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

---

[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. 

Katniss Everdeen + Hawkeye + Batman: A Review of Arrow: Because I have to do something with this blog...

In 1949, DC comics developed a Batman ripoff called the Green Arrow. Oliver Queen was a millionaire playboy with no superpowers who decides to take up crime fighting after a devastating accident. Basically he was what would have happened if Batman was obsessed with Robin Hood instead of Zorro (and bats). In 1969 Neal Adams decided the character was a poor man’s Batman substitute so he decided to change him. He took away Green Arrow’s fortune, gave him a goatee, and made him into an outspoken advocate for the poor as well as left wing politics in general. This made Green Arrow actually interesting, if not a bit preachy. But he still used trick arrows and refused to kill. In 1987 DC comics published Longbow hunters which saw an even darker Green Arrow. In this series Oliver murdered a group of people who kidnapped Black Canary. After this Green Arrow was the gritty street hero. Other DC heroes didn’t show up, Ollie stopped wearing a robin hood hat, and he killed people with his arrows. After this DC did the normal things that comic writers do. They killed Green Arrow and didn’t resurrect him until 2000 in which they brought him back in the weirdest way they could. The real problem was that someone let Kevin Smith write Green Arrow (a mistake DC keeps making despite the bad results). Basically it is discovered that Ollie is in Heaven and he likes being there so he sends back a soulless version of himself (I didn’t make that up) who doesn’t remember any events that happened after 1987 because Kevin Smith didn’t like that era. After that DC gave him back his fortune ('cause continuity sucks) and retconed pretty much everything they could from the last 20 years.


So I'm going to stop talking about mainstream comics since they make me sad, and instead fast forward to today. In 2012 there were three major hits; The Avengers, Hunger Games, and The Dark Knight Rises. None of these were surprising. The Avengers and Hunger Games both had non-superpowered superheroes who really like bows. And Dark Knight Rises had Batman. Not to mention that both TDKR and Avengers had really popular millionaire superheroes. Add to that the breakout character Green Arrow on CW’s Smallville and it becomes pretty clear why they made this show. But to prove that they are not Smallville they deliberately got things wrong. First of all Oliver Queen now has black hair (I know thats a petty complaint but I really do wonder if CW has some rule that all their leads have to look the same. I haven’t seen that many of their shows but, judging by commercials and posters, their lead actors could all be the same guy.) Also Green Arrow is just the Arrow. Why? I don’t know. But they even call him that in the show. I wonder if this is going to catch on and if we are now going to get the Bat, the Lantern, and Super. And finally Star City is now Starling City. Why? I don’t think they even know.

Clearly they are marketing this show based on its writing. Yes. 

Arrow starts with Ollie stranded on an island and shooting an arrow into some wood which cause them to explode. I wonder if he somehow had gasoline on the island. A boat rescues him and brings him back to society. This is all we see of the island but throughout the episode we do see flashbacks to him before his boat crashed. I can only assume that we will see flashbacks to the island throughout the first season. We then cut to a news station announcing Ollie's return to civilization. This is when we realize that this Oliver Queen is as much like Nolan’s Bruce Wayne as they could make him. He’s dark and brooding and seems almost psychotic sometimes. He doesn’t talk or show any emotion until he sees his sister at which point he tells her that she was with him the whole time he was on the island. Maybe that’s meant to be sweet but it really comes across as creepy. 

I mostly just included this as proof that he actually wears clothes in the show, despite what the above picture wants you to think. Holy long Caption, Batman!

He then meets all his other old friends including his old girlfriend Dinah Laurel Lance, who goes by her middle name so that it can be shocking at the end when she says her full name. Also she is now a lawyer and working to take down the corruption in Starling City. As far as I could tell this was just so that she would be as much like Rachel Dawes as possible. Anyway, she doesn’t like Ollie because he cheated on her with her sister.

Shortly after all of Ollie’s fun reunions he is kidnapped along with his old friend Tommy Merlyn (who interestingly enough shares a name with a Green Arrow villain). The kidnappers, who are clearly Marvel fans since they are all wearing red skull masks, ask Ollie if his father told him about them. Ollie says “Yeah, he told me to kill you” and then kills them just to prove that he is a darker edgier kind of hero. I’m fine with Ollie killing if he has to but this show so far hasn’t given me much evidence that he isn’t some kind of psychopath who likes killing people. Merlyn clearly sees this but doesn’t tell anyone and Ollie tells everyone that some guy dressed as Robin Hood saved him.

Then we are told in a voiceover that he didn’t lie; there was a man dressed in a green hood and he will come again. Suddenly he creates a superhero identity and goes out doing vigilante stuff. This aspect of the episode felt really rushed to me, and I wish they could have spent more time on it. Also, oddly enough, he saves the day using computer skills rather than a bow and arrow. I can only assume that he was taught computer skills when he was on that deserted island. The episode then ends with three cliffhanger game changing moments because one is too traditional. And then it closes off with a shot of the island he was trapped on, showing us that that earlier Lost reference was meant as foreshadowing and that we will see flashbacks to this island throughout the season.  I’m guessing he will meet Ras Al Ghul there and be trained to fight corruption.

My problem with this show is how much of a Batman wannabe it was. Its as though the writers said “You think the original Green Arrow was a Batman ripoff...” and then proceeded to prove us wrong. That being said it does keep a lot of stuff from the Green Arrow comics and is a decent adaptation. It has that classic CW soapy melodrama to it but it also has a guy shooting criminals with a bow. But not nearly enough of it. Hopefully later episodes would make this more about Green Arrow and less about the Queens, the Lances, and rich people partying. My other complaint is that Oliver Queen is kind of like a psychopath in it. He’s really actually quite scary and doesn’t really seem all that much like the Green Arrow that I’m familiar with. I did like the idea of the voice overs, but they just didn't work somehow. They felt added on and lazy, like they couldn't think of another way to give us this information. Overall it was a mediocre pilot. But it was much better than any other pilot I’ve watched this year (which shows kind of how bad they all were). So its not terrible but it hasn’t really convinced me that its anything more than Batman with a bow.