The Dude Abides
What would you do if you knew you only had a few months to live?
That is the question that the new Showtime series “The Big C” has asked for a dozen weeks so far this season. It’s an essentially spiritual question that, as the series heads into its final two episodes of the season, has answered with maddening candor, great humor and, increasingly, abundant grace.
Last week’s episode, titled “Divine Intervention,” found the protagonist, Cathy (Laura Linney), a high school teacher, wife and mother in suburban Minnesota who is dying of cancer, facing up to the consequences of her reckless choices in the months following her diagnosis.
Until last week’s episode, Cathy had been keeping her terminal condition a secret from nearly everyone closest to her, including husband Paul (Oliver Platt), whom she kicked out of the house to his great (and endearing) confusion. Her one confidante, apart from her oncologist, is her cranky next-door-neighbor Marlene (Phyllis Somerville), a widow battling the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
For most of her life, Cathy has been a very good girl. She married young, made a beautiful home for her family and was unfailingly practical, right down to her perfectly pressed khaki pants.
But news of her impending demise knocks her world out of orbit and she begins to indulge her fantasies, from installing a backyard pool (or at least digging a hole for it) and beginning to say what she feels (not what she “ought” to say), to getting her first Brazilian bikini wax and embarking on an ill-conceived (if sexually satisfying) affair.
For much of the series’ inaugural season (it’s just been renewed for a second), Cathy’s adventures in newfound freedom were entertaining. I even found myself cheering her on. Still, I began to wonder whether the other shoe would drop.
In the episode, “Divine Intervention,” the Divine seemingly does intercede, handing Cathy much-needed clarity and solace, even if it was delivered with a slap across the face.
When Cathy blithely tells her neighbor-confessor that Paul is divorcing her because she had an affair, Marlene smacks her hard, telling her that cancer doesn’t give her the right to be a “destructive bitch.”
“Ask me, you need to get your head out of your ass ‘cuz you’ve really messed shit up for yourself,” Marlene says, adding, “Sorry about the slap.”
“Somebody needed to,” Cathy answers, convincingly.
When Cathy’s favorite student, the troubled Andrea (Gabourey Sidibe) threatens to quit school, in part because she knows about Cathy’s affair, the teacher tracks her down at church choir practice to try to talk her out of it.
It’s a fool’s errand. But on the way out of Bethel AME Church, Cathy spots a sign that reads: “Need a do-over? Our God is the God of Second Chances.”
Hallelujah! It’s not a burning bush or pillar of fire but it might as well be.
Cathy returns to church on Sunday in pursuit of her prodigal student, and during the pastor’s sermon about “do-overs” — God’s cosmic mulligans, if you will — she stands up to ask the congregation to pray for her. The monologue that follows is a beautifully articulate expression of repentance, redemption and grace.
“Pray for me. I’ve lied. A lot. I keep on lying and I’m sitting on a huge pile of lies right now. I’ve cheated on my husband. I’ve had an affair and it’s hurt people I didn’t expect it to hurt,” Cathy says. “There is some stuff that I can control and then there’s this other stuff that’s, um, it’s killing me. Pray for me. Oh help me God. If there is a God and I hope that there is because I have to believe that there’s going to be someone on the other side who’s going to leave the light on for me when I get there, that there’s going to be someone there to welcome me. Pray for me because I have managed to turn my once average life into a complete fucking mess. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say fucking. Now I’ve said it twice.”
“The Big C” is stellar storytelling. It’s spiritually smart and brutally honest. It treats faith with respect and tenderness, seeing it for its complexities, foibles, and the blessing of comfort and guidance that it is for millions of people.
That makes “The Big C” terribly unusual.
In another exchange with Marlene over a game of Scrabble, Cathy sheds a little more light on her spiritual biography:
CATHY:
Do you go to church?
MARLENE:
Every Sunday
CATHY:
Do you go because you want to or out of obligation?
MARLENE:
If you’re asking if I believe in God, yes I do. Pray every day too.
CATHY:
What do you pray for?
MARLENE:
The usual stuff, I guess. For my family, for Eddie to be in heaven, for me to join him one day and when I do, for it NOT to hurt.
CATHY:
I used to go to church. My parents used to take Sean and me all the time. And then this one summer, a freak tornado took out a bunch of houses in the town next to us, and killed the pastor and his kids. And we stopped going.
But now that I’m a dying person, I’m wondering if I should reopen my spiritual options. If there is a God, do you think he could bring me some sense of peace?
MARLENE:
He’s not a miracle worker….I think God gives us problems so we can learn to deal with them, not so He can fix ’em.
CATHY:
Say a prayer for me, Marlene.
MARLENE:
Every day.
As Cathy grapples for a rudder to steer the drifting ship of her soul, faith isn’t her last resort. Instead, it’s the answer she’s been seeking, a light in the darkness of grief and despair.
But it’s not the easy answer. It requires action, not just beliefs. Cathy has to make amends to those she’s injured and begin the process of mending broken relationships.
On “The Big C,” faith is as difficult, confounding and entirely necessary as it is for so many of us in “real” life.
Life is short, the show’s writers tell us, too short to waste it on petty grievances, and hollow selfish indulgences or to allow disharmony and division to fester.
It’s also too short not to have hope, choose love, and cling to the substance of things hoped for: faith, the evidence of things not yet seen.
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