Note: As with all TV recaps, there may be some mild 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.
It certainly had its faults, but part of what made HBO’s Six Feet Under relatable to so many was that it took the book of Ecclesiastes seriously when it says this:
It is the same for all. There is one fate for the righteous and for the wicked; for the good, for the clean and for the unclean; for the man who offers sacrifice and for the one who does not sacrifice. As the good man is, so is the sinner; as the swearer is, so is the one who is afraid to swear. This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all men.
Each episode of the show opened with a death—occasionally of a named character in the show, but usually just some anonymous person. Sometimes it was a bit of macabre comedy; other times it was deeply tragic. But the point was: everyone dies. Good people and bad people. Children and adults. Preachers and prostitutes. Old people and young. At the end of the day, their fate is the same.
For those left in the land of the living after the departures in The Leftovers, the universe seems similarly indiscriminate—no rhyme or reason to who was taken and who was left behind. But that doesn’t keep them from trying to figure it out, and in this episode Nora Durst is looking for reasons and patterns.
Part of this is precisely because the departures defy that Ecclesiastes passage, which is to say that actually, nobody knows what the fate of the disappeared is. Are they dead? Are they living somewhere else? Will they be returned?
That leads to some awkward situations: for instance, if your husband just sort of disappears without a trace, are you still married to him? Apparently they’ve decided you are, because we see Nora in the courtroom, dissolving her marriage now that she knows her husband was sleeping with their children’s kindergarten teacher, but it’s important, and unavoidably cruel, to stipulate that “should the departed return, this will be be binding.” (Should that come to fruition, that would be pretty awkward.)
But Nora won’t change her name, because she isn’t moving on at all. In the opening sequence of the episode, we see her shopping for groceries (far too many for one woman), then going home and throwing out the same groceries from last week, full gallons of milk and boxes of cereal, and replacing them with the new ones. She can’t bring herself to replace the paper towels.
And because she’s afraid she’ll stop feeling, stop missing them, if she moves on, she has to feel some other way. So she calls a prostitute named “Angel,” puts on a bulletproof vest, and asks her to shoot her—“right below the heart.”
“What happened to you?” the girl asks, horrified. But she complies.
This whole episode focuses on Nora in the way that “Two Boats and a Helicopter” focused on her brother Matt, revealing her to be a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Outwardly she’s calm and even funny, but we keep catching hints of something dangerous festering below the surface. After all, Jill spotted a gun in her purse in an early episode (the gun Nora hands Angel in this episode).
Rather than recount the whole episode—which, I think, is stunning, and well worth watching—I’d like to note mostly the episode’s theme, which is the difficulty with and trouble of feeling and emotion for the grieving. As I’ve written previously, eight years ago I lost my father to an aggressive leukemia three days before my wedding. That felt akin to a sort of “departure”: he had been there, and then, he wasn’t.
Many people cried a lot after he died, but I didn’t, not for a long time. In fact, it took me almost three years to cry, really cry, about it. So I see myself in Nora: she has locked out the feeling of grief with work and routine. She remembers her family, but she’s pushed her own hurt into a place below her heart, where it has to be shot to be revived.
This is what makes Wayne’s actions so interesting in this episode: he is either a Christ figure or an antichrist figure, and the show isn’t letting us know quite yet. Arms outstretched, he approaches Nora, asking, “Do you want to feel this way?”
And he quotes from Ecclesiastes, from that same passage: “For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion.” He tells her, “Hope is your weakness.” And she breaks down.
By the end of the episode, Nora seems to have reached a new level—maybe even moved on, a little. But if the comfort that Wayne offered wasn’t divine, but something more sinister, what does this mean for her? (After all, it cost her a thousand dollars to get it.) And as opposed to all her previous surveys, in which every respondent affirmed that they believed their departed was in a better place—or at least that’s what Nora heard—for the first time, she hears someone say “no.”
What just happened?
A few more notes:
- It is interesting to note that the way the “Rapture” occurs in The Leftovers could sort of be consonant with certain Calvinist theologies . . . but that’s all I’ll say on that.
- Except to say that of course that “one fate” also didn’t apply to two figures in Biblical history: Enoch and Elijah, both of whom were apparently taken from the earth without dying.
- Obviously, Nora isn’t just worried that someone is impersonating her: she’s worried that she herself is disappearing, and it’s a short leap from her self-possessed exterior to madness.
- Interesting point: immediately following the verses in Ecclesiastes quoted by Wayne, this is what the book says: “Go then, eat your bread in happiness and drink your wine with a cheerful heart; for God has already approved your works. Let your clothes be white all the time . . .” Out of context, obviously, but this seems interesting.
- The message Matt leaves on Nora’s answering machine says, “I’ve made some changes in my life.” We’ll have to wait till a future episode to see what that is, but it seems likely that last week’s episode, in which he is rebuffed by the GR, has affected him profoundly.
