(no subject)
Leftovers postmortem:
1. The finale takes a major cue from Certified Copy, but uses it as pretty much the ultimate Lost-viewer troll, where we're at first to think the parallel universe thing is back (which, along another line, it later is!). All this weirdly good-natured, thinly-veiled trolling by Lindelof is ... well, entirely unheard of in the history of art. It's one of the oddest things I've ever experienced. Clearly this is therapeutic for Lindelof, but he's inviting us into the therapy with him. He's apologizing for his fake history by turning it into real farce. But the farce is much realer than the history - he's saying things got way out of hand, that what he really wanted to say on Lost was what he's saying now. It's almost like we're the birds who have come back to him. Coon's ridiculous story IS Lost, and he's conveying that just as she meant something else by it so did he. And while he'd like to go back and tell the story he'd meant to before things all got out of hand that story is no longer his - his is the one he'd told a particular audience, us. We're his viewership. And we really did give him a second chance by looking around for years for his next appearance and then watching his goddamn second show - and we really are ambivalent about him and given to violent fantasies that have probably required purgation by proxy. I think I'm getting off-base a bit here, but maybe not far: there's something extremely meta going on here, re. Lost, and he's not just identifying with the God who enabled the Departure but also the survivors. The two different kinds of people dealing with loss that the show's about are the primary survivors and the secondary, who have lost their ability to rely on the depressed or otherwise traumatized primary survivors. Maybe he's saying that it was the show that he had wanted to write that went missing, and that mourning for that stopped him from giving us the show we deserved. Hmm. Anyway the fact that his show about people who had gotten lost very clearly ended up getting lost itself has not been lost on him.
2. The God actor is the same guy from Kevin's dreams? Definitely supports that Futurama reading, if so.
3. Is water something consistent this season? Over the whole series? Death? Or somehow death and life both? The pain of living that seems like death to those struggling to avoid it?
4. Does the offered story make sense even on its own terms? If everyone is so unhappy on the other side then why didn't Doctor Whatshisname make the machine before Nora came to him? Are we to assume they'll run into the same problem Nora did? Or are the physicist people making sure they're sending over people who are thoroughly miserable on this side because only that would be worth the risk of messing with their departed ones' situations, and assuming sending anyone at all back the other way would cause global chaos? I dunno - way too many unresolved questions there. I mean, the correct answer is "who the fuck cares," of course. Most of a vehicle is always Maguffin, and I guess you're allowed to say so while landing it, if only then.
Still ... Kevin turns his 3.7 epiphany that he needs to stop looking for ways to run away from his wives into a metaphor that he later insists is true: that he had a heart attack that made him realize he'd always had a condition, but that the attack led to its being recognized and corrected (except he must no longer smoke, maybe fitting that fuckup vs. sin distinction from the wedding speech - one does not accidentally smoke; I think the series starts with him smoking illicit cigarettes he'd hidden under a mailbox?). So is Nora doing something similar? The nun was virtually quoting from Life of Pi, where selective (and more or less freestyle) religious supernaturalism is defended over fact as "the better story." Nora stubbornly insists she's only into the truth, but the nun gently points out her own lies - which include her whole new escape-life. So the delayed boat voyage in her journey story would then be how long it took her to work through her guilt. Her taking the sins of others onto herself - after putting them onto an innocent (goat = Kevin?) - and then instead of letting herself get stuck because of them (like she was in the bathroom) setting them aside maybe fits what she's doing with the story? She's hurt Kevin to an unimaginable degree, so she's belatedly accepting a version of his clean-slate Certified Copy offer in order to pretend that she didn't merely fake her death to avoid him (and everybody else, but mostly him). Her lie is forgivable to herself because it contains the truth, and forgivable to him because she's there to tell it.
The fact that he did have a heart attack (if true, which why wouldn't it be?) perhaps means that we can usually manage to convey to others what we'd feel humiliated to say directly via truths rather than lies, thus that even truths can be lies, just as lies can be truths? With forgiveness coming in where we've been transparent? Where we've been bad enough at veiling our truths behind lies or vice versa that both the truth and the lie are apparent. Which they will be to people who know us well so long as we're present.
5. Coon is a way better actor than Theroux. His strength is his pretty much default vaguely stung and bewildered expression, which can be squeezed into stricken where necessary; Lynch, who can get a good though not a naturalistic performance out of anyone, recognized this about him and ingeniously limited how much he was allowed to speak in Mulholland Drive. This show has tried accommodating his weaknesses and maximizing his soulful standing-there potential in its own way, but there's times when he has to say a bunch of stuff.
6. I've long suspected "In the Waiting Room" informs this series on some level, but am now wondering if "The Weed" had some influence on 3.7. Situation's not quite the same, of course, but the imagery seems oddly similar. Inception's a way bigger "surface" influence on the dream episodes, and Borges behind it and Swedenborg behind Borges.
Probably I just see things through Bishop reflexively these days. Still, a portentous National Geographic + vertiginous flooding + Africa + being disturbed by how everyone's going to die = a lot of shared Leftovers/Waiting Room territory.
7. The convergence with aspects of this season's Kingdom subplot(s) of Walking Dead seemed also curious. Maybe that stuff's carried over from the comic book and Lindelof's a reader?
8. 3.6 was well done but pretty close to a belief-in-belief tract ... till corrected by the 3.8 revelation about Laurie's fate. What does it become in retrospect? She doesn't need a reminder of her daughter because her daughter's already back in her life to stay? Was she ever going to kill herself at all, if so? Or was the point of going and doing that a) to get away from people who were doing ridiculous things she couldn't handle with a straight face, thus was in danger of preventing them from working through what they had to and b) to ratify her decision that the painful flux of faced moments is life and not death? An atheist not drowning but waving. The creators' explanation that their position is not one of belief in belief, but instead belief that our losses are so profound that believing weird shit is one of the stages many of us are sure to pass through? Drugging everyone was supposed to be analogous to institutionalizing Kevin's father, I take it. She wanted to make sure Kevin wanted to do it? He did do it while they were sleeping. Something consent-related was being underlined there - how they pulled him out, how he asked his father to push him down etc. When you sacrifice someone who wants to be sacrificed, and doing that provides him with something as well as you with something, you've achieved, what, consensual old time religion? So their position is that belief will sometimes need to happen, so we should provide a safe space and clean needles and counselling for those ready to abandon it. Hamsterdam, basically.
9. How is this show's use of music so inoffensive? It doesn't seem pretentious or self-praisingly hipster-y. Just genuinely and effectively eclectic. It's winking at us about its own choices. For an unrelentingly gritty show there's been a whole lot of winking. This show's not like anything else, is it, and there will never be anything like it again, will there. Despite the connections I've mentioned and some I haven't. (For example: didn't the finale seem like it had some San Junipero touches? E.g. Nora's bicycling coming across a bit like the bisexual girl's jeep rides?)
10. My feelings could not be mixeder. But by a lot of definitions of art that's complete success.
1. The finale takes a major cue from Certified Copy, but uses it as pretty much the ultimate Lost-viewer troll, where we're at first to think the parallel universe thing is back (which, along another line, it later is!). All this weirdly good-natured, thinly-veiled trolling by Lindelof is ... well, entirely unheard of in the history of art. It's one of the oddest things I've ever experienced. Clearly this is therapeutic for Lindelof, but he's inviting us into the therapy with him. He's apologizing for his fake history by turning it into real farce. But the farce is much realer than the history - he's saying things got way out of hand, that what he really wanted to say on Lost was what he's saying now. It's almost like we're the birds who have come back to him. Coon's ridiculous story IS Lost, and he's conveying that just as she meant something else by it so did he. And while he'd like to go back and tell the story he'd meant to before things all got out of hand that story is no longer his - his is the one he'd told a particular audience, us. We're his viewership. And we really did give him a second chance by looking around for years for his next appearance and then watching his goddamn second show - and we really are ambivalent about him and given to violent fantasies that have probably required purgation by proxy. I think I'm getting off-base a bit here, but maybe not far: there's something extremely meta going on here, re. Lost, and he's not just identifying with the God who enabled the Departure but also the survivors. The two different kinds of people dealing with loss that the show's about are the primary survivors and the secondary, who have lost their ability to rely on the depressed or otherwise traumatized primary survivors. Maybe he's saying that it was the show that he had wanted to write that went missing, and that mourning for that stopped him from giving us the show we deserved. Hmm. Anyway the fact that his show about people who had gotten lost very clearly ended up getting lost itself has not been lost on him.
2. The God actor is the same guy from Kevin's dreams? Definitely supports that Futurama reading, if so.
3. Is water something consistent this season? Over the whole series? Death? Or somehow death and life both? The pain of living that seems like death to those struggling to avoid it?
4. Does the offered story make sense even on its own terms? If everyone is so unhappy on the other side then why didn't Doctor Whatshisname make the machine before Nora came to him? Are we to assume they'll run into the same problem Nora did? Or are the physicist people making sure they're sending over people who are thoroughly miserable on this side because only that would be worth the risk of messing with their departed ones' situations, and assuming sending anyone at all back the other way would cause global chaos? I dunno - way too many unresolved questions there. I mean, the correct answer is "who the fuck cares," of course. Most of a vehicle is always Maguffin, and I guess you're allowed to say so while landing it, if only then.
Still ... Kevin turns his 3.7 epiphany that he needs to stop looking for ways to run away from his wives into a metaphor that he later insists is true: that he had a heart attack that made him realize he'd always had a condition, but that the attack led to its being recognized and corrected (except he must no longer smoke, maybe fitting that fuckup vs. sin distinction from the wedding speech - one does not accidentally smoke; I think the series starts with him smoking illicit cigarettes he'd hidden under a mailbox?). So is Nora doing something similar? The nun was virtually quoting from Life of Pi, where selective (and more or less freestyle) religious supernaturalism is defended over fact as "the better story." Nora stubbornly insists she's only into the truth, but the nun gently points out her own lies - which include her whole new escape-life. So the delayed boat voyage in her journey story would then be how long it took her to work through her guilt. Her taking the sins of others onto herself - after putting them onto an innocent (goat = Kevin?) - and then instead of letting herself get stuck because of them (like she was in the bathroom) setting them aside maybe fits what she's doing with the story? She's hurt Kevin to an unimaginable degree, so she's belatedly accepting a version of his clean-slate Certified Copy offer in order to pretend that she didn't merely fake her death to avoid him (and everybody else, but mostly him). Her lie is forgivable to herself because it contains the truth, and forgivable to him because she's there to tell it.
The fact that he did have a heart attack (if true, which why wouldn't it be?) perhaps means that we can usually manage to convey to others what we'd feel humiliated to say directly via truths rather than lies, thus that even truths can be lies, just as lies can be truths? With forgiveness coming in where we've been transparent? Where we've been bad enough at veiling our truths behind lies or vice versa that both the truth and the lie are apparent. Which they will be to people who know us well so long as we're present.
5. Coon is a way better actor than Theroux. His strength is his pretty much default vaguely stung and bewildered expression, which can be squeezed into stricken where necessary; Lynch, who can get a good though not a naturalistic performance out of anyone, recognized this about him and ingeniously limited how much he was allowed to speak in Mulholland Drive. This show has tried accommodating his weaknesses and maximizing his soulful standing-there potential in its own way, but there's times when he has to say a bunch of stuff.
6. I've long suspected "In the Waiting Room" informs this series on some level, but am now wondering if "The Weed" had some influence on 3.7. Situation's not quite the same, of course, but the imagery seems oddly similar. Inception's a way bigger "surface" influence on the dream episodes, and Borges behind it and Swedenborg behind Borges.
Probably I just see things through Bishop reflexively these days. Still, a portentous National Geographic + vertiginous flooding + Africa + being disturbed by how everyone's going to die = a lot of shared Leftovers/Waiting Room territory.
7. The convergence with aspects of this season's Kingdom subplot(s) of Walking Dead seemed also curious. Maybe that stuff's carried over from the comic book and Lindelof's a reader?
8. 3.6 was well done but pretty close to a belief-in-belief tract ... till corrected by the 3.8 revelation about Laurie's fate. What does it become in retrospect? She doesn't need a reminder of her daughter because her daughter's already back in her life to stay? Was she ever going to kill herself at all, if so? Or was the point of going and doing that a) to get away from people who were doing ridiculous things she couldn't handle with a straight face, thus was in danger of preventing them from working through what they had to and b) to ratify her decision that the painful flux of faced moments is life and not death? An atheist not drowning but waving. The creators' explanation that their position is not one of belief in belief, but instead belief that our losses are so profound that believing weird shit is one of the stages many of us are sure to pass through? Drugging everyone was supposed to be analogous to institutionalizing Kevin's father, I take it. She wanted to make sure Kevin wanted to do it? He did do it while they were sleeping. Something consent-related was being underlined there - how they pulled him out, how he asked his father to push him down etc. When you sacrifice someone who wants to be sacrificed, and doing that provides him with something as well as you with something, you've achieved, what, consensual old time religion? So their position is that belief will sometimes need to happen, so we should provide a safe space and clean needles and counselling for those ready to abandon it. Hamsterdam, basically.
9. How is this show's use of music so inoffensive? It doesn't seem pretentious or self-praisingly hipster-y. Just genuinely and effectively eclectic. It's winking at us about its own choices. For an unrelentingly gritty show there's been a whole lot of winking. This show's not like anything else, is it, and there will never be anything like it again, will there. Despite the connections I've mentioned and some I haven't. (For example: didn't the finale seem like it had some San Junipero touches? E.g. Nora's bicycling coming across a bit like the bisexual girl's jeep rides?)
10. My feelings could not be mixeder. But by a lot of definitions of art that's complete success.