The leftovers, a review

The music. The music is faeric, it works as a feedback loop, feeding off the images, and the images grow, feeding off the music, both transcending their immediate meaning. Just for the play of music and images, I would watch this series. That haunting piano melody, it transforms you, I am becoming a perfect Pavlov dog, every time I hear those few piano strokes I cringe, my heart constricts, and I hear…

The series follows a few tortured souls, adrift in a world devoid of meaning, of anchors, of purpose, except for a few fanatics full of raging, deadly purpose. This opposition reminds me of “the second coming” poem by W.B. Yeats:

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

…

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Dreams intrudes on reality, nightmares takes shape, and the haunting music swirls around. Symbolism abound, images, relations, and links can be made, yet I don’t feel the urge. That is the genius of the show’s creator, I care more, much more, about these tortured souls and their struggle, than about what caused the departure, and what powers are hiding behind the curtain, pulling the strings.

The characters struggles, their emotional turmoil awaken feelings in me, new old feelings that are forgotten, yet vaguely remembered, like the memory of a bittersweet dream fading away. I hate it, yet I’m slowly falling in love with it, with these new feelings...

Thankfully, you might think, we live in this world, not in theirs. Until you open the TV and watch all the horrors happening a few miles away, perpetrated by people who also had a purpose, a purpose to live for and a purpose to die for. And you fervently wish to stay lost, without a purpose, adrift …