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May. 6th, 2017 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionThe Leftovers 3.3
So we have confirmation that Kevin's father was in fact in a hotel room in Perth with Aboriginal body paint on and a bed on fire and a chicken on the television (forgot this detail). I guess he could have called Kevin and described all this, with Kevin hearing it from the answering machine while temporarily dead and just interpreting it as a tv show in his vision thing. Though was he even in his house at the time? I thought he was at the voodoo guy's shack, and then getting buried in the woods nearby, though. This is relevant because other than the Departure there is literally no other confirmed supernatural occurrence. But I think there's juuuuust enough wiggle room to do a takebacksy if they feel like it.
Were the contents of the National Geographic issue actually relevant to the episode? I can't even remember what they were. Something about Egypt? The Biblical Flood is presumably based on earlier stories in turn inspired by the flooding of the Nile or some other great river. I guess mostly it's just their high water mark tease, and especially so for Bishop fans. "In the Waiting Room" is about a different sort of flood, after all. And, in a sense, one prevented by song.
So life itself is the great miracle, the true implausibility, and death itself is the great vanishing. Just as Emerson in Nature pointed out that if the stars appeared once in a century we would fall down in amazed worship, speak of nothing else etc., the Departure compresses the strangeness of death into one event. Not the violence or the ubiquity so much as the fact that a perspective that the world is present to can suddenly not exist, which is equaled in singularity only by the fact that one had existed at all. Dead loved ones bring this strangeness home, requiring one to come up with either an explanation why or with an explanation why there cannot possibly be one - which is why these are the two forms of sickness most of the characters have exhibited. How do you snap people out of either without just switching them to the other? Prove to the explainer that they've tricked themself and they'll just be sad till they're tricked again (like the Australian woman); prove to the explainer-away that they don't have all the answers and they'll so the same. People have great difficulty living with uncertainties when these are both specific and momentous. The show handled this especially well with Nora in 3.2: someone tells you to fly to Australia to see your vanished kids and you WILL fly to Australia, even if your job is shutting down manipulators of others' grief. The cure for death will have to be stranger than the phenomenon of death to be categorically disbelieved, and it's not clear that anything can be.
On the show, anyway. But the show gets to cheat, because it's often unclear whether an impossible occurrence is supposed to be tv-possible in the show's view - e.g. Kevin's death vision or his hallucinations of people. Schizophrenia doesn't work like that, but TV schizophrenia maybe gets to. Ditto with near death experiences. The disturbing fact that we can't (at the time of watching) actually prove these things can't happen gets mixed up with television's license to tell certain kinds of lies in order to represent truths (e.g. a black screen is someone's eyes being closed, or Kevin talking to a dead woman he may be hallucinating is presented with both in the same frame as though seen by another rather than him, representing how he feels the two of them WOULD be seen). How unlikely IS it to have a police chief named Kevin within 20 km of one in the Outback? One just doesn't have the right reference volumes on hand to answer that. Can only think, "That's either the kind of thing that cannot happen, thus never does, or the kind that only rarely does, thus does constantly, since nothing's commoner than a second where something rare is happening somewhere or other."
I hope they come back to the guy who set himself on fire at some point. He could just be a fellow crazy person, whose voices just happened to tell him to kill a baby, making him a fairly simple foil for the father: is the latter willing to hurt innocents to feed his addiction to "purpose"? How many? And of what sort? Christopher Sunday seems a subtle suggestion that one could be killing off one's true chance of salvation in pursuit of a hallucinated one. The Australian police chief, an even more indirect victim, is a terrible person, but the father may be misdirecting an innocent woman at episode's end, which could lead to her destruction. May, in fact, be setting her up to kill his own son, hence the bringing up of Isaac - and his having been an adult - earlier in the episode. The woman's need to believe really may have led to the sacrifice of her own five children.
So we have confirmation that Kevin's father was in fact in a hotel room in Perth with Aboriginal body paint on and a bed on fire and a chicken on the television (forgot this detail). I guess he could have called Kevin and described all this, with Kevin hearing it from the answering machine while temporarily dead and just interpreting it as a tv show in his vision thing. Though was he even in his house at the time? I thought he was at the voodoo guy's shack, and then getting buried in the woods nearby, though. This is relevant because other than the Departure there is literally no other confirmed supernatural occurrence. But I think there's juuuuust enough wiggle room to do a takebacksy if they feel like it.
Were the contents of the National Geographic issue actually relevant to the episode? I can't even remember what they were. Something about Egypt? The Biblical Flood is presumably based on earlier stories in turn inspired by the flooding of the Nile or some other great river. I guess mostly it's just their high water mark tease, and especially so for Bishop fans. "In the Waiting Room" is about a different sort of flood, after all. And, in a sense, one prevented by song.
So life itself is the great miracle, the true implausibility, and death itself is the great vanishing. Just as Emerson in Nature pointed out that if the stars appeared once in a century we would fall down in amazed worship, speak of nothing else etc., the Departure compresses the strangeness of death into one event. Not the violence or the ubiquity so much as the fact that a perspective that the world is present to can suddenly not exist, which is equaled in singularity only by the fact that one had existed at all. Dead loved ones bring this strangeness home, requiring one to come up with either an explanation why or with an explanation why there cannot possibly be one - which is why these are the two forms of sickness most of the characters have exhibited. How do you snap people out of either without just switching them to the other? Prove to the explainer that they've tricked themself and they'll just be sad till they're tricked again (like the Australian woman); prove to the explainer-away that they don't have all the answers and they'll so the same. People have great difficulty living with uncertainties when these are both specific and momentous. The show handled this especially well with Nora in 3.2: someone tells you to fly to Australia to see your vanished kids and you WILL fly to Australia, even if your job is shutting down manipulators of others' grief. The cure for death will have to be stranger than the phenomenon of death to be categorically disbelieved, and it's not clear that anything can be.
On the show, anyway. But the show gets to cheat, because it's often unclear whether an impossible occurrence is supposed to be tv-possible in the show's view - e.g. Kevin's death vision or his hallucinations of people. Schizophrenia doesn't work like that, but TV schizophrenia maybe gets to. Ditto with near death experiences. The disturbing fact that we can't (at the time of watching) actually prove these things can't happen gets mixed up with television's license to tell certain kinds of lies in order to represent truths (e.g. a black screen is someone's eyes being closed, or Kevin talking to a dead woman he may be hallucinating is presented with both in the same frame as though seen by another rather than him, representing how he feels the two of them WOULD be seen). How unlikely IS it to have a police chief named Kevin within 20 km of one in the Outback? One just doesn't have the right reference volumes on hand to answer that. Can only think, "That's either the kind of thing that cannot happen, thus never does, or the kind that only rarely does, thus does constantly, since nothing's commoner than a second where something rare is happening somewhere or other."
I hope they come back to the guy who set himself on fire at some point. He could just be a fellow crazy person, whose voices just happened to tell him to kill a baby, making him a fairly simple foil for the father: is the latter willing to hurt innocents to feed his addiction to "purpose"? How many? And of what sort? Christopher Sunday seems a subtle suggestion that one could be killing off one's true chance of salvation in pursuit of a hallucinated one. The Australian police chief, an even more indirect victim, is a terrible person, but the father may be misdirecting an innocent woman at episode's end, which could lead to her destruction. May, in fact, be setting her up to kill his own son, hence the bringing up of Isaac - and his having been an adult - earlier in the episode. The woman's need to believe really may have led to the sacrifice of her own five children.
