Station Eleven: Around and Around We Go!
If I remember correctly, there’s a scene in Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” where the unseen Herzog narrates in bemusement that the cave in question had been used as a canvas for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years. Generations on generations of Cro-Magnons returned again and again to capture and recreate what they’d seen on the plains, on the hunt, in streaks of ash and clay, animated by torchlight shed across the undulating walls. The cave’s other treasures — a jewel-encrusted cave bear skull, for one — all pale in comparison to the gift that is our realization that we are them, that we already know the story, and we’ve come back to hear it again.
Ancient herds practically dance across the stone canvas, as captured by Herzog in digital 3D. In Shaman,” Kim Stanley Robinson crafted a recreation in words. A few miles from the real Chauvet Cave (official UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2014), there is a tourist center with a full-scale replica in shot-crete and scaffolding. Aesthetic opinions may vary — no one claims that Chauvet contains the best-ever depiction of an Ibex — but on balance we have collectively decided to revisit the cave, again and again, to retell, perchance to recreate, its stories.
I heard the early hype about Station Eleven (2021), but the first few episodes struck me as overly theatrical (ha?) and tonally scattered: the rare moments of levity were almost shocking, arriving like jump-scares and sometimes collapsing into despair almost as quickly. But the show maintained a sense of optimism and adventure early on, portraying the Traveling Symphony of Year Twenty as a kind of rolling commune. It’s no pastoral utopia — dangers abound! — but in the telling it seems like a healthy society based on mutual aid and care, starting to stitch the world back together (a necessary corrective, as the flashbacks show complete societal collapse - i.e. our current reality). If the show had settled on being a simple post-crash adventure with some character drama, good enough. But Station Eleven has higher ambitions, which the season finale (Ep. 10 — Unbroken Circle) makes abundantly clear.
Spoilers below.
Guess I shoulda known that a show about a traveling theater troupe would trick me into appreciating Shakespeare. I even rewound a few times to better parse the cheese-block pentameter: surely better said than read, and benefiting immensely from a back-to-front scrub. And good thing I don’t know Hamlet, the better to speculate that the show’s text-subtext-text layering is a smart way to support a central theme: that we need shared narratives to make sense of our lives and our social histories.
So the son-in-exile (returned) of the Severn City Airport is cast as the son-in-exile (returned) of Denmark, and the play’s cast is matched up accordingly. When Tyler as Hamlet rehearses a scene with his Mother as Gertrude, the dialog could simultaneously describes their own personal history, one plot of the show we’ve been watching, establishing the central character conflict of the episode, the son’s unclear motives, and the pain both of them carry.
While Station Eleven’s characters never get out the whiteboard to diagram how their backstories map to their Hamlet characters, I’d bet the show’s writers did. If they misremembered, or purposely fudged some details, or allowed the underlying meaning to slip, that’s only evolution, the repeated stories adapting to new circumstances and contexts, staying relevant and surviving through the retelling but changing in the process. We revisit old stories because it connects us to our history, to our loved ones who have passed on, and to our past selves, those “before times” ghosts who we can’t quite reconcile with our current selves. When you re-read an old paperback, you bring the intervening years along, you see it from a new perspective, and with any luck you’ll smile gently to recognize how you’ve changed, and how good art rewards return.
So when Station Eleven (2010) Episode 10: “Unbroken Circle” spins the wheel showing the Traveling Symphony’s yearly rotation around Lake Michigan, or has a character reminisce about yo-yos, or drops dialog like “we travel for a reason… to come back,” or lets the lyrics of “Midnight Train to Georgia” and its message of return and reconciliation play out over plaintive tuba, one might think there’s some kind of point being made. The series finale is so packed with circular imagery it’s hard to find a line that’s not supporting the theme: we move in circles. Through the days, the nights, the seasons, a lifetime, generations, it’s the rituals that bring us back, and it’s art that binds us together.
So when this show concludes with long-gone characters returned having learned and changed, only to go off again, having shown several settlements shaken out of their status quo through tragedy or “art therapy” liberation, freed to constitute new paradigms of social reproduction, there is a pervasive optimism that social change for the better is possible, even and especially in the face of civilization-threatening calamity. Because when we remember, when we record histories and turn them into myths, we can recognize when we’re down the wrong path.
We drift apart, we come back together, and we share our stories.
