johnson in Peep Show, reminded me of one of favourite stories about Jesus. I’ve always loved the section in John’s gospel when he tells his followers that the only way they can be forgiven is to drink his blood and eat his body, and they’re horrified. Most of them leave, appalled at the prospect of literal cannibalism, and to the ones who don’t leave, Jesus confronts them directly. To which Peter replies, “where else would we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.”

Sure, what Jesus was asking seemed crazy. But Peter did it anyway.

Maybe that’s admirable, maybe it’s mad. You decide.

As for me, I have seen God at work in extraordinary ways, and I have seen him be absent in my times of greatest need, times when an omniscient, omnipotent God really should have stepped in if he were either able to step in — or cared about doing so. I have experienced his guidance in tangible, powerful ways, and I have experienced his deafening, baffling silence. And I am still here, and still a follower of him, after all of it. And so maybe that’s why I love The Leftovers like I do — because it is the story of people who have faced up to some of those things and who are still there, trying to make some sense of a world that now seems senseless. There’s power in watching even fictional characters do that, and a surprising amount of wisdom too.

It should be mandatory viewing for anyone in 2017, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you should rectify that right away.

But then, of course, I would say that.

Bushfire

A collective of writers discussing the links between culture and faith. Fighting didacticism and trite, easy answers whenever possible. We will aim to publish twice a week.

Tom Carlisle

Written by

Exploring the links between culture and faith: film/TV, literature, music.

Bushfire

Bushfire

A collective of writers discussing the links between culture and faith. Fighting didacticism and trite, easy answers whenever possible. We will aim to publish twice a week.

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