It is also not well-researched. It's like the kind of thing I would say to you at a party.
Ahem.
S is the least political person I know—including myself, and I would say I'm not very political either. If I had to explain it, I'd say we try not to have strong opinions about things until we have all the facts... and where politics are concerned, who could possibly have all the facts??? We don't trust the media, or anyone with a microphone, really, and the country and world are so enormous and full of so much shit that politics seems like a war no one could ever, ever win. We try to make art, instead, and if that seems like a cop-out it's because it definitely is.
So current events don't get discussed much in our house. Sometimes one of us will say to the other, "Hey, have you noticed this thing is happening?" and the other will say something like, "Yes, it's crazy, the world is crazy," and that will be about all. But yesterday, S came home, flopped wearily onto the couch and said of the San Bernardino mass shooting: "Oof. This really just... opens up the existential gulf between you and... everyone. It just reminds you that people can't ever really know each other."
Full disclosure: after that, he also said something about gun control, but that's not what this post is about. This is about The Killing.
Yes, the TV show. This morning I found myself once again mentally walking around in the too-short-lived AMC/Netflix series, walking with detectives Linden and Holder beside me, opening the cupboards of memory and taking down each episode of this show one by one, as though I was looking for something. (Do you ever do this? Our stories comfort us, and they sit around on our literal or metaphorical bookshelves until we need them.)
As I wandered around in that show again, I realized that it a show firmly placed IN the existential gulf S mentioned, and I appreciated it even more. To be succinct, The Killing did not save us. In the first season, the honest politician was corrupted, the grieving father was drawn back into violence, and even Holder betrayed us. Later, the show did not save Kallie or Bullet or Ray Seward or Kyle's sisters or Linden's relationship with her son, and it did NOT STOP RAINING, not even once. In fact, the only thing it did save was Skinner's reputation, and it turns out he'd murdered 19 teenage girls.
Of course, The Killing is fiction. Because in real life, it does stop raining, at least here and there. But when you really settle into that gap, that universe-wide tear between you and everyone else, then you realize that it isn't outside of you at all, but that it is made by you, and as much as part of your fabric as your blood and bones. When, at the very end of season 4, we realize that it really was Kyle the whole time—that this teenage kid really DID crack and brutally murder his entire family, including his eight-year-old sister—we only realize this as Kyle does, too. He didn't know. He didn't remember. After all, the point of The Killing is that you can't out-clever darkness. You can't logic it. You can look around all you want to in the daylight, but ultimately all is concealed from us. Darkness doesn't have to be clever. It just waits in the corners to envelop you when you can't see it or stop it or even know about it.
According to True Detective season 1, "the light's winning." But according to The Killing, the light is NOT winning. It may some day, but at the moment, it doesn't have a prayer if we live in a world where it's possible for you to have murdered your entire family and not even remember it.
Or where a couple of gunmen can end your life like that —bang—for no reason.
In season 2 of the show, it is revealed that "bad guy" who killed Rosie Larsen, ultimately, was her aunt, who loved her, and who has been grieving for her and helping to put the family back together. In real life, this is often the case: that the bad guy is, in fact, not a bad guy, but a person. And that's something to remember.
None of this probably makes you feel less scared, but it actually does comfort me, did comfort me, this morning. In the final scene of the show, Linden's blue scarf comforts me. No, The Killing doesn't save us, it bravely doesn't save us, but we do survive it, and we pick ourselves up and survive all kinds of things, and we wait out each night until dawn again, and collectively we survived yesterday. And that's also something to remember.
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