the soft chewy center
layers of life in "Underneath"
This is only the first layer. Don't you want to see how deep I go?
— Fred, "Underneath"
Damn, I love this episode. It’s bleak and dark and desperate—perhaps the most despairing episode in all of the Jossverse. Yet I love it to pieces, because it encapsulates nearly all of the themes that Joss has been talking about for all these years. This is why I love Angel, and what makes it so much more than just a television show. This isn’t an episode about Angel or these characters or their universe. It’s an episode about us.
The earth’s outer layer is called...
The first scene we see after the credits roll shows a demon, singing to Lorne in a bar.
BARTENDER: She's gonna say no, isn't she? I should've gotten a bigger ring.
LORNE: A June wedding. There's rain, so get a tent.
BARTENDER: She's gonna say yes?
LORNE: Ain't love grand?
The bartender is excited about the fact that he’s getting married. He’s doing something almost everybody does, and he’s overjoyed. He asks later about the possibility of having children. These are normal, natural things. Regular things.
So why a demon? Why not just a regular guy? One could speculate that it’s just for laughs. But let’s look a little closer.
When the Senior Partners decide to send Lindsey to hell, they send him to suburbia. A nice, normal, average place. A place where most of us (in North America, at least) probably grew up, lived most of our lives, and may still be living in now. Lindsey has a wife and a child. He plays in “the league” (football, maybe, or hockey). He enters contests to win free vacations. He has a comfortable life. But underneath…
Underneath, lies the dread. In the basement, he gets his heart cut out day after day. His comfortable life—raising a child, picking up the mail every morning, sleeping in on weekends—are a mask for a Colonel Kurtz-style battle against the human condition. One can almost hear Marlon Brando in the corner of Lindsey’s basement murmuring, “The horror. The horror.”
The writers are telling us that our comfort zone is just a crust. Love, family, everyday life, are a way of protecting ourselves against the truth of the world. It makes us complacent; makes us lose sight of what’s really out there. Hamilton says as much to Eve:
HAMILTON: The senior partners felt it was time for a change. Eve was too easily distracted. Lost sight of the big picture.
EVE: I fell in love.
HAMILTON: Yes. Congratulations.
This is not to say that we should never love, because love is what makes us care. It’s just a reminder that we should care not only for those we love, but also for those who are caught in the undertow.
So, what is it that’s hiding beneath the crust?
And underneath that...
LINDSEY: It's here. It's been here all along. Underneath. You're just too damn stupid to see it.
ANGEL: See what?
LINDSEY: The apocalypse, man. You're soaking in it. […] You're playing for the bad guys. Every day you sit behind your desk and you learn a little more how to accept the world the way it is. Well, here's the rub... heroes don't do that. Heroes don't accept the world the way it is. They fight it.
The worst thing we can be in this world, is complacent. That’s one of the fundamental themes of this episode, and all of the Jossverse. We can never forget that there are wars going on around us, every day:
SPIKE: Where's not the Wrath? The Wrath's all over!
Children shoot each other with guns, just as Lindsey’s fake son shoots at him. Ordinary people go postal, just like the mail truck driver in this episode. Wives shoot their husbands. Husbands beat up on their wives. And every day, a third of the world is starving to death. It’s impossible to look at this world and not feel helpless. This is why we turn away. This is why we build ourselves a crust, develop a thick skin, and learn to not see:
ILLYRIA: Your world is so small. And yet you box yourselves in rooms even smaller. You shut yourselves inside... in rooms, in routines.
WESLEY: There are things worse than walls. Terrible... and beautiful. If we look at them for too long they will burn right through us. Truths we couldn't bear. Not every day.
We can’t spend every moment of every day thinking about the horror of the world. If we did, we would surely go mad. Even those caught in war zones learn to look away, if only for a moment or two; it’s a natural, human coping mechanism. But neither must we turn our backs on the world entirely. We must listen to the cries of those who are suffering, in pain, and alone.
And underneath that...
And it’s not just those “out there” who need our attention. Because in a very real, psychological sense, every one of us is alone. No one can read our minds; no one can live our experiences; no one can really know what’s going on in our heads. It’s the opening theme of this episode:
ANGEL: If they were here, I wouldn't be alone. Why am I alone?
Angel is alone because every one of us is. It’s the human condition. Yet there are things we can do, to try to overcome our aloneness:
FRED: You have a visitor.
WESLEY: I thought I was in isolation.
FRED: Whose fault is that?
Wesley is alone because he has deliberately cut himself off. He feels it’s the only way he can cope with his pain:
WESLEY: Two men walk into a bar. The first man orders a scotch and soda. The second man remembers something he'd forgotten, and it doubles him over with pain. He falls to the floor shaking.... and then through the floor and into the Earth. He looks back up at the first man, but he doesn't call out to him. (pause) They're not that close.
The Jossverse has many examples of characters trying to build connections with others, to overcome this fundamental aloneness. They have varying degrees of success, and one wonders if anyone can ever truly overcome the essential isolation that is the human condition. Yet as Fred points out, we must make the effort. If we do not, we will be condemned to suffer, until we must face the ultimate loneliness.
And under that...
LINDSEY: We're all gonna die.
ANGEL: Not today.
LINDSEY: Every day!
Death is the fundamental, inescapable commonality of the human condition. Every one of us is doomed to face it. Yet, when it comes, every one of us will experience it completely alone. We cannot bring anyone else over with us; even if we die in bed, surrounded by loved ones, they will not experience death with us. The crust we build for ourselves—our children, our families, our home in suburbia, our rooms and routines—are a way to avoid the inevitable. They are a way to create life, so that we may (for a time) forget about our inexorable slide towards oblivion:
EVE: I just want him back, and I don't want to die.
Eve wants her immortality and her white picket fence. Don’t we all? Her love for Lindsey is a way to cheat death; just as our love for our children, our families, and our friends is a way to forget, for a time, that we must eventually follow her to the grave.
ANGEL: This is about a contract? I thought you said you were gonna die.
EVE: And now one day I will.
Now Eve is just like the rest of us. When God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for disobeying him, the first thing he did was make them mortal. That was their punishment for aspiring to know what God knows.
The soft chewy center
So what does God know? Well, if you’re familiar with the Book of Genesis, you’ll remember that God gave Adam and Eve the power to disobey him. He gave them free will.
Humanity sinned against God by choosing not to obey him. Free will damned humanity. But in the Jossverse, free will is the only thing that will save us from the despair of this life:
ANGEL (to Lindsey): Look, we're telling you the truth. You don't want to believe it, that's your choice. Either way, you're coming with us.
We can choose to box ourselves up, cut ourselves off. We can choose to live a comfortable life, and never think about what’s going on around us. Or, we can choose to look at the world, and try to change it:
(Gunn puts Lindsey's necklace on)
ANGEL: Gunn, no! What the hell are you doing?
GUNN: What needs to be done.
ANGEL: I'm not leaving you here.
GUNN: You don't make the rules here. Wolfram & Hart does. If one leaves, one has to stay. A void is impossible.
(The gate in front of the fire opens.)
ANGEL: You knew.
GUNN: The thing about atonement.
Gunn chooses his punishment, because he believes he deserves it. But he also does it so that his friends can escape. He chooses to be the hero, because he believes it’s the right thing to do—even knowing how much he will suffer for his choice:
ANGEL: I thought a few months of torture at the hands of the Senior Partners would have dug a little deeper.
LINDSEY: Just scratched the surface. Turns out they can only undo you as far as you think you deserve to be undone. I wonder how Gunn's gonna make out.
Lindsey does not suffer as much as Gunn, because he doesn’t blame himself. His crust is thick. He chooses not to see or feel the suffering of others. Gunn does, and it hurts him. Yet he does not let the pain stop him from trying to atone. He knows it’s the only way, in a world filled with pain, to make his life actually mean something.
In the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, we are condemned to be free. Our will to choose is not comfortable. It means that we must make hard decisions. Yet it is the only real power we have. We cannot avoid death; we cannot escape our isolation. These things are part of being human. What we can do, is choose how we live.
We can choose to cut ourselves off from the suffering of others, and do nothing. This is the easy, comfortable path. Or we can choose to help. Sometimes this will be a hard, painful choice. We may need to sacrifice things in order to do what’s right—our money, our time, our home lives, our jobs—perhaps even our lives. Yet in the end, this is the only way to overcome our fates. Joss is exhorting us not to look away.
We must remember what’s going on out there. We must remember those who are suffering, those who are in pain, those who need our help. And we must do what we can to help them, no matter how small. Because that’s what heroes do.