Enlightened

Enlightened – Enlightened is an HBO series starring Laura Dern and the geeky-looking Mike White – White is also the series’ screenwriter. In the show, Dern’s character has returned from treatment after a spectacular and terrifying breakdown in the corporate suites of Abbadon, a multi-national company that markets a variety of health and beauty products (and who knows what else besides). Back from Hawaii, Dern demands to be reinstated at her job and she is so convincingly obsessed and ferocious that management reluctantly assigns her to a job in the lowest circle of Abbadon’s various hells, a basement realm populated by “circus freaks” (to use Dern’s phrase) where the workers labor on completely meaningless software reconciliation projects. Dern’s character is a remarkable creation and it is the fascination that she exerts that makes this series so compelling. Dern is a zealot, probably in a manic phase of astounding energy and grandiosity, and she believes that everyone must be enlightened as she has been during her treatment in Hawaii. Simultaneously, seductive and horrifying, Dern browbeats her timid co-worker, played by Mike White, into assisting her in various schemes aimed at making Abbadon – the name signifies the “demon of the bottomless pit” from Milton’s Paradise Lost –into a more virtuous, socially-responsible corporation. But, of course, Abbadon represents the kingdom of Hell on earth and it is an obdurate, immensely powerful opponent fully equal to Dern’s heroic machinations and fulminations. The series is filmed with extraordinary beauty and grave conviction – there is none of the herky-jerky moving camera spawned on TV by The Office and, subsequently, adopted by Hollywood in films like Zero Dark Thirty and Carlos. The camera is dispassionate, a fixed and immutable eye, sometimes slowly panning or tracking across the antiseptic vistas of Abbadon’s glittering, but satanic realm. Everything is bright, clearly lit, hyper-defined – the series has a surrealistic objectivity and clarity and a great narrative that ultimately derives from Don Quixote. Dern’s character wants to inspire heaven on earth but she isn’t against merely the powers of earth, rather, she is defying and battling the powers of darkness, what Blake called “the dark satanic mills” that entrap the human imagination. The stakes couldn’t be higher and the portentous, if poetic, voice-overs by Dern characterize the world as a struggle between good and evil. The problem is that evil is so seductive, visualized as a paradise of glass towers and lush corporate courtyards, freeways glittering with light between pinnacles of polished steel. The series has several features that are unique. First, Dern’s co-workers are physically ordinary specimens – this means that on TV, and in high-def, they look like goblins and monsters. TV shows people that are uniformly beautiful –the ordinary-looking people in Abbadon’s pit, who are the victims of the system, look monstrously ugly. Second, the script which is exceedingly intelligent and literate, is slightly over-schematic and I fear that the show will be a one-trick pony – just as Don Quixote, at its core (and ignoring all the digressions that make up most of the huge book) has only one theme, although a theme that is worthy of close attention, much thought, and a commensurate degree of repetition. In the opening of season two, the episode that brought me to this series, the images are surreal and dream-like – the canyons of the glass towers are eerily empty at night and filled with emerald foliage and the camera prowls through eerie white corridors where huge paintings of plants and meadows adorn the pale walls: this is Abbadon, a place that is both intensely real and completely metaphorical. Later, Dern’s voice-over tells that she intends to break the enchantment and free this kingdom from the evil that has befallen it – the camera tilts up into the black sky which lightens around the form of a great sea-turtle plowing through turquoise waters. I thought this was an astoundingly bold series of images that were intensely moving. Later, I watched several episodes of Season One to catch up with the plot and realized that the sea-turtle, to my dismay, was an animal that Dern encountered while snorkeling off Hawaii’s beaches and that she equates the animal with God. It was disappointing for me to see this dreamlike and poetic image brought to earth in this way and I hope that the series does not devolve into something that is preachy and over-explicit.

Several episodes later, I am convinced that Enlightened is one of the best television shows ever produced. It serves as an interesting counterpoint to Lena Dunham’s Girls, also a fascinating program but at the other end of the spectrum. In Girls, the characters are much worse than people in real life – they are more promiscuous, self-centered, and emotionally needy than anyone you know (I hope). Dunham’s characters are intriguing and pretty and you can ascribe their failings to naivety; because they are young, and finding their way, you are on their side although, generally, forced to conclude that their behavior is despicable. Enlightened’s searchers and strivers are heroic – they intend to do good, while perpetually achieving exactly the wrong thing. Dunham’s show is Menippean satire, Petronious Arbiter for the 21st century; Enlightened is tragedy – everyone wants to do the right thing and, even, attempts to act virtuously but the world and circumstances drag them down. Several shows from the first season are beyond praise: in particular, there is one episode in which Laura Dern’s character attempts to relive a happy day fifteen years earlier by persuading her drug-addicted husband to go with her on a kayak trip on a river in the Sierra foothills. Of course, a catastrophe results, but we’re not invited to laugh at the characters but rather mourn with them – the episode reminded me of Renoir’s Day in the Country, a film that I revere and, from my perspective, the highest accolade available to me. Not far behind is an episode in the second season in which Dern’s ex-husband goes to Rehab, a bit of shrewd social satire that suddenly morphs into tragic awareness of human frailty. Dern’s show (it’s actually written by Mike White) is so good that I’m scared to watch it – the feelings that it stirs seem so authentic and sad that I’m fearful that the miseries of the characters will prove to be unbearable. (And I should remind you that the show is a comedy.)