After the Leftovers

Edited by Erica Fretwell and Anna Krauthamer

Introduction

There are two different kinds of leftovers, two different problems they represent. The first problem is long division, which teaches us to let the leftovers be. The leftovers of division are excess quantity; the numbers that cannot be incorporated into a group but nonetheless endure as fragments. The remainder means the problem is solved, the end has arrived, and it's time to move on. The second problem is the family dinner, which teaches us to finish the leftovers. The leftovers are the unconsumed excess that, in a misguided moral calculus, registers the young eater's indifference to hungry people elsewhere. The leftovers are not disposable; they have not (yet) been disposed of. Far from over, the end has only just begun. We work towards a clean plate, returning ourselves to a blank slate that forms a whole number: 0.

After a rapture-like event in which two percent of the world's population instantaneously disappears, are the leftovers — the people still here — worth saving? Are they, are we, an excess to be discarded like numerical remainders or begrudgingly metabolized, like the broccoli at dinner? This is one among many questions that the HBO television series The Leftovers (2014-2017) pointedly does not answer. On one end of the spectrum is the Guilty Remnant, a nihilist and suicidal cult that, trafficking in silence and cigarettes, is notorious for trolling the bereaved in the vein of the Westboro Baptist Church. On the other end of the spectrum is Nora Durst, whose spouse and children departed and who, in her capacity as an employee for the Department of Sudden Departure, works to recognize and recompense, on behalf of the state, the loss of fellow leftovers. And between these two ethical and hermeneutic poles everyone else in this network toggles: the troubled protagonist and police officer Kevin Garvey; his estranged wife, the former psychotherapist and current Guilty Remnant member Laurie; Laurie's former patient Patti, who now leads the local Guilty Remnant chapter; Nora's evangelical brother Matt Jamison and his disabled wife Mary; and many more. 

The post-apocalyptic world that the characters ambivalently navigate is saturated with grief, doubt, and loss. They survived an extinction event but are not entirely sure that the event is "over" and safely contained in the past. The show's narrative arc felt foreboding when it aired, and it did not take long for it to feel prescient. In May 2022, for instance, as I [Erica] sat in a large waiting room for a ferry boat, the schism between masked and unmasked commuters revealed with striking clarity the two entirely different worlds the earth's humans were inhabiting: one in which the COVID-19 virus is a significant risk to health and life in the short and long term, and another in which the COVID-19 virus is little more than a bad cold or flu. No one, it seemed, could (and still cannot) agree on what constitutes a grave threat to human life — let alone to planetary life. A distorted mirror of the Guilty Remnant's white uniform, the white N95 mask similarly signals no, I am not moving on, while trading the cult's belligerent nihilism for an ethics of care. But what follows? Everyone moved, via the ferry, from point A to point B, but in fact we sit in that purgatorial waiting room, that holding station, still.

Fig. 1: Detail from Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam (1508-1512)

Human finitude is a deadly serious topic that, in its appeal to unreality, cannot but also be seriously funny — hence the oft-overlooked sharp humor that courses throughout the show's veins. How to make sense of a world in which both the Pope and Gary Busey, Condoleezza Rice and J. Lo, Nora's philandering spouse and Laurie's prenatal child, are casualties of the Sudden Departure? Why would a show that begins its first season using Max Richter's symphonic score — abetted by shots of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam (fig. 1) — to amplify the theological mood spend its final season repeatedly playing the Norwegian band A-ha's "Take on Me"? Synth-pop makes for an unlikely, and indeed silly, soundtrack to the unbearability of living. And yet "Take on Me" manages to crystallize the show's most abiding concern: the elemental, near primordial, desire for human connection across worlds, whether those worlds exist on different hemispheres, different planes of existence, or (as per the 1985 comic-strip-come-to-life music video) forms of mediation. To be a leftover is to live in the impasse of pattern recognition, which is at once a drama and a comedy of errors. 

Fig. 2: A human hand clasps a pencil-drawn one in the video for A-ha's "Take on Me" (1985)

Reaching across geographic, metaphysical, and spatial dimensions, "leftovers" generally inhabit the temporality of after-ness — a presence at once shadowed and overshadowed by the event(s) that preceded it. In 2024, with The Leftovers well behind us, the writers contributing to this cluster have had time to consider the material, affective, formal, and ethical stakes of being left in the wake of incomprehensible disaster. Insofar as "leftovers" generally designate a surplus that may or may not be disposable (that's what Tupperware is for!), this cluster on The Leftovers seeks not to resolve the problem of remainders but to respond to the impossibility of incorporation or wholeness by inquiring into how that impossibility is produced, across a variety of registers, as an ontology. 

In keeping with its object of study, this cluster contains multiple entry points and pathways. One might read essays by Liz Bowen, Brian Connolly, Gabriel Hankins, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay together as a meditation on loss and the unbearability of kin, care, and repair. In "Why Are None of These People in Therapy?" Bowen looks to therapy's ambivalent status in The Leftovers (and in many of our own lives) as a form of care inextricable from neoliberal imperatives to better ourselves — yet still, perhaps, something worth saving. In thinking about how the series navigates this uneasy ambivalence, displaying skepticism about therapy's curative properties while still not quite being able to disavow the talking cure entirely, Bowen asks how and why the latter (therapy's relationship to late capitalist subjectivity) might be true in light of the former's (the thing about therapy neither we nor The Leftovers can disavow entirely) context. Connolly, meanwhile, looks to another of The Leftovers's foundational ambivalences: loss, the show's structuring condition, in its simultaneous measurability (two percent) and unknowability. For Connolly, in his essay "Family, Unbearable and Otherwise," the recurrence of Freudian "primal scenes" in The Leftovers are responsive to when the "aporia of individual experience can neither bend nor yield no more." The "ephemeral fantasy of the comforting family" is always attached to the desire to know; primal family scenes thus are fundamentally related to the foundational loss at the core of The Leftovers. Hankins, too, wrestles with the contradictions of care and its infrastructures. In "Care, Interrupted," he looks at "paradoxes of interrupted caring" as a crisis in social reproduction, with careful attention to the modes of distracted television viewing (both staged by the show and of watching the show itself) that mediate collective trauma. Jean-Thomas Tremblay's essay "Being Here, Leftover" similarly meditates on the affective and televisual pleasures of the compulsion to not depart. Ongoingness thus situates the temporality of trauma in fundamental tension with the very event (or non-event) of departure and, by extension, the fantasy of care as a narrative of completion or overcoming. Each thinker captures one of the most enduring problems with care, and specifically care as (affective, unwaged, narrative) work: we can seem to live neither with nor without it.

All the while, essays by Jorge Cotte, Mia Florin-Sefton, Wendy Roberts, and Patrick Whitmarsh address genre at the end of the world. In "On the Other Side of the Screen," Cotte looks at how loss's doubled trauma to film — a trauma to a film's psychologically textured character(s) and to film's spectral ability to make absent things present - results in The Leftovers's generic movement. In mediating the questions of "absence and presence unique to the screen," in crossing thresholds and binaries, and in literally entering other worlds, The Leftovers finds an entryway into more fantastical genres, Cotte writes. "The show's self-consciousness," or "the way it holds this other world in a suspense of reality/unreality" allows it to play "with genre without being subjected to genre." Florin-Sefton similarly asks us to think about genre in "You Want to Infect Me" — but in her case, about the affordances of reading The Leftovers, and particularly its mode of representing cultishness, as an outbreak narrative. In The Leftovers, cults, as embodied by the Guilty Remnant, suggest the radical promise of total epistemic upheaval, but the series, Florin-Sefton suggests, is ambivalent about such a promise. If the Guilty Remnant promises a sort of radical epistemic disintegration, how does the show express skepticism about alternative ideologies when figuring them as viral in nature? Roberts, too, writes about the series's ambivalence to "bad belief." Ultimately, Roberts argues in her essay "The Book of Nora," The Leftovers administers severe consequences to religious subsets that "most interfere with the hetero-nuclear family, and its attendant whiteness." Whitmarsh, in his essay "Nothing is Next," also attends to a latent genre in The Leftovers: extinction. In reading The Leftovers as a narrative of extinction, Whitmarsh suggests, we come to understand the possibility of human endurance as "permeated by extinction," where "the idea of a human species" is "riven by unimaginable and unexpected ruin." Because The Leftovers, in withholding from its viewers the actual visual of people departing (instead only showing us the moment right after) is disinclined to suggest extinction as a discrete moment, the series instead asks us to "wrestle with an extinction already taking place." 

Essays by Elizabeth Alsop, Adam Fales and Lily Scherlis, and Olivia Stowell, Cecilia Reynolds, and Hannah Krieshok build on genre studies to consider mediation, and the aesthetic and ethical implications of The Leftovers as a prestige television show. In "Hotness at the End of the World," Fales and Scherlis take up the question on all our minds — how is it that Nora is so hot — to "account for hotness as an aesthetic phenomenon in times of crisis." Hotness, they posit, has more affordances than simply "lust and sentiment;" rather, it functions in The Leftovers as more of a reality effect, indexing (in the case of this series) shattered expectations; for this prestige show, hotness embodies a character's differentiation as opposed to cliche. And for Alsop in "Let the Mystery Be," The Leftovers speaks to the dominant mode we contemporary viewers consume prestige television: in response to the "narratively complex series" that proliferate in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century TV, viewers adopt "maximally suspicious hermeneutic approaches." But while The Leftovers' characters at first may seem to model this paranoia-driven relationship to content, they ultimately make a case for a "different interpretive posture...one driven to mystery, not mastery." Like a small subset of other prestige television (The Curse, Twin Peaks: The Return), Alsop finds, The Leftovers asks us to approach narrative as "something that does not primarily exist to be explained." Finally, in "Carrots & Little Sweet Peas" Stowell, Reynolds, and Krieshok stage a dialogue between the three of them that both captures and reflexively interprets their experience of watching The Leftovers during the first few months of the pandemic. They movingly offer us a fascinating mode of engaging with the series that, we think, embodies much of what makes The Leftovers so enduringly gripping: its many sites of potential analysis coupled with affective poignancy that at times seems to exceed scholarly interpretation. Of course, this cluster encompasses but also exceeds these groupings, and readers no doubt will find resonances between the social contexts of television watching between Stowell, Reynolds, and Krieshok and Hankins (while folding laundry), or the bioethical concerns shared by Bowen and Florin-Sefton. While most of the essays here engage in some form with the affinities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Departure, not all do, a fact that testifies to how, even as our writers make good on drawing out those affinities, they also resist reducing The Leftovers to its immediate resonances with the pandemic.

In speaking of testimony, we are reminded of one reason we were so eager to put together this cluster: the possibility that the excellent writing gathered here might function as its own form of testimony, or perhaps even memorialization, to the lives still in the process of being altered, scarred, and lost to the pandemic, to police violence, to US-backed genocide of Palestinians, and, in general, to the many forms of structural dispossession that accompany and power the flows of late capitalism. Thinking, now, about memorializing the pandemic through the writing collected here feels different than it did even in the summer of 2022, when we first pitched the cluster to the editors of Post45: Contemporaries. Then, it felt like something possible, something meaningful, something attainable, perhaps only because, in some admittedly tautological logic, it still seemed like then there was yet still time enough for the world not to completely pass that possibility by. With that possibility vanishing, the relationship between this collection and memorialization feels different, somehow — more tenuous, more fraught, thinner, almost as if we have now fully moved past the point for any kind of radical epistemological upheaval, to borrow Florin-Sefton's words. In closing, then, we leave it to you, our readers, to complete whatever means toward memorialization this writing might afford — to realizing it in some form, even if only as a possibility now departed. We might even say, that, as per the sped-up temporality of ongoing crisis (such that most of us feel we are aging in dog years) After the Leftovers is the COVID era's leftovers. In keeping with the show's ethos of ambivalence, this cluster reminds us that what remains still is — which can be freeing but is also exhausting.

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Erica Fretwell is associate professor and director of the graduate studies program of the Department of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke, 2020) and is writing a book about political constraint and the aesthetics of unlived experience titled “The Art of Slight Living, 1900/2000.”

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References

Past clusters