Matt Jamison sees "God" on The Leftovers
Photo Credit: HBO
Brief thoughts on “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World”
brought to you in part by Frasier, life’s sexiest lion…
“That’s the guy I was telling you about.”
-Matt
Yeah you heard him right, that guy… The one who was mauled
by a lion.
Almost unsurprisingly at this point though “man who thinks
he’s god gets disproven after being mauled by a lion” is one of the least
strange things to occur in “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World.” This season’s
Matt POV episode feels like familiar territory thematically (although it is
fantastic and necessary familiar territory) but boy does it go to some strange
new places. First there was a naked man who launched a nuclear missile into the
sea, then there was the fact that Matt and crew desperate to get to Melbourne
take a ferry which turns out to be a giant orgy, and then it turns out that
orgy occurs entirely due to a lion who named Frasier who had lots and lots of
sex.
Completely unsurprisingly at this point though is the fact
that The Leftovers not only makes all of this strangeness work, it knocks it
out of the park. We’ve seen a similar sort of Matt episode before but nothing
quite this strange and devastating. “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World” is
the episode in which Matt discovers, like many of the characters on this show
seem to, that his faith is misplaced. Throughout the run of the show Matt has
been a man who has been righteous to a fault. He’s the guy who approaches you
demanding you to join his cause to the point that you want to punch him
straight in the face. He’s so dedicated to the cause, and so narcissistically
certain that he can not only make a difference, but be the driving force for
the faith, that it seems as though he is basically unbreakable. Until he meets
God himself of course.
Now of course in true Leftovers fashion Matt does not meet
God himself, just yet another fraud, but Matt is so wrapped up in his cause that
he falls into believing that its real. Matt’s own narcissism has made him
essentially unbreakable in a way, but his fatal illness returning (in this case
Leukemia) has brought him to the point where he just vulnerable enough to have
his faith broken. Matt obsesses with the crusade of stopping former decathlon
bronze medalist turned supposed god David Burton, who ended up pushing a man
overboard for whatever reason, before everything finally breaks down. Matt does
the thing that he’s been fighting since the first season, he believes a false
profit. In yet another magical Leftovers extended monologue, Matt finally allows
himself to let go of his faith and find the true pain he is in. Matt has
sacrificed everything for his belief, his family, his wife, his health, and has
gained nothing viable in return. Burton was the proverbial straw that broke the
camel’s back. Matt’s faith has been tested a lot in the past, he’s been
punched, spat at, you name it, but the combination of all the pain he’s been
through, and the proof in the illness that God may not be watching over him was
finally enough. Turns out the final straw was only the snap of a false prophets’
fingers.
Of course this is a Matt episode and so this all plays out
as a giant elaborate sick joke against him. He winds up on a boat with a giant
orgy in order to get to Melbourne quicker. He finds his God only to have his
faith shaken. Then the man who fundamentally shakes his faith ultimately gets
mauled by a lion. Through the wackiness though we see a Matt who seems at peace
with himself, his probable imminent death, and the fact that what he has been believing
in the whole time has been worth nothing. It’s hard to tell whether we can call
this version of Matt enlightened, but at the very least he does not seem to be
in a big hurry to fulfill a prophecy like he was at the very beginning of the
episode. At the very least Matt Jamison has finally become able to laugh at the
sick joke that his life has become.
This week’s other musings are going to jump through the last
three weeks of the Leftovers due to my mini hiatus. Here goes nothing…
Some other Musings:
- On the list of plot contrivances naked French man using his hands and feet at to turn two keys at the same time and launch a nuclear missile into the Pacific may be among the greatest. It not only gets us one of the strangest and most interesting moments in a series full of them but it manages to get all our characters together in wild fashion for the last few episodes.
- On the note of great Leftovers monologues, the last two weeks in Australia have been full of them. Whether it was Kevin Sr. telling his entire drugged up Australia story to Christopher Sunday, Grace telling Kevin Sr. of her dead children, or the big fight between Nora and Kevin Jr. in the hotel room (more on that in a minute) the show has been showing its full range of dramatic monologue storytelling over the last few weeks. “Crazy Whitefella Thinking” especially was an episode that made the absolute most out of close up monologue filmmaking even amongst the beautiful backdrop of the Australian outback. Week to week the show continues to find incredible emotional power through its broken characters, no matter how strange and wacky the show gets.
- How about that hotel fight at the end of “G’Day Melbourne”? It was due time for the Nora and Kevin’s ticking time bomb of a relationship to finally explode, but boy did it take a dramatic and tragic turn. The explosion at the end of the episode was very difficult to watch just because how nasty the fight was. Because neither Kevin nor Nora had been able to talk about anything important over the course of the series, their fight turned completely nasty instead of a healthy fight between an otherwise loving couple. The tragic blow up coupled with a couple of amazing shots near the end of the episode (in particular the close up of Nora drenched by the hotel sprinkler comes to mind) made for another incredibly powerful moment in a season that has been full of them.
- On the note of the hotel scene The Leftovers continued its run of incredible music cues with three separate uses of different versions of Take on Me to highlight the big moments of “G’Day Melbourne.” It’s an amazing example of the show not only using a song but the context and history behind the song (the Take on Me music video, one of the more famous music videos of the era, involves a leading man jump out of a fantasy into reality in order to be with a woman, much like Kevin has, until then, jumped through differing layers of insanity just to get back to Nora) to enrich the theme of the episode. It’s not uncommon for song to be used to enforce meaning but no show seems to use song in a way that digs this deep.
- Speaking of deep digging Frasier the Sensuous Lion is a real movie! Yes a real movie!
That’s it for this week. Hopefully things end up back to
Sundays for the last two weeks but because of a busy schedule no promises can
be made.
That’s just me though. What did everyone else think.
No comments:
Post a Comment