Note: As with all TV recaps, there may be some spoilers below for those who did not watch the episode. If you're only looking for a content advisory, I'll tell you: this HBO show, were it a movie, would be rated R for language, violence, sexual content, and thematic material, but it changes from week to week. The first commentary carried a Caveat Spectator, so you can check that out.
I lost my father to an aggressive leukemia nearly eight years ago, less than a week before my wedding. I was 22. He was 47.
And that still makes no sense to me.
I know all the ways to explain what happened eight years ago, and even why. But no matter. It doesn't—it truly does not—make sense.
My faith is supposed to sustain me through tragedy. I always (unwittingly) took that to mean that it was supposed to cheer me up and help me feel less angry and upset about it.
It took a long time for me to understand that faith also demands I speak and bear witness to the tragedy of human life, to the balance between hope and doubt. To brush past tragedy is to degrade faith: the assurance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. Failing to acknowledge tragedy for what it is—tragic—is a way to deny that all things will be set right in the end, but they are not right, not now.
HBOEveryone responds to loss differently. I responded by locking myself up inside for a long time, sure that to doubt or complain was wrong, needing to be strong for others. Others respond by acting out, or self-destructing, or slipping into deep depression, or even madness.
I continue to learn how to properly experience and understand tragedy through art—movies like Krzystof Kieslowski's Blue that left me longing for the world to come; books like Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin that challenged how I thought about light and darkness, hope and sacrifice; poetry, like Anna Kamienska's, that let me doubt and believe at once. Mahler's symphonies. Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion.
The Leftovers might also wind up on that list, in some capacity. As I mentioned in my commentary on the pilot episode, what's important to keep in mind about The Leftovers is that it is not really a post-Rapture show. I persist in thinking of The Leftovers as a religious show, in the way that True Detective and The Americans (and many more) are religious shows.
They are interested in entertaining us, which is a good thing to do. But they have ambitions that surpass entertainment—with artistic integrity, they explore matters of ultimate concern that extend beyond humans on earth. This is what makes them religious. These aren't merely character studies: they're explorations of things too mysterious for human understanding, though that doesn't keep us from trying.
If The Americans is about what commands our loyalty and shapes our identity, and True Detective wants to know whether evil is a real force or just something we invent, then The Leftovers is about how we respond to loss when we can't explain it in rational terms. Tellingly, the words we use to talk about sudden, inexplicable loss deal in the transcendent: "act of God," or "senseless tragedy" (which is to say, not conforming to human reason).
The Leftovers uses its Rapture-like disappearance as the backdrop from which modern man's various responses to loss fan out across the spectrum. This second episode ("Penguin One, Us Zero") took that full range seriously.
One way we saw this in the pilot was the "Remembrance Day" parade, which sought to rewrite the narrative about the disappearance, making the "victims" (or were they?) into heroes to be remembered. But not everyone agrees. There's the former priest, whose anger—presumably at not being among the disappeared—has driven him to reinforce the senselessness by proclaiming, quite literally from the streetcorners, the guilt of the disappeared.
There's Nora Durst, who has gone stoically cold after losing her family and parlayed it into useful work, distributing departure benefits to bereaved families. (The benefits themselves are how governments respond.)
There's also the various adherents to cults, and this episode focuses on Laurie and Meg at the Guilty Remnant. Laurie is resigned and committed, but she remembers. Meg is learning how to give up, chopping at a tree with a tiny axe at the GR's behest, submitting to what she already knows: in the face of random disappearance, how can anyone have joy on earth? Where do we locate joy? Or should we just resign ourselves to our fate?
The Guilty Remnant as a whole is a study in group depression. They're "not a cult," as Laurie scribbles to Meg on her notepad. They're more of an extreme support group for people who have given up on life and any joy it might bring. Clad in white, smoking, eating tasteless gruel, stalking town residents, they are gnostics in the fullest sense, trying to abandon the world.
HBOIn so doing, they've managed to make themselves into more of the departed. They withdraw from the lives of loved ones and withdraw from embodied life as much as possible. Touch, taste, smell, smiles: all are gone.
That's in stark contrast with the cult of Holy Wayne, who believes that he can hug away the pain of others, and who maintains a harem of underaged teenage girls. His mother Laurie is part of the GR, but Tom—young and confused—is attracted to this more exciting way to make sense of the world.
Jill, still at home with her father, has no idea what to do with her loss—not in the disappearances, but the one her mother inflicted on her by joining the GR. She can't even explain her own responses. What she's trying to do is feel alive, from her drugs, partying, and violent reaction during the lacrosse game in the pilot to her impetuous horn-honking in this episode. But it's not working.
If Jill was a child, she'd be pounding her fist into the penguin her father's therapist keeps in his office—or, perhaps, trying to fruitlessly chop down a tree along with Meg?
And then there's Kevin, who clearly is beginning to think he's going nuts. Is he? It's up to you to decide: the man who seems not to exist, but whom Jill sees; the bagel that disappears and reappears. His father's own mental health issues loom over him. But this kind of stress and loss certainly can provoke mental instability—and that's what he's afraid of.
What everyone knows—what I learned—is that nothing I do, no way I respond, can bring back the departed. Our remembrances and guilty reminders and attempts to cope can't resurrect those who have gone. Our world is bathed in the seeming injustice and tragedy of that.
What next?
A Few More Notes
- As far as the episode goes, I don't think this second one lives up to the promise of the pilot. Part of the problem is simply that once the intriguing premise has been set, there's little to propel us or the story forward (or there is, but it's discovered a bit too late). We still don't really have a plot. This is the problem with Perrotta's novel, so I'm hoping the dogs and Tom and Christine's story will be made a stronger thread.
- The scene with Nora and the old couple who are collecting benefits on their son is probably the strongest in the episode, and it underlines the absolutely bureaucratic weirdness of trying to determine who can benefit from what is, undoubtedly, tragedy.
- If you get a chance, look up the composer Max Richter, who's scoring these episodes with those lovely aching minimalist piano melodies.
- I watched another HBO show right after my father died: Six Feet Under—which I wouldn't necessarily recommend to a lot of CT readers, but it's worth noting Justin Theroux had a recurring guest role on it. Weirdly, it helped me process senseless death, even shake my fist at it. Bookended as it is by inexplicable, sudden loss, it reminded me that I'm not the only one who's ever gone through this. And then that final montage in the finale made me treasure life, even as it left me in tears. If you've seen it, you know what I mean.
- I'm eager to see more of Nora.
