Dreaming and Reality in The Leftovers

These are rough notes towards what I may later work into a longer essay.

I am in the middle of the final episode of The Leftovers TV series and was struck with an observation. The series has had two opening montages and different opening musical scores for each season with the final season having unique musical scores for each episode (only the final episode reuses the music for season two's opening). It is all popular music as opposed to musical scores, only season one used a musical score. Popular music is interspersed almost at random throughout every episode of season 3. It felt at times either jarring or at least contrary to what seemed the mood of a given scene. Here is my theory for what is going on.

The theme of this series is trauma, trauma of the worst sort. It is an unresolvable trauma and so one that apparently cannot be healed. The trauma only grows worse and less bearable as time passes. The series has many moments where it powerfully conveys this sense to the viewer. Seasons one and two end in riots and chaos, where the reserves of sanity have broken away. We participate in this breaking down.

The series also has three dream episodes, where Kevin Garvey temporarily dies and so is allowed to enter the realm of the afterlife. When Kevin from one of these journeys he's asked if he was afraid. He says that on the contrary, he wasn't afraid but felt more fully alive.

David Lynch, whose films are often said to be dream-like, is a master of creating a sense of dread. His films are suffused with a palpable silence, often in the form of an electrical hum. The feeling his films evoke in me are more powerful than just about all other contemporary films. It is a kind of existential fear. Is this reality?

Watching The Leftovers sometimes I desired something along the Lynchian lines. I wanted to see the film delve deeper into this emotional state of the characters. Instead, there was a Hollywood quality to the show. For every step it advanced towards a depiction of trauma, it moved several steps back. One means of doing this is through the introduction of popular music. Listening to music, whether it is a song we know, or a style of music that summons up memories of other songs, evokes in us our own realities that seem just as real as the sense of dread.

Music has the power to create a real world, a world that is convincingly safe and knowable. It is not the world of the unknown and the unresolved. When Kevin enters his dreams and enacts a role, such as assassin or president, he is, like music, making a narrative of his life. In this kind of created reality he does feel more real.

Month in Review: July

I've been working 6 days a week consistently for most of the year. This month I went two weeks without a day off.  The hottest days of the summer were also in July. We had two periods of exceptionally hot days, where the temperatures once went as high as 110 degrees. The hottest days stretched out for as long as 3-4 days. But even when the heat did slightly break, the temperature remained in the high 80s. I'm writing this in mid-August and can look back in relief. It has been significantly cooler so far this month and even if we do have a few more hot days, I don't expect anything like July. Because of the heat and my general exhaustion I didn't listen to as many audiobooks or do as much reading at home as I had previous months. I mostly went home, had dinner, and watched an episode or two of Star Trek or The Leftovers. On the advice of Ron Drummond I watched the Australian film Walkabout which is referenced in season 3 of the Leftovers.  I read Marianne Williamson's A Politics of Love. I also read another Culture novel, Player of Games, this month. I saw this years Shakespeare in the Boston Common play, Cymbeline twice. Once with Dennis Donohue and later with my brother Joe. As far as the comic goes, I had more good ideas here and there. I picked away at it more. I did have the idea recently that I wanted to set the more modest goal of sketching the whole thing out for this year and then start releasing it next year, editing and revising along the way. I'll release a page (actually two pages-each "page" is a spread) a month.