Flung out into space — a winter’s tale.
Matilda Lawler’s performance in the HBO mini-series, Station Eleven, is one of my favourite pieces of acting in the last several years. I wish she was in the show more than she is / can be. She is one of two actors playing Kirsten Raymonde — the adult self is played by Mackenzie Davis — and the nature and structure of the story means we leave young Kirsten behind more and more as the mini-series unfolds. The story gets more and more rooted in “the present” — post-apocalyptic 2040 — and spends less time in “how we got there” — the (extra, super, television variant of a) lethal pandemic in 2020.
The series concludes in 2040, because of course it does, and of course it must. It makes complete narrative and thematic sense and I have no quibbles with it, objectively; but at some point in the last episode or two I realized I wasn’t going to see Lawler very much more at all, and I was bummed about it. Her journey as Kirsten brings life, and heart, to something that should be — to anyone watching this 2021/2022 series in 2021/2022* — maximally terrifying: the part of the story where the pandemic fully wipes out the world. The version of history where we didn’t get lucky. (And yes: Station Eleven‘s pandemic will, at least, make you look around at ours and recognize that we are very, very lucky.) As civilization disintegrates and ice overtakes the remaining flickers of life, huddled around the Great Lakes, Lawler’s grace and spirit are a blazing candle in a cold world.
*Every single person I have recommended this show to has, after my describing it, looked at me like I’m insane for watching it. I assure you: it’s essential viewing for our moment.
I do not recommend reading Station Eleven when going to bed. I have been doing that since the mini-series ended; I’d read the novel once before** but as soon as the show was off the air I needed to revisit it. Worked out great, for the first bit. The novel is merciful (to us) in time-jumping pretty quickly out of that first night in Toronto (yes I said Toronto, HBO!)… the night when people start coughing. One can imagine it’s fully The Stand after that point, but the story doesn’t dote on that (yet). After the halfway mark, though, we start getting back into the details, by way of Jeevan — who, in the show, is paired with Kirsten for the disaster, but in the novel is much more on his own. A stranger in a crowd, who leapt onto the stage of the Elgin in a (futile) attempt to save a dying man, and then wandered in the snow through the neighbourhoods where I make my home, where I buy my groceries, before retreating into the darkness of encroaching winter to shelter with his brother in a one-room condo facing the water, not unlike mine.
**There is a slip in my copy of the book, around 2/3rds of the way through, a receipt for an archaeological site I visited in Sardinia, in 2018. I do not know if this means that I read the book for the first time in Sardinia in 2018 — it feels further back than that, to me; but then, everything does — but I do know that when that relic of the old world fell noiselessly out from between a page and the next, while I was nosing my way through the novel for the second time in my life, I felt a chasm of time open behind me that nearly brought tears to my eyes.
And I lay there in my bed, reading about the Station Eleven pandemic (the “Georgia Flu”), and — as much as I had all of the equipment, beforehand, with which to understand what I was letting myself in for — I almost couldn’t help but give myself a panic attack. Not because the details themselves were revealing or alarming (although they were); but because we were right there. Right on the fucking edge of the thing. You know that thing where you stand on the precipice of a cliff, or the edge of a balcony, and peer over, and feel that dizzy urge to jump? That was us, on the planet Earth, in the years of the covid-19 pandemic.
From Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.
Reading Station Eleven this time, in January 2022, the line in the novel about the fantasy of the army rolling in at the end of a disaster movie, announcing the end of the crisis, was the most recent moment when I realized that the end of the crisis was never coming. Covid changed the world; there isn’t a normal to return to. Normal is where we are now. You know that line in A Fish Called Wanda, when John Cleese (sorry) jabs the American moron-patriot, Kevin Cline, by telling him that an example of the word “winners” would be “North Vietnam”? That’s us, pretending we overcame the covid-19 pandemic. We didn’t. A virus rearranged the planet and all the lives on it, pushed wider every crack that was already there. The reasons it did that are multifarious and not worth getting into here, but it is a signpost of a sick, sick society. Sure, there were nations on earth who, communally, did better than Canada and the United States; but, virus being virus, that doesn’t really matter. Those people are trapped on this planet with us, and we’re trapped on this planet with them; and no, Elon, there isn’t a way off. We’re a single community now, on this Earthship Us. And we fucking suck at it.
In Station Eleven, the titular station is the location of a self-published comic book written by Miranda Carroll (an absolutely superb Danielle Deadwyler, in the show) and given to young Kirsten, the night before the end of the world. The station’s dream-logic varies between series and novel but, per the above, it is a sealed planet-like environment negotiating with itself for the futures of the handful of people (and peoples) on it. In the story, Kirsten becomes obsessed with Miranda’s made-up world, and shelters within it to some degree as the apocalypse blasts past her. It rearranges the terms of her real world into something she can understand and work with, of course; and of course, that’s why I fell into this thing. For any degree to which it feels painfully close to life, Station Eleven also feels comfortingly transformative about it.
What made Station Eleven my favourite thing to watch in the early days of 2022 was its (perhaps farcical) central notion that human connection somehow makes it out of all this. I am who I am and yes, even at my age I still want to believe in all that. (I still watch Star Trek series written for children, and at no level of emotional chill, I assure you.) And who knows? It could still be true! Maybe when the next pandemic or the next weather catastrophe or the next whateverthefuck else wipes out enough of us, the ones that remain will retreat into some kind of communal self-awareness that existed for most of the time that humans have lived on the earth, but died out in the 20th and 21st century. Died out, I tend to assume, because there are simply too many of us, and we’re connected to one another now in ways that our ape minds were simply never designed to process. Think about yourself reading this, right now, and see your precarious weirdness in the animal life of the planet Earth. In Station Eleven, the internet blinks out on, like, Day 15 of the crisis or something, and never comes back on. At that moment, at least, our society would become a lot more eye-level. I’m not saying that’s good or bad. Hell, it’s us, so we’d probably fuck it up completely. It’s not like Station Eleven, both book and show, aren’t full of examples of cliques of humanity using violence and coercion to continue to make life awful for as many people who aren’t them as they possibly can. This story about life after the end of the world, then, is comforting for who Emily St. John Mandel (the author) and Patrick Somerville (the showrunner) choose to focus on. Goofy David Cross with his huge beard, his landmines, and philosophies. Francois Diallo, of the New Petoskey Library, interviewing a passing Kirsten Raymonde for his newspaper, in Year 15. That outright lunatic in the Walmart birthing centre who teaches Jeevan how to midwife. Young Kirsten, crossing the frozen lake alone.
Ok, back to Kirsten. Matilda Lawler isn’t in the last two episodes much because her portion of the story has been largely told at that point. The consolation prize is the absolute delight of episode 7, where — because this is television and we can do whatever we want — young and adult Kirsten get a whole episode together. Lawler and Davis. Adult Kirsten’s been knocked unconscious by brigands (I told you! Evil cliques!) and is dreaming about the first few months of the pandemic, when she was in lockdown in that downtown Chicago(Toronto) condo with Jeevan and Jeevan’s brother, Frank.
It doesn’t hurt that the view out their window is basically mine; different Great Lake, same icy wilderness, paralyzing beauty, deep undercurrents of a world arrested and held still. (Intellectually, you know the ice melts eventually… except, what if this time, it doesn’t?) It doesn’t hurt that young Kirsten is the latest in a lifelong series of my onscreen avatars, the characters in whom I most see myself — stretching all the way back to Pomma in the Windham Classics Below the Root videogame in 1984 — the young girl who is herself supernatural or exists within a supernatural adventure. (She may not have superpowers, but Lawler’s Kirsten — in her puffy winter overcoat and King Lear costume — is very much a visual icon, aside from also being a grounded, empathy-churning character.) It doesn’t hurt that I was reminded painfully of the first thing I ever wrote that I actually liked, which also happened to be a snowbound, faintly melancholy tale of a night after the end of the world, when a frightened young boy met and spoke with his future self.
The teacher I wrote that story for was a big one for “only connect,” from Forster, rendered G-rated for his audience perhaps, or perhaps made slightly more pedagogically useful to a teacher by building it as mere encouragement to his students to seek all the ways you can find richness and nuance in a given text, by letting the things that spark within it connect to any of the other things that have ever sparked with you, before. No wrong connections. Station Eleven is that kind of experience, for me; it throws lines out in so many directions, and the best thing I can be doing with my time right now is to wander along all of them. I’ve found things I thought I’d lost. And it’s not lost on me that those same words — “only connect” — are a different kind of spine for the journey of the Travelling Symphony, into which Kirsten becomes inducted. They wander a circuit around the Great Lakes in the years after the end of the world, performing Shakespeare. They connect the remains of the human race in their small (but growing) pockets, speaking words from before the end of the world to the fledgling civilizations afterward. They have “survival is insufficient” emblazoned on the side of their wagons, to somewhat explain why they do what they do. That line connects the show to Star Trek, which connects back to me, as well. Another small thread, another gentle current, another pathway through all this big, healing world. Only connect. Maybe that’s what the story is all about.