slight spoilers s01e06 of The Leftovers
I feel like I watched The Leftovers in a fever dream. And, timelining it now, I sort of did. I watched a bunch in LA, which I hate, while my grandmother was dying, which I also hated, while having opinions counter to the critical ones, which I don’t hate in theory but in practice made me antsy and distrustful of myself.* A lot of it blew me away and also a lot of it made me feel stupid. The memories I have are rapid and emotional and in my stomach. Kevin singing karaoke.“Take Me To Church” over the credits of the third episode. The color white. But mainly what I remember is Nora getting shot.
When The Leftovers starts, 2% of the world’s population has disappeared with no explanation or discernible pattern. Everyone loses someone. Nora Durst loses everyone. Her husband and children are at the breakfast table and then they’re not. There is no precedent for how to deal with your family evaporating. She thinks that no one understands her, and she’s right. So she gets inventive with her coping. By which I mean she pays a sex worker to shoot her in the chest while she’s wearing a bulletproof vest.
The Devil gets a bad rap. Which, fair. It’s a card of addiction, spiraling, collapse of self-control. Being constantly at the brink. Total id.
I think it’s the queerest card in the deck.
Queerness, at its heart, is about deviant desire.† Wanting something— sex, love, a body, some combination therein— that you’re not allowed to want. We frame unmitigated desire as a bad thing, something that is intrinsically harmful. But that framework is predicated on the idea that all desire operates on equal ground, and that there is always too much of a good thing. Of course, there often is. But I think that idea also exists as a metric of social control. There is so much that we’re told that we’re not allowed to want or have. If we can only have it in moderation, then maybe our deviance won’t upset the status quo.
We have all been ashamed and afraid of our own desire. The Devil asks what it would be to want freely. To let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.‡ I think all of us are scared, on some level, that we’ll lose something irreplaceable if we let ourselves both want and have. The Devil doesn’t say we won’t. But he also wants us to know that loss isn’t always bad.§ And when it is, it might be worth it, anyway. This mythic, terrifying creature basically just wants us to follow our hearts (or, often, our junk).
It would be dangerous to frame all unmitigated desire as good. Many desires with rough consequences cover up underlying desires with consequences that feel even rougher, and it’s much easier to run with the first set. It’s why people from marginalized communities smoke at such high rates. If we’re afraid of what we want or maybe even need, we can sublimate it into wanting and needing something simpler, easier, something that will hurt us just enough to distract from the possibility of deeper desire. The Devil grasps at the thing he hears us want and pushes us up into it. Sometimes, he’s helping us, distracting us from things that we’re not ready for. But sometimes those distractions are intensely harmful, and he has no interest in discerning the difference.
So what the fuck should we make of Nora? The first thing we have to pay attention to is that Angel, the sex worker she hired, verbally and visibly didn’t want to shoot Nora, and Nora’s bullying and bribing in order to get what she wants is unequivocally unacceptable. But briefly putting that down, what about the shooting itself? Look, Nora should absolutely have a therapist and probably a psychiatrist and possibly some medication and some sort of grief-friendly community, like religion or a support group or a rugby team. But I don’t know that we can say that her following her Devil here is wrong or bad. Getting shot is going to bring something totally different than any of the previously mentioned coping mechanisms. It might be bad for her every single time. It might be good for her once and never again. Most likely, it’s some complicated combination, and if she only ever sits in that desire and never looks for what’s underneath, that’s not so good. But Nora knows that she needs something, and this is her way into fulfilling her need somehow. For better or for worse, this is The Devil, whispering to Nora follow what she wants right this second. It’s up to Nora to look him in the eyes and decide what to do about it.
*RIP Grams, a total badass who ran a factory and farm by herself in the ‘40s, protected communists from the FBI, and was an exceptional trans ally in the sense that she immediately forgot my old name and gender which I do feel bad about because she would sometimes be confused about who was in my old school photos and it sucked when no one was around to remind her it was me.
†This is my take on and experience of queerness; of course of course of course there’s no one definition or experience.
‡Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese.” I personally hate this poem but I do respect it.
§The Devil is one of the cards I have the most solid pronouns for. “He,” for me, has been such a signifier of forbidden desire, of being trans itself and also of being a man in this moment of widespread queer misandry. When I need and want The Devil most, he’s the part of me that will sometimes find myself referring to myself with pronouns I do not use. (I don’t use those pronouns very purposefully, as “he” only feels right sometimes and “they” feels right always, but I’ve never questioned the year and a half where I did use “he” or the unmeasurable amount of time before that that I wanted to.)
Okay, this one is fun. Have Townie by Mistki and Son Of A Preacher Man (Aretha version), but honestly you could have a million other ones that would be just as on point. What a gd card.