After Life, which launched its second season on Netflix earlier this year, proves its director and star, Ricky Gervais, to be very self-aware.
For those unfamiliar, the series has Gervais playing Tony Johnson, a local newspaper reporter who recently lost his wife to cancer. Johnson’s tragic loss has left him bitter and cynical. He spends most of his days complaining about everyone else in his life and ruthlessly mocking religious and spiritual traditions from an atheist’s perspective.
“Humanity is a plague. We’re disgusting, narcissistic, selfish parasites, and the world would be a better place without us,” Johnson tells a co-worker in the first season. “It should be everyone’s moral duty to kill themselves!”
In other words, the show basically has Gervais playing himself.
But what makes After Life a cut above a Gervais stand-up bit is that the show tempers his cynicism with a dose of sentimentality that his other work often lacks. In season two, we see that Johnson can behave not only pro-socially but also compassionately.
When an increasingly intrusive postman bores him to death at his doorstep, he tries a carrot rather than a stick, working to get him a romantic date. After ruthlessly mocking a co-worker for her steadfast belief in astrology, he has a change of heart and decides to take her out for a coffee to make friends with her.
When news comes down the pike that Johnson’s newspaper may be closing down, his first reaction is indifference — he says that he’ll just get “another job that barely pays enough to live.” But when he notices a colleague tearily admitting that this is the only job she has ever liked, his attitude changes, and he sets out on a one-man crusade to convince the paper’s patron to keep it alive.
After Life never takes the time to explain the psychology behind Johnson’s more embittered behavior, but if it did, we could say that it’s a television show about what researchers call displacement aggression.
Displacement aggression occurs when we get angry or aggrieved about something but can’t direct our anger toward whatever caused it. In our darker moments, this can manifest itself in violence.
One study, published in 2011, estimated that NFL losses can contribute to as much as a 10% increase in domestic violence reports after a local team suffers a loss. When people are cruel, it is often because they’re acting out about some form of pain they’ve suffered.
In Johnson’s case, it’s the pain of the death of his wife. His atheism doesn’t allow him to believe he will ever see her again, and so his character repeatedly takes out his suffering on other people. If we’re honest with ourselves, just about all of us have done some variation of this — we all displace aggression onto others from time to time.
But the lesson After Life is trying to teach us is that you can’t really find happiness by trying to make other people as unhappy as you are. You may get a momentary burst of sadistic pleasure, but there’s a big difference between pleasure and contentment.
By the end of season two, Johnson’s quest for contentment is far from complete. Without giving anything away, I can say that the death of his wife is hardly the last tragedy he experiences. It can appear as if life won’t give him a break.
Yet you get a sense watching the latest episodes that he appears to be growing as a person, picking up the sort of skills he needs to cope with the losses he’s suffered.
At least some of those skills are learned from reminiscing about his departed wife, Lisa. He spends hours watching videos she compiled for him before her death, and he draws on her life to inform the lives of others. “You remind me of Lisa sometimes,” he tells a friend who comes to check on him. “Everyone else had to be OK before she could be OK.”
He also draws on the model of his father, who suffers from dementia, recalling how his dad dealt with the death of his mother.
“When mum died, he was broken. But he even did that alone. He was old school. Just because you’re unhappy doesn’t mean you have to make everyone else miserable, the opposite to my approach,” he says.
Johnson’s approach continues to evolve in the second season, and he starts to understand that making people happy can improve his well-being as much as, if not more, than making them miserable.
“I meet people every day with worse lives than me, and they got on with it,” he admits. “I’m going to try being a little Zen.”
Hopefully, viewers can learn the same lesson.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging Differences writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and a freelance journalist.
