I don’t know that they have a point other than to try and make people remember what happened. My sense is that their main issue is that everyone else is trying to either forget what happened, move on with their lives, or create cheesy memorials. Their message isn’t “life is meaningless”. I think it’s “God has judged us! Recognize bitches!” At least according to their web site.
IOW, in spite of all the lip service, most people really aren’t recognizing the magnitude of what happened. But it does seem like the event created this underlying sense of confusion, dispair, pointlessness and anger, even for families that weren’t directly affected.
Also, why in The Leftovers universe do cults fall under the expanded ATF (which apparently now stands for Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives and Cults or ATFEC). The A,T,F and E are all restricted materials or devices. “Cults” doesn’t seem to fit. I would think cults would fall under the FBI or Department of Homeland Security as possibly “terrorist organizations”. Except maybe that the ATF is somewhat more controversial with the war on drugs and Waco and whatnot.
You’re right in terms of the story, but what I’m saying is that this story element doesn’t make sense. If a genuine, can’t-explain-this-away supernatural event occurred in plain sight of most of the world’s population, there would be no need to try to make people remember it happened.
The book’s author and the showrunners seem to believe that if this never-before-in-history (clear evidence of the supernatural) thing happened, people would just get back to normal, except for a few who decided they had to live in communes (run by the smoking mutes, or by the charismatic leader). Everyone else would basically just get on with their old lives; some would mope around with grief for the vanished, but that would be about it. Oh, some teens would do more sex. (Good for the ratings!)
To me that’s a misreading of human nature. Nothing about it rings true to me.
(Good point about the ATF being used instead of the FBI…doesn’t seem logical.)
I feel the opposite. If anything they’re exaggerating big time the effect that event would have. People went to work the day after 9/11, or the Tsunami, or any horrid war you care to mention.
The idea that they would be so obsessed with the subject three years later is what I found silly. People survive and gets on with their lives and start worrying about the love life of celebrities more than we care about any tragedy or impending doom.
Obviously nothing like that event has ever occurred, so we don’t know how people would react, but I can imagine that it would have a big impact on everyone. Many, many scientists and statisticians would be attempting to find the cause of the event, or at something that the disappeared have in common. (If someone actually did figure it out, I’m sure they’d get a Nobel Prize the next year.)
For all of human history, people have been asking for proof of the existence of the supernatural. Because no such proof exists, we had to invent the concept of “faith.”
Individuals certainly do find “proofs” that they themselves find convincing. But actual proof that the supernatural exists?—proof that could not be explained by other, non-supernatural means? That has never happened. Not once in human history.
9/11, the 2004 tsunami, and horrid wars of all description may provide topics that people who believe in the supernatural find to be significant----but those events themselves are in no way proof of the existence of the supernatural.
I think you’re underestimating the likely reaction if incontrovertible proof of the supernatural really did appear.
For millenia people thought the sun rising as incontrovertible proof of the existence of the supernatural, and still got up in the morning to hunt and gather. I don’t feel that most people are all that invested in whether the supernatural or aliens or whatever else exists more than they care about who’s dating who and what that bitch Becky said at the office.
They don’t have proof of the supernatural. They have an unexplained event. You can come up with natural explanations if you get jiggy with it. Maybe our universe collided with a parallel universe, making a bunch of weak spots that people got sucked through. Not very plausible, to be sure, but no more implausible than a supernatural event.
Hell, it could be as mundane as alien abduction. Nothing supernatural about aliens. Maybe they are aware of an earth-killing meteor on course for us in a decade’s time, so they grabbed a sufficiently large and diverse cross-section of the population to restart humanity on a different planet.
The whole point is that nobody has the first clue what actually happened. The event isn’t proof of anything.
I’m also not understanding the question about the cult. I don’t see the cultists or their motivations as a mystery at all. I definitely do not think there will be some sort of “pay-off” where the cult is “explained.”
People who are overwhelmed by the pointlessness of life flee to the support of the cult. Whatever the cause of the event, the one legit result is that people now have to go out of their way to deliberately ignore the clear and undeniable pointlessness of life.
And even if it was, so what? Plenty of us get up in the morning and go to our jobs without moping around or joining demented cults while being pretty much sure there’s no such thing as an afterlife. Why would a 2% rapture change that?
To me, understanding the motivation behind the people joining the cult would be one of the reasons, even the main reason, to keep on watching. I think that said motivation is left vague and mysterious to pique the curiosity of the audience. To hook them.
If the writers don’t care about the motivations of the characters, if they are just empty plot elements that can act as weirdly as the writers want them to in order to ramp up the drama, I don’t feel like watching any more of this, because the implicit promise that my curiosity will be satiated will be broken.
Maybe another cult was really illegally into booze, smokes or guns, and Congress, recognizing that this kind of thing was likely to happen again, gave jurisdiction for cult monitoring/law enforcement to ATF?
Come to think of it, GR folks smoke like chimneys…
I personally can’t wrap my head around the idea that the motivation to join the cult is a mystery that should be explained. It not only would never have occurred to me, but now that you’ve clearly explained it, I still can’t really internalize what your question even means.
Given what you’ve said, I think you should skip this show.
For the vast majority of people, the 2% rapture had no effect on their lives. They keep going to work or school or whatever.
Why is it so hard to understand that a tiny fraction of people might have a little more trouble dealing with it? Maybe that tiny fraction includes people who weren’t already sure there was no afterlife.
Probably I didn’t explain myself well enough. If, in real life, somebody joins a cult and is told to smoke incessantly and to never speak, people would be all like “okay… but why? What are we trying to convey here?” Right?
Now, maybe we get that explanation, why they are doing what they are doing, what’s their motivation. Which can be silly if the writing is bad or it can make a lot of sense and give you a “now I get it!” moment if it’s good.
Now, if we don’t get any explanation, well, that’s just a random idea without any thought behind, like something a child would write.
Well, it’s a small town in Jersey. The fraction of people joining the GR in that town is fairly significant. And it’s not only about them, or even the other cult. Everybody in the show is surrounded by bleakness and gloom. Worse stuff happens every day somewhere, and life goes on, they go back to smiling and things become pretty much indistinguishable from life before the tragedy.
A small town in Jersey probably has around 10,000 people. (I live in a small town in Connecticut with 16,000 people.) There’s maybe 100 people in the cult, which is 1%. That’s a tiny fraction.
Think of the impact of an event like 9/11 that killed a couple thousand people or the disappearance of a single airplane. Those events have an impact that lasts years or decades and they can be explained.
The sudden and inexplicable disappearance of more people than were killed in all the wars of the 20th Century combined would have a massive and ongoing impact on society.
I’d think a lot of people would have trouble dealing with it. Even if they weren’t affected directly.
Really? Because I feel like, historically speaking, people did get pretty riled up when someone told them the sun actually stayed put and it was the Earth that moved. People “accept” the existence of the supernatural, so long as it doesn’t conflict with what they already actually believe. What they tend to now accept is when they are provided incontrovertible evidence that it doesn’t actually work that way.
But you really think that your average Italian peasant was particularly invested in Galileo and his fate? They didn’t. People kept on living after 9/11. And after WWII. And after the Black Death. We move on. We adapt to anything.
You make a movie about 2003 and wouldn’t be an accurate portrayal if it had everyone talking about the twin towers constantly. I don’t think that a possible supernatural explanation would make such a difference.