Initially difficult to endure, this HBO series evokes a profound historical consciousness of the struggle for communal life in the face of liberalism's contrived alienation and cultivated resignation.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
It is hard to pay proper homage to the television series Gösta, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's most recent work for HBO Europe. There is something in it that is simply nearly not any longer of this world. A way of being that is every day receding beyond the horizon and becoming lost to us. His films, generally, look out into their world from a very simple, pure, perhaps even naive viewpoint. And from that, an entire world springs once again to life for us to gaze into. Gösta is no different.
The modern liberal generally no longer looks at the world in this way. Either one has matured to the pragmatic reality of life as it is and simply abides, has become cynical about the loss of and pointlessness of truth and seeks rather to reproduce that truthlessness themselves, or one turns their life into an empty, imitative university political project in the context of a world ostensibly without authority. Either naive anachronism, an unnatural, unsettling waste of time and energy, or a trolling, juvenile pyrrhic rebellion against all forms of authority.
Gösta is a reminder of the worth in each of us saying, with simple deliberateness and blind empathy, only just what each of us can say; that this simple demand to speak oneself truthfully is inextricably bound-up with broader historical social struggles that give meaning to our actions, beyond the narrowness of their own truth. The series is not the renewal of a political rallying cry to the multitudes of clamoring, fanatical radicals; rather, it is a calming, softly spoken, sometimes amateurish, unsteady return of a perception that leads out of the contemporary desert of liberalism's always textual 'life as political endeavor' and into the fullness and uncertainty of an historically grounded communal struggle for being together.
Act I: Towards the Communal In and Of Itself
Gösta is a good-natured children's psychologist with an serious inability to refuse another in need that sees him implicated in all kinds of relationships from which he can't escape. An old woman resting by the train ramp with heavy bags of groceries turns into hours of slow walking through the streets back to her house to help her into her house and put her groceries away; and upon leaving, he finds himself faced with someone trying to steal his bike because he needs a ride to his house on the other side of town, which leads to yet another long, painful series of situations. Eventually, his father, a child that needs treatment for her suicidal thoughts, and an old friend who needs space to work on writing a new song all move into Gösta's tiny shack in the forest that he already shares with a refugee. Their demands on him are seemingly endless, and his willingness to give into the them boundless. They are incapable of operating properly in society's mundane situations and reflect the reality of contemporary technological liberal culture, with its alienated amateurism without prospect of redeeming authority. Fomenting our rejection of his inability to assert himself for 3-full episodes, the situation begins to take on the feeling of caricature in how absurd its situations become.
Unexpectedly, things change in episode 4,while on a walk into the forest, when suddenly the incoherent rambling of Gösta's father finally starts to make uncanny sense:
Everything just disappears, goes away. How strange, the people who lived here...but now it's all gone, just an old pile.
We trick each other with illusions. We try to keep each other in the illusory world. We talk about the nice lake over there. When it's really a puddle with rotting dead animals and plant material.
With the honest courage of this statement, the claustrophobia of the group recedes as a unifying voice arises that takes them each out of their interiority through the objectification of common context. That such profound thought can arise from out of this group reflects a deep, simmering dimension to everything. In this way, Gösta's ceaseless compassion becomes recast as the cause of the coming-together of lost souls who are now able to find redemption from life's meaninglessness in the radicalization of their own togetherness. The fluidity of the moment in the internal life of the group is a release from the impenetrable complexity of the (liberal) society and its suffocating demands for tolerance and self-moderation. Even Gösta himself becomes affected by the new possibilities the group has awakened within him as he becomes more experimental in his clinical practice as he seeks to incorporate some of his father's uninhibited, unabashed clarity of purpose bordering on recklessness into his own life. Rather than the hopelessness and emptiness of the solitude of existence, an assemblage of disparate souls that's a catalyst for experience, discovery, and meaning arises.
In the context of hyper-liberalized societies in which most of us in the West now live, communal living is only a concept and an historical footnote to the 60's, that has some, perhaps, distorted echo in the forms of artificial solidarity and 'innovative' living arrangements of environmental and human rights activists; or it has simply devolved into the persistent product of the juvenile worldviews of students whose living-together is organized as a form of rebellion against the rules of their parents and the boredom of ordinary life. Rather than a form of living and of life that itself has intrinsic worth, it has become now just the subtle contours of and echoes within the living-together of liberal society, i.e. that which takes place within neighborhoods with 'neighbors'. Rather than a form of life with intrinsic value, possibilities and potentials itself, it becomes just the impoverished basis for temporary, provisional tolerance of the disparate and irreconcilable (if only for the simple lack of interest) lives of others amongst whose 'preferences' one is consigned to live. Or it becomes the exclusive bastion and empty ideological domesticity of the political 'radical' that makes of his or her living situation a materialization of their refusal to live according to the norms of traditional society. So, either the faint, persistent fumbling praxis of an impoverished concept or the hollow, performative structure of an exaggerated political ideology.
What we get in Gösta is a reminder that communal living is something other than either of these things. Gösta foments the typical cultural response to itself through which one becomes aware that liberalism's commandments for tolerance, self-circumscription, and the respect of others is mirrored by an internal psychic compulsion for self-assertion and exercising one's rights and clearing space for oneself from their messy imbrication amidst the lives of others. Gösta's unflinching necessity to always do good by everyone through to the point of caricature slowly liberates our own thought from the straight-jacket of this tyranny of the liberal individual. Once one sees one's compulsions for what they are, Gösta teaches us that the joy in finding our being-together in the world becomes it's own force for sanity (from the schizophrenic liberal double-bind demands for tolerance and self-expression), as well as self-expression not available to the individual itself (on the one side, the individual catalyzed by the collective, and, on the other, that of the collective catalyzed by the individual).
In this way, Gösta exposes the existential structure of communalism itself, for itself, stripped as it is in the series of any kind of objective definition as this or that specific politically or ideologically defined social structure. No longer is it about living organically, low-carbon lives, or about the expediency of living together for political purposes—communalism is simply about what togetherness itself gives as self-propelling, self-actualizing structure within a world devoid of any other achievable meaning.
Act II: Undone by the Liberal Romantic
But just as the communal living situation proves the necessary compliment to Gösta's claustrophobic, stultifying compassion is also what undermines the emergent communal situation. The group that redeems them all forms around Gösta's his inability to refuse them a place to sleep—in the living room, in the kitchen, in the attic, on the floor; but it begins to slip as everyone looks to parlay their security in the group into an independent adventure. And so it is that Gösta is at every moment taken advantage of in increasingly brazen ways. The old lady he helped bring her groceries home now wants only 2% milk; his girlfriend wants to be just a friend but to also live with him so he can help her study while she undertakes sexual adventures with his best friend; his coworker wants a date, gets drunk and compels him to sleep with her, and then guilts him into perpetuating those sexual encounters so he doesn't appear to have taken advantage of a drunk or lonely woman.
It's when Gösta's father takes the liberty of abandoning the refugee Gösta had been helping in the middle of the forest, though, that things cross a line. Finally, he orders them all out of his house—what needed to be done all along, through the circuitous adventure of some brief experimental moments of communal life, has been done. Not only has he redeemed himself from the group, but he has redeemed himself from himself, as Gösta's self-assertiveness flows into all aspects of his life: he asserts himself to his patients and makes his points as he should; he brings his rocking chair back into the office since it reflects his own approach to his work that is also his right. Gösta becomes the exemplar of liberal society: fair, just, compassionate, and narrowly circumscribed within his own self-conscious orbit of influence. And as he settles into the self-indulgent snack-meal with cold bear in the comfort of his own home, one expects the series has just ended and for the credits to roll. However, after a brief moment in darkness, Gösta is seen again riding to the gas station to make a late-night romantic entreaty to the cashier he had been flirted with. He's a self-actualized man and the only thing preventing this series from being complete is the consummation of a new romance, on the terms of Gösta's new self-assertive approach to life.
But, upon arriving there, the conversation doesn't go exactly as planned. For a few brief moments, everything is on the cusp, with wave after wave of deepening honesty in the hopes that the unnecessary and unnatural barriers between them will be swept away. But, it isn't enough and in rolls a tricked out neon green Volkswagen carrying the cashier's boyfriend to pick her up after work. The whole thing unravels in a rush of the return of ordinary, undermined by the base predictability of life.
In this moment Gösta becomes liberalism's actual, once all the illusions have been stripped away: deeply wounded, let down and giving up on hope for the future. And back at home again, alone in his robe in bed, Gösta encounters the very contemporary reality of this experience: staring into his phone looking at photos of the past. Everything is just a dark reflection of what it once was...
The '60's were a time of pervasive social and political experimentation with ways of living that tried to break free from the outdated constraints and traditions of careers, domestic suburban conjugal living situations, and from a dependency on the global war economy. Across a broad spectrum arose a wide range of new experimentations that were permitted as part of the cultural Cold War against the communist Soviet Union that ranged from more performative and economically oriented efforts to more radical attempts to form within the liberal West actualizations of communist philosophy (the commune). And although this period didn't last long, reaction to it led to the formation of the broad contours of the liberal society in which we are still today living: which is that of the form of an indisputable insistence on free-market principles that incorporates superficially demands of this eras many movements for cultural freedoms, tolerance,and diversity. From out of this came the myriad cults of self-expression that blended a focus on the individual as creative spiritual actor with the radical contingencies of the free-market economy: one's economic fate becomes bound up with their capacity for authentic introspection and their ability to bring forth the particularity of their experience to a broader public. Broadly speaking, this is a generation that took their feelings of togetherness forged through their social experimentations and their stories of those experimentations and used them to create for themselves narrowly circumscribed stories of self-actualization whose economic success carried them through the next 2-decades, through the 80s, 90s and into the 2000s when the current cultural and economic rot and disintegration began to take place.
On the one hand one could look at the story of Gösta as only the expression of personal histories of betrayal, loss, regret—perhaps our own, perhaps Moodysson's; but Gösta is also about the broader historical struggle for some form of sustainable communal life over and against the increasingly performative and hollow liberal societies in which we live. The loss of communal life, rather than being purely a metaphor reflecting the decay of family or friendship relationships to much of the world that has little or no experience with these forms of living beyond impoverished concepts, is an historical fact that evokes the profound historical consciousness of an existential social structure whose possibilities have been only partially been discovered. Referring back to this moment in the 1960s when communal experiments were taking place, Gösta reactivates a deep collective memory of the togetherness that arose in those contexts and the complexity into which it devolved over the coming decades. This is not a superficial historical account of this period, but the memory of the lived experience of the decay, mutation, and eventual abandonment of its communal spirit.
As such, Gösta is a allegory of the subtle self-deception that operates at the core of the cultural transformations that took place at this historical juncture. There is no blameless cultural victim who was deceived by the promise of a system designed to co-opt them, as the common explanation goes. Rather, the reality of the transformation that took place at that historical moment can be seen as the result of an irrepressible romanticism that permeates liberal existence. Which is to say: it's not that the experimentation ends through the force of a decision and the repression of the police and military alone; its that the situation has already in some sense been undone on account of the inescapable allure of the liberal romantic that becomes reactivated in the lull of communal dynamism. And it is the re-valorization of social atomization and a radically individualized philosophy that pretends to be the existential pretext for the poetic encounter that then motivates its abandonment in favor of the dream of a truly personal adventure.
And so, while liberalism's mind lies in the purification of humanity of what has not yet reached the level of the ideal within it, it is liberalism's heart that lies in the grace of the encounter one is given through one's resolute stoicism in the face of life's perfectly individualized struggle. Just at the moment when these social experimentations were on the cusp of breaking through to establishing durable permanent alternatives for organizing society, it was the arbitrage that took place at that moment that fundamentally undid them: a bet on finally consummating the liberal romantic using the communal as a wager.
Act III: What's to Be Forgiven
As one sits in silent contemplation as the credits roll, preparing to move on to other things in life, Gösta's friend who had moved in to work on his idiotic song about the extermination of Jews in Auschwitz reappears. This time, he is practicing a new song about his betrayal of his best friend. His song begins similarly uncertain, amateurish, over-full of words and things to say that don't fit the rhythm. But, suddenly, it all comes together in a '90s pop-rock refusal ballad as his words find their focus on a plea for forgiveness to his friend Gösta that he wronged. Its the only thing for him that makes sense and it becomes his entire song, his entire being. The aggressive, certain, pure rejection of the present of the pop-rock rhythm as he rakes the strings melds with his simple sorrowful cry for forgiveness and reconciliation with the lost communal moment they all shared together that may never be again restored:
She was my best friend's girlfriend.
Now I feel so bad.
I feel so sad.
You were my best friend, I don't want our friendship to end.
Gösta, please forgive me for what I've done.
Göstaaa, pleeease forgive me for what I've done.
Gösta manifests for us today the nearly vanished emotional logic of the communal. It is an opportunity to reflect anew on the subtle, complex interplay between two distinct constellations of desire. On the one hand, there is the communal, a structure can arise as a haven from the impenetrable complexity of liberal particularity and whose internal emotional logic then provides the catalyst for an internal fluidity and dynamism one had lost hope of finding in the wasteland of liberal existence. Then, on the other hand, there are the liberal fractal pathways of the multiplicity of romantic adventures of self that emerge from out of that communal redemption. Together, the two describe an historical ebb and flow, as the one (the communal) flows into the many (the liberal), as the many flows into the one.
In this sense, after nearly 40+-years of uninterrupted liberalization, the emptying out of any kind of shared communal experience has produced generations who's only form of solidarity has come in the form of the irreconcilability of disparate experiences of civil society that is everyday: (1) more obviously glued-together through the force of habit and fear, and a lack of experience with anything meaningfully different; (2) organized into performative imitations and perversions of meaningful past political movements; or (3) enforced through the pervasion of propaganda, self-delusion and the application of state repression.
What's to be forgiven, then, is not simply the regret of having taken for granted the communalism of the past, of the self-indulgences and the all-to-human parlay one permitted themselves at the expense of those others upon which their togetherness depended; it is also for the inability to resist the allure of liberalism's romantic ideal that, in the comforting heart of the communal, reemerged to catalyze an insistence on the personal projects that eventually undid it. As such, perhaps what is necessary at this moment is not a more forceful reassertion of the liberal romantic that continues to derive its meaning through a nostalgia to the lost communal past it has the courage to reference. Rather, perhaps, what is needed is that the historical consciousness of the last 50-years becomes the wisdom and ephemeral remaining foundation for channeling the anxiety of the present back into the formation of more durable communal structures.
