“Nothing is Next”: After The Leftovers, After Extinction

In his introduction to the edited volume After Extinction, Richard Grusin questions the chronologically linear assumptions of extinctive thought: "Is extinction something that only happens belatedly, after there are already species or forms or practices in place? Or does the very possibility of extinction work in a more radical form, as already present in the origin of species more generally?"1 Expanding on Grusin's comment, we might ask whether extinction is not the foreclosure of existence but the very condition for its happening in the first place. The HBO adaptation of Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers offers a surreal expression of this possibility. The inexplicable vanishing of two percent of the planet's population — an event dubbed the "Sudden Departure" — manifests as a partial extinction event, an episode of massive species loss. The premise visits upon human beings a tragedy that is all too common among nonhuman species during our ongoing Holocene extinction (better known as the sixth extinction), yet without the requisite anthropogenic conditions for widespread biodiversity loss: global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation, water and soil contamination, and the like. By contrast, the Sudden Departure is ostensibly an annihilatio ex nihilo, with no discernible cause or impetus.

Some may object that the Sudden Departure doesn't qualify as an extinction event since some humans have survived; a species is either extinct or it isn't.2 As viewers learn in the series finale, however, the entire human species has vanished, in a way. In the alternate world that protagonist Nora claims to have visited via an experimental device, she discovers the vanished two percent, for whom an astronomical ninety-eight percent of humankind vanished. The extinction of the entire human species is a virtual reality, realized in the complementary experiences of the ninety-eight percent and the two percent. Moreover, The Leftovers casts the Sudden Departure as a form of extinction through its emphasis on the insurmountable subtraction that has been wedged into its characters' collective reality. As Nora declaims when she accosts Patrick Johansen, an author who wrote a self-help book titled What's Next. (period, no question mark), about moving on after the event: "Nothing is next!" Even for characters who have survived the Sudden Departure, extinction is a palpable aspect of their lived experience.

The Leftovers embeds a sense of visceral extinction at the heart of its fictional world, forcing its characters to acknowledge one another's existence through the condition of irrational loss. The idea of extinction becomes a fixture of social interaction. The narrative's moving irony emerges from this idiosyncrasy of an existence constituted by a virtually total loss. The cast's collective journey toward the show's conclusion becomes one of radical acceptance and persistence. Here, we can invoke Margaret Ronda's elegant reading of the end-of-nature trope to illuminate the effect of the series' structure: "an emphasis on what is not, on the negative workings of creative imagination in light of a concept's withering away."3 In The Leftovers, what withers away is not nature or wilderness (the resurgence of wild dogs in the first season suggests that, at the very least, wilderness remains an idea to be reconciled) but the facticity of human existence, the confidence that our bodies exist in this world. Since the show aired in 2014, the subfield of extinction studies has grown as environmental scientists and humanists have trained their focus on the intersections of ecosystem disruption and social instability. In its depiction of the Sudden Departure, the series offers audiences a world in which the possibility of endurance has become permeated by extinction, the idea of a human species riven by unimaginable and unexpected ruin.

In what follows, I want to examine the haunting effectiveness and theoretical import of extinction in The Leftovers through two key scenes: the famous opening of the season 1 premiere and the concluding montage of season 1, episode 9. Both depict the Sudden Departure, recounting it by degrees both heartbreaking and horrifying. More importantly, however, and despite the foundational significance of this extinctive event in the series' narrative, no human character is ever depicted vanishing onscreen. In every instance, extinction is unrecorded by the camera. Although some of its characters may have hypothetically seen someone vanish, the show's insistence on never depicting a visual vanishing suggests that the Sudden Departure, as an event, is unwitnessed if not unwitnessable. Like extinction itself, it cannot be observed or circumscribed. There is no spectacular disintegration to corporeal ash that accompanies the snap of Thanos's fingers in Marvel's The Avengers: Infinity War (2018). It is as though the Sudden Departure cannot be witnessed because it happens faster than the human eye can even calculate. Those in the proximity of vanished persons look about confusedly, as though they somehow missed someone's exit. The Departure is emphatically non-spectacular, eluding the vision of both characters and the camera.

For this reason, I use the word vanishing and not disappearance, the latter of which underscores a phase shift from seen to unseen, as in the slow dissipation of Infinity War's victims. Disappearance entails visualization, but vanishing happens when we are not looking. Taking place always offscreen, the Sudden Departure happens beyond the frame of human perception. Furthermore, vanishing establishes an etymological link to death: evanescence, a passing away, becoming memory, crossing from presence into absence over a boundary that cannot itself be identified. Finally, the show's commitment to this technique of vanishing carries both theoretical and ethical import, conveying the illogic of identifying extinction as a moment and a disinclination toward gratuitous visualization. In our era of climate crisis, environmental disruption, and heightened political violence, the prospect of extinction feels like an impending yet resolutely invisible happening. The Leftovers asks its audience to think through this impossible happening, and to wrestle with an extinction that is, somehow, already taking place.

In the memorable opening of the series premiere, viewers follow an upper-middle-class mother doing her laundry in a laundromat, crying baby in tow. She speaks to someone on her cellphone, revealing that the basement of her house (presumably where her washer and dryer are located) has flooded. Her exasperation continues in phone conversations with what appear to be customer service representatives regarding unspecified complaints. As she prepares to leave the laundromat, strapping her baby into the car seat and climbing behind the wheel, she pleads with the child to stop crying. The camera slowly glides from the front of the car to the backseat, angling down through the cracked rear window so viewers can see the child, strapped into the seat. As the camera glides forward again, the baby resumes crying, the mother now appearing to speak to her partner or a family member about making baby formula. Suddenly, the crying stops. Two, three seconds pass, and the mother turns, her voice coming to a halt. The camera glides back again, and audiences discover the source of her concern: the car seat is empty, the baby vanished. Throughout the entire sequence, the tension between sight and sound — between what the camera shows us and what we hear happening beyond the frame — heightens viewers' attention to the irreducible moment of vanishing. As the absence of the baby's crying sinks in, audiences identify with the mother, who was not looking, and will always be not looking, when the Sudden Departure occurs.

Ensuing shots convey the extent of what has happened. A grocery cart rolls unattended across a parking lot. A young boy calls for his father. Two cars on a nearby street collide. Finally, a black screen segues into the time of the main narrative action, featuring overlaid 911 calls reporting missing people. Less than three minutes, the short opening introduces audiences to the Sudden Departure. The mother's narrative is relayed in a concatenation of linear but disjointed shots — multiple moments of her errand to the laundromat, all close in proximity to each other, strung together in chronological fashion. By breaking the sequence into short, discrete moments, continuous but not contiguous, the narrative establishes a baseline of tense pacing, amplified by the baby's crying. Combined with its marketing campaign, the premiere's opening scene is an exercise in harnessing audience expectations. We follow the mother, listening to her conversations, paying attention as best we can to details, waiting for the inevitable moment . . . but by the time it arrives, it has already passed. Buried beneath the banality of daily conversations, routines, and to-do lists, the Sudden Departure fails to register — for characters as for the audience — until after it has occurred.

One of The Leftovers' many successes is its ability to deliver the abruptness and absurdity of its premise in sincere tones, such that the incalculable abruptness functions, in fact, as a linchpin of its implicit thought experiment: the experience of extinction. We might be tempted to impose a Freudian reading onto this scenario — the speculative and spectacular imagining of our own deaths — especially given the show's attentiveness to the valences of trauma.4 Yet the emotional gravity of the Sudden Departure rests in its anti-spectacular expression, its occurrence offscreen. The Departed are not exhibited in final moments of agony or expectation but in mundane intimacies: shopping and laundry, or — as the episode 9 montage reveals — sex and science fairs, breakfasts and ultrasounds. The trauma that persists in the wake of the Sudden Departure is not that of Freud's death drive, a movement from bounded organicity to a formless expulsion of energy. Rather, it signals a potentiality (extinction) external to the organism yet somehow constitutive of it.

According to Claire Colebrook, it is precisely this extinctive approach that describes our present dilemma of anthropogenic planetary change: "A species can only survive by mutation and by not being itself; any species also—through that very survival—takes a toll on its milieu that might lead (as in the case of man) to the destruction of life in general."5 The Leftovers locates this contradictory coexistence of life and extinction in the non-spectacle of the Sudden Departure. Extinction cannot be identified as a singular event because it has already happened; the characters of The Leftovers confront this loss as antecedent if not foundational to life itself. The Sudden Departure is an estranging expression of this philosophical idiosyncrasy: that extinction precedes existence. "Nothing is next" doesn't mean no one goes on living. It means that loss is always ineluctably present. Nothing is always next.6

After viewing the premiere's intense opening, audiences might expect that the series would, eventually, grant a more revealing portrayal of the Sudden Departure; but although we see more goings-on for the show's characters, we are never given any visual depiction of disappearance. The thrill of this optical strategy is on full display in the closing montage of season 1, episode 9, titled "The Garveys at Their Best," which recounts Nora's and the Garvey family's lives in the moments leading up to the Sudden Departure. In the minutes immediately prior to the vanishings, Nora's husband and two children sit at their kitchen table in the morning sunlight, her daughter accidentally spilling juice on Nora's cellphone. The Garvey half-siblings, Tom and Jill, are at a science fair, holding hands with classmates and using their bodies' electricity to illuminate a bulb. Kevin Garvey, a police officer, has sex with a woman he has just met, who struck a deer with her car. Laurie Garvey, Kevin's wife, watches the ultrasound of their unborn baby.

Each of these scenarios leverages a form of connectivity to highlight the impact of the Sudden Departure, its inevitable happening irreducible to any temporal experience. The bulb at the science fair goes out, implying that someone from the handholding circle has vanished. Nora walks toward a vacant kitchen table, a tipped glass dripping juice onto the floor. Kevin throws the sheets from an empty hotel bed, his partner having vanished mid-intercourse. And Laurie stares in confusion and subtle dread at the ultrasound, invisible to viewers, her unborn baby presumably having vanished from the screen. It is this final scenario, which also concludes the montage, that performs the Sudden Departure's optical evasiveness most effectively.

As viewers, we can only intuit the fetus's vanishing through Laurie's facial expression; we watch her onscreen watching a screen. At the moment of the Sudden Departure, she and the sonographer are distracted by a scream from another room. Just as the absence of sound augments the impossible moment of vanishing in the series premier, the anonymous scream of episode 9 both highlights the Sudden Departure and interrupts it, commanding our attention and preventing us from witnessing. By the time Laurie looks back at the screen, the fetus has vanished. The logistics of this scene beg certain questions. If the Sudden Departure happens instantaneously everywhere — and if we can assume that the scream issued from someone reacting to a vanishing — then Laurie's baby would have vanished before they heard the scream. This logic requires some assumptions (namely about the source of the scream), but we can confidently say that the effect of the montage supports these assumptions; the scream can be read plausibly as someone's reaction to a vanishing. Why, then, the temporal disunity in this scene? Would Laurie not have witnessed the fetus vanish from the screen and looked back quickly, even after being distracted by a scream? Instead, she looks back as though she expects to still see the ultrasound image of her baby. Although seemingly contradictory, it is precisely this disunity that emphasizes the Sudden Departure's irreducibility. For characters in the show, the moment is over before it has happened. It will always and forever be missed.

In its anti-spectacular representation of the Sudden Departure, The Leftovers rescinds any implicit offer of objective singularity that viewers might anticipate. Rather, the event is only accessible through an assemblage of what Donna Haraway has called situated knowledges, partial perspectives that reject the imperial regime of total vision.7 Adopting a montage technique, the show leverages partial perspective at the formal level, structuring its shots around a central, singular occurrence that evades any privileged viewpoint. Insofar as extinction remains inaccessible in itself, happening beyond our full capacity to observe it, the Sudden Departure embodies a dark mirror of human extinction, an experience that realizes extinction at the heart of human life. The situatedness of this experience also constitutes what I would call the show's ethics of extinction, which comprise its rejection of both spectacle and any claims to objectivity. In this light, the scene of Laurie's ultrasound can be read as an inversion and critique of the 1984 anti-abortion propaganda video, The Silent Scream, which pairs highly problematic ultrasound imagery of an abortion procedure with the absence of sound, the nonexistent "silent scream" of the fetus. The Silent Scream aspires to an objective and infallible moralism, heightening its gratuitous visuals through the implied titular scream; by contrast, The Leftovers presents an audible but disembodied scream, the sound pulling both Laurie and the audience away from any visual confirmation. The scene undermines the moral and anatomical certitude with which The Silent Scream treats its audiovisual content, linking the ethics of extinction to the politics of bodily autonomy. Extinction becomes a form of lived experience for victims of biopolitical domination and legislation; the denial of autonomy compromises the embodied subject. Extinction manifests most viscerally for Laurie not in the loss of her child but in the sudden dispossession of her body.

Building on the series' ethical concerns, the first season trains its cinematic eye on the suburban town of Mapleton, its residents mostly upper-middle-class White people. As critics and activists have long announced, extinction has been a "slowly evolving global disaster" for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.8 The shock of The Leftovers derives partially from this racial transgression, reinforced by the reactionary mantra "it can't happen here." But the Sudden Departure happens everywhere, has happened everywhere, indiscriminately. Considering Indigenous perspectives, we might juxtapose the suburban sprawl of Mapleton with the urban sprawl of 1924 New York City, as described by explorer and Indigenous Greenlander Arnarulunnguaq: "I see things more than my mind can grasp," Knud Rasmussen records Arnarulunnguaq saying; "and the only way to save oneself from madness is to suppose that we have all died suddenly before we knew, and that this is part of another life."9 There remains, in these lines, the problem that Arnarulunnguaq's words are being recalled and recorded by a White man; but even despite this cultural mediation, her words resonate with The Leftovers. Arnarulunnguaq imagines herself (not to mention the hundreds she sees below, walking the city streets) as one of the Departed, vanished, in this scenario, by the monolithic presence of industrial modernity. The very existence of the urban landscape expresses a certain foreclosure of human existence, as though the rise of the modern city constitutes a kind of tomb. Given a minoritarian voice, extinction reveals itself to be already embedded in our lives, inscribed by the histories of capitalism and colonialism.

In most mainstream apocalyptic and dystopian narratives, the threat of extinction posed to White characters can be read as a kind of fantasy — the dominant culture representing itself as diminished, yet valiantly resisting attack, as in John Krasinski's A Quiet Place (2018) — but The Leftovers pushes against this reading by subverting heroic narratives of salvation (if not avoiding them entirely). The show is not about overcoming and understanding the Sudden Departure but about accepting and learning to live with it. Whereas apocalypse implies an unveiling or revelation, the Sudden Departure reveals nothing. It is an anti-spectacular anti-apocalypse, a dystopia that proffers neither an explanation of its origins nor a rationale for its impact. In her writing on speculative aesthetics under the aegis of climate change and other ecological metamorphoses, Elvia Wilk suggests that "[m]any of us have successfully outsourced dystopia to somewhere else. But now it is here, because it is everywhere."10 Presenting a similarly ubiquitous calamity, The Leftovers serves as a quietly salient document of ecological crisis, imagining a planetwide rupture that doesn't discriminate in terms of its victims.

As human welfare worsens in the age of advanced climate change and the threat of widespread mortality increases (both between and within species), the prospect of extinction edges away from the periphery and closer to the center of our cultural outlook. Nearly each day that passes poses new challenges of focus and contemplation, from lethal heat waves in India to hurricanes and wildfires in the United States. The transition of such events from anomaly to normality installs a greater need for aesthetic and theoretical exercises that address the immanence of extinction in our daily lives. The Leftovers models such exercises, affording popular audiences the chance to internalize the meaning of extinction on personal, social, and cultural levels. It asks us to consider the persistence of loss throughout our daily existence and across timescales as a feature of planetary being.

By way of conclusion, I turn briefly to the opening of the season 2 premiere, which depicts a sequence of human prehistory. A hunter-gatherer is separated from her community by an earthquake before giving birth. Later, she suffers a fatal snakebite when defending her infant child, who is then taken by another nomadic woman after the mother succumbs to the wound. The entire sequence takes place in the geographic location that serves as season 2's main setting: Jarden, Texas, a town that claims to have lost no one in the Sudden Departure, and whose name carries religious overtones with its homonymic combination of garden and Jordan. Featuring a mother who perishes and a child who persists, the sequence also recalls Laurie's ultrasound scenes in "The Garveys at Their Best." As a weird and silent (the sequence features no dialogue) counterpoint to the Sudden Departure, the opening of season two could be seen as resisting the theme of extinction. The child's rescue implies a sense of normative, even conservative, futurity — that younger generations will perpetuate human existence, that children are the future. Yet the events of season two complicate this reading. When an earthquake again strikes Jarden in the present, three young women from the town vanish in an eerie thematic echo of the Sudden Departure, only to turn up later as having faked their vanishing and joined the post-Departure cult, the Guilty Remnant. Their stunt is a form of quiet protest, a thorn in the side of Jarden's milquetoast liberal optimism, ultimately leading to the destruction of the town by season two's end. Through its interplay of futurity's promise and the creep of extinction, juxtaposed with its long temporal framing from prehistory to the present, the second season builds on the extinctive dimension of the first. Jarden's fantasy — an Edenic dream that conjures life prior to the Sudden Departure — is betrayed by revelations of the unrest that permeates the town, culminating in its inevitable downfall. Moving on means working with and through loss, not cleansing it from our cultural memory. From start to finish, The Leftovers refuses any escape from extinction, offering instead the impossibility of reconciling extinction's material reality with narratives of visual circumscription. The Sudden Departure remains a visceral experience of daily life despite its refusal to abide perceptual authority. Insofar as we exist, The Leftovers suggests, we do so according to the unobservable guarantee of extinction.

---

Patrick Whitmarsh is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross and author of Writing Our Extinction: Anthropocene Fiction and Vertical Science. His current work focuses on extrapolations of crisis and genre in contemporary literature and film.

---

References