This is my first tentative foray into film and TV criticism. Any feedback is as always welcome.
[Spoiler alert: if you haven’t yet seen Season 2 of The Leftovers the second half of this post may impair your appreciation of the show.]
As many have noted, TV series these days are morphing from mindless entertainment into high art, while movies have become either serialized shallow spectacles designed to sell popcorn and toys or dewy-eyed nostalgia pieces that pander to the tastes of the ageing academicians who hand out awards. A great genre-shift is underway.
Movies have always struggled to aspire to the breadth and depth of the novels or epics that preceded them. Nor can they achieve the condensed brevity of a painting or poem. They were never substantial enough for the former and the economics of the box-office has largely dictated their length, content and form and ruled out brevity, experimentalism or pith.
A director as wily as Alfred Hitchcock or as brash as Orson Welles could always find a way round these restrictions. But they suffered terribly for their art. Auteurs who enjoyed either lavish government grants in non-English-speaking countries or the stamp of approval of the Academy in north America have produced worthy but ultimately stodgy work. I would make some exception to this rule for UK-based and –oriented directors, such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, who have produced uncommercial but touching and important movies without hefty government support or approval from the powers that be. Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and some of the work of Spike Lee also merit an exceptional note.
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It is hard to pinpoint exactly when genuine artistic aspirations pivoted from cinema to TV. But a key figure in this movement must be David Lynch, whose Twin Peaks TV series in the early 1990s was one of the first to be directed by a Hollywood director and star actors who had also appeared on the big screen. Almost all high-art TV series of recent years throw a nod of respect or approving echo in the direction of David Lynch, even if they do not directly imitate his peculiar surreal style.
The development of the TV series as art in many ways shadows that of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries. The novel, as an emerging art form, started out episodic or epistolary in nature, and slowly developed its narrative thrust and verve, depth, popular appeal and economic viability, through serialization in newspapers and periodicals. Techniques such as cliffhangers and mysteries were devised to keep readers glued to the page and, of course, keep up subscriptions. These were often the most widely read pages of a newspaper at a time when journalism was far less sensationalist than it is today.
Changing habits and technology, then as now, also played a big part. The printing press and the locomotive enabled newspapers to be delivered around the country at more or less the same time. Higher rates of literacy, increased social mobility, and a growing focus on the home rather than street, stage, or stadium, as the more respectable setting for entertainment, all fuelled the novel’s rise.
Likewise, the emergence of the TV series as high art in recent years has been spurred by box-sets, Internet access, binge-watching and an even greater focus on the home. It is no accident that the TV channel that purveys the most groundbreaking work in this genre is called Home Box Office.
HBO is exactly what its name says it is. It is a movie screen beamed into your home, for which you have to pay. Different from public broadcast or commercial TV, it is restricted neither by the diktats of governments nor by the fussy flightiness of the admen who drive the free market. There are no adverts on HBO, no government interference, and, because the shows are beamed directly out to householders, who can opt in or out of the service as they please, it is not subject to the same censorial restrictions as movie theaters. The only factor determining the survival of shows on HBO is the quality and appeal of the work itself. No wonder it has become a magnet for more serious-minded directors, screenwriters and actors.
Last year, HBO, in my opinion, scaled a new peak with the screening of Season 2 of The Leftovers. I had watched the first season of this series in 2014 and found it intriguing and well-executed, but a little too scrappily put together and gratuitously grim for my liking. I preferred True Detective, which was equally grim, but beautifully tight, and was looking forward more in 2015 to the second season of this series.
True Detective Season 2 turned out to be a disappointment to all but its most ardent aficionados. The idea of creating a similar feel with completely different characters, setting and plot, while initially enticing, turned out to be impossible to achieve. True Detective Season 2 had some stunning visuals and moments—not least the horrifyingly drawn-out shoot-out scene in Episode 5, which took this traditional topos of US visual media to a whole new level and led us to reflect a little more on issues regarding police and guns. Overall, however, the second season of True Detective tended only to drag and bore. Watching the over-lengthy season finale awaiting some final redemption was more chore than joy.
Season 2 of The Leftovers, however, is a work of art on a whole other scale. The tone and style diverged sharply from that of the first season, despite the fact that it is centered around mostly the same characters and the same implausible rationale. The setting, like True Detective, also changed, but, in this case to somewhere lighter and brighter, almost impossibly magical and redeeming, giving viewers who had previously invested a degree of vicarious emotional attachment in the various characters an albeit ominous sense of hope. Likeable new protagonists were seamlessly introduced.
Season 2 of the Leftovers works as a symphonic whole. While it preserves some of the episodic features of the previous season, it sews them together into a truly intriguing narrative, lubricated rather than stilted by experimental editing and aided by heroically understated acting, an exquisitely carefully chosen soundtrack with a score by post-minimalist composer Max Richter, and a cinematography that veers in seconds from luscious to ironic, to painfully intimate, to expressionistic, all set in a bizarre but believable, imaginary but mundane world. Episodes 1 and 2 present exactly the same sequence of events in the same time-frame from the diverging points of view of two neighboring families.
Season 2 of The Leftovers also sensitively addresses very contemporary issues. It is about radicalization and extremism, fear and hope, grief and alienation, and the evil web these can weave around every one of us. It is one of the few dramas I have seen that takes religious belief seriously—deeply seriously—without either mocking or sentimentalizing it and yet is firmly set, albeit questioningly, against the backdrop of a typical North American sentimentality and religiosity that it neither condones nor condemns.
I loved Twin Peaks, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the first season of True Detective, but this is something different. There is a transcendence to this work that seeps even into its tiniest details. There is a scene in the last episode of the season, where a father, whose daughter is missing, is drinking out of a mug early in the morning. “There’s no coffee in the pot. What are you drinking?” his wife says. She snatches the drink from him and sniffs it audibly off-screen, while the camera remains fixed on the father’s sad face. Nothing more is made of this.
In a long scene in the same episode, the mother (who is hearing-impaired) remonstrates violently with her daughter (who refuses to speak) at a point where she appears to be about to ‘martyr’ herself as a suicide bomber. The scene is screened in total silence, as if numbed by the unbearable horror, but also realistically, since the mother is presumably without her hearing-aid.
The character of the daughter, Evie, who literally overarches this season, appearing only in the first and last two episodes, is, to my mind, the Sprecher of the piece. The ineffable, unimaginable, intolerable essence of the Jihadi bride. At one point, her father begs a policeman, to explain the reasons for his otherwise impeccably dutiful daughter’s changed behavior. He replies simply, “I don’t know.”
A particularly tear-jerking scene occurs in the last episode, in which Nora’s adopted baby is torn from her arms by a crazy woman and apparently trampled underfoot by a mob rushing towards a promised land. A scene clearly designed to touch hearts and challenge minds in this age of refugees.
It is perhaps significant that The Leftovers is broadcast—at least here in Brazil—late on Sunday evenings at a time when people are returning home from church. HBO, for all its nudity and swearing and experimentalism, is providing a pulpit for sermons that are not often heard and issues that are rarely aired.
Poetry, Politics & Language 