Hotness at the End of the World

We are not over Nora Durst. But watching just the pilot of The Leftovers, you wouldn't get it. When the show starts, Nora is the poster child for the collective grief associated with two percent of the world's population disappearing. Having lost her husband and two children straight from the breakfast table, she is obliged to stand in front of a memorial parade and speak on behalf of everyone who has lost someone, as the person who lost the most. She's an avatar of heteronormative loss — a symbol of the ordinary, generic life we lose in catastrophe. So why are we still crushing on her, years after the show's finale?

The Leftovers gives us a world that nobody really wants. Our characters make do with what remains, but they do so ambivalently — Nora most of all. Her grief has stuck her in time. Once a week she buys Cinnamon Toast Crunch and individually packaged applesauce and throws it out unopened. As a claims verifier for the Department of Sudden Departures, she goes to people's homes and subjects them to a standardized list of questions about their missing loved ones, dragging other people back into the same muck of grief she hasn't been able to escape. Instead of mothering her kids, Nora provides the impersonal pastoral care of the bureaucrat stuck witnessing someone else's emotions on loop.

And then the show's plot unsticks her: over the course of the show, Nora divorces her departed husband for adultery, screams at memoirists, scientists, and parking-garage goers, starts dating a cop, adopts a baby, sells her house to scientists and impulse-buys another one in a small town in Texas, uses handcuffs as a sleepwalking cure, steals classified documents, takes in her brother's disabled wife, leaves her boyfriend, loses her adopted baby, gets her departed children's names tattooed on her arm and then immediately gets a Wu-Tang Clan tattoo to cover them up and then uses her car door to break her own bone to get a cast to hide that tattoo. She loses her boyfriend, takes up smoking, crawls into a machine to teleport across dimensions and find her original family, discovers them happy without her, comes back, and finally lives alone for twenty years in rural Australia speaking only to a nun. 

In other words, she does a lot of yelling at people, taking care of people, and leaving people. She lets her pain control her and chronically fails to move on. We aren't into Nora because she's nice, or because she suffers.1 We like Nora because she's difficult. What's so hot, we want to know, about difficulty?

In this piece we're trying to use our respective crushes on Nora to achieve a more robust understanding of hotness as an aesthetic phenomenon in times of crisis. Nora's hotness isn't exactly an anomaly. She meets the standard criteria of conventional desirability — she's a straight, cis, upper-middle-class white woman played by an actress with nice bone structure — but her appearance isn't all of it. Nora is durably crushworthy in a way that is unattainable for even a character with Justin Theroux's abs. We find it vaguely upsetting, even, when Tom Perotta, in the novel on which the show is based, writes that when Kevin first lays eyes on Nora he immediately contemplates her nice ass. Her butt has nothing to do with it! we complain, territorially. 

***

While hotness feels so personal, it's hard to write about precisely because it isn't. It's an oddly intimate aesthetic judgment that references an especially nebulous aesthetic category — desirability. Hotness can't quite be disentangled from structural forces and is deeply social. A claim about someone's hotness is usually staked on the premise that everyone else would find them hot too. Even so, asserting someone's hotness is often calling dibs: that's my crush, not yours. People go to fictional characters, in part, for crushes they can inhabit together without ever getting possessive. For a way to share something that is usually only — merely — personal. 

Mass culture does this — it makes the personal feel general. Through books and films, one's individual, felt experience becomes valid because it's shared. These objects exert a normative force called sentimentality: everyone's feelings work the same way and mean the same thing. Everyone's pain, for instance, can be taken away with a hug. A sentimental novel or film uses emotional identification to make readers feel part of a broader community — such was the abolitionist strategy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), for example. Texts in this mode leverage readers' and viewers' attachments to fictional characters as a means to perceive and understand their social universe — to position a reader or viewer within a scene and make them feel they belong there.2

If character hotness in prestige drama functions in the same way, it might seem like a basic tactic of market competitiveness — a tool to amp up the stakes, to bring sentimental identification to a fever pitch. Thirst is just the twenty-first century's "feeling right." But hotness has more affordances than lust and sentiment. Nora, more than other characters, becomes hot post-departure. Her desirability is contoured by the pseudo-apocalypse, in a way that teaches us about the world these characters inhabit. What does Nora's desirability — her style of negotiating white femininity at the end of the world — tell us about the logic of the Leftovers universe, a world both like and unlike our own? 

In The Leftovers, desirability emerges through the strategies that individuals use to survive the end of the world. HBO's original series have a long history of using sex to punch up otherwise lackluster writing. See Game of Thrones, True Blood, Californication, and so on. Here, by contrast, rather than serving as merely the cherry on top of a gripping story, hotness functions as more than a reality effect: it indexes characters' shattered expectations. Everyone loses everything, but as they piece their lives together, they refashion hotness around their actions. 

***

Among its many other revelations, the Departure gives us a glimpse of the difference between a hot actor and a hot character. Characters live in the ambiguous gray area between people and things: the place where the effect of a personality crashes into the form and materiality of an aesthetic object.3 With live-action motion pictures, you have a little added complexity to crushing on a character: the actor. We worry you have been wondering this all along: aren't they just talking about Carrie Coon's hotness? "Is Seinfeld's Elaine Benes canonically hot?," asks Alex Abad-Santos, while taking as a first principle that, of course, Julia Louis-Dreyfus is.4 A person's body — in this case, Carrie Coon's — is part of the character's materiality. Desirability emerges in the process of a person turning themselves into an idea of a person. The words of the script become hot through Carrie Coon's embodiment of them, yet Nora's emplotment makes her desirable in ways that Coon is not. 

What's hot about plot? Before the Departure, everyone was a cliché. Mapleton consisted of types: Kevin was the reluctant family man itching for escape; Laurie a standard-issue upper-middle-class therapist; Jill the awkward, braces-wearing preteen; Nora the dissatisfied stay-at-home mom with a cheating spouse. Like characters in a make-believe toy set, they all belonged to stock scenes of good-hearted liberal individuals — a relatively white, middle-class small town free of social conflict. Then the world broke, and their types didn't fit anymore. Everyone became deformed, disturbed distortions of their former clichés. In other words, they became developed, differentiated characters. To be a cliché, in the universe of The Leftovers, is to be okay. And after the Sudden Departure, anyone who's okay is pretending.

The Departure shredded narrative, thwarting everyone's expectations of their life trajectories. It replaced these trajectories with grief. After the departure, many people put as much distance as possible between themselves and the remains of old life models, e.g., abandoning fiancés for the Guilty Remnant. But other people, especially privileged ones, want their clichés back. 

It turns out, clichés had been useful. To suffer relatably requires feeling in the same way everyone else does. Sentimental mass culture teaches people how they ought to feel based on the social type it produces for them. Sentimentality usually spectacularizes the pain of marginalized people, turning it into a means for the privileged to vicariously experience social ills, and thus creates the mirage of unity in a stratified society.5 The Leftovers invokes tropes of sentimental culture, but in its post-Departure reality, those tropes no longer quite fit. 

Because the Departure is ostensibly blind to social stratification, the show gets to make marginalization irrelevant to loss. Suffering becomes universal. The privileged, like Nora, don't need a proxy to experience their pain as social. Moreover, pain no longer follows the patterns sentimental cliches set out for it. It is unpredictable and uncontainable. 

In the absence of clear formats for feeling, some people join cults. Others seem only too happy to retrofit old cliches or embody new ones. Nora rejects the post-Departure social forms that spring up to encase her hurt. She's not just a grieving mother, but a grieving mother who makes out with a perfect manufactured cadaver at a work conference. While legible clichés — think porn keywords — warp desire around what everyone thinks everyone else wants, specificity has the frisson of surprise on its side. 

Refusing cliches means becoming difficult — hard to understand, hard to deal with, but also hard to predict — and in the world of The Leftovers, difficult might be the hottest thing you can be. Unlike sentimentality, desirability is made of reticence and contradictions. Hotness lives somewhere in the neighborhood of the quality Joseph Roach calls "It": the social magnetism characteristic of the "it girl," which emerges from the push and pull of authority and vulnerability, an alternating current of power and weakness that makes you both worthy and available.6 

Likewise, our desire for Nora involves our pleasure in how convincingly the writers bundle contradictory traits into a coherent gestalt of a character. Nora counterposes tenderness and ruthlessness: she is a committed caregiver, yet impulsive; sometimes full of nostalgic pathos, sometimes an unsentimental "heartless bitch." Nora stalks a preschool teacher who had sex with her departed husband; she frantically calls 911 in tears when Kevin sleepwalks, thinking the Departure has happened again. Sometimes she is all these things at once: Nora blows up an air mattress and checks its firmness, then counts out hundred-dollar bills, providing warm reassurance while instructing a terrified, reluctant sex worker to shoot her in the sternum so that she falls onto said air mattress. "I'll talk you through it," Nora says gently to the woman. We can't fail to mention Nora's dry sense of humor, either. "Better cancel the kegger," she says when induced to sign a code of conduct upon checking into a hotel. The combination of all these traits lets her climb into a machine that launches people into the void (and, even then, find a way back).

***

The show sometimes positions Nora as the clear-eyed realist, more inclined to puncture other people's fantasies about being okay than to believe in them herself. She is the reality police — to the man who tells her about the carcinogenic teleportation machine that will send her into space, she scolds, "If they've actually built this magical device, they're not sending people to be with their loved ones. They're incinerating them," and unceremoniously informs him he might be suicidal. At other times, it portrays her as the one most seduced by fantasies of life being otherwise — a three-million-dollar house in a Departure-free town, the faint glimmer of an alternate universe where her family is not gone.

Characters in sentimental texts normally model secure commitment to a social world for readers. Here they don't. The show cycles Nora through temporary scenes of attachment: to a new relationship (season 1); or to a newer, less normative family that includes her boyfriend's adult daughter, a newborn left on her doorstep, and her brother's catatonic wife (season 2); or to an alternate universe containing her original family (season 3). She ultimately refuses them all, choosing to live in the past, to give Lily up, to dump Kevin, to head for Australia, to come back. 

Rather than a mere lens through which we can better perceive the show's universe, Nora's ambivalence makes character the show's real focus. In a world that's hard to hold onto, characters reach for one another, and we reach for them. The show subordinates other narrative tools to developing its characters' ambivalence — giving us people to hold onto. In this light, hotness appears as a kind of inversion of sentimentality: what happens when a story's people are people, not proxies. Nora's hotness is a kind of surplus of character development, a byproduct of being a narrative ends rather than means.

This is perhaps why Nora repeatedly says no to scenes of life that don't work for her, but her escapes always take her somewhere else, which eventually must also be escaped. After radioactively catapulting into the mirror world where ninety-eight percent of people went missing, she finds the three people whom she grieved for years have grown, moved on, and left her behind — in their world, they are the lucky ones. Nora finds herself once again suffering the most: leftover. The show skips over these scenes: we hear the story from Nora herself, after she's long since made the brutal decision to come back and has grown older living alone in rural Australia with no attachments whatsoever, caring only for messenger doves that need nothing but birdseed. Yet the doves, which she loans to a nun who takes them to weddings, are vehicles for optimism — wedding guests tie "messages of love" to their feet in a fantasy that their notes will spread globally, transcending the smallness and disappointments of individuality. But, as Nora tells the nun, the birds are trained to do one thing and one thing only: come home. The messages, misdirected, come only to Nora, an anonymous cog in the optimism of strangers. She herself has sworn off attachment but lets the wedding guests maintain their fantasies of interconnection. 

Having learned to live without hope, we see Nora, for the first time, willing to let others retain theirs.7 The finale's ending suggests that Nora is ready to be a type again: Kevin returns and reinserts her into a typical plot where love will always find you eventually. But her character arc reveals the problem with getting back what you lost: it was never enough in the first place. Nora's dialectic of attachment and refusal, tenderness and ruthlessness models a way of navigating the cruel plot that is life with style. Hotness seems like one imperfect word for that style.

---

Adam Fales is a writer and PhD candidate living in Chicago. His work has appeared in Avidly, The Yale Review, Full Stop, Chicago Review, and Dilettante Army, among other places. You can find more of his writing at adamfales.com.

Lily Scherlis is a PhD Candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. She has written for Parapraxis, The Baffler, The Drift, and Cabinet.

---

References