These tomes are scribed with human hands, please don't forget them

An exploration of the uniquely personal storytelling of The OA

While I was off work this week I made a definitive push to finish a number of TV shows I had put on the back burner for what seems like forever. Whether through nervousness, my previously noted issues with anhedonia or simply not having the right kind of time to commit, ticking some of these things off the checklist felt like lancing a particularly vicious boil.

To no surprise, I ended up enjoying all of the things I watched and rather smartly didn’t worry too much about why it took me so long to get round to them. One of these shows was The OA, an absolutely brilliant sort of evangelical sci fi series that I rarely hear people talk about.

So I’m going to talk about it now, and explain with as few spoilers as possible why I think you should watch this show, should you not already have done so.

I first became aware of Brit Marling when she starred in two films made by Mike Cahill: Another Earth and I Origins. While I found I Origins to be a bit of a nonsensical atheist wank fantasy, Another Earth was a really compelling watch. Although far from perfect it had solid performances, a bold sci Fi concept cleverly placed in the background of a more important human drama. It showed promise more than anything, and it was no coincidence that of the two films, this was the one that Marling co-wrote.

Regardless of the quality of execution, the idea at the heart of that film was incredibly thoughtful and precise, an exploration of an expansive science fiction concept through the lens of ordinary people. It felt like it understood fully that with the budget it was working with, you cannot really have one without the other.

After Marling and Cahill parted ways she joined up with writer and director Zal Batmanglij for a new project, one that would present the idea of storytelling itself as the focal point for a fascinating tale of hope, redemption and an incredibly evil Jason Isaacs.

The first season of The OA released in 2016, centering on Prairie Johnson, a young woman who had been missing for seven years, returning to her hometown, and the questions raised by the members of that community about what happened to her. The major conversation being that, having been blinded as a young girl, Prairie is now able to see.

Most of this first season centres on Prairie telling her 'story' to a group of disenfranchised kids (and one emotionally lost teacher played by Phyllis Smith, of The American Office fame, delivering the performance of a lifetime). What happened to Prairie over those seven years is a tall tale that gets increasingly unbelievable the further it goes to the point of questioning the very nature of the universe.

I really don’t want to spoil what actually happens because this is one of the few pieces of TV where the revelations are a fundamental aspect of what makes the whole thing work, but questions are raised about how much of the story is true, and whether a lot of it is a fantasy dreamt up as a trauma response to a very real terrible thing that happened to her. As the Season draws to a close, we are left with a devastating moment of impact, no questions answered and many a viewer left bewildered. No closer to the truth, a lingering question of what comes next, if you’ve seen the first season of Twin Peaks you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about.

I was hesitant to continue on with the second season for quite a while. I knew the show had not been renewed after that, I had heard whispers that it ends on an absolutely massive cliffhanger. The series had already presented such galaxy brained ideas that I wasn't sure that I could deal with the cognitive blue balls that would inevitably follow.

But this week, with love and hunger in my heart, I blitzed through season two, a worthy follow up that goes harder, answers all those questions left at the previous season’s coda, but beyond that it also acknowledges the one left unasked: where do we go from here?

I won't bore you with a blow by blow account of the show's strengths and weaknesses but there's something incredibly special about what I saw that's hard to put to words. It feels, for better or worse, like a complete thing. An unfiltered, granular execution of the imagination of a scant few people brought to life by some absolutely mesmerising performances, a directorial focus on the human lives surrounded by this swirling vortex of absurd ideas and more than anything else, it feels like the thing it's supposed to be.

I've been into creative writing from a very early age, and in school I had a lot of friends who were too. We would often create very stupid but earnest stories, intricate and vastly ambitious, that so clearly wore their inspirations on their sleeves that they were essentially fanfiction before we even knew what that was. Storyboarding vast epic tales of triumphant adventure way beyond any of our individual capacity to actually fully form it.

It's not something that's ever really left me, half formed ideas have always had a place in my heart. Far from a limbo state, they exist as a reminder that creativity itself is an ongoing process. There are no corpses here, only pieces of a much more complicated jigsaw puzzle that will inevitably only make sense to me. It’s a precious part of my identity and someday I will have the courage to publish the stuff I continue to write, unburnished by the weight of expectation of how a story is supposed to be told.

I think back to this burst of creativity in my youth only because The OA has that exact same energy. I don't know Brit Marling outside of my limited exposure to her body of work, nor am I aware how much of this is hers and how much is from the pen of Batmanglij, but I feel through this writing and her performance that she embodies the spirit of this starry eyed school kid, forever scribbling in a journal, honing her craft in a place free from scrutiny until one day she finally convinced someone to trust her enough to help realise her vision. Nothing else I've ever seen feels like The OA. Nothing has those same cristalline vibes, that complete totality of a concept brought to life by people for whom this might as well be a matter of life and death.

In this regard also, it makes perfect sense for Marling to take the lead role. While in previous works she’s always delivered a decent performance, in this space she is Prairie Johnson. She owns that performance with such a crushing honesty and relentless faith that it's impossible not to fall in love with her. In turn the characters her and Batmanglij developed are brought to life by an absolutely dynamite supporting cast, who weave together with incredible pathos and beauty.

Jason Isaacs is typically brilliant as the villainous scientist at the heart of the story's conflict, but I was blown away by the ancillary performances in the show. As I mentioned before, Phyllis Smith is mesmerizing as BBA, a woman lost in grief and finding solace in the newfound camaraderie of this group of troubled kids, all equally enthralled by Prairie's fable. There are some absolutely brutal, wonderful performances to bear witness to, at times you often forget the monstrous creativity that lies in wait because you cannot take your eyes off of the ordinary, beautiful mess of human lives placed so tenderly in the foreground.

I strongly urge you to watch this show if you have the means to. Like many sadly brilliant works it wasn't renewed after season two. Certainly that ending will make you curse the executives at Netflix and their ilk for abandoning such a wonderfully singular thing in favour of forgettable $200 million blockbusters and safe, predictable programming. 

I'm not completely against design by committee, certainly there are moments where collaboration brings about the better version of a thing. I strongly believe that the best version of Twin Peaks is the one where someone is there to tell David Lynch ‘no’ from time to time. Anecdotally, however, I turn my gaze to that new season of the Mandalorian, something I really can’t bring myself to give a shit about. This is the more likely end result of such boorish alliances. Bright eyes and bushy tails so hopelessly compromised away from the honesty of their storytellers by virtue of being part of a wildly overgrown narrative universe, a villainous corporate keymaster and a rabid fanbase addicted to canon.

Breathless lore isn’t good storytelling you fucks.

But this isn’t an article about the Disney rot, so please forgive the diversion.

I don't think we will ever get anything quite like The OA as a TV series again. And perhaps that is what makes it so precious an idea, and so important a warning sign. You cannot trust profit seeking organisations to help bring these things to life when in the blink of an eye not only can they be cancelled, but as we've seen with recent tax write offs, they can also vanish altogether. Any works built off the back of this system run the risk of one day being kept alive only by the law-breaking endeavours of the just and righteous.

I wish we lived in kinder times. I wish faith wasn’t something so virulently usurped by calculated risk. I hope someday someone with a lot of money and little sense lets Marling and Batmanglij finish their story the way she wants.