The Leftovers is not
feel-good television. Initial reviews described HBO’s new drama as “some
of the most desolate, despairing television on air”, “like a
French arthouse series, but sadder” and “a
show that will make some of its viewers want to slit their wrists” – and
those are the positive ones. Perhaps realizing that waxing poetic about a
show’s potential to rouse thoughts of suicide isn’t the most effective strategy
for convincing people to watch it, many of these critics go out of their way to
point out that The Leftovers “isn’t
for everyone,” a qualification that seems not only unnecessary (nothing is “for everyone”) but also counterintuitive.
If you like a piece of art, why discourage others from giving it a shot? Since
when were critics responsible for accommodating audience opinions rather than
simply articulating and trusting their own?
The moment I fell in love
Needless
to say, in an era infatuated with antiheroes and violence, there’s no shortage
of death on TV. During the past couple years, serial killers have become almost
as commonplace as cops and lawyers, and you can barely go a week without
hearing about yet another Red Wedding-style bloodbath (none of which, as far as
I can tell, have even come close to replicating the devastating brutality of
the original). For the most part, though, these shows are more interested in
the dying than in death itself, keeping the tumultuous aftermath at an arm’s
distance or ignoring it altogether. They dispatch characters matter-of-factly,
with minimum emotion (see: Breaking Bad,
Fargo, Hannibal, etc.), and when they do show the mourning, it’s brief,
usually in the form of a funeral scene or a Special Episode, an obligatory
interlude in the ongoing narrative. In The
Leftovers, on the other hand, the mourning is the narrative. It has the space and time to savor the nuances of
despair.
So conflicted...
That’s
not to say all movies have to involve death. Given the post-Dark Knight onslaught of “gritty”
reboots/remakes like Man of Steel and
Robocop, which flaunt their
portentousness and murky aesthetics as evidence of artistic importance, you can
hardly blame people for craving a little levity. But Hollywood overall seems
determined to avoid venturing into dark places beyond the most superficial
level possible. Everything has to be “fun”, in all-caps, with an exclamation
point tacked on, which mostly entails relentless rapid-fire banter and
tongue-in-cheek, self-aware humor; even with the fate of civilization hanging
in the balance, our heroes can’t resist the urge to rattle off a few snide
quips. Even Man of Steel, widely
criticized for being too somber and thus betraying its title character’s
fundamental idealism, refuses to linger in the chaos it wreaks, skimping on
relevant, thought-provoking questions about terrorism, faith and morality in
favor of a lackluster mishmash of superhero tropes. It wants credit for
tackling Big Ideas without actually having to do any work.
The
more people call this “fun”, the less I want to see it.
At
the end of the day, Man of Steel
didn’t fail because it was too serious; it failed because it was boring. As Skyfall, the original Bourne movies and Christopher Nolan’s
career, among others, have shown, it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster
that takes itself seriously and still manages to be entertaining. Lately,
though, it seems like almost any big-budget or genre movie that attempts to say
something meaningful or aspires to more than pure escapism gets dismissed as
pretentious and self-important because apparently, ambition in art is a bad thing. But while there’s nothing
inherently profound about gloom, neither is there anything inherently enjoyable
about flippancy. So often, the lightness feels hollow and the “wit” smug and contrived
(just think the worst parts of The
Amazing Spider-Man). It’s exhausting, like being stuck in an elevator with
an overly enthusiastic and insecure comedian. Frankly, if the best version of
your movie is one that involves constantly making fun of its own stupidity or
ridiculousness, you should probably take a step back and ask yourself why this
movie needs to exist in the first place. It’s time to stop treating tone as a
binary rather than shades in a spectrum; “dour”, for example, is different from
“sad”, which is different from “dark”, “cynical” or “gritty”.
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