A Cosmic Mystery About Seeking Cosmic Mysteries

Cosmic mysteries are tricky to find. The earliest days were all about talking, articulating a feeling. Winter nights in Arizona wandering cinderblock alleys, plucking oranges from overhanging branches and marveling over Disco Elysium. Rosy summer nights in Sweden following the fireweed banks of Björkskatafjärden, trying to name the Venn diagram heart of Claire DeWitt and The City and the City and True Detective. Deciding what to search for.

Next came the search. I knew better than to ask a search engine for cosmic mysteries by name—in terms of SEO, the phrase belongs to the Space Is Odd scientific community. So I typed in ‘weird mystery novels’ or ‘books like House of Leaves’, scanned the results, resignedly rephrased each search with ‘reddit’ attached. These threads were sparse, often a list of title drops without the commenter explaining (or perhaps being able to explain) their rec. Endorsements and arguments helped identify horror and experimental literature—back then, I believed cosmic mysteries could be most easily found at the selvedge of reader disorientation. Piranesi, Night Film, The Raw Shark Texts, S, Rosewater, City of Glass, The Red Tree, The Ruined Map, The Taiga Syndrome…

Some were easier to get ahold of than others, but eventually I found enough that I knew what cosmic mysteries looked like on the shelf: grainy grayscales, neons and tertiary colors, surreal or lightly psychedelic art, blurbs that promised genre-straddling narratives. (Spoiler-immune as I am, I also learned to turn to the last chapter and read a few sentences.)

The truth is, this approach was full of false starts. Which made the whole process exhausting, even if the stories weren’t. I started to feel like one of those little goblins in the beginning of Labyrinth, hissing that Sarah has to say the magic words—‘I wish’—as I hoped for sleuths in uncanny situations to wonder/wander past the threshold. But in this reading period I parsed the cosmic mystery vibe into what eventually became ‘Welcome to the Cosmic Mystery Club’—because in writing it out, I realized how much more sense I was able to make of what I was looking for.

If you’re not the one asking the question, you can’t expect the answer to suit you. So I started asking. I explained what a cosmic mystery was to a coworker who knew his way around little-known films, did the same to my local comic shop owner. A friend recommended a video game podcast hosted by Persona fans, Into the Aether. While listening to related podcast dotzip’s episode on Phoenix Springs, I learned what I knew from the beginning: you find a cosmic mystery by listening to the way people talk about them.

(Readers, recs are always welcome. Just tell me why!)

A few months ago I found myself sitting in my local dive with a near-stranger. I explained to him what I do for work—movies—and he revealed himself to be a film buff. So I told him what a cosmic mystery was, hoping he knew some I didn’t. That’s when we really started talking. And one of the many mysteries we talked about was the tv show Lodge 49.

I recognized Lodge 49, a two-seasons-and-a-cancellation AMC comedy by Jim Gavin and Peter Ocko about grieving burnout Dud’s adventures among the financially-browbeaten residents of Long Beach after Dud joins an alchemy-based social lodge in search of… something. I’d started it a couple of years ago, couldn’t get a grip on it despite excellent performances all around, and forgot about it. Which is what a lot of people did when the show aired in 2018.

Reviews and pleas for audience eyeballs are self-conscious about their attempts to explain what’s actually going on, why it’s worth your patience. It commits is all I needed to hear. A strange assurance, given that the show is all about hovering on the cusp of change and the risk of falling backwards, Chutes & Ladders-style, to borrow a metaphor from Dud’s sister Liz. Its plot-driving mysteries behave like river currents, meandering and braiding and eddying, disappearing underground only to show up miles downstream. Its brand of humor is a soft-serve swirl of post-stoner profundity and workplace derangement. (Ever wanted a little Severance by way of benign Florida? Liz has a corporate seminar horror story for you.) Each character is caught in their own riptide of mundane struggles and calls to adventure. The magnum opus is rad and all, but rent’s due yesterday.

Probably spoilers ahead, though honestly, good luck getting spoiled on any of this without context.

In the early episodes, one source of ‘what am I watching?’ uncertainty comes from the fact that the Lodge fulfills very different needs for its members. If you ask Dud, he’d probably struggle to say this outright, but it’s about having a foundation from which to experiment with all the ways one tries to find significance in contemporary life: a job, a relationship, a quest to find some mystical scrolls. Ask Dud’s mentor Ernie, a plumbing salesman who listens to mystery novels and is the Lodge’s next Sovereign Protector, it’s about community. Ask bartender and alternative medicine practitioner Blaise, it’s about the spiritual practice of alchemy. There are so many characters telegraphing what this show is really about that the point in which the first season connects is different for many people. For those seeking a plot anchor, it might be when Dud and Blaise found the Ghost frontman-esque dehydrated corpse of a former Lodge Sovereign Protector, sealed into a secret lab with his notes on the transmutation of the soul. I didn’t necessarily care if it meant that alchemy was ‘real.’ What mattered to me, story-wise, was the possibility that someone believed in alchemy enough to die for it—and if that wasn’t the true nature of the death, then what happened? But on a gut level, I became committed the instant Dud found a sparkling pool of stars during his security guard night shift at the abandoned aerospace facility.

Once it clicks, whenever that happens, Lodge 49 feels in the best way like sitting with a near-stranger in a dive bar after work with nothing but half a cheap beer in you, talking about something surreal and elusive and shared.

This is a cosmic mystery about seeking cosmic mysteries, and the show is at its strongest when it’s wrestling with the difficulties of that investigation. And usually that’s when it’s at its funniest, too. Such as when the show juxtaposes the American hustle-your-way-out-of-poverty magical thinking of MLMs and being way too late to the bitcoin party, with conversations about purity of intent when conducting an alchemical process that, as a side effect, purports to turn lead into gold. Or when Dud, in pleading the case of a dream prophet played by Cheech Marin, exclaims, “He’s not a con man! He can see the future. That’s why they call him El Confidente. He’s confident! He’s a confidence—man!”

I believe Wyatt Russell’s voice crack at the end of that sentence is a fundamental shift in Dud’s character. Even if he behaves the same, he does so with growing self-awareness, not so much reacting to the whims of fate but acting against a shadow of feeling he’s only able to fully articulate in the series finale. As Glen Weldon put it for NPR, “[A] series about our need to believe in that underlying infrastructure — to feel that, beneath the reality we know, the daily existence we all, in the words of one character "just keep grinding out," there is mystery, fate, purpose, magic.”

But as Darren Franich eulogizes in EW,

“Only a world with five thousand scripted shows debuting tomorrow could've produced two seasons of Lodge 49, and only that same world would flood our attentions with big-budget spectacle and cover-bait superstars, short-term delights distracting us from the inexplicable wonders gentle enough to be human.”

Lodge 49 ends on the cusp of discovery. With cosmic truths uncovered and still more to seek, we’re left with what Ernie, Sovereign Protector, sees in the Lodge: a place to sit down, have a drink, and talk about the search.

Most Wednesdays my sister comes over after work to eat dinner and play video games. It’s always been the way we’ve stayed connected, and that usually meant RPGs. But Wednesday is her Friday and she works closely with hospitals, so our game choices have typically erred on the side of chill. And yet, sometimes the only salve for engrossing and stressful work is engrossing and stressful play, so two weeks ago we started Disco Elysium. She’s no stranger to games with heavy choices and she’s extremely methodical, so it’s a unique delight to listen to her decide what kind of Harry Du Bois she wants to be and reflect on her evolving understanding of Revachol. Last week she had her first talk with Joyce, and we spent as much time breaking down that cynical Reality Lowdown as playing through it. This week she got the body down and almost finished the field autopsy, went back in to talk to the corpse because she felt she was missing something—and the game crashed, guaranteeing she’ll be thinking about deep places and gifts in horse’s mouths until next week.

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In a rare cosmic alignment, I was in the mood for romance during Valentine’s Day. I’ve been forensically flirting my way through the cast of the many-branched mystery/folk horror visual novel Scarlet Hollow and I read Annie Mare’s Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon. I checked out Cosmic Love as a romance, not a mystery, even though ‘cosmic’ is right there in the title. But you know what they say about love cosmic mysteries: you find them when the back cover mentions an investigation into a temporal paradox.

 It’s probably no surprise that I prefer romance novels that read like puzzles, with internal emotional logic resembling that of mysteries. Hair stylist Tressa Fay discovers her missed connection, civil engineer Meryl Whit, is texting her from several months in the past—and is a missing person in the present. Cosmic Love is electrically curious, determined to treat the romantic shockwaves of this time-gap relationship with the same rigor as a crime scene investigation.