Murdering Mindfulness (II)

The best TV show about mindfulness is back. The second season of the satirical black comedy Murder Mindfully breaks no new ground in terms of embodied awareness practice – no surprises there – but its lampooning of the wellness industry is as sharp as ever. There is something refreshing about how this show twists mindfulness concepts to points of such vacuity that it seems to be laughing at itself. By refusing to take anything too seriously, it is vastly superior to junk productions like Mindfulness Manual, Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindful Escapes. But is Season Two’s total lack of expansion on the nature and function of mindfulness an intentional part of its satire? That might be taking things a step too far.

Picking up from where Season One left off, sociopathic lawyer Bjorn, the show’s deadpan antihero, is still up to his neck in organised crime and trying to figure out why he isn’t happy. The convoluted events and implausible plot twists that unfold over eight episodes are many, but they boil down to Bjorn calculating who needs to die next, how to cover his tracks, and whether he can persuade a bunch of entitled mothers not to change the heating system in a kindergarten basement. Because the story is preposterous, the stakes always feel low. The real substance of the show is found in Bjorn’s musings, deluded as they are, on the relationship between his egregious criminality and his search for inner peace.

Illusion of Health

The dark running joke in Murder Mindfully is how little Bjorn cares about anything beyond himself. He complains about not enjoying life and being plagued by inner unrest, but he exhibits no interest in reflecting on why this might be. He is oblivious to the impact of his immoral behaviour because he isn’t serious about changing it. His self-declared “commitment to mindfulness” is really just a deflection from looking at himself honestly. It involves nothing more than occasional moments “concentrating on the present” and visits to his mindfulness coach, Joschka, who colludes in his lack of rigorous self-enquiry. 

Joschka describes his own work as “a quasi-repair shop for Ferraris” because he believes a few sessions with him ensures “the beautiful Ferrari that is your life will be returned, completely scratch-free.” His therapeutic acumen is as thin as the paint on his clinic room walls. He is confident bordering on smug but lacks any insight into Bjorn. It’s hard to tell which character is more inauthentic, which makes for a great send-up of the wellness industry. But below the surface of their inane conversations are layers of truth about mainstream mindfulness.

Diminishing Returns

The most striking thing about Season Two of Murder Mindfully is its lack of emphasis on mindfulness. Several episodes are devoid of any reference to it. Others contain no scenes with Joschka, the espouser of the show’s mindful doctrine. Whereas the first series made much use of Bjorn learning, practising and talking about mindfulness, this has not continued into Season Two. Gone are the mindful training points neatly folded into Bjorn’s ponderings about how to deal with his circumstances. The few instances of Joschka offering practical guidance on mindfulness in the new series are poorly scripted, even by this character’s dubious standards. He didn’t impress before, but at least he wasn’t coming out with unironic guff like “breathe in and out, clear your mind and relax, your auto-pilot will take over soon.” For a show purportedly about mindfulness, how did it get so diminished?

The obvious answer is probably the truest: the show has nothing more to say on the subject. Murder Mindfully is heavily invested in framing mindfulness as weaponised, ethic-free self-help. The practice is deployed as a way of relaxing, focussing and smoothly achieving outcomes. Not a single allusion is made to cultivating equanimity, discernment and goodwill, which are characteristics of bona fide practice. In Bjorn’s case, mindfulness is instrumentalised to help him scheme, manipulate and harm others for personal advantage. For him, that’s the whole point of it. He got really good at it in Season One. He’s still doing it in Season Two. Sometimes it’s very funny. But it’s the same old joke and it needs no elaboration.

If you listen carefully to the voiceover of his thoughts and his exchanges with Joschka, you can hear how Bjorn really believes mindfulness is about quelling thoughts, controlling emotions, focussing attention and pursuing self-serving agendas. The attitudinal factors and reflexive self-awareness that form the foundation of real practice are missing. Taking the show seriously for a moment, this absence is not that outrageous. Similar varieties of mindfulness are readily available in the real world. 

For example, the primary aim of many workplace mindfulness programme is to train individual employees to manage difficult emotions and sharpen their mental focus in order to improve their efficiency on the job. Such programmes are a form of deliberate pacification, couched in the rhetoric of wellbeing, to keep workers productive and docile. They have zero interest in addressing the deeper causes of individual unhappiness. These causes are often systemic and relate directly to the working environment itself – low wages, intolerable stress, exploitative practices, bullying, surveillance, to name a few. 

Inner Conflict

Another true-to-life feature of Murder Mindfully is the way it takes psychological ideas from different modalities and rebrands them as ‘mindfulness’. Self-styled ‘mindfulness experts’ in the wellness industry have been doing this for years. Season One does it in ways that point at Joschka’s shallowness. Season Two takes things to strange new levels by bringing Bjorn’s ‘inner child’ into the story. No coherent connection can rightly be made between mindfulness – the intentional cultivation of embodied awareness to foster deep connections with the immediacy of psycho-physical experience – and psychotherapeutic work with a vulnerable, child-like sub-personality that holds suppressed pain and unmet needs. But coherence is not the point of Murder Mindfully and, in this regard, it echoes real-world trends in popular psychology.

Because mindfulness of the ethic-free self-help variety (sometimes called McMindfulness) is so puny, its purveyors frequently resort to drawing upon dissimilar psychotherapeutic ideas and techniques in order to flesh out their products and services. After all, in the wellness market, the desire for monetisation invariably trumps the need for coherence. Joschka’s character is a good example of this. In Season Two, his mindfulness tuition very quickly takes a backseat – he’s got nothing more to teach about it because he lacks any depth of knowledge – and he pivots to doing regressive, interpretative work with Bjorn, indulging in an abundance of psychoanalytic platitudes along the way. It’s clunky stuff and Bjorn could be forgiven for winding up even more confused about what is and isn't mindfulness than he was before.

By the way, in case you hadn’t noticed, Bjorn’s ‘inner child’ is nothing of the sort. There is nothing playful and innocent about this personified part of him. It behaves more like a demanding twin, at times manipulative and nefarious, whom Bjorn uses as a sounding board to plot his next amoral move. Schematically speaking, it is more like a composite of angry and impulsive child modes, which is something quite different. The relationship between Bjorn and this sub-personality continues being dysfunctional and leads to him indulging negative impulses in ways that perpetuate his inner conflict rather than resolve it. Nothing useful comes out of his therapy work. He would have been better off not having sessions with Joschka in the first place.

The presentation of the inner child in Murder Mindfully is as erroneous as its presentation of mindfulness. It makes for an entertaining story, but one that is obliged to keep blindly treading the same old ground. Nothing fundamentally changes for Bjorn because he is no more serious about working with his inner child than he is about practising mindfulness. Joschka is no wiser than Bjorn and cares just as little. Though it is probably unintentional on the part of the scriptwriters, we can admire this multi-level consistency. We can also play our part as viewers. We can sit back, relax and ease ourselves into an undemanding fantasy, all the while knowing we will be totally unchanged by it. Along the way there will be a few laughs, the occasional eyebrow-raising moment, and a pile of dead bodies. All in the name of mindfulness. What could be the harm in that?

Click here for Part 1.

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