EPISODE 220 – HUNG PARLIAMENT

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

The week my sister spent in the hospital after the terrible car accident that in the end would cost her and two others their lives, we had many visitors. Day and night, people came to support us. Some of them total strangers. Everyone was incredibly generous.

And challenged, too. You hear stories of people vanishing from their friends’ lives after the friends go through a tragedy. It seems so cruel, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that someone else’s tragedy poses huge questions not just for them but for all of us, and the way we think about our lives. After all is said and done what kind of world/God/human scene is this?

Inevitably we found ourselves fielding a lot of different variations of comments like “God loved your little girl so much he wanted her with him sooner” (if you hear that comment enough times, in addition to a headache made of rage you get diabetes), or “It’s all a part of God’s plan.” These are the things people think they’re saying to reassure others, but are actually saying because we want to reassure ourselves that things are okay, that the world cannot be the cruel nightmare you’re seeing in front of you right now. It’s the lullaby that you sing to try to put yourself back to sleep.

In the end there’s no answers to tragedy – that’s what you learn on the inside. There are no explanations that can satisfy, just mystery and the silence within which you slowly, painfully adjust to this new experience and awareness of reality.

Answers, it turns out, are like nature photographs--they can satisfy and be so beautiful and meaningful. But when you put them alongside the actual realities that they’re describing or depicting, God do they fail completely.

How many times have you been on a vacation and you rush to take a photograph of a skyline or a mountain and you realize, either right then or later when you’re looking at the photos, that no photo could ever capture what it is that you’re seeing, and oh God why did I spend all that time taking shots and never even stopped to really take it in?

++

Somewhere in the vicinity of all this lies one of the reasons I’ve been so passionate about “The Leftovers”, which had its series finale on Sunday. I’ve mentioned the show here before; for those who don’t know it, here’s the premise: One day – say, three years ago – 2% of the world’s population suddenly vanishes. One second they’re there. The next, not so much. No rhyme, no reason. Good people, bad people, Mark Linn-Baker, just all gone.

The show, set in that “three years later” present, has been about how everyone around the world who didn’t disappear has dealt with both the loss of their loved ones and the departure’s unrelenting ambiguity. What happened to those people? What about the ways we thought the world worked? What does it all mean?

It’s been, in other words, a show about how we make sense of things that refuse to solve for x (like tragedy and grief).

++

An insight about the Bible that seems so crazy but turns out to be so true that ever since I first learned it in theology I have held onto it with the enthusiasm of Linus with his security blanket: Genesis 1 is maybe one of the most profoundly moving statements of faith in the entire Bible.

Not the healings of Jesus. Not Abraham and Sarah dropping everything and everyone at age one hundred to go where God wanted them to go. Not Moses, who leads the knothead Israelites (aka us) across the desert for forty years but then never even gets to enter the Promised Land himself. Boring old Genesis 1.

The Old Testament is generally understood to be the product of four different sources of material, each produced at a different time and with a different agenda. So, for instance, most of the great stories of Genesis, all the family drama stories that people love to talk about, come from the “J” source. A lot of the stuff on the covenant and the law came from the “D” source (named after Deuteronomy). There’s an E source, which is almost as early as J. (In E God is called “Elohim”; in J he’s called “Yahweh.”)

And finally there’s the “P” source, which had as its focus things related to the business of priests. Genesis 1 actually comes from there. That first account of creation is very much a liturgy, a set of building, ritualistic moments with a repeated refrain that is a blessing from God: “And he saw that it was good.”

But what’s really interesting about the P source is that it was written at a time when Israel had been invaded and largely dispersed. Which is to say, the foundational beliefs of Israel – namely, that their god was THE God, possessing of ultimate Power, and they chosen that he would protect from all the bigger seemingly more powerful nations that surrounded them – had been seemingly revealed to be absolutely untrue. In the ancient world a God was judged by its deeds; a God who allowed his or her people to be destroyed was either a rightfully furious one (a tack that would play out elsewhere in the Old Testament, and cause so many problems for much of the two thousand year history of Christianity) or No God At All.

In that absolute worst moment of doubt and despair, P comes out with Genesis 1, the story of the creation of the universe. On its own it can seem so formal and abstract – its vibe is way more Kubrick than Wes Anderson; but in context, it turns out to be this incredibly bold doubling-down on faith. “Don’t listen to the world telling you that our god was a nobody, that everything we believed in was for nothing,” P is telling his audience. “Our God created the universe. And not only that, he created it with an intrinsic order. No matter how things might look in this particular moment, that’s all still true.”

In fact, Genesis 1 takes it one step further: You know that nightmare chaos that we know to be present in the world? Well, says P, even that is ultimately subservient to God’s greater order. In the Bible water – particularly big units of water, like the Sea of Galilee or the ocean -- is often a metaphor for chaos and/or evil. So for example in the beginning of Genesis the unformed chaos is described as water.

And God, P tells us, is the one who molds that previously uncontrollable water, who separates it into manageable areas – the sky, the oceans. He doesn’t get rid of the water (which admittedly begs a ton of questions about what kind of universe God is running); but, P implies, in forming the waters into areas, God has shown that he is master over it.

All of which is to say, rather than some sober priest’s academic recitation of creation, the story you have to get through to get to the fun version, Genesis 1 is the beating heart of the Genesis creation accounts. It’s the story the refugee woman tells her kids as they’re fleeing for their lives and the children aren’t sleeping because they’re hungry and afraid and don’t understand what the hell is this universe they’re living in.

++

That’s what “The Leftovers” has been about, that struggle within us between the awful, meaning-annihilating moments we sometimes experience, moments that reveal how much of our interpretation of life is in fact a fiction, and our desire to understand, to find meaning nonetheless.

Each season has involved different groups and individuals offering forms of meaning-making to others, whether through experiences or sacred locations or new religious practices and teachings. And most turn out to be pretty darn destructive; but at the same time the show’s creators have been really reluctant to completely write off any of the groups that it presents. The Guilty Remnant, who are these sort of spiritual terrorists that take a vow of silence (and smoking) and spend their days harassing their neighbors, trying to prevent them from creating any new myth to help them cope with the brutal realities of life, were apparently absolutely hated by audiences.

But their insight, that most of the time we will all do almost anything we can to avoid the existential ambiguity and discomfort of life, is so true (at least for me), and so valuable. It’s only when you learn that you’re running away that you gain the ability to stop.

This final season has blurred the lines more than ever, with two main characters creating their own fake quasi-religious experience to try and help people (and largely succeeding in doing so), and another pursuing what she takes to be the most vicious con job of all – telling people there’s a way to travel to where their loved ones are – while at the same time down deep pursuing them in truth because she wants to go there herself.

In the finale – and spoilers ahoy here, though I will try not to go into too much detail – she tells the story of what happened when she put herself through the science experiment and/or con job that she was chasing. And the story she tells is remarkable and poignant and beautiful. In a show that has insisted on not being about answering where the people went, or what the Sudden Departure actually was, suddenly in this gorgeous, moving monologue we get that answer. (And it’s pretty satisfying.)

So, three years of ambiguity, wrapped up with this wonderful happy ending. The struggle is over. Ahhhhh. Hashtag blessed.

Except then in reading articles about the finale I was reminded that there is this one tiny moment in the episode that doesn’t fit. Right before she was going to go through with this procedure – really trying here not to ruin anything, but we are definitely getting into “maybe I don’t want to read this quite yet if I haven’t seen the episode” territory – she has a moment of...how to put this....significant hesitation.

The episode cuts away before we find out what that was or what it led to. And it never returns to it.

What does that mean? She tells us she went through with it after all, so nothing, maybe? Except then why show it? Why gives us a scene of hesitation, if not to imply she backed out?

The other weird thing is, the story of what happens to this character is quite involved, and yet we never get to see any of it. All we get is her telling someone else about it. Just like so many people and groups on the show have offered stories and teachings, most of which have proven to be both meaningful and false.

So this show, which seems in that final scene to have wrapped up so much, actually turns out to be as ambiguous as ever. Did she see her family? Is any of this true? Did Jesus really actually rise from the dead?

++

“The Leftovers”... it was a show about grief. And about how religion emerges out of the struggle between our quest for meaning and our experience of reality. And about belief as the well-told lie, and the inadequate, deeply meaningful truth.

From a book review of the Australian author Gerald Murnane’s The Plains:

...For Murnane, for his narrator, any serious art work will fail, as soon as it becomes actual, to capture the possible; but that failure itself can gesture toward, offer a hint of, the invisible topology that is no less real for being unrepresentable.

++

Barry Jenkins, the co-writer and director of Moonlight, which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, was recently asked how he strikes a balance between giving characters definition and allowing some things to remain ambiguous. (One of the biggest challenges of being a screenwriter is that you come to love your characters so much you want your audience to get to know everything about them that you know, to hear and see all their funny stories and different shades, just like when you’re telling a friend about someone you’re interested in or dating or married to, you want to share all the different good stuff about them.

But when you’re writing a pilot or a screenplay, you just don’t have that much real estate to work with. So you can’t tell all the little stories you want to. You have to pick and choose. It’s so hard.)

And Jenkins had this really interesting way of talking about what he’s doing as a writer. “I often think that creatively, whether it’s on the page or if I’m on the set directing, if I’m working towards questions – whether I’m clarifying questions, or whether I’m figuring out what the question even means – that [process] is going to yield a more satisfying piece of work.”

++

Last night I went to see a movie at a local theater. Honestly other than for the predictable blockbusters I haven’t been going to the movies all that much in recent years. There never seems to be that much good stuff out there, you know? And as much as Los Angeles is often called “the entertainment capitol of the world”, it is abominable when it comes to the way it treats most movies. If a film is not a big hit, it almost never lasts here longer than a week. Which is ridiculous.

But I’m almost always glad when I go to the movies, even when they’re bad. Just the experience of sitting in a theater, taking it in is such a liberation. And usually if I step back I can get something out of pretty much any movie.

When this film is over and the lights come up in this little Santa Monica art house cinema, who stands up a few rows ahead of me but the filmmaker Christopher Nolan and a woman who I think might be his partner. He’s dressed exactly as you always see him, a stylish blazer and button up shirt and that sweeping “I’m somebody but in a casual, effortless sort of way” hair.

And I think to myself, maybe this is why I came here tonight, to see him and be inspired by his example. To remember that even as I toil away in my own little gerbil terrarium, I’m a part of something bigger, something that is heartfelt and extraordinary.

But then as I’m driving away I realize that I also nodded off about two thirds of the way through the movie. And I wonder, how does that alter the interpretation I’ve just given to these events?

++ LINKS ++

Reply All did a great episode this week breaking down some of the covfefe business from last week in a way that was funny and insightful and also kind of sweet. (The second half, which talks about a Twitter feed that rates dogs -- and always rates them enormously high, no matter, is all kinds of wonderful.)

If you, too, have been obsessed with "Leftovers", here's actress Carrie Coon on whether Nora was lying; here's series co-creator Damon Lindelof on so so many things; and here's the New Yorker's take on the show.

If you're looking for a deep dive into something else, this New Yorker article on our attempts to explore Mars really blew me away. And so did this old Joan Didion piece on Los Angeles. (Good writing is such nourishment.)

Lastly, Vulture had a whole series last week looking back on SNL's season. And there were some GREAT pieces, including this one on why the Tom Hanks David S. Pumpkins sketch worked as well as it did. Their conclusion, that it worked precisely because it was confusing, seemed so weirdly of a piece with everything else in this week's newsletter I had to include it. As did this...

Take it gently.