the leftovers — Bloggery — Touched with Fire Media

1. On Seeing a Shrink

The first time I can remember going to a psychiatrist was sometime in my late teens. I had been fighting with my mom a lot, over stuff that now seems so picayune as to be obscure, and my parents (rightly) suspected that there was more to my attitude problems than being a teenager. I, of course, resented it. I don’t really remember what I would have been “right” about in those fights, but I was sure that I was right about whatever I was fighting with my mom about, and it felt to me that my parents were responding to my perfectly reasonable objections to their opinions and actions by trying to get me bunged up in the loony bin.

I realize now that this wasn’t what was going on at all. Not to blow up anybody’s spot, but mental illness clearly runs in both sides of my family, to varying degrees. The family tree is liberally strewn with little black decorations: people who drank the pain away, others who grew known for being caustic and difficult, still more prone to black moods in which they saw conspiracy in every corner. My parents saw in me what they had seen in other people that they loved. But at the time it just pissed me off. I believe this period was the first time when I had a major depressive episode.

I’ve always been chronically prone to dissatisfaction, and occasionally given over to dark moods, but it’s only happened two or three times that I became so depressed that I lost touch with reality. When I’m in these periods, they seem all-consuming, and obsessively, totally real. It’s not “sadness” — I can’t think of a less accurate word, actually; I’m very rarely sad — it’s something else. I am, quite literally, disturbed. I sink into paranoia and obsession, I have difficulty sleeping at night and difficulty doing anything else in the day. Total anhedonia is also a problem, which tends to lead to excessive drinking, which doesn’t help with the not-in-touch-with-reality thing. Now, when I’m just run-of-the-mill anxious and restless, I have a hard time getting inside that feeling. I can describe it for you, but it’s so faraway that I can’t conceptualize what it’s like any better than you can, probably.

Anyway, I’ve covered that territory before. What I was going to say was that, when my parents sent me to that shink, I resented it. (Didn’t help that he was technically a child psychologist.) So I went to the library and looked up the symptoms of a disease I knew I didn’t have, and tricked the psychiatrist into thinking I had it. This was all part of a very shitty, adolescent superiority complex I had (which is in slightly — slightly — better check now), which largely manifested as a need to prove that I was smarter than everybody, mostly as a means of humilating them and making myself feel better. This shrink prescribed me some drugs, which I was smart enough not to take, thank God. Later, I went to another shrink, ostensibly to treat the mental illness I had convinced the first shrink I had, the mental illness which is not the mental illness I do have, and I decided to fool her, too. She was a little wilier, but after a few months I had proved to my own satisfaction that psychiatry was a scam and that these psychiatrists in particular were idiots. I took Zoloft for a while, but I never noticed it did anything other than make my dick malfunction. So I quit that.

The next shrink I saw was a clinical psychiatrist who practiced in a big old building in one of the fanciest parts of Portland; I seem to remember sessions with him were outrageously expensive. Because I was young and chronically irresponsible, I (A) did not have health insurance, (B) tended to skip sessions, and (C) had a hard time remembering to pay the bills. Combine this with the fact that the guy I was seeing seemed to talk to me about basketball a lot, and my ongoing suspicion that the whole thing was some kind of confidence game, and not a lot got done in those sessions. I was put back on anti-depressants, this time Celexa, and again I didn’t notice much change — I was sweating more, that was basically it. At least he had correctly diagnosed me with clinical depression, instead of an array of things I didn’t have. Shortly after I moved out of town and quit seeing him, he lost his license because he’d been prescribing pills to his patients and then buying them back off of them. I don’t even remember his name. If you look up the archives of Willamette Week from 2003 or ’04, you’ll find a story about him. He was on the cover.

Since then, I’ve kept psychiatry at arm’s length. When I was in graduate school I had another one of the really serious episodes, the ones where I lost track of reality and quit sleeping for a few months. I went to see a staff psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota. She put me on Zoloft again. Again, I gained weight and my sex life got screwed up. It was either a solution to a problem I didn’t have, or the wrong solution to a problem I did have. I’ve never really figured it out.

The major difference is that by then I had a stronger sense that there was something wrong with me. I mean, I had always had a faint idea that I didn’t fit in, I wasn’t a real person, I wasn’t functioning how other people did. Things had been developing, however, and I’d come to feel genuinely broken. But when I tangled with the mental health system, it didn’t offer me what I needed — what, probably, those shrinks I had manipulated and fooled back when I was in college had been offering. I didn’t need a pill to stop me feeling bummed out. I needed help changing my habits. I needed to drink less, figure out how to sustain a real relationship, and quit feeling like a fraud at every adult endeavor I undertook. There’s no pill for that.

So I’ve started seeing a shrink again. I’m hoping that coming at it honestly, really hoping to change some stuff, will make the process work better. Who knows, right?

2. The Problem of Over-Reading TV, pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

The other day I was on some internet forum on which people were talking about Damon Lindelhof & Tom Perotta’s televisual adaptation of Perotta’s Rapture-fest novel, The Leftovers. (See here for part one of this post.) Much of the discussion consisted of one of two things: people complaining about how the show was just going to fail to deliver on its promises, like Lost did; and people dissecting its alleged “mysteries” for clues as to how they would be resolved.

Far be it from me to tell people how to enjoy the media they consume, but — holy shit, all of these people are watching the show wrong. The Leftovers is a show with some things in common with Lost: a head writer; an ensemble cast; an interesting mix of science fiction and naturalistic drama; a willingness to do weird shit largely for the purpose of fucking with its viewers’ heads. But The Leftovers also illustrates, at least to me, what Lindelhof appears to have learned from the Lost experience — how to use an air of portent and mystery without promising answers that are bound to be disappointing.

I mean, the first clue here is right there at the heart of the show. I said in the last post that the premise of Lost was a question: “What is this island, and how did these people come to be on it?” That’s just not true of The Leftovers. The newer show does center around a troubling, mysterious event: one autumn evening, 2% of the world’s population vanishes — not dies, but vanishes, leaving behind no bodies or explanations. The thing is, The Leftovers only rarely asks the question, “Who were those people, and how did they disappear?” It only ever comes up when it’s organic that one of the characters or institutions involved in the show might be asking the quesiton. The show itself does not seem interested in that question. That’s the big difference between Lost and The Leftovers. It’s why The Leftovers is a more finely-crafted show. It may also be why the show lacks a little of its antecedent’s manic inventiveness, but these are the tradeoffs one makes in art.

Illustrative of this is a character from The Leftovers’ first season: a bald, middle-aged guy who goes around killing dogs (Michael Gaston). The series’ protagonist, Kevin (Justin Thoreaux), keeps encountering him out at night. Sometimes they have offscreen encounters when Kevin is sleepwalking. The character is freaky and weird. There is also never any implication that he knows more or better than the viewer does. He’s somebody who has observed a phenomenon: after the Departure (the series’ name for the Rapture-like event at its start), some dogs appear to have become irretrievably feral. They’re dangerous, they need to be disposed of. Watching whatever happened drove them insane. Maybe most people don’t recognize it, but these dogs need to be gotten rid of. This is the kind of thing that the viewer, if she lived in the world of the show, could deduce for herself, if she had the bravery to.

And that’s what’s really important: the character matters more as an allegory than as a mystery, and his mystery never really drives the story. He stands in for the understanding that a lot of people share, that it’s sometimes impossible to surpress — that disorder is a flinch away, and the only way to maintain a society and a coherent reality is to battle disorder with disorder. Kevin is a police chief; this man is a vigilante. Kevin has a choice: does he combat disorder with the tools provided to him by the law, or does he do it by any means necessary? This mirrors a choice he has to make about a cult called the Guilty Remnant, a cult which has absorbed his wife and is threatening order in the little town in which he is police chief. That he encounters the dog-killer character while sleepwalking is not a mystery, but instead a profoundly troubling question about the human psyche: are we who we are when we think, and make choices, or are we who we are when living out the unfiltered processes of our brains?

On Lost, the dog-killer character would probably perform a much different role. The dogs would drive a couple of episodes. We’d worry about his motivations. He would still be functioning as an allegory — part of Lost’s genius was its ability to ask big, sometimes ugly questions about the nature of society — but he’d also be a plot point, in a way that he’s just not in The Leftovers.

But some people will persist in reading The Leftovers as though it were Lost. I can’t tell you why, but I have some guesses. Probably chief among them is that Lindelhof himself is attached. It’s natural to expect his next show to be similar to his last show. (It is, actually, just not in this specific way.) And it’s true that strange things happen on The Leftovers. But I also think that part of what has happened is that the infinite combination of the internet and science fiction television has destroyed some people’s ability to appreciate TV as anything other than a series of of clues that lead to a solution: not just, What are the whispers in the jungle?, but Will Lorelai choose Christopher or Luke? And I’m just not sure that’s a very good way to watch most shows, even if it’s kinda Damon Lindlhof’s own damn fault that you’re watching The Leftovers in this way.

So what does it mean that the country of Australia keeps coming up in The Leftovers? (Kevin’s father claims to be interested in moving there; a nutty prophet-type who lives on top of a pillar in the show’s second season appears to be corrosponding with someone there.) I saw a certain amount of dissection of this question on the above-mentioned internet message board. You know what I think it means? I think it means two things:

(1) Damon Lindelhof is having a little fun with his fans, who remember that Oceanic Flight 815 departed from Sydney, Australia before crashing on the Island.

(2) There is somewhere very far away, and though it, too, has been affected by the same disaster, it seems like a clean slate to people who have never been there before. It is clean, and unmarked by the memories of the departed here in America. It’s about a common grief fantasy: escape.

Anyhow, what I’m saying is that reading The Leftovers for clues and mysteries is a boring, and liable to be unrewarding, exercise. It’s a show that really does reward close reading in a different way: the characters and themes that course through it. What does it mean that a woman who lost her whole family might hire a prostitute to shoot her while she wears Kevlar? What happens to teenage culture when its already foreshoretened view of consequences is complicated by an event that emphasizes mass mortality? How do you love after loss? Raise children? Move on? That’s the stuff you should read closely.

(Note: the first season of The Leftovers is very grim stuff. That’s probably a different post, if I get around to writing it. The second season is brighter and more colorful, in more ways than one.)

In some degree, Damon Lindelof kinda has it coming with The Leftovers. If you don’t recall, Lindelof was one of the minds behind Lost, which appears to be, despite its status as a failure, the most influential TV show of the last many years. In fact, it seems likely that it was Lindelof’s interests that chiefly drove the show’s interests — JJ Abrams directed the pilot and then noped out, the way he would do later with one of Lost’s progeny, Fringe; the other executive producer was Carlton Cuse, a more experienced TV producer whose previous (and subsequent) work lacks the tinge of mad genius that made Lost what it was. When it was announced that Lindelof was teaming up with Tom Perotta (author of Election and Little Children, among other pop-literary bestsellers) to turn Perotta’ s rapture riff, The Leftovers, into a TV show, I was both excited and skeptical. I hadn’t read The Leftovers — still haven’t — but I’d enjoyed some of Perotta’s other books, which tend to be satirical tales about class in white suburbia. They’re a little old-fashioned, but they don’t apologize for that fact. And Lindelof — well. I had loved Lost, and I had hated Lost, as one can only hate something one actually loves at bottom.

The results have been interesting, if not exactly great all the time. The show has been polarizing; it’s been criticized for being boring, or depressing, or overly focused on upper-middle-class white people, all of which were to some extent true of its first season — but if one assumes good faith and supposes that it’s depressing because it’s about depression, it takes on that tinge of genius that Lost also had, at least sort of. Another criticism of the show that I’ve seen more than once is that it’s too much like Lost, in that there are too many mysteries, and they’ll never get solved in the 30-40 hours of storytelling time the show has. And I think that’s off base — but I also think it’s kinda Lindelof’s fault that he’s receiving this criticsm. Because Lost taught us to watch TV like this. Lost was liberally sprinkled with mystery, and a lot of its MO seemed to be to keep us guessing about what the answers to those mysteries would be. That was its major mistake, if you ask me. It used the mysteries too often as the engines of narrative, leading us to expect answers to questions that were fundamentally unanswerable. While The Leftrovers has done a lot of work to avoid this pitfall, people who followed Lindelof over from Lost are primed to read it the way they read Lost. And that’s fundamentally the wrong way to watch the show. The mysteries here are set-dressing, metaphors — what fantasy enthusiasts call world-building. Leaving aside what Lindelof and Perotta have said publicly about the show, I think the evidence is there in what’s onscreen.

The Beautiful Failure

Here’s the thing about Lost: not only is it basically a failure, it was also a great TV show. It is, in fact, the only show I can think of wherein this was possible, at least up until the point at which it was released. How can a TV show fail and still be great?

I can tell you how it failed. After six seasons, Lost fundamentally failed to deliver on a lot of its promises. Not refused, but failed. The fundamental premise of the show is a question: what is this island, and why did these people come to be on it? Waves of portent crashed across the characters, as they are told over and over again things such as “the island wants you to come back”. There’s a foreshortening of free will on the island. Magical things happen there — people go mad, pregnancies end disastrously (except when they don’t!), the dead appear to the living in spectral form, polar bears wander the tropics, people travel through time — the island travels through time! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING CHARLOTTE! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING US ALL!!!! The show heavily implies that it’s going to tell us how and / or why this state of affairs came to be, not least by occasionally answering a question about such matters. It told us who the mysterious Others, who haunted the first season, were, even if it did ask several questions in answering one. It solved the riddles in the backstories of secretive characters, like the con-man Sawyer, or the fugitive Kate. And so it was natural, I think, for the viewer to expect answers. And the show just ran out of time to give them. I think on some level it never had answers for some of the questions.

I think the most emblematic of its failures is the character of Walt. In the first season, Walt is a 10-year-old boy who has the misfortune of being stranded on the island in the care of his estranged father. Like every character, his backstory is rife with complexity and secrecy, mostly centered around the custody battle his mother and father waged over him. But throughout, it’s heavily implied that there is some extremely bad mojo swirling around poor Walt. It appears that animals have a tendency to commit suicide around him. His stepfather gladly releases custody when his mother dies, and it seems that he’s as much spooked by the kid as he is unwilling to take on the burden of single fatherhood. The bad mojo around Walt would appear to be plugged into the bat mojo that is sort of ambient around the island. Walt is, the first couple of seasons heavily imply, Important. He might be The Key to Everything.

But the show had a problem: the kid who was playing Walt was aging way faster than the character was. One of Lost’s many innovations was its telescoped timeline: over the course of its first three seasons or so, only a few months pass, as the Lostaways (as we used to call them in the chatty rooms) grapple with the many challenges of being not only marooned, but marooned on an island that may or may not be evil and is certainly populated by malevlolent forces.* That was all fine as long as your actors were adults — a little bit of makeup, a certain suspension of disbelief, and it was always possible to buy the idea that Kate was 25, Hurley was 30, Jack was 40, and Locke was 50, no matter how much real-world time had passed. But Malcolm David Kelley, who played Walt, hit puberty hard, and had visibly grown several inches and become much less cute by the the end of the second season. The idea that he was 10 years old was preposterous on its face. And the show had no answer for this dilemma, really. The only real solution was to write him off, and then pretend that pretty much none of his storyline had ever happened. What do you mean, there was a kid who was supposed to be at the center of this whole narrative? His father remained an intermittent player (until being spectacularly greased), but Walt was shipped off to the mainland to live a fairly normal, bird-suicide-free life.

* This was one of the ways in which the show taught us to watch television. I remember when I was watching early seasons being baffled by the glacial pace at which time seemed to be moving in the narrative. In some measure this was thematic — Lost was always about time and its vicissitudes — but in another it was simply a compression tactic, meant to create claustrophobia. Many shows, notably Breaking Bad, would employ this tactic in ensuing years. Other than stunt productions like 24, TV to that point had usually either existed in a suspended land of no-time (eg any sitcom you ever watched) or generally tracked with real-world time, meaning that there would be an Xmas episode around Xmas, and Buffy’s birthday is in the dead of winter, etc.

Malcolm David Kelley as Taller Ghost Walt, not that long later.

But still, the show was addictive, compelling watching, in part because it was doing stuff that no TV show had really dared to do before. I still remember when I was watching the first season — which I did on DVD, back when that was how people binge-watched stuff — and I realized, Hey, this is kind of a sci-fi show. Of course that seems absurd now, as the show really leaned into its sci-fi trappings as it went along, but it was actually possible to miss that for its first several episodes, as it mostly seemed to be a sort of high-class soap opera with arty film-school trappings and a shipwreck narrative. Its genre bending can seem a little bloated in retrospect, that that was part of what was so cool about the show when it started back. Its unusual structure (now so common as to be almost conventional), with present action stitched through with flashback, allowed it to be a slightly different show every week, if it wanted. When Hurley was the focus, it was a delirious dramedy about a man on the edge of sanity. With Sawyer it was often a funny crime story with a certain Butch-and-Sundance flair (with the gifted Josh Holloway playing both Butch and Sundance). Kate’s stories were cat-and-mouse fugitive stuff. Charlie’s were rock-n-roll redemption. Sun and Jin were a mob drama. Claire and Jack — perhaps fittingly, given that they turned out to be siblings — were basically soap opera. In fact, all of them were soap opera, really, but they had spooky, thrilling trappings.

And the show boasted whole, huge characters — an overabundance of them, really, such that one of its main sins was to rob its viewer of time with one character by spending too much time with another. It knew these characters well enough that hilarity could be milked by pairing opposites, as win Korean mobster Jin and Mexican-American lottery winner Hurley end up in a sort of Marx brothers routine after Hurley steps on a sea anenome. It dropped these characters into roles where they would be expected to act strangely, just to see what they would do. Unlike a lot of sci-fi shows, which often feel like they’re struggling to stuff actors into scenarios without coming up with characters first, Lost teemed with compelling stories about interesting people.

But its failures seemed to be part-and-parcel with its strengths. You couldn’t just divorce the drama from the trappings; part of the show’s genius was the way it used a sort of waxing sense of threat from the past as a way of creating its atmosphere. On some fundamental level, Lost plugged into a force that you would call nostalgic if it weren’t, you know, destructive: existential nuclear angst. Much of the show’s drama takes place in concrete bunkers, buildings that recall 60s suburbs, and quasi-military testing facilities. Once it really engages in its core mythology, there’s always the possibility that some ill-understood force will be unleashed and kill everybody. There is, in fact, a nuclear bomb, which plays a critical role in the show’s best season, its fourth.* The lapse in time between the construction of these structures and the show’s current timeline, which took place mostly in 2004, was also the source of a lot of the mystery. That 20-year lacuna between the show’s Cold War past and its Millenial present is both its most potent weapon, atmospherically speaking, and one of those many mysteries that never quite got solved.

* Not coincidentally, I think, this was also its shortest season, interrupted as it was by the writers’ strike.

And so Lost was a beautiful failure. But it it also asked us to watch TV in a certain way, a way that was also highly symbiotic with the internet age, when people had a space to come together and obsess over its minutiae.

See this space tomorrow for pt 2, about LIndelof's new show, The Leftovers

On Seeing a Shrink / The Problem of Over-Reading Television, Pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

Lost, The Leftovers, and the Problem of Over-Reading Television, pt 1: The Beautiful Failure