Infinity in a Grain of Sand

Forever a series by Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard.  With Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Catherine Keener, Noah Robbins.  *****

Forever is one of the most unusual things I’ve ever seen on a screen.  It’s composed of eight episodes roughly thirty minutes long, so my wife and I watched it over two nights.  The difficulty with writing about it is that almost anything you say is a spoiler; I want to tell all about it but can’t really say anything.  On the one hand, it’s a story about an ordinary couple with a completely drab, if satisfying, life.  They live by routines and seem to like their routines.

On the other hand—I can’t believe I’m saying this about a television show—it has an undeniable metaphysical dimension.  I’m not sure how seriously its creators take that, but I took it seriously indeed.  I’m not comparing these creators—Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard—to Samuel Beckett, but the only other modern drama I can think of that gave me this same feeling is Beckett’s.  You’re watching, for instance, Waiting for Godot, and it’s funny and odd and eccentric, it seems to be a small weird story, and at some point you realize it’s the story of all humanity.  That was the feeling I got from watching Forever.

Classical drama has that feeling, or at least it’s supposed to.  It’s the feeling that you get at the end of Our Town, when a character comes back from the grave, and he’s looking down on the perfectly ordinary life that is going on, and he says something to the effect of, They don’t see it.  They don’t see how beautiful it is.

That’s the feeling you get from Forever.  Except that finally, maybe they do see how beautiful it is.  Or they’re beginning to.

Maya Rudolph (June) and Fred Armisen (Oscar) are a comic duo from way back; they worked together on Saturday Night Live, and I’m embarrassed to say I know nothing of their work.  I’ve never seen them before.  But if they’re playing Forever as comedy, they’re playing it straight, and understated.  It is funny, but it isn’t howlingly funny.  It isn’t even necessarily the kind of funny that you laugh at.  You shake your head and wonder.

It could just as easily have been called Now, or Eternity.  We think of Eternity as another state, or another thing altogether, but it is also true—we come to this realization now and then—that we’re living in eternity now.  This is a moment in eternity.  That’s the kind of realization that can make you stop, puzzle over it; it can almost paralyze you.  But it’s true.  It’s what Zen practice is all about.  I think it’s what all true religion is about.  And this television show that seems utterly secular, about completely ordinary, even drab people, addresses that fact.

It also brings to mind Roger Ebert’s experience just before his death, which has been reported in various places.  His wife described it this way:

“The one thing people might be surprised about — Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I asked him, “What’s a hoax?” And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once.”

That place that Ebert visited could also be called the human mind.  It has that vastness.  And if you watch your mind, the past and present, and even the future, are all happening at once.

Forever addresses this metaphysical dimension in various ways.  There is an episode that doesn’t include any of the regular players at all.  It’s a completely different situation, about a couple who are having an affair.  There’s also an episode in which a young man is attracted to a woman he once knew in high school, and is just as strongly attracted to her as ever, even though she’s now a rather dumpy middle aged woman, and he’s still young.

The Catherine Keener character—named Kass—seems to be someone who believes that there is another place, a better place, to get to, where she can forget or transcend this dull drab everyday world.  She heads off to find it, and takes June with her.  And though the place they arrive is better in a sense, by the standards with which we usually judge things, it also ultimately isn’t.  It’s different but it’s the same.

Once June and Oscar realize that, they find the other possibility, the one that my Buddhist teacher Larry Rosenberg—now 85—mentions every time we talk.  “This practice just gets deeper,” he says.  “It keeps getting deeper.”  That’s true because the mind, or the body, or the universe—whatever we’re calling all this—is in itself infinite.  It goes on forever.  There’s no discovering the whole thing.

The way Forever shows that in its final episode is mysterious and fascinating.

It’s impossible to write about this show, and I honestly don’t agree with other things I’ve read about it.  It isn’t about relationships, and how they do or don’t work out.  It’s about a different way of looking at relationships, and human life, altogether.

I’m amazed that a couple of television writers thought this up.  It’s enough to make me start watching television.

Not really.  But I’m glad I saw this.