‘Midnight Mass’ Is The Show That Gets Addiction Right
Rehabilitation requires a leap of faith - and 'Midnight Mass' understands that leap more than any show of the modern era.
The 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard did not have proof — neither hard evidence, nor logical, iron-wrought arguments — for the existence of God. But he believed in Him anyway.
— Warning: Spoilers for Midnight Mass follow. —
For Kierkegaard, what was important was not definitively uncovering the existence of a higher power. It was making a “leap of faith”, a kind of mental processing he called a “qualitative leap.” For Kierkegaard, this meant accepting that reason cannot explain the universe, or its miracles. It meant noticing the gap between our rational explanations and the world as it is. It meant leaving behind a constant search for proof, and accepting, with something like stoic resolve, that there are things outside our understanding.
Kierkegaard’s leap is not a way of giving up on the search for truth. It is distinct from a kind of surrender; from the belief that we have no choice but to throw up our hands and live with blind ignorance. As the philosopher Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a pre-cursor to Kierkegaard, described it: “truth lies in the search for an object, not in the object sought.”
We must continue our search, always, but we must understand that it is this search that is valuable; that we will never reach a point of total knowledge, the world and God laid perfectly to rights.
Midnight Mass, the new Netflix horror series directed by the already legendary Mike Flanagan, is an exploration of this leap of faith. It is a series of mysteries; of unexplained happenings, going-ons outside the realm of scientific knowledge. Its tagline could be that famous line from Hamlet — “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Some of these aberrant happenings are of the old-school, Lovecraftian variety — dead cats washing up onshore, a strange, gleaming-eyed creature that preys on those who wander where they should not wander. But the heart of the show — its very lifeforce — is the leap of faith that must be taken when confronting not that which feasts on blood, on falsity, but addiction.
Midnight Mass Understands Addiction
When we meet Riley, the troubled hero of Midnight Mass, he has been forced into a state of self-reckoning. Each night, he is haunted by the mangled ghost of the girl that he killed in a drink-driving accident, a crime for which he has spent years in prison. Ejected back into the real world, he returns, licking his wounds, to his family — a now sober prodigal son, accepted with varying levels of tolerance by the town that he left in his past.
As part of his life post-prison, Riley must attend mandatory Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Noticing that these sessions require Riley to travel via ferry back to the mainland, the town’s new priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater, in one of the small screen performances of the year), offers to set up a AA chapter in the quiet halls of a rec room, quasi-therapy sessions with precisely two attendees: Riley and Paul.
Everything about Riley is shaped by his resigned, quiet search for some way to resolve that which part of him believes will never be resolved.
Riley accepts. This acceptance happens offscreen; we don’t need to see that such a decision is formed by a place of desperation. Everything about Riley is shaped by his resigned, quiet search for some way to resolve what part of him believes will never be resolved, the trauma that he has wearily come to believe will never leave him. He is all out of options, and yet he tries, time and time again, to search for a way to dispatch the ghost that stands in the corner of his room as he stares blankly ahead, sleep as distant a country to him as peace.
When these AA sessions begin, they are marked by Riley’s steadfast refusal to surrender to forces greater than himself. It is not just, as he reveals in a lengthy monologue, that he is anti-church. He is anti-faith. He refuses to follow one of the central tenets of AA — to give oneself over to a universe, or a higher power, that has plans greater than one’s own. He is done with the process of surrender. What he wants is to regain control, not to lose more of it.
What he needs to learn — as all addicts need to learn — is that the process of getting sober is not one in which the self is better explained; the world better understood; control wrestled back into one’s own hands. What sobriety teaches you is how much you don’t know, how foreign your own desires are, how strange and mysterious both addiction and the journey out of it can be.
The things that we do as addicts when we are drunk, when we are high, are part of us forever, imprinted on our casual histories. They are of us, but they are not us. The drunk self, the sober self — these are not marble statuettes, to be regarded from every possible angle. They are ever-shifting and evolving narratives, ones that we can never fully explain. Midnight Mass understands one of the core tenets of addiction: that we are as human beings are constantly, chaotically, perpetually in flux. The trick is to accept this flux, to give up trying to name the crest of every wave, and to submit, finally, to the tide.
The Rising Sun, And The Unknown Unknown
Riley’s journey of understanding is a slow one, and a flawed one, marked by regressions of all kinds. His guide, Father Paul, is no saint: both Riley and the audience come to learn that the man is a liar, that his own faith has fatally blinded him, that he has mistaken demons for angels.
This too is a lesson — that the process of bettering ourselves is a crooked one. Help, when it comes, need not be delivered by perfect objects. Indeed, there are no perfect objects. AA teaches you to learn from those who have sinned, to accept guidance from those who have made similar mistakes to oneself. We learn, and we change, through a constant process of taking what we can from what we are offered. This is humility. This is a form of grace.
Riley’s journey of understanding is a slow one, and a flawed one.
What we learn as addicts is not the extent of the known unknown — all the things that we are aware that we do not understand. We, like Kierkegaard, like Riley, embrace the unknown unknown — all the things that we do not recognise even as gaps in our knowledge. We submit.
This is what Riley does. In his final scene, he submits himself to the rising sun, a thing both beautiful and terrible. He gives over. And he dies, not only sober — gratefully, firmly sober — but finally at peace with the world and his understanding of it, and the way those two things pull apart, gently, like swimmers rising out of the water, not turning back.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.