'The Leftovers' taught me how to grieve—and believe
The post-apocalyptic cult favorite takes us from hell to hope, from this life to the next, in a bizarre and beautiful story of belief.
I grew up in an environment – a family, a church, a culture – that did not express sadness. I don’t mean to suggest that those around me didn’t experience sadness, or that those around me possessed a stunting emotional stoicism. I’m sure sadness and deep grief were somewhere there on the menu, just waiting for the sommelier to send for it. There’d be tears at a funeral, misty eyes during a powerful sermon, sniffles during a particularly heart-tugging commercial. Emotional softness was allowed, a tender spirit cultivated. But however its hand was stayed, deep grief remained outside the gates. We were spared.
I took kindly to this joyride of positivity, of hopefulness and cheer. I certainly wasn’t clamoring for grief to come wrap its ragged arms around me. My childhood was charmed – I truly was blessed. No one got sick, no one moved out, no one had a wreck. We never had a family pet, so none of them died. I was handed rose-colored glasses and never had reason to go back to the optometrist.
I guess it’s possible that, a time or two, grief poked its hooded head into my periphery. But raised to embody traditional masculinity in the patriarchal South, I wouldn’t have known what to do with grief if it walked up and blew its cigarette smoke in my face. I wouldn’t have known who to talk to, or how to feel. Like literally: Do I squeeze the eyes? Is that how to cry? Scrunch the tear ducts? Is this working?
I’m thankful for how I was raised, for the love and blessings and safety. And I lived well into my twenties without grief, sorrow, or sadness being a part of my emotional vocabulary. And then, in 2014, I watched the pilot episode of The Leftovers. And boy, did I experience grief.
In the opening sequence of the pilot episode of The Leftovers, the show’s defining event is depicted. In the parking lot of a small town’s laundromat, the camera hugs tight to a woman strapping her infant into a car seat. The baby wails. The woman yaps on her phone. Suddenly, the crying stops. With relief, she turns to look. The baby – along with two percent of the rest of the world, we learn – is gone. Cars crash and sirens squeal, and the baby’s cries are replaced by its mother’s. She screams, and screams, and screams, and the blaring horn of the show’s title credits hammers.
My roommate was asleep in the next room over, which I remember because of how hard I jammed down the volume as the woman screamed over and over. Dark. Deeply unsettling. Jarring. Loud. The opening sequence doesn’t supply sadness as much as it does a confusing blaring sonar wail of grief. The episode – and the show – continues apace.
The Leftovers is my favorite piece of art I’ve ever encountered. And season one is not an experience I recommend. If you quit at any point, I won’t begrudge you. There’s a point early in “Gladys,” the season’s fifth episode, where I might suggest all of us just pack it in, toss our TVs off a high cliffside, and go for a long walk. (I forged past this moment only at the urging of my brother, who insisted I’d love it. This is me urging you. But as for your choice, it’s between you and God.) The show, based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name and adapted by Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof, follows an ensemble of gloomy survivors of the inciting event, the Sudden Departure. They mope around a small town in upstate New York three years after the Departure, the weather looped in a permanent halting gray, negotiating life’s aftermath. Life has lurched on, and yet it hasn’t. A silent, smoking cult garbed in all-white – called the Guilty Remnant – emerges. Full-throated religious zealots are emboldened. Every character sinks deeper into the all-encompassing nihilistic loam. It’s a super fun watch!
Season one is crushing, and gets raked deservedly across the critical coals. It’s as if Damon Lindelof went through a devastating breakup, but instead of drinking a lot or getting really jacked at the gym, he decided to make the single most depressing season of television of all time. And yet, even amid the gray, there are little twinkles of something there: Carrie Coon electroshocks as the shattered Nora. Broody teen Jill is imbued with deep solidity by Margaret Qualley. Justin Theroux takes his shirt off a lot, and you can see why. Max Richter handles the score, and it’s so good I’ll bring back the phrase “nuff said.” The season ends on an upsweep, a glimmer of something: Hope? An upturned half-smile? If you make it this far, congrats – a miracle awaits.
The Leftovers pulls a weird little trick: it is and is not a post-apocalyptic show. There’s been this apocalypse, but the world keeps going. The universe looks exactly the same – it’s everyone’s emotional landscape that’s in carnage. An inherent stake-plunging tension wriggles beneath the show’s beats and within our hearts: characters lurch their way through a life they all, on some level, believe has ended, is no longer worth living. It’s not that it’s not a fun watch (at one point, Carrie Coon’s Nora gets a tattoo of a certain hip-hop group, which she calls the “Wu-Tang Band,” and jumps on the trampoline with Regina King while Wu-Tang blares – this is fun!!!), it’s that it’s an emotional-spiritual tongue twister.
Cults and bands of believers and holy men pop up everywhere as humans try to make sense of it all. The show’s resident zealot is pastor Matt Jamison, played with thrumming excruciation by Christopher Eccleston. Matt endures again and again brutal tests of his faith, a true and obvious Job character. He stands to lose his beloved church to outstanding bills. He gets the money, has it stolen, and takes it back. He gains just enough to keep his world together, but loses just enough of his soul to lose it. If we followed the Job metaphor literally, Matt’s journey of pain and grief and loss would seem to be a test of his faith, but we see in the haunted belief on his face that it is actually Matt who is testing God. Relentless, unending, undying faith. He’ll go to the ends of the earth — casinos and refugee camps, miracle workers and middle-of-the-ocean sex cruises (season three gets weird!) — to prove his faith. The show takes a decidedly we’ll-say-noncommittal stance on whether Matt Jamison’s God is real or not. But Matt’s belief? You can put that in scripture.
The show, to a stronger degree than any other piece of art I’ve witnessed in my life, gives double middle fingers to the concept of faith. In one full-throated chorus belts a louder F-you towards belief than the world has ever heard. It’s blasphemy at true record-setting levels. And (!), somehow (!), simultaneously (!), the show illuminates and elevates and empathizes with the beauty and truth and meaning of faith more prominently and beautifully and gently than…anything artistic creation I’ve ever seen. Matt is entirely broken, but believing.
I envy it, as I too long to throw double-birds at the architects of faith and, at the same time, throw myself, face down, before the architecture, weeping, in worship.
The show eventually emerges from its own handmade quicksanding mud pit of grief. The volume of savage sadness is notched down, the equalizers balanced. The show literally gets brighter in its second and third seasons – flings and whorls of bright colors appear as the show moves its characters to a town called Miracle, Texas, then to the bush of Australia. The vivid brightness allows the show to explore more of what makes us who we are: bizarre humor, unfathomable coping strategies, wild sex parties, purgatory karaoke songs. Painting with far more messier colors. Because life is messy, and grief isn’t linear, and because people laugh — even at funerals.
There are zany off-ramps, wild superstitions, handcuffs to bedposts, plastic bags over heads to feel something. There are self-referential jokes about the size of Justin Theroux’s penis. More than once, the show sends one of its characters to a nondescript afterlife hotel to, among other things, sing Simon & Garfunkel. The show is elbow-deep in its bag. Iris DeMent’s wickedly wink-smiled ballad replaces the huge blaring horn of the title credits, and perfectly illustrates the show’s spirit. As a bit of a Leftovers onboarding survey, allow Iris, or myself, to ask: Do you want to know where they went? All those people? I’ll tell ya this, or Iris will: you’re better off just enjoying the ride. Better off just letting the mystery be.
I grew up with a fear. But first, a disallowance: a disallowance of grief. In my mind, disallowing grief was a key tenet of proclaiming the Lord’s goodness – if God is good, who could ever be sad? If God is for us, who could ever be in grief? I didn’t allow myself to go there, partly because of the demand for male stoicism and a lack of models, but mostly because I was afraid. Afraid that if I felt grief, the world would end. Fear that my faith would be shattered. Let me be clear: I do not mean that my faith would have been proven weak or not-strong. I mean that my fear was that grief unleashed would engulf us all, God himself collapsing beneath the weight of grief, my containers for hope and belief disintegrated, all of it, all of us, washed away into an ocean of nothing.
After all this time, I’ve had my griefs. Gasping breakups, shattering losses, impossibly lonely pain. I’ve allowed them. I’ve gone there begrudging, kicking and screaming, hands held to the scalding fire. Searing rejections. Hopes for the future irrevocably and brutally dashed. Answers blaring no, no, no; no answers at all. I’ve eventually found some models – therapy, a few brave friends.
The Leftovers, though, showed me most clearly how to experience grief. The Leftovers showed me how to die, how to be born again. It showed me how to search, how to love, how to keep on searching, how to lose, how to not find but keep searching anyway, how to lose but keep loving anyway. The Leftovers showed me how to tell the truth, how to have faith, how to enter the fire of the world and stand there shining and willing. It showed me how to go through to the other side. The Leftovers showed me how to believe.
Fucking phenomenal, my friend!! Almost makes me, a devoted happy-tv-only watcher to watch this show! Almost!!!