“You always like watching heavy stuff. Why don’t you watch something more cheerful?” or a version of this statement is something I have been told many times in my life. It is not that I don’t watch cheerful stuff, but it is true that I do like stories that are considered heavy.
People may think such stories are, even if they are very good, depressing (or not hyggelig in Denmark). I think the contrary. Depending on the ending, and unless it is a Gaspar Noé movie, such stories can give you the positivity, peace, and hope you need to move forward.
In this light, I decided to briefly write about some of the films and series that helped/help me to process different forms of grief I had/have from time to time in this blog.
But first, some definition … The textbook (or the wikipedia) definition of grief is “the response to loss”. This loss can come in different forms and intensities from letting go of a beloved routine (even if it opens up room for another beloved routine) to saying goodbye to a close friend (even if you are moving to a new place that you are very excited about) to death of a loved one (even if our loved one lived a good long life). Despite being a healthy response to loss, grief is not an easy thing to process even in lighter cases like the loss of a beloved routine, because we aren’t very welcome to talk about it publicly light or heavy. This is what grief has in common with menstruation.
Now, let’s move onto the series I want to write about in this post: The Leftovers (2014-2017).
An academic brother once called this series “depression in audio-visual form”. It is true, I cannot argue with that.
On the other hand, Emily Nussbaum, the ex-TV-critic of The New Yorker, writes “But it captures the disorientation of grief in a way that is provocative and rare for television.”, which is why I love this series so much.
The Leftovers tackles grief that is triggered as a result of a collective trauma, which is due to the disappearance of two percent of the whole global population. Different individuals react to this loss differently: divorce, faith, creating/joining a cult, repeating a thrill …, while the life moves on in parallel. All these reactions depicted in a manner that feels well-thought-out and genuine instead of cheesy or just for the sake of drama.
There were already two seasons out, when I started watching The Leftovers, which was mid-August 2016. It was roughly a month after the July 15, 2016 military coup attempt in Turkey, which is an example of an event that creates collective trauma for a nation. I wrote about how I felt in those days in an earlier blog post back in early August 2016. Starting to watch The Leftovers shortly after that wasn’t a calculated choice from my side by no means. I started watching it with no particular expectations. It was just in “my watchlist” for too long. It turned out to be an unexpected helping hand. In those days, The Leftovers was one of the rare things that managed to reach me at an emotional level and broke my numbness. I am forever grateful to it.
The Leftovers is also annoyingly-fitting for the time we are going through right now, which is why I chose it to be the first thing I discussed as part of this Series & Films about/for Grief posts. If you need to watch something to process your grief of all the losses you had to experience as a result of the current pandemic, just give The Leftovers a try or re-try.