In the first few days of 2023, I compiled a list of my accomplishments from the preceding year.
I started with all the bullet points one would expect: career successes, examples of personal growth, memorable experiences, and newfangled hobbies.
You know — all the big, boring stuff.
But as I drifted off to sleep with my big, boring list precariously sitting on the corner of my nightstand, I realized I had forgotten to add the accomplishment that put all others to shame — the singular moment that stood out from that last trip around the sun.
That is, the time I touched Anne Lamott’s shawl.
Before you laugh, you must understand this: Anne Lamott has long been one of my personal icons. The 68-year-old, dreadlock-donning friend of expletives has not only changed my life through the written word but has also tread a vocational path I wish to follow.
If you’ve read her work, you know she’s incredibly humble, genuinely curious, and full of both frankness and wit.
Her brand of Christianity is of the no bullsh*t variety, and millions of ordinary people like myself have found it immensely refreshing.
When I attended a speaking event during her last book tour, Denver’s famed Paramount Theater was chock-full of middle-aged white women who filled the dimmed space with just as many tears as belly laughs.
My head spun with a renewed fervor for writing and loving and living as I headed to the restroom afterward.
I was almost done crossing the sea of grey hair when I quite literally ran into someone — a very small someone.
I’d just gotten out the reflexive “I’m so sorry!” when my eyes met with the victim of the collision.
“Oh…” I paused, and time stood still. “It’s you!” I exclaimed. Without even thinking about it, my hand floated down toward Lamott’s slight frame and grazed her seemingly hand-knitted shawl.
To me, the scene was reminiscent of one from the gospels.
I played the desperate, hemorrhaging woman who touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment in the hopes of being healed. She, of course, played God incarnate.
Yes, the moment felt that dramatic, even though Anne Lamott was just trying to make her way to the book-signing table without being accosted by tall and bulky fangirls. I, on the other hand, felt like I had just touched the shoulder of the divine.
I half-expected her to turn back and say “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace,” but alas, as spiritual as the moment was for one of the two parties, we were not, in fact, living out some 2022 white-Christian-girl version of Luke 8:43-48.
After recalling what shall henceforth be known as “the event,” I squeezed another bullet point into my list and scrawled it all down.
Too excited (though I really should have been too humiliated) to sleep, I checked my notifications, only to find her name mentioned in a text.
“Have you seen any of ‘The Midnight Gospel’ on Netflix?” my brother had asked earlier, to which I responded, “Never heard of it.”
In the interim, he’d texted back. “I liked it on your Netflix account. You should check out episode 2,” he wrote. “It’s with Anne Lamott.”
What can I say? He gets me.
I promptly navigated over to the Netflix app and clicked on the episode in question. If you’ve seen the show, you know the wild ride I was in for. Let’s just say there’s a reason the streaming service released it 3 years ago to the day (*cough* 4/20 *cough*).
If I had taken the time to read Netflix’s blurb, I would’ve learned that it’s about “a space caster” who “explores existential questions about life, death and everything in between” while “traversing trippy worlds inside his universe simulator.” I also would have learned that it’s a collaboration between “Adventure Time” creator Pendleton Ward and comedian Duncan Trussell.
To put it simply, this is not your average binge-able TV show that fits comfortably within any predefined genre.
Like the streaming service promises viewers, the 2020 series focuses on Clancy, a video podcaster from space who uses his glitchy, second-hand multiverse simulator to interact with beings on other, often dying worlds.
The setting alone is compelling, but when it’s paired with the psychedelic animations from Titmouse (the studio that worked on hits like “Big Mouth,” and “Her”), it’s simply spellbinding.
However, these aspects of the show aren’t what make it so idiosyncratic.
Rather, it’s the fact that the bulk of the narration is made up of soundbites from Trussell’s podcast, “Duncan Trussell Family Hour,” in which he interviews guests like media personality and addiction specialist Dr. Drew, Buddhist meditation teacher Trudy Goodman, mortician and death-acceptance advocate Caitlyn Doughty, and — you guessed it — spiritual writer and woman whose shawl I touched in 2022, Anne Lamott.
Episode 2 of “The Midnight Gospel,” which is curiously titled “Officers and Wolves,” features Clancy (voiced by Trussell) meeting a “deer dog” named Annie (voiced by Lamott) on a planet inhabited by boisterous baby clowns.
I know it sounds strange, but I can assure you it’s even stranger than whatever your mind is conjuring up — and I didn’t even mention the episode’s intro, which involves the space caster downloading an unverified emoji pack that subsequently turns him into an avatar of a skirt-wearing, human-chicken-snake hybrid with a morning star as one hand and a fleshy nub as the other.
Let me attempt to summarize.
Although initially a colorful and “majestic scene,” the simulated universe quickly turns morbid when deer dogs savagely attack and eat the singing clown babies. The massacre doesn’t last long, though, as a machine shows up to take the deer dogs (and Clancy, who gets impaled by and stuck to one of them) to slaughter.
The visuals are reminiscent of activists’ secretly recorded clips showing the horrific conditions of modern slaughterhouses, only they’re animated in rainbow hues with compositions by Joe Wong playing in the background. The machines inject the creatures with hormones and thrust them on a journey of being processed into meat.
Along the way, Clancy asks the bright-blue deer dog to which he’s stuck if he can interview her for his space cast, thus ushering in bits of a very interesting and very real conversation between Trussell and Lamott, which had clearly been embellished with new dialogue.
The former jumps in by asking “Are you worried? Because it seems like we’re all about to die.”
“Hmm … it does feel that way, but I’ve actually had a lot of deaths in my life,” Annie responds, before delving into her father and best friend’s tragic demises. “I don’t feel scared about it,” she says.
Sprinkling in wisdom from her late father and the guru Ram Dass, Lamott speaks passionately about embracing death without fear.
Of course, in typical Anne Lamott style, her deep spiritual revelations (including “all truth is a paradox and I hate that the culture tells you that you will get over it”) are balanced by blasphemous jokes about being seated by the cheese table in heaven and one hilarious scene where her character attempts to help Clancy use the bathroom by singing “You Are My Sunshine” (assuredly a post-podcast addition or product of masterful sound editing).
Ironically, the characters onscreen die halfway into the episode, though their — for lack of a better word — meat continues to converse.
As you can imagine, it’s all quite cacophonous, or as one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer aptly put it, “as close a TV show can get to emulating a good psychedelic trip.”
As Darren Franich mentions in his review for Entertainment Weekly, “Netflix probably debuted the show on 4/20 for a reason.”
The critic also notes how “The Midnight Gospel” can be counted among shows like “Fleabag” (my personal favorite) and “Ramy” to exemplify TV’s recent shift toward portraying sincere religiosity.
“At a moment when even the best cartoons are trending hyperkinetic, Ward and Trussell deserve credit for going in a meditative opposite direction,” Franich writes. “The result is a new kind of masterpiece: easy to like, easier to worship.”
This quirky piece of pop culture likely affects everyone differently.
While one Trussell fan might go into the experience expecting mere comedy and come out the other end with a spiritual revelation and a Ram Dass book in their Amazon cart, another might expect a jovial storyline to match the show’s vibrant color palette and walk away with a newfound desire to research the inhumane slaughter of captive-bred animals in the West.
And then there’s the ever-wandering spiritual writer, whose meet-cute with Anne Lamott suddenly became all the more fantastical and divine.
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