Homeward Bound? The Leftovers
SPOILER ALERT: Two stand-alone significant events from the season two finale of The Leftovers are discussed below.
The HBO series The Leftovers is a dazzlingly strange, deeply sad, and often surprisingly witty TV drama. It’s unclassifiable - according to Wikipedia, it’s a “supernatural mystery drama television series” and while it bears very little direct resemblance to any of his work (despite the central role of Justin Theroux as in Mulholland Drive) it’s deeply Lynchian in tone, increasingly so as the series continues.
The premise of the show is laid out in the opening moments of the series. One October 14th, three years before the main action begins, the “sudden departure” occurred. Without fanfare, and without explanation, seemingly at random, 2% of the world’s population instantaneously disappeared. Was it ‘the rapture’ despite the fact that those ‘taken’ were not necessarily good or holy? Was it an unknown natural phenomenon? Was there a pattern to the departures? Or was it just more unknowable chaos? With greater or lesser coherence, cults, messiahs, and pseudoscientists abound in the world of The Leftovers which captures something of the spirit of England in 1649. After the execution of Charles I, the established order was shattered, the mad seemed sane, the impossible possible, and cults, sects, messiahs and new political formulations sprang up as the world turned upside down. The world of The Leftovers is similarly gripped by the same terror and possibility, the same hope and despair, and the same seekers and fraudsters. Notably, a silent cult called the Guilty Remnant, a group of white-clothed, chain-smoking nihilists, committed to forcing the painful remembrance of the departure.
The ten episodes of the second season aired between October and December 2015. Writing this post in the eye of the Brexit storm, with Trumpism ever madly circling the vortex of its own chaos, that autumn four years ago seems almost quaint. David Bowie was still with us, the Labour Party had just elected an ‘impossible’ leader, Trump seemed like a bad joke and David Cameron thought the established European order was so certain that a referendum was a safe bet. The material conditions which created the current collapse - generations of neoliberal disorder - were bearing rotten fruit through “the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart” and the centre was not holding. Despite this, I would not have it back. Even in these chaotic days, I have to hold to the defiance of Buenaventura Durruti, interviewed in a Spain increasingly razed by civil war:
We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.
- Interview with Pierre van Paassen,
published in The Toronto Daily Star, 5 August 1936
The second season of The Leftovers is set in the fictional town of Jarden, Texas - as far as we know unique in all the world, in that not a single citizen was lost in the Sudden Departure. This has led it to become a site of desperate pilgrimage, with a large encampment outside its borders of drifters and the desperate trying to get into the semi-fortified town in the hope that there, somehow, they will be safe. This blessed ghetto mentality has generated a smugness and superiority in its residents. They were not saved by dumb luck, they tell themselves, but because something in the water, something in this patch of earth, something in its special people - this specialness acted like the blood on the lintels that saw the angel of death pass over their homes.
In the final episode of the second series - and here’s the first brief spoiler - this perfect, blessed town is overrun by the encampment at its borders and is reduced to smoking chaos, partly at the instigation of the Guilty Remnant who have been hiding in plain site, but with the enthusiastic following of the misfits and the lost who’ve gathered at the gates. It’s a carnival of destruction, both horrifying for the viewer who has found some patch of solace in a world otherwise saturated with loss - and satisfying: the destruction of the superior, deluded, and smug who had assumed their innate goodness, rather than chaos, had saved them. It cannot but be thrilling.
Watching it, as I’ve just done for the first time, in the autumn of 2019, it feels so perfect an analogy for the projects of national self-harm we undertook on both sides of the Atlantic in the year that followed its premiere, and that we continue to enact, that it feels almost like a premonition. From Hampstead to Bristol, Brighton to Edinburgh, Amherst to Seattle, San Francisco to New York, some of us were living in our own miracle towns of Jarden. We believed we were saved from the great neoliberal reckoning that was shaking Stoke-on-Trent, Middlesborough, Flint and El Paso, implicitly that we deserved it. We were then appalled by those subject to material horrors: they were deplorable, racist, swivel-eyed loons, little Englanders. And, in 2016, as across the bridge guarding Jarden, they came in a rush and push via the ballot box, in an impulse that was not to build but to spoil. Melanie Klein wrote about the trajectory from envy to spoilation. In 2016, as in the fiction of Jarden in 2015, we saw what a true ‘politics of envy’ entails: it’s ugly, it’s vulgar, it’s uninterested in building and it rages with disinterest - but it has a moral force which is undeniable because it’s a story which breaks us out of our smug, neoliberal slumber. Those of us who were doing OK had ceased to think we were lucky and had begun to think we were special.
At the time of the Brexit vote (in which I held my nose and voted Remain, much as I’d have held my nose more firmly still and voted Clinton had I been in the US) I was working at an elite London arts organisation. No-one in the organisation ventured pro-Brexit views and they may have been entirely absent, reliant as we were on the free movement of artists across Europe and benefiting from funding which required a liberal outward-looking government and a healthy stock exchange. But the spirit in the days and weeks that followed the vote was of ‘more-in-sadness-than-in-anger’ victimhood: no-one had voted, so the consensus story ran, to expropriate us. We were cultural collateral damage of a racist popularism. We were still special. Almost uniquely within the wider organisation, I was working on outreach in areas of economic deprivation and ‘low cultural engagement’. Unsurprisingly, these areas mapped closely onto the highest leave voting areas in the referendum.
And the story which emerged was disruptive to the story we were telling ourselves back in our ivory tower. Rather than collateral damage, the Brexit vote was an inchoate howl of rage against neoliberalism. The world wasn’t working, the material conditions were grim, and people voted, yes, against immigration, but more deeply against a whole basket of deplorably esoteric games being played in ‘that London’: arcane and archaic political formulations, entirely idealist in tone; asymmetrical investment; and the latter coming, often in the form of seemingly bizarre cultural institutions that “said nothing to [them] about [their] lives.” We, the DJs, weren’t being hung as collateral damage, the rage was focussed on us as representatives of the established order.
Watching the Guilty Remnant trash Jarden felt grimly familiar. It was so neat a metaphor for the glee of a #MAGA crowd, or an audience for Nigel Farage. All three examples were socialisms of fools: the same impulse as the ‘wrecker’ tendencies of anarchism - destroy, tear down, cancel. The impulse is not just to level down, but to punish, to expropriate the expropriators with a punitive cruelty. It goes without saying that it’s a dumb impulse - it’s dumb when Brexiteers want to level down, and it’s dumb when identitarians want to diversify power in an unchanged world - but it never stops being entirely thrilling. And we’ve almost entirely refused to collectively reckon with it: efforts of #resistance to Trump, or the #FBPE People’s Vote-ers have been inherently and explicitly reactionary - a restoration project for an order which is dangerously undermined. The opening of the third and final season suggests that the residents of Jarden have opted to at least attempt to create something new, or at least different. The harrowing soul of the episode is - second and final spoiler - Justin Theroux’s character being compelled to sing Simon & Garfunkel’s Homeward Bound in an other-worldly karaoke, depicted in the header image. We deeply feel his homesickness, as we can understand feelingly, those who want to return to the pre-2016 order, but it’s tragically compromised because it was already broken. We need not defend Hampstead from ‘no deal’ at the expense of those who’ve been living ‘no deal lives’ for generations, we need to build a new world for all. Bernie Sanders offers a route in the US, and, however compromised by ineptitude, so does Jeremy Corbyn here in the UK. We restore an order which ruptured so spectacularly at our peril - even in Hampstead and San Francisco, we’re not special, we have nothing to lose but our chains in building an alternative to neoliberalism.
So what’s the narrative analysis? Reading Jarden’s storming as Brexit or Trump is to read metaphorically. Metaphor is a strange thing, particularly a pre-emptive or seemingly premonitionary metaphor like that episode. At one level, this is simply the pattern-finding we explore in our first podcast episode using Louis MacNiece’s Snow. When looking into the chaotic entrails of reality, it is easy to see ourselves. And this is dangerous: for we’re always seeing things not as they are, but as they compare, and that is always exclusive of the richness of reality.
In another sense, The Leftovers, like any piece of fiction, represents not the singular voice of its author, but the concerns of the culture that created them. Fiction is not penned by atomised individuals but encultured social animals. Culture, being downstream of material conditions, reflects the concerns they create. The Leftovers didn’t foretell Brexit or Trump in some supernatural sense, but it did reflect the same anxious concerns of social selves in crisis. And it reflects those concerns right at the anxious moment before defining political events took place. For the student of narrative, this is one of the key contributions of fiction: the opportunity to ‘read over our own shoulder’ and understand how we got where we are:
The process of studying humans is not the same as "reading" persons as "texts" (Gergen, 1988), but more like standing behind them and reading over their shoulder the cultural text from which they themselves are reading (Sass, 1988a, p. 250). In an earlier article (Cushman, 1987), I suggested that all elements of the clearing, in eluding psychological theories about the self, are cultural artifacts and can be examined as elements of the cultural text.
- Philip Cushman, ‘Why the Self is Empty: Towards a historically situated psychology’
Where do we go from here? I don’t know. But restoration is not the answer, and - in the political movements underpinning two socialist old men on either side of the Atlantic - there is hope, if only as the partial, incomplete commitment to a world beyond neoliberalism. Materially different worlds will create new and surprising cultures, and so new and surprising stories. We are not in the least afraid of ruins, but ruination in itself is plainly stupid. Meanwhile, we can wrestle with our social selves by understanding the stories we tell - and find the means to build.
