Family, Unbearable and Otherwise

Seven years after the Sudden Departure, erstwhile sitcom star Mark Linn-Baker, having faked his own departure after being left behind when his three Perfect Strangers co-stars departed, contacts Nora Durst with a promise to reconnect her with her departed family. Linn-Baker's scheme will involve a hotel in St. Louis, a trip to Melbourne, Australia, a couple of Dutch physicists, irradiation, and interdimensional travel. In the end, Nora will find her lost family. A fraud investigator for the Department of Sudden Departures, Nora initially takes Linn-Baker as one more fraudulent actor in the post-departure psychic and financial economy of confidence, but the desire to recover her lost children is too strong for her to dismiss him out of hand. Ambivalent and irritated, Nora suggests that Linn-Baker is delusional and maybe suicidal, an insinuation he refuses. "Four series regulars. Three go, one stays. Me," Linn-Baker retorts. "What happened was arbitrary. It was purposeless. It wasn't my fault. I didn't do anything to deserve this. So, no, Nora, I don't wanna kill myself. I wanna take some fucking control." Linn-Baker's outburst is a fantasy of control in the wake of loss, in the shadow of the psychic and intimate crises of global catastrophe. It's also a brief, anxious peroration on knowledge and family. 

In The Leftovers loss is the condition of life, which the acute event of catastrophe both obscures and reveals. Nonetheless, a question hangs over it: how can loss, both catastrophic and quotidian, be known with any certainty? Perpetuating modernity's fantasy that all of life can be quantified, the Departure is at once measurable insofar as a metric can be assigned (two percent of the global population suddenly disappeared), and immeasurable insofar as loss does not really afford measurement. The enumeration of mass death, an effort to account for loss, to reduce the immeasurable to the measurable, is apparent from the beginning of the series. Early in the first episode, a news report enumerates the departed tolls for each country ("Iran — 1.47 million, Turkey —1.55 million, Germany —1.71 million, Egypt — 1.73 million"). A voice then cuts in: "The thing that one fails to grasp is that two percent is not a staggering number. That's only one out of every fifty humans on the planet. Statistically speaking, on the average football pitch none of the players would be departures. The odds of losing someone in your immediate family are slim at best. . . . Now, if you look at, let's say, casualties from mass pandemics. . . . Smallpox, for one, decimated ninety-five percent of the Native population." The metrics of catastrophe are inadequate. One could say that between the measurable and the immeasurable, much of the show traces efforts to establish meaning and knowledge, in almost fetishistic repetition, at once avowing and disavowing loss.

There are numerous rationalizing efforts to explain, ascribe meaning, or discern some truth: the bureaucratic investigations of the Department of Sudden Departure subject the families of the departed to questionnaires; scientific investigations, such as the MIT researchers who want to purchase Nora's house in Mapleton, seek to determine causality; scientific-cum-religious researchers who approach Nora in Jarden are convinced they will reveal the presence of a demon working on behalf of Satan. Like the quantification of loss, these efforts are mostly background noise, fleeting moments, intrusions from the fantastic world of ratiocination.

Then there are the substantively and structurally more significant narratives, ones whose attention is not simply abstract and fleeting but attuned to personal psyches. Take, for instance, Matt Jamison, who spends much of his time researching the lives of the departed and posting flyers around town describing their transgressions. Exposing the guilty is tied to establishing meaning for the catastrophe, for which he is repeatedly attacked by the grieving loved ones of those he claims to be exposing. Or consider John Murphy, so certain that there is nothing special about Jarden, no miracle, that he is willing to burn down houses and attack people to prove it. Or take even the Guilty Remnant, so certain that there is nothing but departure, that they "strip away the colorful diversions" that distract from the departure itself. Their actions, too, generate violence. All conjoin the certainty of knowledge, the eradication of uncertainty and loss, and violence.

Yet the show pushes us away from the event and toward the deep structure of loss, for which knowledge cannot account. This is made clear through the opening scenes of seasons 2 and 3. Season 2 opens in a prehistoric past, where a pregnant woman leaves a cave to urinate and is cut off from her kin when an earthquake causes a rockslide that blocks the cave entrance. She then goes into labor, gives birth, and subsequently wanders with her newborn baby looking for food, shelter, and other people. Just after she sees a sign of other people in the distance, she is bitten by a rattlesnake. At the moment of her death another woman appears and takes the baby, presumably saving its life. Indeed, survival is tethered to the re-establishment of kinship. Kinship established as a substitution at the moment of loss and death; kinship as the exchange of a baby between dead and living mothers. 

Season 3 opens in mid-nineteenth century Australia, where a Millerite sect is preparing for the imminent return of Christ.1 Initially exuberant about Christ's return and their likely ascension, assured that they have accurately discerned the date through complicated calculation, the sect's members are met with disappointment when Christ doesn't show up. Their minister then recalculates the date of Christ's return and on each designated night, the Millerites climb to the top of their houses again (and again and again), then climb down once more when morning arrives without Christ.2 Disappointment grows, as does ridicule from non-believers. The family at the center of this scene breaks apart, as the father and son leave the wife/mother, who continues to the end to be a perfervid, if increasingly despondent and weary, believer.  

There are a few tenuous connections between these two scenes and the era of the Sudden Departure: the geographic site of the prehistoric scene is where Jarden, Texas will later be established; the designation of the prehistoric site/Jarden as an axis mundi (this is the title of episode in which this scene appears) seems to be substantiated in a conversation between Kevin and the child-Patti in the afterlife, when she reads from a pamphlet on the way to a well where Kevin will attempt to kill her. "The Orphan's Well outside Jarden, Texas was built by one of these tribes," explains the pamphlet. "According to the ancient legend the well formed a conduit between the world of the living and the spirit world."3 There are, too, connections made through formal technique: both scenes end with transitional reveals to the era of the post-Departure: a shift from the emaciated, wounded, rotting, dead body of the mother lying next to a spring to modern-day Jarden, where Evie Murphy and her friends are swimming in the same spring; a transition from the remaining Millerites, huddled together in dirty, wet white robes in their church, to Meg, Evie, and the rest of the Guilty Remnant faction camped out in the Miracle Welcome Center. These two scenes seem to provide viewers with knowledge that offers an interpretive key unavailable to the characters in the show. Can we, as viewers, now do what Matt Jamison, John Murphy, the Guilty Remnant, and almost everyone else cannot?

No. Both of these moments are better understood as what Freud called primal scenes. "These [primal] scenes of observing parental intercourse, of being seduced in childhood, and of being threatened with castration," Freud wrote, "are unquestionably an inherited endowment, a phylogenetic heritage, but they may just as easily be acquired by personal experience."4 Freud's wavering between reality and phantasy gets at the structural condition of knowledge and certainty that animates the world around the Departure. What Freud is particularly concerned with is "the activation of the primal scene," a contingent event that brings the primal scene, as event or phantasy, (back) into consciousness. "All that we find in the prehistory of the neuroses is that a child catches hold of this phylogenetic experience where his own experience fails him. He fills in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth; he replaces occurrences in his own life by occurrences in the life of his ancestors."5 For Freud, then, when the aporia of individual experience can neither bend nor yield no more, a phylogenetic inheritance in the form of primal scenes is activated. Both of these scenes operate in precisely this manner.

As Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis would put it, "The original fantasy [for them, the primal scene is one genre of original fantasy] is first and foremost fantasy — it lies beyond the history of the subject but nevertheless in history — a kind of language and a symbolic sequence, but loaded with elements of imagination; a structure, but activated by contingent elements. As such it is characterized by certain traits which make it difficult to assimilate to a purely transcendental schema."6 The primal scene is both explanatory insofar as it appears to provide some new knowledge, and an effect of the structure and imagination. In reaching for origins stories to explain something of the moment of the Sudden Departure, these primal scenes throw the viewer into the realm of what Ned Lukacher calls "ontological undecidability," a realm that no form of knowledge can overcome. This is what these two primal scenes lay on the table for us — there is no key to unlocking meaning or establishing certainty, especially by accumulating proper knowledge. Both primal scenes are, in a sense, ruses, seducing viewers with knowledge unavailable to the characters. But they also point toward a cause: loss.

There is an ineradicable loss, a kind of founding event dramatized by the prehistoric primal scene, counterposed to a more prosaic sense of loss that comes as a consequence of attempts to eradicate that first loss, dramatized by the Millerite woman. In the prehistoric primal scene, the mother loses her kin to a natural disaster, the baby loses their mother to death in the service of survival. These are the kinds of primordial loss that are ineradicable. We are all orphans. The Millerite scene is different — the loss that follows from trying to transcend the fundamental condition of loss that animates human life, the desire for transcendence, which, in its perpetual disappointment, leads to the mother losing her family (and the father/husband and son losing wife/mother). 

These two forms of loss are also effectively depicted in the opening credits. Season 1's opening credits scan a fresco of people ascending during the Departure as they reach out for their loved ones (fig. 1). It is an acute sense of loss, redolent on the anguished faces of those who believe that if they could just grab onto each other, loss could be prevented. Seasons 2 and 3 depict loss as a structuring condition, something like a gap in the symbolic, a foundational cut or castration (the show's numerous phallic scenes further suggest this reading of castration).7 Here, the credits roll over a series of photographs in which one or more people are missing from the photos — the outline of them is there, but it is empty, or sometimes filled in with the cosmos (fig. 2). Loss, ineradicable and otherwise, produces the uncertainty that generates the desire for knowledge.

Fig. 1: The opening credits from season 1 of The Leftovers.

Fig. 2: The opening credits of seasons 2 and 3 of The Leftovers.

Coupled with the desire to know is the ephemeral fantasy of the comforting family. In The Leftovers the family is a catastrophic structure of intimacy and relationality. From the Guilty Remnant's repetitive insistence that "There Is No Family" to Nora's repeated disappointments in trying to construct a substitute family to the Murphys thin veneer of familial attachment, The Leftovers follows the impossible promises of the family. In this, it joins a long, if often repressed, lineage of family catastrophe, from Freud's claim that "Society must defend itself against the danger that the interests which it needs for the establishment of higher social units may be swallowed by the family," to R.D. Laing's assertion that "the world will collapse if the 'family' is not assassinated."8 In a different register, twenty-first-century disaster films, from 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow to Melancholia, insistently couple the family and global catastrophe. 

There is a sense in which The Leftovers, with its bracing critique of the familial fantasy, can be read as part of a constellation of family abolition thinking at the current conjuncture. While the reinvigoration of family abolition, which finds its early articulation in the work of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier and then Marx and Engels, can be seen in recent communist-inflected work by Sophie Lewis and M.E. O'Brien, there is also a softer, perhaps more surprising (and much dumber) strain exemplified in something like conservative huckster David Brooks's 2020 essay in The Atlantic, "The Nuclear Family was a Mistake."9 I want to be clear, the radical critiques of the family by Lewis and O'Brien have nothing in common with the social science lite proffered by Brooks; rather, they are symptomatic of a moment in which, for all the familiar and vociferous rhetoric on the family, both as material institution and fantasy, the family has become exhausted. It would be wrong to call The Leftovers a work of family abolition if for no other reason than that it does not stake a political and emancipatory project in that manner. And yet, the series itself is a repudiation of that family, most bombastically in the politics of the Guilty Remnant, but also, and perhaps more powerfully, in the insistence that the family cannot sustain the affective and psychic demands put on it.10 Indeed, if it would be a stretch to say that The Leftovers offers a materialist critique of any sort. It dwells more capaciously, and in a complementary manner, on the psychic conditions of loss that will haunt any forms of intimacy and sociality. 

For the most part, The Leftovers vacillates between two familial poles, repair or repudiation, with disappointment the almost universal end. There are Nora's efforts at creating a substitute family with Kevin, Jill, and the adopted orphan Lily. Or the Murphys, whose family is rent by the suggested but never quite named abuse associated with the "foul machinery below the waist" of Erika's father. Despite that fundamental rupture, the familial fantasy allows John to state with certainty, in the face of Evie's abandonment of family, that "Evie loved her mother. She loved her brother. And she loved me. So why in God's name would she do this to us?" When Kevin suggests maybe she didn't love them, John shoots him. "The Garveys at the Their Best," the only episode set entirely before the departure, depicts Kevin's and Nora's families, the families they are trying to recover after the departure, as always already fractured, sites of loss and suffering. From Nora's immiseration to Kevin having an affair to Laurie's misery and anxiety to Jill's and Tommy's compensatory preening happiness, families as intimate attachments that can suture the wounds of loss never existed. Which doesn't mean the Guilty Remnant, whose "No Family" mantra seems one solution, are right — one can no more act as if families don't exist than they can make the families that do exist repair loss. 

And yet, The Leftovers does not take such a simple, either/or tack with the family. The issue, rather, is how to live with inadequate attachments. "Leaving the family behind," the psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle writes,

Love is a risk made possible only by leaving the family which is, even in the best of times, a series of obligations that stand in for love. In The Leftovers, love is almost always confused with family and knowledge in order to enclose and ward off a more capacious and unsettling intimacy. The relation between the Departure and the family captures this in its full flower — everyone wants to reconstitute their lost families, or, in the case of the Guilty Remnant, hold onto the fantasy that it can be entirely abandoned and destroyed. What Dufourmantelle suggests is that for one to experience love one need leave the family which is, perhaps paradoxically, an impossible task to accomplish once and for all. Here then, in the context of family abolition, we might think, as The Leftovers urges us, about the implacable persistence of that which we must leave behind.

In the series finale, set a decade or so in the future, after Nora and Kevin have long lost one another, Nora is back in Australia living a life of near total isolation, until Kevin shows up pretending they were simply casual acquaintances from back in Mapleton. While at a strangers' wedding, Nora and Kevin dance, embracing each other, tears streaming down their faces, an uncanny (and so far, perplexing) reunion neither imagined possible. Nora asks, not for the first time, "How did you find me, Kevin?" and he responds with the story he had already concocted for her once: he was on vacation in Australia and saw her ride by on a bike. Breaking away from him, Nora leaves as she says, "I can't do this. . . . Because it isn't true." And yet, for the first time in the show, truth is about to emerge.

The next day Kevin shows up at Nora's house and shouts, "You wanna know how I found you, Nora? You want the truth?" For all of the demands for and proclamations of truth that mark the show, truth is not actually uttered until this moment. "I was going to start right where I lost you," Kevin says. "Every year I have two weeks of vacation, and every year I come to fucking Australia, and I show your picture to everybody I meet." Everyone believes Nora is dead, but Kevin can't believe it. As he says, more than once, "I couldn't stop." And then, when he shows the photo to a nun, he sees the look of recognition and knows that Nora is there. "She recognized you. She knew you. . . . And when I saw you . . . I couldn't believe it. There you were. And I was so . . ." It's this unutterable moment that is the truth, the inability to stop looking, the force of desire, the wordless jouissance. "Oh, but I didn't know what to say, or where to start, and so I just thought 'Oh, fuck it. I'll erase it.' . . . But you were right. It's not true." The absurd story wasn't true, but truth was finally spoken as the inexorable force of desire.

Nora then recounts her experiences since the last time they saw each other, in the hotel in Melbourne. She did, in fact, go to the other place, where she found unfathomable loss — while their world lost two percent of the population, this other place lost everyone else, ninety-eight percent. The world, like the subject, cleaved in two, asymmetrically. "And that's when I understood," Nora says, "Over here, we lost some of them, but over there, they lost all of us." Nora does find her family, but when she sees them, in the Mapleton over there, on the other side, she knows she doesn't belong, that loss is ineradicable. "And I understood that here, in this place, they were the lucky ones. In a world full of orphans, they still had each other. And I was a ghost. . . . I was a ghost who had no place there." She went to recover her family, to become whole again, only to realize that the fantasy of wholeness, of recovered loss, had no place for her.

For Kevin it is the inexorable force of desire; for Nora it is the ineradicable nature of loss. This is the truth, the figuration of the real. When she addresses her refusal to contact Kevin in all the years since she returned, she does so not in the language of knowledge and certainty, but in that of longing and belief. "Did I . . . think about you? Did I wanna call you? Did I wanna be with you, Kevin? Of course I did. But so much time had passed. It was too late. And I knew that if I told you what happened . . . that you would never believe me." Her one assertion of knowledge is wrong — this is an issue of whether Kevin would believe that, unlike almost everyone else, Nora had come to accept ineradicable loss. When she says, repeatedly, that she "understood," it is the understanding of loss. The understanding of leaving the family, the cold barrenness of love that Dufourmantelle notes. Kevin understands it, too, because he understands the other, insistent companion of loss: desire. "Why wouldn't I believe you?" he says, "You're here." "I'm here," Nora says. And then, in a move of subtle intimacy, they clasp hands, cry, smile, and the camera pulls out so that we can see them framed in the only lit window of the house, and the carrier pigeons, though lost, return, intimate communication, forever deferred, now arrived.

This final scene lets go of the desire for knowledge and the fantasy of the family and in doing so The Leftovers privileges the quiet, unbearable moments of loss and desire that we almost obsessively repress and occlude. With a slight adjustment, we might think of the entire show as concerned with what Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman have called "sex, or the unbearable." Sex is always there — one need only think of Kevin at the moment of the Departure, having sex with a woman who departs, or Nora paying sex workers to shoot her. As Edelman puts it, "sex can be said to resist . . . narratives of moving on, naming instead the site where desire, for all its potential mobility, remains fixed to a primal attachment that alone makes our objects appear as desirable. The movement produced in this combination of mobility and attachment defines . . . the circuit of the drive in its orbit around an inaccessible (non)object."12 In The Leftovers' final scene, Nora and Kevin have arrived at the unbearable, the repression of which in the wake of the Departure generated so much misery and violence. The show offers us nothing else, which is fitting as it has insistently, from the first episode, shown us the problem of knowledge itself. What would it be now, at this moment, to give us some structural plan for the future? It seems simple enough, arrived at over a quiet cup of tea in barren, rural Australia. But to get there, Kevin and Nora experienced the impossible first.

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Brian Connolly is associate professor of History at the University of South Florida. Most
recently, he is the co-editor of Situation Critical: Critique, Theory, and Early American
Studies (Duke 2024) and editor of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History.

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References