‘They haven’t changed their lives in any way’

I’m looking forward to HBO’s The Leftovers. Creators Tom Perrotta and Damon Lindelof discussed the show with the Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern (whose name would have been perfect for the protagonist of a novel like The Leftovers).

Lindelof’ does a good job explaining one of the many, many things that the Left Behind series gets wrong:

The presentation of the Departure in Tom’s book is much more believable than Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind books. … To me, the idea of, “What if a huge, inexplicable supernatural event occurred that the scientific community was completely and totally baffled by, and that was also undeniable?” You go see the Transformers movies, and you’re like, “So … the world has experienced massive robot battles and invasion ships in multiple American towns, and then every time a new Transformers movie starts, they’re just back to where they started.”

… They’re aware that it happened, but they haven’t changed their lives in any way. That idea that you’re living in exactly the world that we know now — except there are Transformers in it — is a very heightened reality.

That’s a pretty good summary of the whole Left Behind series: “A huge, inexplicable supernatural event occurred … but they haven’t changed their lives in any way.” No one responds or reacts to that huge supernatural event because the story doesn’t allow them to respond the way real humans really would.

But real humans responding to such an event should be the story.

That was the insight that led Tom Perrotta to write his novel in the first place. What would real people really do in such a scenario?

Left Behind fails not just because it declines to explore that question, but because its plot requires that question to remain unexplored. And that plot, Tim LaHaye insists, isn’t fiction — it’s a prophecy, a sequence of events that must and will soon happen. Paul Lalonde, producer and screenwriter for the upcoming Left Behind reboot, says the novel and movie “… is a contemporary story that could actually happen at any moment. It’s also a historical account, in a sense, because it’s based on a true story, it just hasn’t happened yet.”

But as Perrotta’s variation on this theme shows, Left Behind is not a story that “could actually happen.” It could only happen if no one reacted to a “huge, inexplicable supernatural event” in the way that real humans would really react. The plot of the Transformers movies is driven by humans who fail to act like humans, which makes those movies bad stories. The plot of Left Behind is dependent on humans who fail to act like humans, which makes LaHaye’s tale not just a bad story, but a false prophecy — a prophecy that can never come true so long as humans continue to behave like humans.