Love and Sorrow: Or why you should watch The Leftovers

Are the gods not just?"

"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

Some shows and movies are difficult to convince people to watch. Sometimes it’s because it’s best watched with as little information going in as possible[i], sometimes it’s because the premise is too high concept[ii], and sometimes it’s because the whole thing does not sound like fun to watch. The Leftovers seems to fall squarely in those later too categories. Its concept is alienating especially considering that up to now its mostly only been used to proselytize, and its themes and purpose do not sound like something that sounds particularly entertaining. My purpose here is to attempt to convince people to watch The Leftovers for almost entirely selfish purposes; I want people to talk to about this show.

The Leftovers takes place three years after an event known as the Sudden Departure, in which 2 percent of the world vanished. We follow the residents of a small town as they try to live in this world that doesn’t make any sense anymore. No one knows what caused this to happen, although people all have their own ideas and theories. The first season has an unrelenting bleakness as characters struggle to go on in a world that has lost all meaning. When you are grieving none of the regular formalities of life make sense anymore, and The Leftovers is about a world in which everyone is grieving. All the regular parts of life start to seem useless and unreal, and the world starts to have a nonsensical feeling. The first season has a magical realism[iii] aspect to it as the characters stumble through this weird world they live in. And we don’t really know what is real and what isn’t. We don’t know what’s going on with the birds or the dogs or if that one guy can actually remove psychological pain with his hugs, and we don’t need to.

            When I like something I often go and read negative reviews of it.[iv] In the case of The Leftovers the most prominent complaint seemed to be about the perceived similarities to Lost[v]. A lot of people were mad when the show started because they said it was a mystery show that would never answer its questions. In a way they were right because the Leftovers was never going to answer its questions. But unlike Lost, the lack of answers in The Leftovers is the point. One of the truly unsettling things about life is that none of us have any clue why we are here, or what the point of any of this is. We stumble along through it all trying to make sense of it, and trying to find a purpose. Sure, I have certain beliefs[vi], and I truly do believe, but I don’t know any of it for certain. In the Leftovers there cannot be answers because the Leftovers is about grief, and there are no answers in grief. None that are good enough at least. 

The truly frightening implication of the Departure isn’t that it could happen again, but rather that it might not. In the last season people seem to almost be hoping that something will happen on the seventh anniversary of the Departure, whether that something is the end of the world or merely a second Departure. If it happens again then maybe people could just accept it as another kind of natural phenomena such as a hurricane or an earthquake, but if it doesn’t then that might mean that it happened for a reason. If it happened for a reason, then it might mean that those who were left behind were left because they weren’t good enough. It could mean that they missed out on something important. And that’s a problem. We live in a world where someone we love could be gone tomorrow, and we need to live with that. I don’t think it’s the knowledge that we could die that truly horrifies us, but that our loved ones could. 

“Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.” 

 C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

I have lost people close to me, but never due to death. However, over the last few years I've had quite a few people die who I knew, but didn't know well. There is a strangeness in the grief for an acquaintance. Some of it is in the regret that I lost a chance to know this person better, but most of it is a genuine sadness that this person was gone, and it is a sadness that is really hard to know how to express. I think I've never quite confronted the idea of death. I'm not sure I actually understand it.

Life is uncertain. Life’s uncertainty is often horrifying, and often thrilling. Sometimes when I start new things and meet many people I can’t help but look around and wonder which of those people will someday seem like necessary fixtures in my life. One day someone who was a stranger could be someone we can’t imagine not knowing, and someone we couldn’t imagine not knowing could be gone forever. And it’s that uncertainty that can be unbearable some days. Life would be far less scary if someone would just tell me the spoilers. This is part of the human condition. Life is terrifying and we just want to know why.

What seems to often be missed in the public understanding of the Book of Job is that it doesn’t actually offer any real answers to the question of why we hurt. God essentially makes a wager with Satan who thinks that God cannot be certain that his servants love him if he continues to reward them. So, he punishes Job to see if he will curse him. Job is given advice by his friends, and by his wife, and none of it is helpful. Job eventually does demand God give him answers, and God does show up. He just doesn’t offer any answers. He asks Job why he thinks he can question his judgement when Job is just a man. And Job apologizes, or he doesn’t[viii], and God gives him greater rewards than before. The book depicts suffering, and directly criticizes those who try to give advice to people who suffer. The friends give advice of varying quality, but it doesn’t matter how good the advice is since they shouldn’t have given it in the first place. We aren’t ever really given an answer for why life hurts so much, because there isn’t one. At least there isn’t one that we can understand.

“I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words.” 

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces[ix]

Which brings me back to The Leftovers, because that’s what the show is about. It’s not about mysteries, or at least not about manufactured ones. It’s about a mystery that we all have to try to solve, and ultimately none of us truly understand. It’s about the question of why we all have to suffer so much, why life has to continually hurt so much. And its answer is simple. Life is so uncertain that we have no choice but to hold those who we love close, even though we seem to hurt them so much, even though we never seem to make the right choices concerning them. In the end all we have is each other. 

“We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.” 

Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise

At the end of The Leftovers two people are sitting together in a small house. One of them tells the other a story that she has been scared to tell him because she thought he wouldn’t believe her. After she tells him she looks at him waiting for him to her she's crazy, and he doesn't: 

"I believe you."

"You do?"

"Why wouldn't I? You're here."

"I'm here."

         The world feels likes its getting worse. I don't know if it is, or if that's just part of getting older. The environment seems to be in tatters and people don't seem to be doing much about it. The threat of nuclear war is hanging over us again, and hate and fear seem to be becoming ever more present in politics and in life. It's hard not be frightened of the future.

          The Leftovers is a show that is very aware of the uncertain nature of the world, and while it doesn't exactly have a solution, it does feel as though it offers a lot of hope. If there is one message that I took from it it's probably that we are in this together; Be kind, say sorry sometimes, forgive often, and believe each-other. And remember to hold your loved ones close to you because they could disappear at any moment.

And watch The Leftovers. It’s really good.

“... and we held our breath, just for a moment, to see if the world had ended, but it hadn't, so we yawned and drank our champagne and carried on living, except for those of us who died, and everything continued such as before.” 

 Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise

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[i] Watch Cabin in the Woods or Never Let Me Go

[ii] Watch The Good Place

[iii] Sorry, Trevor, I couldn’t think of a better term for it.

[iv] We could chalk that up to me being open minded, or non dogmatic, or we could say that I hate myself. Who knows really.

[v] This is mostly because both are created by Damon Lindelof.

[vi] https://www.ccel.org/creeds/nicene.creed.html

[viii] There’s some debate about the translation from Hebrew.

[ix] Read Till We Have Faces. It's really good.You should read it regardless of what you think of Lewis’s other work.