Lines of Flight: Desire, Deterritorialization and the Return of Authority in "Unchosen"

Netflix's six-part British miniseries Unchosen is set inside a fundamentalist Christian community living cut off from the outside world, and it is about the relations between femininity, masculinity, desire and authority. Reading it through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I want to ask one question: can desire carry us across the boundaries of a closed order — or can every line of flight it opens be captured again by a new power?

A note before I begin: what follows discusses the plot in detail, including the ending. If you haven't seen the series and intend to, watch it first.

The story

Unchosen is a six-part British production released on Netflix in 2026. It is set in the English countryside, inside a fundamentalist Christian community called the Fellowship of the Divine, which lives largely severed from the world outside. At its centre are Rosie, her husband Adam, and their daughter Grace. The Fellowship understands itself as the assembly of those God has chosen; everyone outside it is, as the title has it, "unchosen." Technology, individual decision-making and contact with the outside world are all tightly restricted. Women are expected to submit to men, and men to embody the authority of the family and of the community.

Rosie's life changes when Grace, close to drowning in a river, is pulled out by a mysterious stranger named Sam. Coming from outside the Fellowship, Sam initially looks like a rescuer. He reminds Rosie of a desire she has not felt in a long time, and of the possibility that life might be arranged otherwise. Later we learn that Sam has escaped from prison, has a violent history, and is an extremely dangerous man — one who reads the vulnerabilities of the people around him and turns them to his own advantage. By the end of the series Rosie has managed to escape the community with her daughter. Sam, meanwhile, reappears a year later as the Fellowship's new leader.

This is where the series becomes genuinely interesting. The individual escapes and the system survives — indeed, it converts the very stranger who threatened it into its new leader.

Desire is not a lack

I want to think about this narrative using some concepts from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The most important of them is desire.

In the psychoanalytic tradition running from Freud to Lacan, desire is defined primarily through lack: we desire because something is missing; desire is always directed at what we do not have. In Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze and Guattari object to this definition in the strongest terms. For them, desire is not a lack but a production. In the traditional account a person desires what they do not possess, and desire is understood as a feeling of deprivation aimed at an absent object. For Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, desire produces. It builds new connections between people, bodies, objects, spaces and ideas; it produces identities, relationships and social orders. Desire, then, is not merely a private emotion we experience within ourselves. It is one of the forces that constitutes social life itself.

Three further concepts need brief explanation. A line of flight is not simply the act of physically fleeing somewhere. It is a movement that loosens existing identities, relations and boundaries, and thereby opens the possibility of living otherwise. Deterritorialization is the beginning of the dissolution of those relations that bind a person to a given identity and order. Reterritorialization is what follows: desire, after that loosening, being bound once more to an identity, an authority or an order.

For Deleuze and Guattari a society is never a finished, unchanging whole. It is an assemblage — a provisional linking-together of different bodies, discourses, spaces, objects and practices. Every social order therefore contains both the forces that hold it together and the lines of flight that could dissolve it.

But we should not read Deleuze and Guattari as an excessively optimistic pair of thinkers. The founding question of Anti-Oedipus is this: why do people desire their own repression, as though it were their salvation? Desire does not always flow in an emancipatory direction. It can just as readily invest in authority, hierarchy and order.

The purity order

What kind of order does the Fellowship construct? One of the key concepts here, I think, is purity. The community imagines itself as unspoiled, uncontaminated, sheltered from the evils of the outside world. At first glance we see a life many of us might occasionally long for: houses set in greenery, gardens, chickens, fresh eggs, a quiet existence built on manual labour and organic production. Behind this natural and peaceful image, however, lies an extremely rigid gender regime.

Natural and organic food counts as pure; industrial goods, things arriving from outside, count as contaminating. The question of what enters the body and the question of who enters the community turn out to be two forms of a single question. Pesticide and stranger occupy the same position within the same grammar. The Fellowship's clean fields are not a charming incidental feature of its patriarchy; they are the same doctrine expressed in agriculture. The soil is guarded exactly as the daughters are.

The closed community is taken to be safe, the outside world corrupt. Heterosexual marriage is coded as divine and natural, homosexuality as sin. Obedient femininity is exalted while women's desire and autonomy become dangerous. Traditional, strong, authoritarian masculinity is treated as a precondition of leadership, while men not found sufficiently masculine are regarded with suspicion. Faith and submission become the marks of purity; questioning and individual decision, the marks of contamination.

So a return to natural living is not emancipatory in itself. The Fellowship does not merely grow organic produce; it also tries to produce "pure" women, "pure" men and "pure" families. The thought of additive-free food passes into the thought of additive-free identities. Yet a woman's submission to a man, a man's being strong and heterosexual, sexuality confined to marriage — these are not immutable laws of nature but the historical and ideological premises of the community.

This purity order also rests on a notion of divine determination that invalidates individual free will. And yet the signs assumed to come from God are, in the end, interpreted, coded and transmitted to the community by male leaders. Unlike the Enlightenment and liberal conception of the individual on which the modern world rests, there is no room here for an autonomous subject who makes decisions about their own life. Purity is not a natural property one possesses; it is a border regime that carves the flow of life into rigid categories.

Nature has no politics of its own

It is worth pausing here. A return to nature, organic living, moving away from industrial food — none of these are emancipatory in themselves. The discourse of natural living has no fixed political content; depending on the project it is attached to, it can end up in very different places.

The most striking example in history is Nazi Germany. The "blood and soil" principle formulated in 1930 by the agriculture minister Richard Walther Darré established a mystical unity between a people and its land, and Darré made organic farming methods state policy on a large scale. The call to return to nature was, in other words, part of the programme of one of the twentieth century's most authoritarian regimes.

The clean, quiet, pollution-free life the Fellowship promises works in exactly this way. It is a genuinely attractive promise — and precisely because it is attractive, it is an extremely effective instrument of domination.

Purity is not a state but a labour

How solid is this purity order? Not solid at all. Purity is not a condition but a task that must be performed continuously. It has to be cleaned again every day, its border drawn again every day; it must be watched, repeated and reproduced. The very fact that the community is so obsessed with purity shows that purity has never been fully established. If it were truly natural and unchanging, it would not require so many rules, punishments and controls.

The system therefore always needs an other against which to test itself. Along a line running from Derrida to Butler we might call this the constitutive outside: an identity is constituted through the other it excludes and declares unlike itself. The Fellowship's "chosen" identity acquires its meaning only through the continual holding-outside of the unchosen.

Isaac is one instance of this constitutive outside within the community. Adam's brother Isaac secretly uses a phone and forms a relationship with a woman from outside; this is treated not merely as a breach of the rules but as a threat to the purity of the whole community. The son of the Phillips family, expelled from the Fellowship, likewise shows that the system's boundaries can be maintained only through exclusion. But the excluded do not disappear. They go on living outside the system, speaking, and demonstrating that the community is not natural. Every exclusion, in other words, produces as much new possibility of critique and resistance as it produces solidity.

The open secret

Here we should also address the phenomenon of the open secret in the series — a concept I take from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Mr Phillips's predatory behaviour towards women is not something of which the community is entirely unaware. People see, sense or know; but they do not speak in a way that would convert this into shared knowledge.

What Isaac says to Adam breaks precisely this silence. He tells Adam that he is in the wrong, that he has treated Rosie and his daughter badly — because once Adam became a leader he began performing "masculinity" and turned aggressive towards Rosie. Rather than questioning himself, Adam regards Isaac as the sinner. What keeps the purity order standing is not that everyone is genuinely pure, but that contamination is never named. The open secret shows not that the community cannot resolve its contradiction, but that it has organised a way of living alongside it.

Leadership as masculine performance

Within this order, leadership rests less on spiritual virtue than on a masculine performance. Adam is a man deeply committed to the community and eager to rise within it, but he cannot fully carry off the hyper-masculine performance that leadership demands. His indecision, his repressed desire for men, and his inability to fit the community's ideal role of head of household all make his authority fragile.

Sam, though he has no faith at all, displays far more effectively the qualities identified with leadership: physical strength, courage, protectiveness, confident speech, and the willingness to use violence when required. His rescue of Grace is stripped of its contingency and reinterpreted as a divine sign.

The community says on the one hand that human beings cannot know whom God will choose, and on the other hand continually determines who is chosen by interpreting signs. Individual will is not thereby abolished; the will of the male leaders is disguised as "God's plan." The reason Sam is finally able to become leader is not that he is genuinely chosen, but that he has learned how chosenness is to be performed. Sam does not demolish the community's language; he rearranges its codes of miracle, salvation, sin, purity and masculinity around his own body.

Rosie's desire

Now to the question at the centre of the series: Rosie's desire.

The community has nailed Rosie to a set of fixed, molar identities: obedient wife, mother, heterosexual woman, member of the congregation. Her desire loosens the bonds between these positions. Through her desire for Sam, Rosie begins to sense not merely another man but the possibility of another kind of life.

And note that Rosie does not begin by declaring "this system is wrong, and I must struggle against it." First her body and her desire refuse the position assigned to her; critical consciousness comes afterwards. We might put it this way: Rosie's desire does not hand her freedom directly, but it makes her feel that the life she is living is not necessary, not natural, and not without alternatives. Her desire therefore produces political consequences even though it carries no political consciousness at the outset.

This is a movement of deterritorialization. The sacred bond between the identities "wife," "mother" and "member of the chosen community" begins to dissolve. And here is a crucial detail: the boundary of the community is first crossed not at the physical level but at the libidinal one. Long before she escapes, Rosie is already outside — in her desire.

We should avoid one misunderstanding, however: we must not take Sam to be the line of flight itself. Sam is, at most, the encounter that triggers it. Rosie's potential for liberation does not originate in him; Sam merely makes visible a capacity for living otherwise that was already present in her, and repressed. This is why her response is so rapid and so total. What happens is not a seduction but a recognition. Rosie is not corrupted by something arriving from outside; she comes face to face with the thing she had been required to expel from herself every morning.

In this respect Unchosen bears a resemblance to The Handmaid's Tale. In both narratives the female characters begin to press against the limits of the system not through an abstract political programme but through their bodies, their intimate relationships and the people they love. The revolt appears first in everyday life and in the body, and only later acquires a political meaning.

Not every line of flight leads to freedom

For Deleuze and Guattari, however, desire is not automatically good or revolutionary. It can build connections capable of disrupting the existing order, but it can equally invest in oppressive structures. Not every line of flight opens onto freedom.

Sam appears to represent the freedom of the outside world, but he very quickly turns into another form of domination. Where the community says to Rosie "obey for the sake of God and your family," Sam operates by the logic of "belong to me, as the man who saved you and desires you." Rosie's moving from one man to another would not constitute real liberation. Sam is not an alternative outside the community's patriarchy; he is a more mobile, more seductive and more violent version of it.

That Sam very nearly kills Rosie shows that a line of flight can turn into a line of destruction. Only when she moves away from Sam as well can Rosie set out on a genuinely different route. There are therefore two escapes in the series: the escape from the community, and the escape from the fantasy of the rescuing man. Until the second occurs, the first is not complete.

Adam's repressed homosexual desire opens another crack in the purity order — but that desire is recaptured by guilt and by Sam's blackmail. Desire shakes the order, then, but it does not liberate everyone in the same way.

The apparatus of capture

In the finale, while Rosie and Grace are deterritorialized as individuals, the community is reterritorialized at the social level. The old leader's authority dissolves, but chosenness, obedience, the heterosexual family, the contaminating character of the outside world and the desire for a strong male leader do not disappear. Sam gathers these ready-made codes around his own charisma.

In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the community operates like an apparatus of capture: it seizes the external element that threatens it, codes it, and converts it into an instrument of its own continuity. The stranger who disrupts the order at the beginning becomes, at the end, the order's new centre.

Three things at once

To draw this together, the series tells us three things simultaneously. First: the individual can escape the system. Second: individual escape does not by itself abolish the system. Third: the system can perfectly well continue, producing new leaders and new narratives in the wake of the members it loses.

The third is precisely reterritorialization. Authority does not vanish; it changes form, reconstitutes itself, and very often converts its own crisis into the story of its own legitimacy. This is why the ending of the series is not a victory but, at most, an opening.

And let us return to the question we began with: why do people desire their own repression? This, I think, is where the series has the greatest difficulty offering an answer. The narrative presents the woman who escapes as its hero, and shows those who remain not as people to be understood but as obstacles to be overcome. Yet the genuinely hard question is not "how did Rosie escape" but "why did the others stay."

Two closing notes

First: we are generally accustomed to thinking of religious fundamentalism as a condition of backwardness belonging to the East, to the Islamic world. Unchosen shows us that it is happening in England, in one of the most secular countries in Europe. In the 2021 census, the proportion of people in England and Wales identifying as Christian fell below fifty percent for the first time in history.

But this is not a contradiction — quite the opposite. The more secular its surroundings become, the more separation a closed community must produce in order to distinguish itself. Secularisation does not dissolve these groups; it sharpens them. And it is worth knowing that the fictional Fellowship draws heavily on a real movement, the Plymouth Brethren, which began in Dublin in the late 1820s. The Ireland that a community established in England treats as its outside is, in fact, the place where it was born. What is excluded is very often the origin itself.

Second: there is a much shinier, much wealthier contemporary version of this order. I mean the "tradwife" movement in the United States — women on Instagram and TikTok who bake their own bread, grow vegetables in their gardens, have many children, and present obedience to their husbands as a virtue. Research suggests that what unites this movement is not a single theology; evangelical and Mormon women meet inside the same aesthetic despite holding incompatible beliefs. The common denominator is not a creed but a form: fundamentalism aestheticised.

The difference from the Fellowship is this: the Fellowship survives by remaining invisible, the tradwife by being visible. One persists by hiding, the other by being displayed. And here lies the sharpest irony: the influencer tradwife is very often the household's primary earner. She makes her living by selling the representation of economic dependence.

This essay is adapted from an episode of my Turkish-language podcast, CultPost. Thank you for reading.