Perfectionist Returns to the Ordinary

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I would like to offer a few remarks about the notions of the ordinary and of crisis, notions that lie at the center of Stanley Cavell’s work. In order to do so, I will mention one TV series that may be placed in a certain post-apocalyptic genre, The Leftovers (HBO 2014).¹ The Leftovers is about life in the fictional town of Mapleton, New York, three years after the sudden disappearance from earth of 140 million people. The story focuses mostly on Kevin Garvey, the Chief of Police, his family and their acquaintances. This extraordinary global event has changed individual and social life, in particular dividing those who try to go on living from those who can’t. Among the latter, the sect of the so-called Guilty Remnant, who dress in white, have taken a vow of silence and are devoted to making people remember what happened in disturbing ways, including by means of violence. Religion as a way of coping with loss and with the unexplained is a crucial theme in the series, but my interest in the series is particularly in the way it treats the theme of the vulnerability of the ordinary: the vulnerability of these people’s lives in the present, seen through the contrast with the vulnerability of their lives before the great event (which comes into view in flashbacks).

The Leftovers and other post-apocalyptic series explore an acute sense of the vulnerability of our societies, of social and political bonds, and of personal relationships, human bonds within the family and in friendship. Something catastrophic and often supernatural happens at the beginning: for example, in The Leftovers, the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of two percent of the world population. This opens up a train of events in which the ordinary lives of people are recounted—how they cope with the result of this event, how they can accommodate the radical changes in their ordinary lives—and we also come to understand that the threat of loss and the vulnerability belonged to their lives well before and independently of the catastrophic event. In a way the catastrophic event functions as a Great Loss, leaving behind “the abandoned ruin of a dead civilization,” which makes possible the exploration of the more ordinary exposure to loss that belongs to individual lives, the threat that endangers the possibility of “getting close to someone,” of trust, belief and the acceptance of things in ordinary contexts.

The quotations in brackets are by Nora Durst’s character in her final monologue, which concludes the first season. Nora, who lost her family in the Sudden Departure, and who has had a date with Kevin, after finding the dolls with the appearance of her kids and husband placed in her home by the Guilty Remnant, decides to leave town and writes a farewell letter to Kevin, which is presented in a remarkable monologue:

Dear Kevin, I need to say goodbye to someone I care about, someone who’s still here, so I’m saying it to you. You were good to me, Kevin, and sometimes when we were together, I remembered who I used to be before everything changed. But I was pretending, pretending as if I hadn’t lost everything. I want to believe it can all go back to the way it was. I want to believe that I’m not surrounded by the abandoned ruin of a dead civilization. I want to believe it’s possible to get close to someone, but it’s easier not to. It’s easier because I’m a coward and I couldn’t take the pain, not again. I know that’s not fair, Kevin. You’ve lost so much, too, and you’re strong. You’re still here. But I can’t be, not anymore. I tried to get better, Kevin. I didn’t want to feel this way, so I took a shortcut. But it led me right back home, and do you know what I found when I got there? I found them, Kevin, right where I left them. Right where they left me. It took me...