by IGMS
It was not long after the finale to The Leftovers' spectacular second season aired that I lost someone of transcendent importance to my life, and even up to this very moment I have no mechanism to process this, or find any conclusive meaning to it. I suspect I never will. It certainly wasn't as mysterious as anyone's Departure, but I'm no more at ease or comfort, nor have any greater sense of understanding, than any of those characters whose lives were so puzzlingly turned upside down.
Part of the problem is that so many of the questions that spring to mind, cosmic or otherwise, are intrinsically irrational. For me, the questions were despairing, bordering on angry. I found myself wondering what right I had to keep on, for instance, watching football, or going to the movies, or going to work, or doing anything that might be considered normal in a life that now seemed anything but. I wondered why there was still laughter. I wondered why anything that was should still be.
In looking back on the show, I realized that for the first time I understood - even empathized with - the Guilty Remnant in an unexpected way. Not in terms of methods or any kind of belief system; rather I found myself, in the days and weeks after this life-changing event, upset at the thought of the continuation of normalcy, and all of a sudden the thought of a constant, "living reminder" began to make a strange sort of sense. I wanted to remind everyone, too. I wanted to remind myself.
One of the most notable things about The Leftovers, particularly its nebulous approach to the central mystery, is that its showrunner, Lindelof, is the same man behind Lost, the often-brilliant series that ended in such maddening fashion six years ago. The failures of that show's finale seemed - and still seem - like a weirdly miscalculated response to the conventional need for closure and explanation, two issues he's so gracefully avoided on The Leftovers. Lost's endgame was staggeringly banal - too clean, too tidy, too obvious. Too simplistic an idea. And yet I understand that the show would have risked an even more antagonistic reaction had it gone in a completely wild and/or cagier, more abstract direction. Maybe with those stakes, it was a lose/lose.
At any rate, The Leftovers seems like the antidote. And still, there will be those who desperately want an explanation when all is said and done. For many, the show was frustrating enough as it was, and the continued lack of closure to the show's core, narrative catalyst - the basis for the entire world it inhabits - will only add to that. But, by avoiding that (at least through two years), this show is meaningful in a way that Lost's finale prevents it from being.
In discussions of this nature, it's only natural for minds to wander to perhaps the most divisive ending of all, The Sopranos. As a long-time passionate defender of the way David Chase ended the series, I've never understood - expected, yes; understood, no - the apparent need, for some, of a definitive conclusion. (Especially because the show was never especially plot-driven anyway.) If Tony had simply gotten killed, or gone to jail, or joined witness protection ... OK, but ultimately, who cares? What possible purpose would such a clean resolution, on its own terms, provide? Even if the implication is, or might be, that he died in that diner (as various references during that season, and visual cues in the final scene, may suggest), the cut to black is so much more interesting and dramatically rewarding because it's not about simply what did or did not happen. It asks us to consider so many implications and possibilities; there's so much more to chew on with the focus directed away from his ultimate fate. A scene in which someone shoots Tony in the head tells us nothing. The scene in that diner tells us everything.
Many films in recent years have employed the sudden, ambiguous cut-to-black as well (the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man* come to mind, as well as Martha Marcy May Marlene, Jindabyne and Inception, among others). It speaks, perhaps, to a small but growing tendency to handle traditionally cut-and-dried narratives in more oblique terms. Consider the prevalence of apocalyptic cinema, and how so many recent examples have transformed apocalyptic events into abstractions - Take Shelter, Children of Men, Time of the Wolf, Perfect Sense, Melancholia, Blindness, Vanishing on 7th Street, The Happening, Southland Tales, Kairo, The Road. None of those examples provide all (and in some cases, provide very few if any) of the kinds of explanations and hard answers we would normally expect, and not coincidentally several of those films count among the most noteworthy of the last decade or so. With an apocalypse of its own - the existential kind - The Leftovers follows suit.
* The Coens have masterfully demonstrated my point for years. They, and their characters, have constantly probed for meaning in an absurd world in which that meaning is, and remains, elusive. And in doing so they've back-doored their way into a more profound understanding of life than most, if not all, of their contemporaries.
Still, I realize the impulse to demand cold, hard answers will continue to persist. And while I would never criticize more straightforward narratives as a whole (after all, most movies qualify in that regard), I'll never quite be able to fathom the need many people have for every story to be so open-and-shut.
Citizen Kane famously ends with the dramatic reveal of the meaning of its title character's final words, "Rosebud." That it's a sled representing his lost childhood is pop-culture lore, but as is so often the case, that "answer" obscures the real power of the film's ending. Psychologically, the lost-childhood idea on its own is rather elementary; but more importantly, it does not explain Charles Foster Kane as a character. A detail like that does not, and cannot, explain away an entire person or an entire psychology. The reporter in the film has spent the whole movie probing Kane's life, operating on the premise that discovering the meaning of "Rosebud" will truly get to the bottom of the man. That he never discovers what the audience does is an ironic joke, of course - but big-picture, it wouldn't have served his purpose anyway. People are mysteries. They, like the stories they inhabit, cannot be explained with simple answers. And yet we have a hard time accepting that mystery.
Consider all the speculation over the last decade about Bill Murray's final, whispered words to Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation. Even there, in a situation where the artist (Sofia Coppola) is making it abundantly clear that we are not meant to know what is being said (otherwise, y'know, she would have let us hear it), countless people, online and otherwise, insist they've "solved" it. As if anything needed to be solved. As if finding out what he said has any point.
These tendencies extend beyond just movies, of course. Just look at the way we deal with real-life events. My mind goes back to situations like Columbine and Virginia Tech - mass tragedies that couldn't possibly be fully comprehended or explained (especially not right away), a fact that didn't stop people from doing exactly that. With Columbine, people settled on the narrative that it was two boys who were bullied and who then took out their aggression accordingly. Once that narrative stuck, people moved on and stopped thinking about Columbine - never mind that the bullying angle turned out not to be the case at all. With Va Tech, it was somehow decided that the killer's violent fiction (plays and short stories he submitted in classes) were a smoking gun of some sort. In both cases (and countless more), the most simplistic explanations stood in for incalculably complicated truths and circumstances. And then everyone felt better about it, because we'd "gotten to the bottom of it." Now we know why they did it.
Except we didn't.
Gus Van Sant's great accomplishment with 2003's Elephant - loosely based on the Columbine massacre - was in the way he took apart exactly that type of nonsense. He introduced, and then disregarded, every made-up reason that we heard about "why" they did it. Surely there are things that can be understood about that event and others like it. But the events themselves are surreal, inexplicable and random. They cannot be resolved with manufactured narratives. A lesser film would have gone out of its way to (falsely) explain everything that cannot be appropriately explained.
We're conditioned to think of things this way - the justice system itself relies on a singular motive and a very linear path for every cr
ime. But in reality, that's not necessarily how human behavior and decision-making operate. Attempts to construct "meaning" or reasoning are generally applied externally, and we try to make them stick - or find something that will. This makes it easier to digest the narratives we consume, but it's inherently dishonest, isn't it?
To be clear, when I talk about the inadequacy of answers, I'm not talking about scientific answers or demonstrable facts of any kind - those are the keys to understanding, but in a completely different category than what I'm talking about here. It's our storytelling that gets cheapened by an emphasis only on manufactured motives and conclusions. Focusing on the what is so inherently limiting; as for the why ... well, whether we're considering true crime or a sci-fi television show, we tend to gravitate toward that tidy answer. Doing so gives us the impression that the world is rational and easy to digest. I get that; I do. We want to make sense of life, even when - especially when - it doesn't seem to make any. It's good that we keep searching for answers, even to unanswerables. Maybe we shouldn't expect to find them, though; ultimately, maybe the search is good enough.
Vintage Fiction - Yesterday's Taste
by Lawrence M. Schoen
* * *
When Dugli, the most powerful and feared food critic in the galaxy, invited me to join him at a restaurant so exclusive even billionaires like me have to wait two years for a table, I didn't stop to ask why. I packed a bag, scooped up my buffalo dog, and headed for a planet so far off the trade routes that Dugli had sent his private shuttle to ensure I'd come.
Bwill is not a tourist destination. The people smell, the air tastes funny, and the local language will make your ears bleed. But alongside other more common sea creatures, its oceans teem with lithic ichthus, a species of silicon-based fish hard as corundum and ugly as sin. They thrive there. Imagine a swimming creature made of rock. Rock fins, rock gills, rock scales. The culinary masterminds of Bwill prepare them using a series of marinades that permeate the minerals of these creatures, and over the course of months render them as tender and delicate as meringue, and exquisitely safe to be ingested by us carbon-types.
Dugli's shuttle delivered me to Bwill, and a waiting sloop took me from the splashport straight to the dock of Stone Fin, a restaurant created by master chef Plorm. A crowd of Bwillers -- with a handful of offworld foodies -- loitered in front, waiting for their reservations. I was probably the only human on Bwill and Dugli the only Caliopoean. A dark, otterish pelt covered him from crown to heel, with tiny flaps where humans would keep their ears and a whiskered nose that gave him an astonishing palate. We spotted each other at once.
"Conroy!" Dugli's webbed hand pulled me from the sloop and before I could say a word he had frogmarched me past the outraged stares of would-be diners and into the restaurant. Reggie, my buffalito, clattered after on tiny hooves, desperate not to be left out. We were expected. Plorm herself took us through the curtained maze typical of Bwill style and seated us at an elegant table of polished onyx and chalcedony.
I settled Reggie into a booster seat intended for Bwillian toddlers. Dugli waited for the chef to return to her kitchen before speaking. His dark eyes gleamed in the restaurant's candlelight. "So, Conroy, what's it been? Three years?"
"Life is good, Dugli. How's the galaxy been treating you?"
"Truth to tell, I've been despondent of late. But a few months back, I heard a whisper of a hint of a rumor that turned out to be true, and now I'm the happiest man alive. Or I will be soon. That's why you're here."
I smiled, waiting for the catch. "If feeding Reggie and me a fine meal makes you happy, who am I to argue?"
Dugli snorted. I knew he didn't approve of feeding fine cuisine to pets, particularly given that buffalitos were capable of ingesting literally anything. Moreover, he knew that I knew it, but he didn't bring it up. That should have been my second clue that he wanted something.
"It won't be a good meal, Conroy. It will be a great meal. Plorm studied under Nery, the greatest chef this world ever produced."
"I know. I'm looking forward to her stonefish."
His head bobbed in agreement. "Exquisite. The second best meal ever found on Bwill. But... What if I said you could have the very best served alongside it? Nery's seven cheese cribble puffs!"
"That's crazy. The secret of Nery's cribble course vanished with him twenty years ago."
"I assure you, I'm completely sane."
"Then how? Nery's dead. Everyone knows that."
"What everyone knows is a lie. He's been lost all this time, not dead."
"Lost?"
Dugli grinned like an otter. "And I've found him!"
At dawn a groundcar waited to take Reggie and me from our hotel. We shared the road with pedicabs and bicycles but passed no other motorized vehicles on our way to the fish market. Picture a series of cracked and stained piers where the denizens of the local fishing industry -- which is to say every third person on Bwill -- had tied up their boats. I'm normally good at distinguishing among members of an alien race, but that morning I would have sworn my limo driver was the same Bwiller who had bussed our table the night before, having just changed clothes and gone on to his second job.
We arrived amidst a cacophony of scavenging seabirds and whirring cargoloaders. The pierworkers' shanties sounded to my ear like a orphanage's worth of two-year olds in a nursing home of cheek-pinching grandmothers. Even worse than the noise was the smell! The piers reeked of decay, the boats stank from a local sealant made with the rotting remnants of seaweed, and the pungent citrus scent of hardworking Bwillers filled in any olfactory gaps. The fisherfolk of Bwill have an ironic avoidance of bathing that has them banned from traveling offworld; imagine fermented limes and tangerines blended with the funk of human body odor and you'll get the idea. With Reggie trotting after me, I exited the limo reluctantly, limited by having only two hands and desperately wishing I could cover my nose and both ears simultaneously. Dugli strode toward me, one delicate, webbed hand broadly plastered over his whiskers. He had his aural flaps sealed tight.
"Conroy! Come on, if we hurry we can catch the last bit of the performance."
We rushed down the length of one of the older piers, its shattered and crumbling surface held together by layers of graffiti and little else. At its far end a group of Bwillers milled about with their backs to us. Dugli pulled me toward them.
The natives of Bwill are humanoid, same as you and me, but on average a head shorter. Their complexions are a bit craggy -- though many an adolescent boy on Earth has endured worse acne -- and range in color from sunset red to crayon orange. Dugli shoved his way through the throng of locals and yanked me after him. Reggie scampered underfoot, dodging shoes and the thorny toenails of bare Bwiller feet. I muttered apologies, but no one noticed. Everyone was focused on the old man at the edge of the pier who sat chanting in a voice as raspy as sea salt. I could see him easily over the heads of the others, but Dugli pushed us to the front with the determination of a man whose outlook on life includes the certain knowledge that his opinion is infinitely superior to yours.
"There he is, Conroy. The fish poet. His name is Rhine."
I nodded. The oldster was tall for a Bwiller. His burnt orange skin had achieved the clear complexion of the elderly. He wore only a dirty overall, patched and mended beyond its years, and possessed a full beard, which on Bwill generally denoted poverty or at a minimum a healthy disregard for money. Wielding a knife in each hand he balanced, juggled, flipped, and methodically sliced away bits of an enormous, marinated stonefish, all while intoning sonnets with a voice like sandpaper. Fish poetry. Beautiful to watch and painful to hear. I don't get it, and I probably never will.
"Dug, you could have sent me a vid," I raised a hand to pinch my nose shut as a wave of fish art wafted my way, breaking through the other odors that I was becoming inured to. "What's so special about this guy?"
"He's Nery," said Dugli, his face lighting up like he'd just tasted the best Eggs Montrachet on four planets, and for
good reason if he wasn't wrong.
"Why are you so sure he's not dead?" I turned away, my head ringing from phonemes and tones that I couldn't begin to parse, as a smell thick enough to elbow its way down my throat threatened to push my gorge back along the way it had come. The crowd of art-loving Bwillers parted as I pressed through. I kept walking.
Dugli followed. "The Bwill government doesn't permit physical death as punishment, not since the transpersonal faction took power. Instead, they wiped away the man he was and sent him back into society. Nery became Rhine. Rhine the fish poet was once Nery the master chef. The man who invented the legendary seven cheese cribble puff is still alive, and I've found him."
We were nearly to the limo with its promise of scentless silence. I faced Dugli and shook him by his shoulders. "He was also Nery the master spy. When he wasn't cooking, he was stealing industrial secrets and selling them to the highest bidder, right up until he was caught, convicted, and killed. The body may be the same, but the mind is gone. Nery doesn't live in that man's head any more. The only person home is Rhine. All I saw on the pier was a broken-down fish poet."
"Well, sure," said Dugli, grinning like a young otter caught with one hand in a fishy cookie jar. "Why do you think I brought you here, Conroy? Because your buffalo dog business has made you rich? Nonsense! I know plenty of people richer than you. But you're the best hypnotist I know."
"I'm the only one you know. What do you expect me to do?"
"Regress him."
"Excuse me?"
"Don't be coy. You've done this for me before. Remember that woman on Kaftan's World? You hypnotically regressed her back to childhood until she remembered a day when she watched her grandmother preparing fireweed kreplach. We recovered the recipe."