You Want To Infect Me

"Now you want to infect me with whatever it is you've got!" This accusation is levied at Kevin Garvey Sr. by his son, Kevin Garvey Jr., following the former's escape from a psychiatric institution. Sitting across the table from his father in a roadside diner, Kevin Jr. dejectedly asks, "[W]here did you go Dad?" He then proceeds to explain that, unlike his father who, he believes has abandoned him at his moment of greatest need, he cannot afford to get "sick." He has responsibilities and commitments: a house, a mortgage, a job, a family, and mouths to feed. Yet unfortunately for Kevin Jr. — and his excellent performance of white, straight masculinity — such aggressive finger-pointing discloses precisely that which he so desperately wishes to disavow. He, too, is vulnerable to "infection."

What is Kevin Jr. so scared of? Throughout The Leftovers, he oscillates between different levels of torment, all the while believing himself to be in a constant one-man-battle with his personal demons. However, this exchange with his father occurs almost immediately after he declines an offer from his superiors in the FBI to "eradicate" and "eliminate the infestation." The faceless, unfeeling FBI agent on the other end of the telephone line warns that "this shit will spread if you let it." 

Viewers of The Leftovers will know that "this shit" is not a new pathogen, mental illness, virus, plague, or even a bioweapon. Instead, it is the sudden emergence of a collective, anarchic commune that calls itself The Guilty Remnant (GR). The GR's members refuse to speak, dress only in white, chain smoke cigarettes, proclaim the death of all moral and social values, and are devoted, instead, to a kind of guerrilla evangelizing. Its numbers — much to Kevin's chagrin — are increasing rapidly. In a clip that is played at the beginning of each episode recap for season 1, he tells his boss, the mayor, "[W]e have no idea where they came from and now there are over 50 of them" [see Fig. 1].  By season 2 the GR has spread to almost every city in America, bar one. The result is that we, as viewers, are interpolated into a state of constant narrative suspense: who will turn out to have been corrupted next? First it was Laurie, then it was Meg, then Evie, and then, potentially, Tommy. Who will follow? The real threat, of course, is that which Kevin clearly senses but cannot ever explicitly acknowledge. Everyone is susceptible to contamination.

Fig. 1: Kevin and Mapleton's Mayor, Lucy Warburton, strategize about how to deal with the GR's growing numbers at the Heroes Day Parade.

The Leftovers is a show about the stories people tell themselves in the wake of the unspeakably tragic and the totally unrepresentable. Or, as writer Damon Lindelof puts it, "you basically just have whatever you want to believe."1 Yet, even as The Leftovers embraces ambiguity and indeterminacy, it struggles with an unresolved ambivalence about this key feature of its own form: the representation of total epistemic upheaval as, somehow, infectious. However, it is precisely because the show equivocates as a matter of form that it also provides such a fruitful occasion to ask: How does the potentially radical promise of epistemic disintegration routinely get contained through being figured as, itself, a kind of plague?  

***

Tom Perrotta, author of The Leftovers (the novel) and Lindelof's partner in the adaptation's writing room, was asked in an interview to describe the general atmosphere of the show. Perotta explained that "all of the characters are dealing with apocalypse fever."2 This is an eschatological term that has its origins in popular Christian interpretations of the Bible, and it reflects a fatalistic and messianic understanding of historical time. Simply put, we know that the apocalypse is coming, we just don't know when.3 Yet as Robert Hamerton-Kelly outlines, "apocalypse fever" also denotes a distinct literary genre. From the first word of the Book of Revelation, "apokalypsis," "nineteenth century scholars borrowed the term 'apocalypse' in the first place to classify a type of  literature."4 Thus, while the temptation is to think of apocalypse as defined solely by its content and context — war, devastation, crisis, catastrophe, rapture, revelation — Hamerton-Kelly reminds us to also think of it in terms of form, too. 

What, then, are apocalypse fever's defining conventions? And how might these conventions inform the structure and expectations that govern The Leftovers? For Hamerton-Kelly the answer to my first question is relatively simple. Apocalypse fever is organized around "the seamless union of politics and prophecy."5 This oracular element can be traced back to the root meaning of the term apokalypsis, "unveiling" or "disclosure," which reflects the presumption that the rupture initiated by the sight of the end-times reveals something about the world order, while indexing that order's increasing instability. "[W]rite therefore the things that you have seen," Revelation commands its scribe.6 Yet if the concept and form of "apocalypse fever" distills the intense, febrile excitement of a world-shifting epiphany, it also — just as Kevin deploys the idea of "infection" — narrativizes the spread of revelation as a form of contagion. 

 In The Leftovers this proclivity is made manifest through the suspense generated as the GR emerges, grows, spreads, and is finally exterminated. The key point, though, is that even as The Leftovers consciously animates and allegorizes the concept of an ideological "outbreak," it also deliberately undercuts precisely this kind of political rhetoric at pivotal moments. Indeed, it is not by chance that the metaphor of "infection" rolls most easily off the tongue of agents of the police state; be it a faceless FBI agent or the familiar face of Kevin. Spoken by Kevin, it is not unthinkable that the word would elicit our sympathy. In the cruel, unfeeling voice of the FBI agent, by contrast, it has an immediate chilling effect.  

There has been surprisingly little explicit reading of The Leftovers as an "outbreak narrative," to borrow a term from Priscilla Wald.7 Even so, to claim that this reading is of particular resonance now, when we are still living in the wake of COVID-19, feels so cliché as to be banal. Nevertheless, it is surely worth acknowledging not only that the material realities of living in a plague undermine the most fundamental tenets of racial capitalism and liberal possessive individualism, but that the responses this new reality engenders have provoked accusations of "cult-like" behavior on both ends of the political spectrum. This includes everything from anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, to "mask puritans" to "death cults."8 The myriad dangers of treating illness and sickness as a metaphor are not new to literary critics (or to anyone remotely familiar with the work of Susan Sontag).9 Thankfully, therefore, it is not with metaphor that I am most concerned. Instead, I aim to show that The Leftovers allows us to think about the limits of the narrative forms available to us for depicting world-shattering revelations. It might well be a cliché to say, but this doesn't change the fact that the political dimension of our collective life under global pandemic conditions abides by a crisis logic of intensification and revelation while simultaneously being haunted by the opacities and failures of our political imaginations. The Leftovers brings into view the fact that these failures are just as endemic to our imaginations as they are to our popular cultural genres. 

***

In the first episode of The Leftovers, we learn that Laurie, Kevin's estranged wife, has left her family to join the GR. Like many others, she has found it impossible to reconcile the demands and expectations of normativity in the wake of a global disaster that makes a mockery of the explanatory apparatus of rational secularism. Yet the GR presents only ambivalence in response to the question of whether a radical, viable, and desirable alternative to the status quo can emerge out of the desertscape of immediate epistemic collapse.

In the original novel, the GR is based far more faithfully on a nineteenth-century Christian doomsday cult called the Millerites. By contrast, in the TV adaptation the GR is not a faith-based group but instead adheres to a form of Nietzschean-style nihilism. Their founding belief is not that the world is ending or will end, but that it has already ended. Subsequently, they renounce all forms of individualism, disavow all private property, refuse all forms of work, and dedicate themselves singularly to one cause: to remembering the collapse of the world as we know it. They save a particularly strong vehemence, moreover, for the two things that Kevin proclaims to hold most dear: the sacred institution of the "American Family" and the rule of Law.

In essence, then, the GR is a self-contained community that refuses to recognize the authority of the state, and who entertain the promise of true equality through the abolition of private property (albeit alongside the total annihilation of individuality.) Yes, this group of sadistic and unapologetic nihilists does deliberately cause harm. That said, at least they do not pretend a world without harm, violence or cruelty is possible. Yes, the GR is uncompromising and militant, but all its members join voluntarily, and they stay out of choice. Moreover, while most of the show's intimate familial and romantic relationships are built upon layers and layers of pretense, self-interest, and dishonesty, the relationships within the GR, like all true bonds of solidarity, rest only upon a shared commitment, a shared purpose, and a common demand. They are, in other words, comrades. And so, when Tommy confronts his mother, Laurie, and proclaims "they know something, you know they do" her only possible recourse is to forbid him from re-entering their communes, because she knows that — even for all her work as a "deprogrammer" — she has no other real way to persuade him otherwise.

Interestingly it is also Laurie who, following her later exit from the GR in season 2, most fervently calls them a "cult." Within academic discourse the pejorative term "cult — which stems from the Latin cultus, meaning care or adoration — is often rejected in favour of the term "new religious movements." This distinction in terminology reflects the fact that, as Barbara Ehrenreich has written, distinctions between everyday ideology, organized religion, and "cults" reflect more about one's own personal prejudices than any objective taxonomy. In her essay on the subject Ehrenreich describes struggling to define the concept to her children, before resorting to explaining that "it is the job of the government to distinguish the cults from the bonafide religions . . . and the government is the embodiment of the Nation."10 This clarification exposes how the very effort to name a particular ideological orientation as a "cult" inadvertently betrays more about one's understanding or presuppositions of just government, than it does about any objective forms of classifying what is or is not one. 

Ultimately The Leftovers is not particularly interested in settling the question of whether the GR is or is not "a cult." What I think it is interested in, however, is what David Scott Diffrient calls the North American "cult imaginary" as a means to comment upon how, and more importantly, why, the spread of alternative ideologies is regularly represented as somehow viral in nature.11 Admittedly, this tendency is far from unique to the cultural discourse surrounding cults in North America. Let's not forget, the concept of "contagion" referred to the communication of beliefs and ideas, long before it ever denoted the transmission of disease.12 That said, these two twin elements formed a particularly potent cocktail in North America in the late '50s, '60s and '70s, animated by Cold War anxieties about the spread of communism. Not incidentally, this is also the exact same time that the "cult imaginary" first took hold. Wald details how, "as viruses became increasingly sinister and wily, sneaking into cells and assuming control of their mechanisms, external agents, such as communists, became viral, threatening to corrupt the dissemination of information as they infiltrated the nerve center of the state."13 

Season 1 of The Leftovers draws from this historical repertoire in highly self-conscious ways. To prove this point, we need only remember the FBI agent's chilling aside — this shit will spread if you let it. Yet we might also think of episode 5 of season 1. A member of the GR has just been stoned to death, after which the FBI intervenes to extract and exhume her body. The scene (fig. 2) that follows depicts lines of bodies in body bags on a conveyor belt heading towards an incinerator, anonymous sanitary workers in full PPE, faces masked, warning signs plastered on cardboard boxes with neon tape, and hazard labels everywhere. This extermination fantasy is the perfect visual representation of what Michel Foucault calls "the political dream of the plague," meaning "[t]he penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life . . .  not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his "true" name . . . the "true" disease."14 In sum, it is a deeply cynical and self-conscious intervention that dramatizes the political conclusion of deeming the GR "infectious." It is nothing other than an alibi for the necropolitical dreams of state. Representing the GR as contaminated and contagious provides, in other words, the perfect occasion for the total realization of disciplinary power.

Fig. 2: FBI operatives remove the GR member's body, against a backdrop of body bags.

It is hard to look at these lines of body bags and not wonder whether we have been rooting, with Kevin, for the wrong team. Moments such as these thus suggest that, even if the GR do not elicit our political sympathies, they are nevertheless supposed to encourage a critique of forms of state violence in the name of restoring a "normative" social order. This potentially makes the GR less a specter of eastern communist communes past, but instead analogous to a far more recent trend within post-apocalyptic genres: "cults as a prominent figure of political resistance."15 Take, for instance, the Cult of the V8 in Mad Max, the Prophet in Station Eleven, the doomsday cult in The Walking Dead, and the Project at Eden's Gate in the popular video game Far Cry 5. The "cult imaginary" nearly always performs one of two functions: the expression of political anxieties or the expression of political desires. The GR, at least to begin with, gives voice to both.

***

Let's fast forward to the end of season 2. It is, once again, the anniversary of the Sudden Departure. And, once again, a riot is imminent. Led by the formidable, relentless, and defiantly self-serving Megan, the GR have come together to force entry into Miracle, the one American city supposedly "untouched" by the events of seven years prior. Miracle is also where Kevin and Nora have moved, precisely because Nora believes it to be "immune." As a requirement of maintaining its privileged status, the town heavily policies its borders and enforces strict restrictions over who can or cannot enter (the primary criterion of which is owning real estate in the town itself.) As a result, at the entrance to the town an unruly encampment has sprung up, filled with a chaotic assortment of people: the homeless, the hopeless, and the hopeful. 

A storm has been brewing all season. All season long there have been suggestions that Miracle's "immunity" is either under threat or a total fantasy. All season long there have been hints that Megan is plotting something. All of this suspense culminates when she arrives at the city gates, her followers in tow, and "thirty-five pounds of plastic explosives" in hand. When the time finally comes, however, Megan reveals her ploy to be nothing other than a ruse. She is not, it turns out, carrying ammunition. Instead, she holds a different kind of weapon. The is the revelation that Evie, a previous inhabitant of Miracle, has joined the GR (fig. 3). It is this news alone that triggers the realization amongst those excluded that they already possess the power to overthrow the security state. The homeless, hopeless, and helpful at the city's gates charge the bridge in a moment of sudden, collective uprising.  In this frantic, feverish moment the "contagious" force of the GR realizes its full narrative potential. As in the Book of Revelation, the GR, a force of chaos and destruction, successfully infiltrates a sacred and profound land and claims the city. Fire spreads, houses burn, and families disperse. 

Fig. 3: Evie leads the GR march on Miracle.

The revolution does not last long, however. Or so we presume because we don't get to see what happens next. Instead, when we return in season 3 order has been restored and Kevin is back in his cherished role as Chief of Police in the town of Jarden. Meanwhile Nora is enjoying the benefits of a promotion within the Department of Departures where she performs a form of "trauma testing" in service of dispensing state welfare payments to bereaved families (fig. 4). Their shared commitment to build a family together is equally tragic and aspirational in nature. Together they continue to cobble together a non-normative family from the wreckage of civilization's remains. Their commitment to each other ebbs and flows. Where they hardly ever waver, however, is in their commitment to the civilizing mission that their jobs, and their faith in family, supposedly proffer. (That is, until Nora leaves to find her departed family i.e., her "true" family.) 

Fig. 4: Nora and Kevin following the restoration of order in season 3.

I will admit, I have been somewhat selective in my retelling. Yet the events I have assembled here are designed to show how the plotline that follows the GR faithfully mirrors Wald's definition of an outbreak narrative as a "formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks through which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment."16 Likewise, season 1 begins with identifying the GR as a contagious threat, season 2 then tracks its seemingly unstoppable spread into Miracle, and season 3 opens with its containment. This is what I mean when I say that The Leftovers equivocates as a matter of form. It critiques the language of contagion as a metaphor, especially when in the mouths of state officials. Yet it then proceeds to stage its own "outbreak" — complete with emergence, spread and containment — at the level of genre and plot. 

How to make sense of this ambivalence? Perhaps we should conclude that Lindelof's dictum that you can "have whatever you want to believe" applies equally to the GR. This equivocation leaves our judgement of the GR susceptible to different and competing political sensibilities. Are they fanatic fundamentalists or radical revolutionaries? You choose. The problem with this reading, however, is that it lets us all off the hook. The point is that your answer to the question says more about you than it does the show. Thus, while The Leftovers might disavow its own maneuvers, ultimately it does ask us to decide. Should we let "this shit" spread, or not? 

Here, Wald's description of the silent political function of the "outbreak narrative" proves particularly enlightening. In her words, "the outbreak narrative. . . articulates community on a national scale, as it identifies the health and well-being of those legally within the borders of the state and its worthy representatives."17 The spectacle of infection and contagion manufactures consent for ever more draconian governement policy. Outbreak narratives work to bolster the modern capitalist state's self-justification (it justifies its existence through promising to protect the health of its population) while cultivating the desire for forms of state intervention in its audience. Put another way, as an outbreak narrative The Leftovers entertains our desire for anarchy whilst simultaneously producing in us a desire for protection. This, then, provides one possible answer to the question with which I started. The radical promise of epistemic upheaval is contained when likened to a spread of disease, because the spectacle of mass infection produces a desire for the state and its agents — Nora and Kevin. 

The GR, however, not only defies the "believe what you want" principle but is also itself unambiguously judged by the show's final reckoning. Yes, The Leftovers equivocates initially and indulges our fascination with self-annihilation, but its moral pendulum ultimately swings in favor of Kevin and Nora's emotional and political commitments to family, order, and security. This, in turn, allows us to recognize how ambiguity in the GR's presentation is not in the service of fostering multiple interpretations of its actions. Instead, it is symptomatic of the true force of the show's political imaginary: the desire that persists, even while paying lip service to its impossibility, for forms of benevolent state intervention.

Kevin proclaims that he doesn't want to be infected, but the general tenor of the show is one that indulges in our delight that everybody already has "the fever." These are the dual tones of desire and fear that constitute the synchronic undercurrent to Kevin Jr.'s accusation that "you want to infect me." Kevin Jr. the policeman cannot let go of his world view, but maybe what he is actually saying is that he desperately wants to. And boy, oh boy, does he come close. 

Close is the key word here, however. For even as the show deliberately builds up suspense — right up to the very point where everything seems to teeter on the edge — its narrative, too, must come to one. As a result, the suspense it has spent two seasons building collapses under the pressure of the demand for resolution, catharsis, and restoration. In some senses, this is the classic ideological critique leveled at other demonic genres, such as gothic fiction. It exposes and indulges the dark underside of bourgeois values while ultimately restoring a normative order. Fredric Jameson, for instance, argues that the gothic excises social anxieties as a form of cathartic ritual bloodletting via the restorative force of the marriage plot. Isabella Pinedo echoes this assessment when she argues that "horror tends to restore the rational, normative order . . . that brings things back to a more stable and constructive state."18 I wonder, therefore, whether it is necessary see The Leftovers' formal equivocation as symptomatic of the limits of its genre, and dare I say it, of narrative more generally. 

By season 3 the GR has been annihilated, destroyed by a governement attack on Miracle. The outbreak has been exterminated. Yet when Kevin and his band of unlikely companion travel to Australia we get a sense that anarchic impulses still plague the global population. On the boat, for instance, they meet another cult, whose members worship a lion. Meanwhile, Kevin Sr. plays native with cultish fervor in the Australian outback. With these narrative digressions comes the pulsing sense that a return to "normal" simply isn't possible. Ultimately, however, The Leftovers succumbs to the narrative desire for sense-making. By the end, nearly all the characters have lost the plot other than the two that it decides are the only ones that really matter. Yes, you guessed it. Kevin and Nora kiss and make up. 

Here, then, we have our resolution, reunion, and catharsis. Over the course of their destructive love story they — and we — have indulged our shared appetites for "apocalypse fever," disorder, and destruction. Ultimately, however, this outbreak has all been in service of producing the desire for its government. This leaves us with only one possible conclusion. Everyone is infectious. Everyone is infected. Everyone must be contained. 

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Mia Florin-Sefton is a Lecturer at Columbia University. Her first book project, The Disinherited, offers the first literary history of the idea of "the disinherited" in 20th and 21st century anglophone fiction. Her academic writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Diacritics, Modernism/Modernity. Feminist Modernist Studies, among others.

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References