The
archive and the encyclopedia: two adjacent dreams of total information, two
Enlightenment projects in parallel, each vexed by its own internal fire. Parallel, but converging at the vanishing
point—where all encyclopedias become archival through obsolescence.
~Paul
K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism,
Total War, Encyclopedic Form
Fair warning—for here,
there be spoilers…
HBO’s
The Leftovers is a show with no clear
conclusion, and it’s better for it.
Adapted from Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name, the series depicts
the aftermath of the Sudden Departure—a mysterious and cataclysmic event in
which two percent of the world’s population vanishes into thin air. At the end of the show’s final episode,
viewers learn of another world—an alternate reality, perhaps—exactly the same
as the one depicted in the show, but in which the departed two percent
apparently live. Having lost
ninety-eight percent of the population, much of the world’s global
infrastructure has collapsed; for instance, they still have plenty of
airplanes, but far fewer pilots.
Extrapolating from this, we may infer that they have also lost law
enforcement officers, construction workers, farmers, engineers… the system of
individuals that knits society together.
None of this is to mention the traumatic factor. In the narrative world of The Leftovers, the world in which the
Sudden Departure only took two percent of people on the planet, the remaining
ninety-eight percent must grapple with the mystery of losing their loved ones;
but the mystery is not debilitating, the loss not (in most cases) materially
destructive. “Over here,” Nora says, “we
lost some of them. But over there, they
lost all of us.”
Viewers
are never given a glimpse of the other half, of the missing two percent and
their dark, decommissioned world—we must take Nora’s word for it. Some have questioned whether Nora’s story is
a lie, but this is beyond the show’s purview.
It doesn’t give us the information necessary to answer this
question. What’s more, the question is
beside the point. The show is not
interested in answering the questions of how
or why the Sudden Departure occurred,
but exploring the kinds of narratives that people (individually and
collectively) compose in an attempt to make sense of what happened. It’s a story about storytelling, in that
regard, which is another reason why the show never reveals whether Nora was
lying or not—it doesn’t matter. The
story is all that matters.
The Leftovers
is a show about dealing with trauma, and the first season in particular reveals
some of the more traumatic experiences from the Sudden Departure: a mother
whose infant child vanishes from its carrier (the show’s famous opening
sequence); a woman (Nora) whose entire family vanishes from her kitchen table;
another woman (Laurie) whose unborn child vanishes from the womb; a man (Kevin)
whose illicit lover vanishes from his arms while the two are having sex. Sigmund Freud described trauma as the
neurotic reaction to an event for which one could not possibly prepare—a sudden
and unexpected event that leaves the mind and body reeling, struggling to make
sense of what has happened to them. What
could be more unexpected than the Sudden Departure? In the wake of World War Two and the rise of
the nuclear age, which unleashed the horror of atomic destruction on the world,
there emerged a sense of foreboding, a premonitory nervousness. Freud classified these sensations in
different ways: anxiety, for
expectation of an unknown danger; fear,
for the expectation of a known danger; and fright,
for the (non-traumatic) realization of an unexpected danger. The Sudden Departure left no time for any of
these sensations—it was instant, extemporaneous.
Perhaps
the closest real-world analogies we might locate are the actual bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not their spectacular aftermath as the story spread
around the world), or the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001
(once again, not their spectacular aftermath).
But neither of these events had an immediate global effect. Of course, their influence spread rapidly around
the world, but they lack the timeless ubiquity of the Sudden Departure. The 9/11 attacks in particular almost seemed
to presage themselves, as certain critics noted afterward: “Far from
overwhelming survivors and onlookers through its immediacy,” writes Paul K.
Saint-Amour, “[9/11] was ubiquitously mediated, most notably through images
that seemed already to have appeared, everyone said, in dozens of Hollywood
disaster and sci-fi films.” What
Saint-Amour calls the “ubiquitously mediated” quality of 9/11 is distinct from
what I have called the “timeless ubiquity” of the Sudden Departure. 9/11’s ubiquitous mediation derives from its
recording and global reproduction on television screens across the world. It was viewed live, as it happened (absent
the first plane, which was viewed later), and continually replayed, unfolding
before everyone’s eyes in an uncanny way, as though we’d all seen this before
in the movie theater last weekend…
By
contrast, the Sudden Departure was an unrecorded
event, and the show takes pains to underscore this point. Characters are often depicted in the
immediate aftermath of the Departure, with viewers seeing them in the intimate
moments following a particular vanishing.
But the show never—not once—depicts
someone vanishing from the screen. The
Sudden Departure happens, in the most direct sense, offscreen. If we consider the show as a documentation of
the event itself, it could only be a documentation of its effects, however
immediate they might be (if recordings do exist of people vanishing, the show
doesn’t bother to mention them). In this
manner, The Leftovers illuminates the
archival impetus toward catastrophe: that is, the urgency to record the
disaster so as to shape it into a coherent and cohesive narrative. To make sense of what is senseless. The Sudden Departure is the ultimate
traumatic event not because it is senseless (the 9/11 attacks still, to many of
us, remain somewhat senseless), but because it is unarchived—perhaps even
unarchivable. The Sudden Departure’s
singularity—the precise moment of its happening—is designated not by presence,
but by absence.
The Leftovers
appears to be tapping into a central element of humanistic trauma studies, one
whose inaugural moment is likely Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. In her
examination of Derrida’s work, Cathy Caruth suggests that the events in
question—contemporary events such as 9/11, but also Hiroshima, or even the
Holocaust—“are not simply the objects of archives, or objects that call out for
archiving; they are also, themselves, unique events whose archives have been
repressed or erased, and whose singularity, as events, can be defined by that
erasure.” Taking this a step further,
Caruth writes that these events “consist precisely in hiding themselves; they
become events insofar as they are, precisely, hidden.” Careful readers will notice Caruth’s
repetition of the word “precisely”; I take this to be a suggestive repetition
for the case of The Leftovers. In The
Leftovers, the Sudden Departure is precisely what is hidden, what is left
offscreen. We see the repercussions of
this event everywhere in the show, in every character, but the actual
occurrence obscures itself. It is an
archive of suffering and trauma because the originating moment—ground zero—can
never be revisited.
No
one likes to witness the originating moment, but its recording often invokes
the old adage: You don’t want to stare,
but you can’t look away. As we
revisit the photographs of Auschwitz, or the footage of the planes crashing
into the towers, we gradually construct a means of dealing with the event. This phenomenon is unconscious and complex,
but takes shape everywhere, from the pursuit of Nazi war criminals to the
success of films such as Inglorious
Basterds. In the wake of 9/11 and
subsequent attacks, the means of coping has been accompanied by a state of
perpetual anxiety, as the world wonders what form the next attack might
take. Avril Horner identifies this
phenomenon in contemporary literature and cinema as the “Global Gothic”: “that
is, Gothic films and fictions arising from fears about the impacts and effects
of globalisation (including terrorist acts) on culture, societies, and
individuals.” The Leftovers may not fit snugly into Horner’s category, but it is
global (the third season moves us from America to Australia) and it’s certainly
gothic. The show even imagines its own
terrorist organization, the Guilty Remnant—a group that doesn’t inflict
physical pain but mental torment. Its
function appears to be to counteract the archival amnesia that accumulates
around the event itself; that is, the Guilty Remnant resists forgetting,
resists erasure. Rather, it reminds,
remembers, reenacts, and remains. Its
culminating acts occur at the ends of seasons one and two, the first being the uncanny
reenactment of the Departed’s near-final moments, and the second being the
occupation of the only town that claimed not to lose anyone during the event.
The
Guilty Remnant meets its end, appropriately, at the tip of a government
missile—an end that offers minimal preparation.
The missile strike is poignantly depicted in the reflection of Evie’s
glasses, emphasizing the visual, allowing the audience a glimpse, however
slight, into the moment of impact. Even
then, the image is still more than the ubiquitous—and ubiquitously
absent—Departure. The impetus behind an
entire series, a series fascinated by the mythic, the fabulous, by the
narratives that arise from an unrecorded and—to the extent that it was
unexpected—unobservable event. Even
those whose eyes were trained on one of the Departed in the last instant before
vanishing cannot be said to have observed the event, as its occurrence could
not have been anticipated. This may be a
counterintuitive statement, so I’ll linger on it for just a moment. Who can claim to have actually observed the event in the same way that
we observe an experiment, a wedding, or a television show? In keeping with the etymology of observation, we have to remember that
observation is not simply looking, but obeying, hence the phraseology of “observing
the law.” But what laws are there to
observe in an event that defies them all?
What do our instruments record when we have constructed them according
to those laws, when we read their measurements according to their
capacities? In retrospect, we realize
that even visual recordings of the Departure can’t be said to have recorded the
event, that even our eyes can’t be said to have witnessed it. They have only witnessed a mystery.
In
his essay on nuclear war, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven
Missiles, Seven Missives),” Derrida writes that nuclear war “has never
occurred, itself; it is a non-event.”
Fittingly, The Leftovers gives
us a glimpse into the possible advent of nuclear war in the third season,
although the show suggests that it will not escalate. What was once one of the worst disasters
imaginable seems poised to begin, yet none of the characters appear distraught or
nervous. The mushroom cloud hangs in the
distance, recorded capably and reported on news stations across the world. It feels contained, sealed-off. In fact, the only reaction it significantly
evokes is frustration, as several of the characters find themselves stranded
when air traffic is grounded. The
nuclear explosion is mere background, consigned to the dustbin of relative
inconsequence. “For the moment,” Derrida
goes on to write,
one
may say that a non-localizable nuclear war has not occurred; it has existence
only through what is said of it, only where it is talked about. Some might call it a fable, then, a pure
invention: in the sense in which it is said that a myth, an image, a fiction, a
utopia, a rhetorical figure, a fantasy, a phantasm, are inventions. It may also be called a speculation, even a
fabulous specularization. The breaking
of the mirror would be, finally, through an act of language, the very
occurrence of nuclear war. Who can swear
that our unconscious is not expecting this? dreaming of it, desiring it?
Is it possible that, in
the world of The Leftovers, no one
dreams of nuclear war anymore? That it
no longer occupies our thoughts or desires?
That even our Trumpian anxieties have been trumped by something else, by
a mystery we cannot solve? If this is
the case, then what are we to make of the show’s narrative choices? What does the Sudden Departure signify—do we
even dare to ask?
A number of reviewers have noted, as I do above, that The Leftovers leaves Nora’s final
lines—her description of her journey into the mirror-world, where the Departed
two percent live—entirely undepicted. It
is an unrecorded experience, related only through her words. By contrast, the show repeatedly depicts
Kevin’s heavily symbolic journeys, all the while refusing to verify whether
they possess some preternatural quality, or whether they consist entirely of
hallucinations he has in his own head (he suggestively cannot provide an answer
as to why Grace’s children were missing their shoes). Kevin’s experiences rapidly become the stuff
of prophecy and faith, a source for Matt’s quest for religious meaning in the
wake of the Departure. He embarks on his
journeys (or induces his visions) by completely unscientific means, requiring
others to hold him underwater until he drowns (we never learn how he repeatedly
regains consciousness, often without being resuscitated). Nora’s journey, on the other hand, might be
the most scientific aspect of the show, even if the writers never go into the
specifics of the science behind it (we know there’s a physicist involved—being
a humanities scholar, that’s enough for me); and yet, we’re never shown
anything from her tale. In a beautiful
yet confounding move, the audience can only identify with Kevin, whose sanity
has never been entirely unquestionable.
We listen to her words, and we decide if we agree with Kevin’s final
lines: “I believe you,” which he follows with, “Why wouldn’t I believe
you? You’re here.”
It’s
a beautiful end to a beautiful series. When
the archive fails—when our feverish impulse to document, to record, to
represent everything ends up erasing the thing we want so desperately to
understand—what other choice do we have?
In Kierkegaardian fashion, The
Leftovers encourages its audience to take stock of what we know, and to
juxtapose this with what we must believe (or not believe). Kevin’s experiences—the experiences of a man
who has possibly inherited a mental illness—are rendered imaginatively on film,
while Nora’s experience—the experience of the show’s persistent debunker of
hoaxes—is left to language. In the wake
of an unassimilable event, possibly the ultimate unassimilable event, the show
returns us to the problem we began with: not just the unknown, but the unarchived. No matter what we take away from the show’s
Sudden Departure, or from any traumatic event by which we are beset, it won’t
be our ability to return to it, to somehow recover it, as though unearthing its
record, that allows us to move on.
The Leftovers
ends the only way it can: at the moment when knowing is no longer necessary.
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