Care, Interrupted: Social Reproduction, Infrastructures of Care, and the Return to Fatherhood Fantasy in The Leftovers

"Young Mother" and the Crisis in Social Reproduction

February 2019: I fold laundry while watching television, watching a mother sort laundry under a television, both of us unaware of what's about to happen; in the background of my screen is another screen, the network news she's not watching as she does her own laundry, while she tries to negotiate a job, while her baby cries in the car carrier she's brought into the laundromat. The background of her life and mine is the everyday disaster of parental life in the United States: no childcare for preschool children, no place for paid work while doing care work, no time away from the double shift of work at home and the permanently moveable office we keep on our phones.1 And things are about to get so much worse: a worldwide event that will remove one in every fifty people in the world of the show (or twelve in every thousand, in the case of COVID), while heightening the pre-existing horror of imagining care work, children, a future, without a functional childcare infrastructure that would support it.

The Leftovers restages, through the tropes of post-apocalyptic fantasy, the everyday impossibility of care work in America, even as it proleptically enacts a mass trauma about to occur in reality. The show reimagines the everydayness of infrastructural failure through a partially compensatory narrative of mass trauma, personal loss, political failure, and collective paranoia. It's particularly interested in what happens when we leave (cis)gendered roles within the maintenance of "standard" hetero-reproductive care work to directly confront a collective crisis of social reproduction; what happens when a mother refuses to mother, the fiancée refuses to plan the wedding, instead bearing witness to the pain and loss that cannot be located neatly within the standard family romance? What happens when the father has to learn to provide the care he never experienced — or fails to do so? The series explores border cases between public and private care work, where the paradoxes of interrupted caring can be fully played out: the police as bearers of legitimate outer violence and illegitimate internal damage; the social worker bound to her own experience of dispossession; the firefighter as arsonist; the healer as leader of a private cult that obsessively recreates the loss of the Great Departure. Because all these are fantasies of dispossession, trauma, and projective re-enactment, we need the resources of psychoanalytic criticism, social reproductive theory, and a psychoanalytically informed theory of television narrative to fully investigate their meaning. Reading the Leftovers' fantasies of refusal and displacement in relation to real crises in social reproduction requires us to "read the desire" of the show's audience as mediated through the fantasy-images of the screen, and to read the individual fantasies emplotted onto characters as symptomatic of more general desires, impasses, and psychic structures.2 We need to read this show as psychoanalytic critics of social reproduction and its impasses — impasses vividly foregrounded in the pandemic — and also as critics of the aesthetic mediation of crises of social reproduction, mediations like the serialized family melodrama form of The Leftovers.

In serialized family melodrama, meaning is distinctively delayed, interrupted, and interruptive, for reasons both of form and of audience. We can see this in the opening scene of the show, which gives us much of the drama of care(work), interrupted, through the crisis of an allegorically named "Young Mother" folding laundry in the first scene (played by Natalie Gold). The labor and the crises of "Young Mother" will be repeated and iterated many times, in scenes of everydayness more important than the ruptures that follow. "Young Mother" is both allegoric and unnamed, in part because she stands in for a daytime television audience: caregivers without hope of salvation from everyday life, except perhaps through the aesthetic devices of the television that stands just over Young Mother's shoulder in the laundromat. The formal Departure that animates the pilot episode is, in one sense, the arrival of artistic transformation itself, in the form of the show's central conceit: the Departure from the everyday, enacted as a kind of secular Rapture. The show's title retains this double reference to the transcendence of art's breaking and to the everydayness that conditions its possibilities, referring both those "left behind" by the Sudden Departure, and to the leftovers on the table where the Departed were sitting.3

We can read "Young Mother" and her opening scene of carework within a specific form — the pilot — that enacts interruption and delay on many levels. A "pilot" is itself a fascinatingly interruptive form: made months or years earlier than the rest of the season which it claims to commence, the pilot has to tell (for market purposes) a compelling story within the constraints of an episode — as the further arc of a show often hasn't been written — even as it points forward to the longer serial developments of a possible season. Even for a well-established showrunner like Damon Lindelof, and with Tom Perrotta's novel as a conceptual basis, the pilot form is an act of faith in a narrative, interrupted.

"Pilot" (as it is named, season 1, episode 1) begins the sequence of the show's thinking about care work, domesticity, and Departure across three different dimensions: it is the pilot for a show that may not go further, thus must stand alone; it is the beginning of season 1, thus sets up the fundamental situation of the Garvey family in particular; it also forms the first part of a stand-alone historical triad, with the first episodes of season 2 and 3, that center on women reproducing the social world (or trying to leave it behind) in the face of terrifying odds. The pilot of The Leftovers thus lets us see the ways television can stage and identify its own interruptive, anti-teleological purposes - as what we watch to escape from conflicts identified in the opening scene, as a departure from everyday life within the confines and conditions of that life, as something we might watch while doing the laundry. The entire thrust of serialized prestige television (by 2014) had been away from its origins in the episodic life of daytime television, oriented towards the supposedly "amnesiac" housewife of the fifties and sixties, and toward long arcs, novel-esque character development, and extreme forms of serialized delay.4 From the domestic dramas and sitcoms of the Golden Era of television, we move to the supposedly more complex and certainly more masculine traumas and crises of prestige television.5 The Leftovers inherits and rehearses this tendency to long arcs, peripatetic rupture, and the extreme delay of revelation, adding a recursive temporal structure that constantly shifts before and after the point of Departure. But that tendency in "prestige" television (and its criticism) might make us miss the daytime television genres that Leftovers also clearly recalls: the soap operas, telenovelas, and family dramas that generated prestige serial television (through another ground-breaking innovation within serialized melodrama form: Twin Peaks). "Daytime" television distinctively centers on women's lives, dramas, and fantasies, in distinction to the decidedly masculine, if not masculinist, traumatized men of prestige TV.

The opening of "Pilot" both recalls and interrupts the conventions of the daytime melodrama, precisely through its attention to the everyday difficulty of the daytime audience. Even before the opening shot of the first episode, we hear a crying baby, as the subtitles tell us (care workers always have subtitles on while watching television because the laundry is on, the vacuum is running, or the kids are sleeping in the next room). It's October 14: the day of the Great Departure. We see "Young Mother" complain that when she was even younger things were easier, the laundromat wasn't digital, the reference number wasn't sent by email, you just used quarters for laundry. She's thus either a geriatric millennial or young Gen Xer, raised before the Flood of digital content, but parenting within it. We see as well her class position: not a regular laundry user, just caught in a sudden flood that has ruined her machines and her husband's exercise equipment, a little embarrassed by the fact. An HBO (Max) viewer, in other words. The opening also given us a precise religious positioning, though one that won't be noted as such by that audience: when the change machine doesn't work, "Young Mother" says "Oh, goddamn it," and then immediately describes a flood in her basement. We are thus positioned within a secular but also distinctly post-Judeo-Christian story, for an audience that damns the laundry but feels no worries about thus damning itself to the Flood that will follow. 

Fig. 1: "Young Mother," in season 1, episode 1, "Pilot"

This opening sequence sets up the structure of identification with at least two kind of implied care workers negotiating crisis: first, our "Young Mother" caring for a baby, alone; then Kevin Garvey, the nurturing father, reaching out to an abandoned dog. Both objects of solicited care will shortly vanish without a trace. The entire first sequence is composed of medium-close shots, with sporadic, interruptive cuts between calls to friends, repair call lines, domestic tasks, interlaced with dialogue that is self-interrupting; the only continuity in the scene is the laundromat and the crying baby. Our viewer and our protagonist are constantly being interrupted and interrupting themselves. The camera's view is not just on Young Mother but her entire context of domestic labor, including the long rows of empty laundry machines and the cars passing outside; her work is constantly present and overlapping, domestic tasks interfacing with relationship management and the cognitive load of managing the baby formula, the keys, the repairs, and all of it occurring in the midst of caring for a sobbing infant that she apparently cannot leave behind even for an hour. The camera moves back and forth from her face to the face of the baby, who suddenly falls silent, staring upwards.

What will happen next is the moment of the suddenness of the departure, the transcendent removal from social reproduction, the trauma of loss, all framed through an empty baby carrier. When you've labored over a baby carrier for a child or two you know every detail: the restraining bar, the WARNING + ADVERTENCIA label at left, the click of the latch and the straps. That's what Young Mother is looking at just after the Departure: the baby carrier that remains after its purpose has been removed, the space where the object of care once was, the silence in place of crying. What remains after the interruption of care is the point of the shot, and a primary concern of the show (fig. 1).

Fig. 2: "Young Mother" and empty baby carrier, season 1, episode 1, "Pilot"

This shot — a scene of ordinary care work, interrupted — will recur throughout the following seasons. The empty chair is recalled in the breakfast scene at the Dursts, and its macabre reproduction by the Guilty Remnant; it recurs as well in the next scene, when Kevin Garvey's small act of care for an abandoned dog is violently interrupted by a gunshot from outside the frame. Rather than transcendent acts from above, these shots and sequences create an artistic parenthesis between the everyday labor of social (re)production and the moment of formal and contemplative departure from the work of work and care. They represent a rupture in the everydayness of care work that allows space for the aesthetic mediation and working-through of unbearable traumatic materials, in psychoanalytic terms. The Departure is, in the aesthetic sense, the show itself, its investigation into the drama of caring, the way it splits our public and private life, its symbolic projection and resolution of actually irresolvable conflicts and tension. The objective correlatives of that drama of departure are the empty baby carriers, re-collaged family albums, and the uneaten leftovers on the Dursts' kitchen table. In the absence of a transcendent structure of meaning which would explain the work and the loss; in the absence of causes and final days; in the structural absence of both God and his secular double, the Father, we are left with the close examination of an empty baby carrier, an unfinished meal, an abandoned "Young Mother." What is left over is the work of care, interrupted.

Invisible Labor, Infrastructural Inversion, and the Return to Fatherhood Fantasy

The uncanniness of The Leftovers is the way in which it anticipates interruptive crisis, paranoid epistemologies, and traumatic displacements that were then actualized by a global pandemic. The show engages, before the fact and in its formal structures as well as themes, what Meng Li and Corrina Laughlin call the moment of "infrastructural inversion" that working parents and children experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment when the gaps and failures within the American childcare "system" in particular became impossible not to see.6 Infrastructural inversion, a term derived from the work of Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, "encourages analysts to uncover the invisible, behind-the-scenes work that maintains the smooth operation of systems."7 What happens in both The Leftovers and then in the pandemic, as life imitating art, is a crisis of infrastructural life in which normative sex/gender/class expectations of care work become unstable, and flip: the police chief becomes primary caretaker, his talking-cure professional-class wife enters a cult-like group dedicated to silence and endless housework, among other things, in a group which her own patient leads.

Theoretical work on the infrastructure of care work builds on the notion of "hidden labor" that feminist socialists like Silvia Federici and Nicole Cox developed during their "Wages for Housework" campaign of the 1970s as part of their critique of gendered social reproduction under capitalism.8 "Housework is much more than house cleaning. It is servicing the wage earners physically, emotionally, sexually, getting them ready for work day after day. It is taking care of our children — the future workers — assisting them from birth through their school years, ensuring that they too perform in the ways expected of them under capitalism." As feminist theorists and social reproduction theorists since "Wages for Housework" have explored, the "invisible labor" of social reproduction and caretaking — the "hidden work" of women, for the most part - underwrites the visible waged labor of the (largely male) official economy.9

"Social reproduction," in neo-Marxist economic theory, is the work of reproducing the basis of capitalist labor that must occur before that labor can be subsumed into the economy. Largely disregarded in the work of Marx himself, little attended to except as a phase in "primitive accumulation" in Marxist theory, social reproduction is the infrastructural, relational, mental and physical work that caretakers do to get the family ready for the day, where "the day" means life in a capitalist, marketized, productivist world.10 Some of that invisible labor is the work of cleaners, domestic workers, Amazon drivers, and a vast army of home caretakers, along with the mostly unwaged and informal networks of care that support them.11

What happens in a crisis in our infrastructures of caring and being cared for is that the "normal" flow of invisibilized and infrastructural labor is interrupted: in the interruption, and the ensuing "infrastructural inversion" that makes visible hidden assumptions and burdens of care-taking, we can decide not to continue: non serviam, as Laurie doesn't quite say. The opening sequence of The Leftovers dramatizes another kind of infrastructural inversion, one in which the impossibility of caretaking while also doing a job and living a life is literalized. Here, in a brief movement of the camera away from the car seat, the child — a figure both of reproductive futurity and the endless demands for self-sacrifice demanded of women in particular — suddenly disappears, and with it the symbolic coherence of a whole system of heteroreproductive futurity. 

The interruption of social reproduction is figured, in the first season, both at the level of the narrative and the level of the shot: the central interruption is that of the "Departure" itself, as we have seen, along with the interruptions in the stability of gender and caretaking roles that ensue. But The Leftovers also stages the effects of interruption of the continuous shot, of narrative realism, of character and scene continuity. The ground opens up, the sky vanishes, and the dead reappear, routinely. Thus, the audience is trained in a form of interruptive viewing even as we engage, those of us performing care work as we also watch television, in various interruptive and interrupted tasks. Reading the show properly thus requires resistance to the various teleological frameworks employed by television critics and scholars, as in the classic division between episodic closure and serialized delay, even as it represents a challenge to critical theories oriented to closure.12 When we watch as care workers, we don't know the ending. We don't fully understand the beginning. No episodic structure strong enough for the name will give us closure. We don't always understand the genre within which we are watching, why a deer is suddenly inside the house, why a child is saved or sacrificed. The show remains within the ongoing tension of serialized non-disclosure of meaning, even as it offers a series of partial closures, crises, and resolutions of melodramatic tension.

One of the more interesting features of The Leftovers' depiction of a crisis in social reproduction is the fantasy of the Return of Fatherhood as center of the family drama form, paradoxically enacted through a series of failed male figures of authority, suddenly thrust into caretaking roles. In the first and last season, this is focalized through the Garveys, father and son, both police chiefs - figures of legitimized violence and illegitimate desire, in different ways. The basic problem for Kevin Garvey's family, when we first encounter it in season one, is that the mother refuses to mother and the father is falling apart. The two problems are linked in overt and covert ways: Laurie Garvey's absence threatens Kevin Garvey's role as police chief, a position politically under attack both in the show and at the moment of the show's production in 2013 and after. Showrunner Lindelof would not take up the underlying dynamics of this challenge to police authority until Watchmen (2019), his next HBO "prestige drama," which inverts the racial and social dynamics of the standard police procedural. But the crisis of failing male social authority that drives this show clearly predates, and yet is intensified by, the police protests of the #BlackLivesMatter Era. 

The Leftovers stages a contemporary social crisis in police authority as internal psychic fissure, Kevin vs "Bad Kevin," with the absent or psychotic father hovering nearby. The camera work interpellates us into the position of the failing Father throughout the first season: every detail of the Chief's decay into sweaty psychosis is framed as a close shot or by shaky hand-held POV shots, even as the female characters are often given more stable framing and editing. This disjunction is most clear in the near-motionless communal scenes with Laurie and others inside the Guilty Remnant (the protesting cult of memory within the series). As with many of the signal series of the "prestige drama" era, we're watching a man — and then a series of men — in trouble, falling from authority, and failing to live up to the image of their own disturbed father figures (real or imagined). At the same time, we see the relative empowerment of women who refuse, individually or collectively, to take on the standard roles of wife, mother, daughter, or lover, instead inventing new, bold, often perverse experiments in communal living and dying.

The central Return to Fatherhood fantasy of the show's first season is that of substitution for and displacement of the mother as center of the family drama (a genre which the Leftovers re-employs): what if the father suddenly had to take control over the family again, because of the refusal of the mother to mother? What if the police chief had to learn to mother instead, despite his own blockages and inability to care? This male fantasy of familial re-empowerment through replacement of the mother's role, a near exact reversal of the classic Freudian narrative of the mother's substitution of her desires through investment in the phallic authority of the son, is given its spectacular culmination in the burning of the Guilty Remnant and the rescue of Kevin's daughter Jill. The logic of power gained through male substitution for the embrace of the mother, another inversion of normative emotional labor, is also enacted in the embraces of Holy Wayne; then in the mothering of Wayne's abandoned child by Kevin's son Tommy; and finally in the eventual substitution of Tommy for Wayne. Even as these characters displaced the normative emotional labor of their female counterparts, they transmute emotional caretaking into a relatively standard male fantasy oriented to sex and violence: the proliferation of messianic "brides" around Wayne, in the first instance, and the explosive rescue-and-reunion fantasy staged through the burning of the Guilty Remnant at the end of season 1.

The counter-fantasy that the show offers to its audience of actual care workers is that of Laurie's refusal, Nora's traumatized repetitions, Meg's radical act: stop working, stop caring, stop carrying on the endless acts of recognition, empathy, memory, list-making, diaper-cleaning, wedding-planning, and laundry-folding that compose the uncompensated work of social reproduction under unadvanced capitalism. Laurie's story is itself not fully coherent, riven by contradictions brought out more fully in season 2: why does the devastating "departure" of an unborn child cancel her attachment to two existing children? What exactly is animating the cult of the Guilty Remnant and their work of public memory, what belief structure, what animating principles? This disjunction between narrative effects and causes is explained in different ways, most often as the effect of individual trauma, but the contradictions between apparent cause and disproportionate response remain. This disproportion can be explained, in part, through the structural conditions that generate the contained violence which the Departure only retroactively pretends to explain.  

Laurie's problem, before the Departure, is that she seems to have no problem: she's living in a stunning modern home, with two beautiful children, a gorgeous if psychically compartmentalized husband, effortlessly great hair, and what seems to be satisfying care work as a highly-paid psychologist. Her work is itself a fantasy resolution of the inherent contradictions of feminized care work in the United States: she cares for others, as women are supposed to do, but also receives high pay and esteem for doing so. Laurie before the Departure is a recognizable fantasy type, the woman who has the perfect home, family, work life, all without threatening to break normative cis-gendered boundaries: Mary Tyler Moore on The Dick Van Dyke Show, but with her own show and career on the side. 

Fig 3: "The Good Life Before the Loss" (People Magazine, August 25, 2015)13

After the Departure, all this breaks apart, as it must: Laurie loses one child and then her family; she moves into a communal life centered both on repetitive domestic labor (all that white!), stops shampooing, and embraces loss and the death drive, a cigarette always on her lip. The work of the Guilty Remnant, like that of the communes in David Fincher's Fight Club (a key intertext for the show), is centered on revealing the falsity of social normalcy and the insanity of everyday life. Like the men's-only communes of Fight Club, the Guilty Remnant produces an inverted and therefore newly visible world of social reproduction, in which its members can both disrupt and reenact the domestic labor of their old lives: doing the laundry, making props, cutting out family photographs, but this time with a difference.14 

What the aftermath of the Great Departure enables, then, is the double figuration of contradictory fantasies that address both sides of the impasses within normative heteroreproductive futurity, both the absent fathers and the all-too-present mothers. The absent father returns to the center of the family, in a fantasy of the Return to Fatherhood, though still with a psychic split between Good and Bad selves, recoded as Nurturant Male and Psychotic Father. The mother is allowed to leave the impossible contradictions imposed on her by work, family, and "self-care," to live instead in permanent protest against a society that insists women can have it all without providing the support required to do so. This is the hidden source for the violence that Laurie, Meg, and Patti express but cannot explain, and for the missing structures of meaning that drive the Guilty Remnant. The trauma being worked out through this fantasy isn't the unexplained absence of one in fifty people on earth. It's the everyday violence, the quotidian moral injury, of attempting to care for and reproduce the social world of too-late capitalism, in the absence of the structural conditions or even structuring myths that would allow us to do so.

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Gabriel Hankins is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University. He is working on special issues devoted to digital labor and political economy, and AI and/as form.

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