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Apr. 22nd, 2017 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe Leftovers 3.1
(In hindsight, I may have figured out much of the rest of the series, so maybe don't read this one.)
So what was the season 2 prologue? The cromagnon woman, right? She survived a disaster that killed everyone else, made some horrible trek, died - but, without knowing it, had successfully handed off her baby to some other people to take care of, a la The Road, a la that Nicolas Cage movie (Next? No: Knowing). Point of which was that's all of us in the long run. Not that we all leave babies, but we've all survived a horrible cataclysm (history, the past) which killed literally everyone but us, and we're all trying to get something they gave to us to safety but will never know whether we did. With not much to hearten us except the fact that, looking back, that seems to have been what the others managed to do for us. Her shore is Kevin's because it's everyone's.
This Australian (?) end-times cult thing must be doing something similar, then? The date that's being put off is the arrival of the stuff we hear read aloud: the post-Rapture world, like the time before the flood, featuring nonstop celebrations. Meaning what, that we who are born at all are the ones left behind? I guess that's survival guilt after a fashion, but the show's usually more interested in the normative variety. The dead-ender woman lies down next to others at the end, who become the Guilty Remnant offshoot, so the daughter with glasses is like her in some fashion. Did the daughter ever join the Guilty Remnant for real, or was she always Liv Tyler's special recruit? I guess since she actually wakes up from the chain she could represent the first person in a cult to snap out of it, so it works either way. Made the shrouds seem more like cocoons.
Tyler's tiger speech seemed to be about the government, within the scene, but could be just as much about the end of the world truly coming (if we look at this scene as a genuine continuation of the previous sequence), or just death - that sample-sized package of end of the world. Suggesting what, that depressed people / survivor-guilters don't actually want to be dead, and change their tune when the real thing is truly nigh? Couldn't tell if that fit the woman, but maybe the fact that she was fine keeping on with it meant that she liked the thought of it but wasn't after the reality. Whereas the disappointed people were after the reality, hence the disappointment, the giving up?
Kevin's deputation of the Buseyites to make them feel important (and thus be more careful) seems like it's priming us to feel he actually likes the idea of being seen as a new Messiah. Whether that's something human beings are tricking him about or related to the death thing I dunno. By the latter I mean: we're tempted to think it's about us, that it's our life that's the special time, that's history's payoff; and the tempter wants us to feel that way so we won't screw up the order actually being maintained, which is just life's progress. Life's world doesn't end, just ours, and it wants us to feel that that's meaningful so that we don't do something stupid to make it meaningful - like kill ourselves. I don't think the brother-in-law is canonizing Kevin to make him stop suffocating himself (mostly because no one writes a whole book to save an in-law), so he's likelier to be setting up some lightning rod version of apocalypse religion designed to redirect enthusiasm that could do harm within a real one, and is just basing it around Kevin. The father who used to be a militant skeptic seems to now be a part of the Kevin cult, and since his present vocation is faking ghosts of dead family members so that their survivors can move on it seems like propping up a strawman messiah would be up his alley. Kevin's ex-wife did almost the same thing with her son last season. Perhaps she decided that this would work much better if the person at the center actually believed in it? "Don't tell the deluded person they're deluded" sounds like a recipe for a fake / methodone religion, and may justify deluding a person or two into being religious to carry it off. The priest's and the acolyte kid's being totally fine with Kevin not actually believing himself baptized fits all this, as does their "hey, thaaat could work" reaction to the car crash meeting story. I guess even to a priest curing the sickness of people like the woman at the beginning - religion addicts - might be seen as a noble endeavor. (Some of this sounds close to Crowley's Daemonomania.)
Something I'm even less sure of: the father of the glasses girl says "she's done it before" when Kevin's incredulous that he's denying the dental evidence of her death. She has, but another person who's done it before is Liv Tyler, who orchestrated the girls' disappearance and the big martyrdom fakeout. Perhaps she's faked another (the poison commemorating it was also fake, after all). Seems like going back to the well too many times, but maybe the show will have it be true in a dream or something. And if she's foreshadowing some later failure rather than the (apparent) present one the writers can get cred points back by depicting that disaster in the finale, I guess.
I didn't see coming that the dog guy was real. He left with Kevin's psychosis, so I guess I assumed he and it were one.
I don't know who the end person is. Kevin's virgin Australian mother? Felt like we were supposed to know or put it together, so maybe I'm just forgetting something.
Wonder what happened to the baby. And the dog? Or was it at the party and I didn't notice.
The Departure itself can't have been a mass put-on, as depicted, but from Tyler's "use death to get yourself to live" perspective it could be seen as a good thing. So whether it happened or not her own martyrdom would get her thumbs up.
Hmm. This whole fucking thing better not be Lindelof trying to persuade us narrative conflict is all we want therefore it doesn't matter how Lost ended. Because if it is I might bite his face off.
(In hindsight, I may have figured out much of the rest of the series, so maybe don't read this one.)
So what was the season 2 prologue? The cromagnon woman, right? She survived a disaster that killed everyone else, made some horrible trek, died - but, without knowing it, had successfully handed off her baby to some other people to take care of, a la The Road, a la that Nicolas Cage movie (Next? No: Knowing). Point of which was that's all of us in the long run. Not that we all leave babies, but we've all survived a horrible cataclysm (history, the past) which killed literally everyone but us, and we're all trying to get something they gave to us to safety but will never know whether we did. With not much to hearten us except the fact that, looking back, that seems to have been what the others managed to do for us. Her shore is Kevin's because it's everyone's.
This Australian (?) end-times cult thing must be doing something similar, then? The date that's being put off is the arrival of the stuff we hear read aloud: the post-Rapture world, like the time before the flood, featuring nonstop celebrations. Meaning what, that we who are born at all are the ones left behind? I guess that's survival guilt after a fashion, but the show's usually more interested in the normative variety. The dead-ender woman lies down next to others at the end, who become the Guilty Remnant offshoot, so the daughter with glasses is like her in some fashion. Did the daughter ever join the Guilty Remnant for real, or was she always Liv Tyler's special recruit? I guess since she actually wakes up from the chain she could represent the first person in a cult to snap out of it, so it works either way. Made the shrouds seem more like cocoons.
Tyler's tiger speech seemed to be about the government, within the scene, but could be just as much about the end of the world truly coming (if we look at this scene as a genuine continuation of the previous sequence), or just death - that sample-sized package of end of the world. Suggesting what, that depressed people / survivor-guilters don't actually want to be dead, and change their tune when the real thing is truly nigh? Couldn't tell if that fit the woman, but maybe the fact that she was fine keeping on with it meant that she liked the thought of it but wasn't after the reality. Whereas the disappointed people were after the reality, hence the disappointment, the giving up?
Kevin's deputation of the Buseyites to make them feel important (and thus be more careful) seems like it's priming us to feel he actually likes the idea of being seen as a new Messiah. Whether that's something human beings are tricking him about or related to the death thing I dunno. By the latter I mean: we're tempted to think it's about us, that it's our life that's the special time, that's history's payoff; and the tempter wants us to feel that way so we won't screw up the order actually being maintained, which is just life's progress. Life's world doesn't end, just ours, and it wants us to feel that that's meaningful so that we don't do something stupid to make it meaningful - like kill ourselves. I don't think the brother-in-law is canonizing Kevin to make him stop suffocating himself (mostly because no one writes a whole book to save an in-law), so he's likelier to be setting up some lightning rod version of apocalypse religion designed to redirect enthusiasm that could do harm within a real one, and is just basing it around Kevin. The father who used to be a militant skeptic seems to now be a part of the Kevin cult, and since his present vocation is faking ghosts of dead family members so that their survivors can move on it seems like propping up a strawman messiah would be up his alley. Kevin's ex-wife did almost the same thing with her son last season. Perhaps she decided that this would work much better if the person at the center actually believed in it? "Don't tell the deluded person they're deluded" sounds like a recipe for a fake / methodone religion, and may justify deluding a person or two into being religious to carry it off. The priest's and the acolyte kid's being totally fine with Kevin not actually believing himself baptized fits all this, as does their "hey, thaaat could work" reaction to the car crash meeting story. I guess even to a priest curing the sickness of people like the woman at the beginning - religion addicts - might be seen as a noble endeavor. (Some of this sounds close to Crowley's Daemonomania.)
Something I'm even less sure of: the father of the glasses girl says "she's done it before" when Kevin's incredulous that he's denying the dental evidence of her death. She has, but another person who's done it before is Liv Tyler, who orchestrated the girls' disappearance and the big martyrdom fakeout. Perhaps she's faked another (the poison commemorating it was also fake, after all). Seems like going back to the well too many times, but maybe the show will have it be true in a dream or something. And if she's foreshadowing some later failure rather than the (apparent) present one the writers can get cred points back by depicting that disaster in the finale, I guess.
I didn't see coming that the dog guy was real. He left with Kevin's psychosis, so I guess I assumed he and it were one.
I don't know who the end person is. Kevin's virgin Australian mother? Felt like we were supposed to know or put it together, so maybe I'm just forgetting something.
Wonder what happened to the baby. And the dog? Or was it at the party and I didn't notice.
The Departure itself can't have been a mass put-on, as depicted, but from Tyler's "use death to get yourself to live" perspective it could be seen as a good thing. So whether it happened or not her own martyrdom would get her thumbs up.
Hmm. This whole fucking thing better not be Lindelof trying to persuade us narrative conflict is all we want therefore it doesn't matter how Lost ended. Because if it is I might bite his face off.
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no subject
Date: 2017-04-22 01:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, me too. That last part. This is a great read. I'm wondering if the killing off of problematic elements (the remnant and the dog guy) means we'll have a stranger come to town this season. Who knows. I didn't love the first episode but I'm ready for anything.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-22 04:26 pm (UTC)Still, much more interesting than the Fargo 3 opener. Thewlis and the floor box were promising, and Winstead was amusing, but that was about it.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-22 04:58 pm (UTC)Yes I agree.
no subject
Date: 2017-04-22 04:22 pm (UTC)Big if true!
no subject
Date: 2017-04-22 05:55 pm (UTC)Yeah geez maybe.