Is The Leftovers the most important television show since Twin Peaks? Stewart Gardiner visits the other side to find out.
By Stewart Gardiner // The greatest show on television returns for its third season. Bold and strange; haunting and haunted; depressing and sometimes even hilarious–it is all these things and more. I could be talking about Twin Peaks, but I’m not. I’m talking about The Leftovers.
It may not have the cultural impact of Twin Peaks. However, its reputation will continue to grow over time, because The Leftovers is the most significant show of this golden age of television.
What exactly does The Leftovers have to do with Twin Peaks? A good question. Each show deals in good and difficult questions, so there’s that. There are certainly thematic links worth exploring. It also helps that Justin Theroux provides a superficial connection between The Leftovers and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
Lynchian
Twin Peaks occupies a uniquely strange and wonderful space in television. Its weirdness sets it apart and no one does weird like David Lynch. Although many have tried. That’s why the term “Lynchian” actually carries some meaning – or at least a feeling of what it could mean.
None of that is to say that television went back to normal after Twin Peaks. How could it? Twin Peaks hinted at endless possibilities within TV and other creators took notice. The heavily serialized storytelling wasn’t the immediate takeaway – Twin Peaks’ early death at the hands of the network was warning enough against that. Serialization would become standard practice in time of course, with a little help from social media, original cable programming and streaming platforms.
Those Left Behind
The X-Files combined mythological mini-arcs with monster of the week episodes, which worked well until the mythology unraveled later on. Buffy the Vampire Slayer focused on a yearly big bad, perfecting the season-long arc in the process. Although much of that was also down to creator Joss Whedon not knowing each year if they’d even get another season.
Then came LOST. Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams doubled down on the mystery, mythology and serialized storytelling practiced by Twin Peaks. As a result, LOST is by far the strangest of the post-Twin Peaks network shows. It is strange on its own terms, as distinct from David Lynch as it is from everything else.
A Matter of Geography
Twin Peaks also had a profound influence on certain golden age cable shows. David Chase has been very open about The Sopranos’ debt to Twin Peaks for example. The Sopranos is nothing less than a metaphysical meditation in gangster’s clothing and contains more dream sequences than I ever recall seeing in The Godfather or Goodfellas. One of the most memorable of these takes the metaphorical “sleeps with the fishes” and makes it literal. Tony’s friend and associate Pussy confesses that he ratted Tony out. That he is a talking fish in a dream heightens rather than lessens the revelation’s impact.
Damon Lindelof made the move from network television to pay cable and HBO with The Leftovers. LOST established Lindelof as a storytelling risk-taker. With The Leftovers he has pushed such impulses even further, to wondrous effect.
Let the Mystery Be
Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta adapted The Leftovers from the latter’s novel. It takes place three years after the Sudden Departure: a rapture-like event where 2% of the world’s population vanished. The Leftovers asks how people would cope under such circumstances. Do not expect the Departure event to be explained. Not that kind of show.
Kevin Garvey is the closest thing to a central POV character. He is chief of police in the New York state town of Mapleton; a position recently vacated by his father, who has been hearing voices. Kevin may on paper be in a powerful position, but only experiences powerlessness as he also seems to be losing his mind. Like Cooper, Kevin isn’t ultimately an outsider at odds with all the crazy that is going on. He is an active participant in it, despite his reluctance to be so.
Dream Logic
Justin Theroux portrays Kevin as wonderfully bewildered, haunted, angry, charming, funny, and, yes, sexy. Theroux knows how to navigate weird from working with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire. “Damon is not dissimilar [to Lynch],” he has said. “I think in a weird way, they want either some of the imagery or the themes to wash over you subconsciously. There’s a kind of dream logic to both of them.”
Season 2 of The Leftovers embraces the dream logic and then some. It is at once stranger and more purposeful than the first season, which had used up the source material by the finale. Season 2 moves the action to Miracle, Texas, a geographical anomaly where no Departures took place. It’s a fresh start, except Kevin cannot shake his past.
He has become literally haunted by his most powerful adversary, Mapleton’s Guilty Remnant leader Patti Levin. The GR were season 1’s big bad, a post-Departure cult who wear white, don’t talk and smoke to remember. Patti died in Kevin’s arms after committing suicide and sticks to him like glue now that she is dead.
Where is Here?
A man called Virgil believes he can assist Kevin in getting rid of Patti. However, it means Kevin will have to die first! Kevin has reached breaking point and agrees to the plan. He ingests poison that Virgil has prepared and does indeed die. Virgil then takes his own life.
The following episode, “International Assassin”, fully commits to the otherworldly. Kevin doesn’t just wake up in another place. He slithers out of a bathtub full of water, as if re-born. So what strange and magical surroundings does he find himself in? What fantastical kingdom of the beyond? It is a hotel. As cosmic staging areas go, it might seem radically at odds with the Lodge in Twin Peaks. Although the Lodge did take the form of a waiting room, albeit without the magazines.
Meet Cute
In Fire Walk With Me, the long-vanished Agent Jeffries re-appears in the Philadelphia FBI offices. He starts raving about a meeting above a convenience store with the denizens of the Lodge. Glimpses of the convenience store invade the scene like a parasite battling with its host. That an otherworldly location appears as a space with functional purpose within the real world is somehow entirely appropriate. A convenience store does seem like a uniquely American Hell.
One thinks of business meetings taking place in hotels. Why not cosmic business meetings or encounters in the space between the business of life and death? The Leftovers made prior use of a hotel in the Nora-centric “Guest” from season 1. Nora Durst attends a Departure Related Occupations and Practices conference and discovers someone is impersonating her. The episode re-casts the commonplace as cosmic joke, a Kafkaesque situation without the fantastical. Everyday surrealism, if you like.
International Assassin
Know first who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.
So reads the plaque on the wardrobe door in Kevin’s hotel room. He opens the wardrobe to find a selection of outfits. There’s a Mapleton police uniform, religious garments, GR whites and the sharpest of suits. After a moment’s consideration he takes the suit and puts it on. Turns out that he has chosen the life of an international assassin. Traveling the world, no family ties, killing without conscience. Does Kevin choose who he is or who he wants to be? How could he have known what the suit represented? It is a blank slate.
Kevin opens the door of his wardrobe in the first episode of the third season and selects a dry cleaned uniform. It eerily echoes the scene in the hotel, despite supposedly taking place in reality. Has the other world become so real that it is the real world now? Perhaps Kevin has become trapped, rather like Agent Cooper.
The transitions between scenes in “International Assassin” represent synaptic overlaps as the previous scene imprints upon the next. It’s less like a dream than malfunctioning memory.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Garvey has signed into the hotel as Kevin Harvey. It is him, but not him. The same, but not quite the same. “She’s my cousin. But doesn’t she look almost exactly like Laura Palmer?” the Man From Another Place tells Agent Cooper in his first Red Room dream. When Cooper accesses the Lodge in the Twin Peaks season 2 finale, he finds doppelgangers of other characters, including himself. Cooper must face himself in the Lodge, as must Kevin in the hotel.
It goes beyond doubling though. Patti Levin appears as a young girl, a senator and finally her contemporary self in the hotel world. “You’ve got to stop thinking in such straight lines,” Virgil tells Kevin. “Because she surely will not be. She thinks in spirals, and helixes, and zigzags, and circles.” Kevin must piece together Patti’s fractured soul before he can let go of her.
Water Cooler TV
I drank that shit that you gave me and then I woke up in a bathtub.
Water plays a multiplicity of roles within the second season of The Leftovers. A cavewoman died protecting her baby from a snake in the location of the town’s spring. It is also the real world location of a well in that other place, where Kevin must take Patti. Kevin tries to drown himself, but the earth opens up and the water drains away. He enters the hotel through a bathtub. His spirit guide Virgil asks worriedly if Kevin has drunk any water since arriving at the hotel.
“No matter what, don’t drink the water here,” Virgil warns Kevin. “And where is here?” Kevin asks. “You mean the hotel?” “It’s not a fucking hotel!”
Virgil is Kevin’s spirit guide who is atoning for past transgressions (a version of Leland Palmer conscious of his sins). He finally drinks the water to forget. But he has at least already assisted Kevin in his quest. Kevin’s father tried to be his guide in season 1, but Kevin wasn’t ready.
Was Cooper ready when he stepped into the Lodge? He accepts a cup of coffee there. But the state of the coffee transmutes, disobeys the laws of physics. Did accepting it allow him to become Laura’s spirit guide? Perhaps it trapped him there, yet gave him purpose. Powerful questions that may have answers in the third season of Twin Peaks.
Fire Talk With Me
Son, I am fucked up on this shit they call God’s Tongue, so I really hope this is real.
“International Assassin” defines dream logic on The Leftovers. There’s an astonishing scene where Kevin’s father contacts him from Australia via the television in the hotel room. It’s a matter of space-time geography because they are each occupying the same room, yet somehow not. His father has ingested God’s Tongue and his aboriginal colleagues have lit a fire behind him. The fire in his father’s room sets off the fire alarm in Kevin’s version of the room.
The heady dream logic recalls Laura opening the door in her room and the picture on her wall at the same time in Fire Walk With Me. Communication is possible across the interstices between worlds.
Unwell
To rid himself of Patti, Kevin must push little girl Patti into a well. His father communicated this to him. Kevin has already saved her from drowning in the hotel pool and assassinated Senator Levin. He must know his enemy before destroying her. “I feel sorry for you,” he tells her in a scene that will rip the heart out of you.
Kevin tries to deflect responsibility for what he is about to do. “None of this is real,” he says to a man on the bridge over troubled waters, desperation in his voice. “Friend,” the man tells him, “this is more real than it’s ever been.” What a brilliantly evocative statement. The Leftovers gets more and more real as it goes on, just as it gets stranger and stranger. Its world will be ending soon, but at least by then we’ll have Twin Peaks to tide us over.