The Good Place needs Surrealism

My favorite moment in Late Night history is an interview with Keanu Reeves by Stephen Colbert. It starts as a fairly normal interview. Colbert asks Keanu about John Wick III and how Keanu trains for stunts. At the end of the interview, Colbert asks, jokingly, “What do you think happens when you die, Keanu Reeves?” The audience laughs, but then Keanu says, completely straight, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” That answer stunned both Colbert and me. Most celebrity talk shows, most of television in general, keep things pretty light. Death is only on the table as a joke. Keanu, however, collapses the artifice of the stage and says something genuine about what happens when we die, and the normal conventions of Late Night give way. Colbert can only shake Keanu’s hand.

The question of mortality has been on the mind of a lot of television shows recently. It’s a major theme of BoJack Horseman, Forever, the new series Upload, and perhaps most famously the Good Place, a sitcom that takes place in the afterlife. I like the Good Place. It’s funny and the characters are great. My favorite part of the show is seeing Chidi’s struggle to try to do good in an imperfect world where he can’t know the outcome of our actions. It’s a struggle I share. And most surprisingly, it’s good and funny while also explicitly being about moral philosophy and moral improvement.  I watched the first two seasons all at once on Hulu, but (as with most shows now) I couldn’t keep up with it once it started airing in real time. I saw about a quarter of season three before falling off. Because I don’t care about spoilers, I read everything about the show's ending and was disappointed.

The Good Place begins with the death of the main character, Elenor. After she dies, she wakes up in the waiting room of what she is told is ‘the Good Place’ (as opposed to ‘the Bad Place’). However, Elenor knows that based on her life, she doesn’t really belong in ‘the Good Place,’ that there’s been a mistake. Eventually, she realizes she and her friends, Jason, an aspiring Floridian DJ; Tahani, a socialite; and Chidi, a professor of moral philosophy, are really in ‘the Bad Place,’ and everything they’ve experienced has been an elaborate ruse to torture them. Eventually, the four are able to demonstrate that they have improved themselves while in ‘the Bad Place.’ They reform the system to work more like Purgatory than the binary system of never ending bliss or never ending torture. In the end, though, the show disappointed me. The tortures of ‘the Bad Place,’ are obviously undesirable, but the show makes the argument that unending paradise may be just as unwanted. In the show, Hypatia of Alexandria says about ‘the Good Place,’ “It’s infinite, and when perfection goes on forever, you become this glassy eyed mush person.” Faced with infinity, Jason, Chidi, and Elenor all choose non-existence. 

To me, this shows a profound lack of imagination. Forever, Upload, and the Good Place all imagine the afterlife as being largely contiguous with our current lives. Nothing really changes between how we live now and how the characters live in the afterlife. This is likely so the shows can function at all. The afterlife needs to be familiar enough to the audience that recognizable stories can happen. The Good Place needs to fit the expectations of the sitcom genre. Meeting these expectations make the show watchable, but they also limit what the imagined afterlife can be. Life in ‘the Good Place’ is like life in most sitcoms: a heightened version of real life. But, just because the afterlife is imagined as sitcom life, doesn’t mean that ‘the Good Place’ really reflects the afterlife. It means that we are so familiar with life, and life as it is portrayed in sitcoms, that we cannot imagine a mode of existence that falls beyond those three walls.

Surrealism as a movement formed to counter such trends. In the Manifesto of Surrealism, Andre Breton laments the loss of unbounded imagination to the ‘realistic attitude.’ He writes, “Imagination which knows no bounds is henceforth allowed to be exercised only in strict accordance with the laws of an arbitrary utility; [imagination] is incapable of assuming this inferior role for very long and, in the vicinity of the twentieth year, generally prefers to abandon man to his lusterless fate.” This is how the ending of The Good Place feels. Imagination is only allowed to be exercised in the strict accordance with the laws of arbitrary sitcom logic, so ‘the Good Place’ can only be imagined as a lusterless fate. Of course no one would want to live in a perfect sitcom forever, but there’s no reason to believe the afterlife is really like our present lives. Even the concept of unending might be meaningless in an afterlife. Time, what Einstein called a “stubbornly persistent illusion,” might be broken in death.

At its core, The Good Place is a show about coming to terms with death in this life. Despite taking place in the afterlife, it’s more about how we live now. However, it’s sad to me that the show cannot imagine anything better than non-existence. If the paradise of the show isn’t good, then it isn’t truly paradise. That doesn’t mean paradise doesn’t exist, it means that the show isn’t imagining it. This is why we still need Surrealism. Surrealism isn’t about strangeness for the sake of being strange. It’s about breaking down the barriers we place around our thoughts and imaginations in order to envision and build better futures. If the greatest good we can imagine is non-existence, we desperately need to break the limits of the realistic attitude. We need people like Keanu Reeves to break the conventions of Late Night TV, and we still need Surrealism to open a way to new conceptions of reality. As Breton says, “This summer the roses are blue; the wood is of glass. The earth, draped in its verdant cloak, makes as little impression upon me as a ghost. It is living and ceasing to live which are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere.”