Written by Max Thornton.
Carol Ann Duffy, the British Poet Laureate, has a poem called “Mrs Lazarus,” a characteristically feminist and unsettling take on the biblical story of Jesus’ resuscitation of Lazarus. “I had grieved,” it begins, and the mourning process is definitively pluperfect, the dead man “dwindling … vanishing … Until he was memory.” The man’s revival is not exactly a source of joy:
He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mother’s crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,
moist and dishevelled from the grave’s slack chew,
croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.
The French TV series The Returned (Les revenants) takes a similar approach to the question of the living dead. These are not the faceless, flesh-chomping hordes of popular lore, but individuals returned from the grave to reunite with family and friends who have moved on.
If you type “The Returned” into the Netflix search bar, you get two almost identical results. “The Returned (2013)” is a movie that takes a slightly more cerebral approach than many zombie films, but is still recognizably a zombie flick. “The Returned (2012)” is a tense, atmospheric French television series that acknowledges the z-word while maintaining its distance from it.
In a small French mountain town, the dead are returning. Whether days or years after their deaths, they return with no memory of dying and no knowledge that the intervening time has passed. Families who have completed all five stages of grief and found some sort of post-tragedy equilibrium, even a fragmented one, are suddenly reunited with loved ones who are, like Lazarus, “disinherited, out of [their] time.” The returned themselves find a world in which they no longer fit.
Each of the first seven episodes is named for a character, but the plot tends to be fairly evenly spread in focus across all the characters.
Fifteen-year-old Camille, killed in a bus crash, returns to a broken family and an identical twin who is now four years her senior.
Simon died on the morning of his wedding, and is now literally haunting his erstwhile fiancée, as she prepares to marry another man, and the daughter he never knew.
Julie survived a horrific serial killer attack seven years ago. She is followed home by the almost mute little boy whom she names Victor, a superbly unsettling instance of the creepy child trope.
Serge and Toni are brothers, Toni the manager of local watering hole The Lake Pub, Serge a revenant with a dark past.
Lucy, an employee of Toni’s, is violently attacked in an underpass late one night.
Adèle, Simon’s ex-fiancée, at first believes she is experiencing a resurgence of old nightmares and hallucinations.
There are, of course, significantly more characters than those named in episode titles, and their interlocking lives and intersecting pasts are elegantly unveiled over the course of the show’s eight hours.
There’s a lot to like about this show. It’s very French, slow and creeping, profoundly visual, wonderfully acted, beautifully directed, layered with meaning.
There’s also undeniably a focus on the abjection of the female body, women’s bodies as the site of violence and rupture. The violence against women on this show is never explicitly sexual, but there is a consistently sexual subtext to it: repeated stabbings, the biting of flesh, a mysterious wound opening up – it’s all a-quiver with invagination. Moreover, the water levels of the town’s reservoir are in flux, suggestive of the fluids of pregnancy, the grave birthing forth the dead back into life. As the normative cycle of reproduction is fissured, so there is also a challenge to (cis)sexist imaginings of the female body as the site of generativity and procreative sexuality. Motherhood is bestowed on Julie, whose uterus is surely rendered inoperative by the knife-blows that have scarred her lower abdomen, whose sexuality is shown only as queer. Unlike Simon, who is impotent and superfluous as a parental figure to the child he fathered from beyond the grave, Julie, the nurse, takes on the role of parent to the near-silent little boy who follows her home. The child chooses the parent; the grave rebirths the dead; barrenness is no impediment to parenthood and potency no guarantee of the same. Heterosexist logics of reproduction are disrupted, but so too are the bodies of women. Simply reversing the logic of reproduction is no guarantee of female bodily integrity. All the major male characters, including Adèle’s new fiancé and Camille and her sister’s father, sin against the women in their lives, committing betrayals that manifest as violence and/or controlling behavior.
The Returned is not explicitly about male violence against women, but this is an unmistakable through-line for those who are watching for it. Violence against women is, perhaps, more normalized in our culture than death itself; yet in truth it is as damnably unnatural as the dead returning.
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Max Thornton blogs at Gay Christian Geek, tumbles as trans substantial, and is slowly learning to twitter at @RainicornMax. His friend Catherine told him to watch this show at least a year ago. Catherine, you were right.