To The Leftovers with grief

In addition to its martial overtones, War and Peace (1869 & 2016) follows the romantic lives of Russian aristocrats. While special attention is typically paid to Andrei (James Norton) and Pierre (Paul Dano), it is interesting to follow the story from the perspective of Natasha Rostova(Lily James). Natasha, a lovesick teenager, undergoes an emotionally taxing ordeal and affair which results in her disgrace as well as her family’s embarrassment. What Davies and director Tom Harper refrain from doing however is oversexualizing or glamourizing Natasha’s love life. In the same vein, they also capture the depth of her remorse and sorrow. Ultimately War and Peace is a romance told from the perspective of a non-judgemental narrator. In her day, Natasha would be considered a disgraced woman. However, we can all relate to her impulsiveness when we understand her story, perspective, and pains through an impartial lens. What Tolstoy suggests and what the BBC team translated well is that if we truly understood other people, we might love them even more for their faults.

“Pierre was right when he said that one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and I now believe in it. Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.” (Book 6, chapter 15)

This is perhaps the most important takeaway for everyday life in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a brief two sentences written in a very accessible script. It speaks to the author's overall philosophy on art, something he discusses further in his aptly titled book What is Art (1897). Tolstoy wanted art to be accessible for everyone. He knew that if novels were not entertaining, no one would read them. But he also considered them a kind of therapy. Art should teach us something about one another. It should make the audience more aware of the imperfect human condition that we all share. Essentially, the BBC miniseries accomplishes this very well. Tom Harper’s excellent direction interweaves history and romance into a highly pleasurable viewing experience. At the same time, Davies drops Tolstoy’s esoteric discourses in favour of a more intimate humanizing message. War and Peace (2016) reminds its audience that history is a cloudy reflection of the present. In fact, other people, with their many faults and issues, are not so unlike us. We should try our best to be happy and to live authentically with others in peace.

- Seamus Conlon

By: Caroline Kelly

Television functions as a kind of subconscious for what people care about. It is fascinating to locate its fluctuations and changes, to observe how it both is influenced by our shifting social codes and actively influences them. In this sense, it’s a little door in the back of a work. At the front, lies the work itself—the plot elements, directorial choices, and so on. But always, in the back, there’s a door to everything else; all of the cultural implications and philosophical meanings are found through here. Open the door a crack, and you might catch a glimpse of those things. Throw it open wide, and you reveal just as much about yourself as you do the work itself.

The Leftovers forced me to open that door and leave it that way permanently. It was incredibly comfortable letting me struggle with its implications, rather than providing tidy summations. Even when it answered its biggest questions, it did so in a way that suggested the answers might be wrong, because what matters isn’t the answer, but whether I believe the person who’s offering it to me.

The series takes place in a world where, on 14 October in a year contemporary to our own, 2% of the world’s population vanished without a trace or reason. The series opens on this event, remembered as ‘The Sudden Departure’, but its objective isn't to find where these people went. Whatever the answer is will pale in comparison to the fact that when millions of people just up and disappeared randomly, the world was reminded that existence is basically random, meaningless and uncontrollable.

The lack of definitive answers about the event throws humanity into a world-wide existential crisis where neither science nor religion can offer any relief. Such relief becomes scarcer and scarcer as the seasons progress, tracking the lives of Kevin Garvey (Justin Theorux) and Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) as they rummage through the rubble and aftermath of the Sudden Departure, searching for any sign of life.

In The Leftovers, signs are taken up by stories and function in vastly different ways. And no story ever prevails. Nor does the show itself give us any firm foundation to stand on, no privileged perspective of truth. The last of the three seasons combines these competing stories. The bookend episodes of Season 3 are entitled “The Book of Kevin” and “The Book of Nora.” In between, there’s “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World”. It’s all stories— science, religion, history, the self. Each character envisions and revises themselves constantly, which reveals The Leftovers for what it is: a study of the different stories intertwining each other at every possible angle. That foundation will never firm up. The show is all these stories at once, all competing and colliding and intertwining, offering neither comfort nor closure.