Notes: Return to Xanadu, Chapter 18

[stefanie_bean]

Claire in-canon is no stranger to dreams, visions, mysterious illnesses. Most likely the creative team intended to non-lethally "fridge" her (i.e. put her in peril to drive the plot and/or make other characters upset.) I chose to interpret it as Claire's predilection for and sensitivity to alternate states of mind, of shamanic consciousness.

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"Three days" has deep resonance in lore. Lazarus was three days dead before being risen on the fourth day. Jesus was three days in the tomb. In RTX, it's been suggested so far that Hugo can travel between worlds, but liminality is preserved by limiting him to three days in "our world."

Because time is different in "that other place," Claire's vision doesn't feel to her subjectively like three days.

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The bird-girl Rima in her human-hybrid form was inspired by the magical bird, the gamayun, with a woman's head and bird of prey's body. In the Slavic creation myth, the gamayun lived on the magical island of Buyan, and speaks prophecy. ("Did that bird just say my name?" Hurley asks. In my view, yes.)



Just as the gamayun is linked with the phoenix, so do I link Claire in the same way. In LOST, Claire has been "claimed" by the Man in Black, yet she clearly gets better enough to greet Hugo lovingly in Locke's camp, as well as listen to Kate when it comes time to get on the Ajira plane.

Claire is literally burned in the refining fire of her fever, so that something new can come out of it.

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The scene where she sees Hugo was inspired the scene in Wim Wender's 1987 Wings of Desire, where angel Damiel appears to his love Marian in a dream, and shows her his angelic form.

The poem Marian recites is from the fourth stanza of Peter Handke's Lied von Kindsein. In English:

When the child was a child
It was the time of these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?
Why am I here, and why not there?
When did time begin, and where does space end?
Isn't life under the sun just a dream?

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Someone needed to be able to interpret Claire's dream for her. In-canon, much trouble resulted time and again because there were so few "interpreters" of the more mystical story lines. (Eloise Hawking does serve this purpose to some degree, and she provides tantalizing possibilities for later.)

I wanted way more crones in LOST: more characters like Nanny Oggs, Granny Weatherwaxes, the aunts in Anansi Boys, pretty much any character played by Judi Dench. Rose is rising to the occasion in RTX, but she's on-Island.

Someone needed to shepherd Claire through her near-death experience, as well as "name" it for her when she revived, and that role fell to the "aunties."

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We also hear for the first time the name of the Man in Black. While his name in-show was deliberately omitted, I don't hold with the fanlore that he never actually had a name. His foster-mother had to call him something; she didn't say, "Hey, kid-in-black, go to the stream and fetch me some water." He obviously had a name, although keeping it hidden deepened the mystery.

Fans started calling him "Esau," which makes perfect sense given the biblical struggle between Jacob and his brother (Jacob favored by their mother; Jacob cheating Esau out of his birth-right, etc.)

I chose to name him Samael. Not so much the occult "dark angel," but rather more like how CS Lewis referred to the White Witch Jadis, as "the Emperor's hangman." In Tree of Souls: the Mythology of Judaism, folklorist Howard Schwartz goes into Samael at length. More than the simplistic view of him as "the devil," he is "the accuser" to whom Yahweh gives the authority to torment Job. He is the husband of Lilith, who also attempts to seduce the Shekinah (the feminine principle of divinity.) Samael is also a judge, and we see the Man in Black fulfill this role in-show (with Mr. Eko, Ben, and perhaps even the Oceanic 815 pilot.)

Further, Jacob is given his name by his birth-mother Claudia, but she has no name for her second child. "Mother" (right before she kills Claudia) looks favorably upon Jacob, but not favorably upon the second twin. I wanted to show that what you *expect* of a child is often what you get *from* that child. Naming the second twin "Samael" went a long way to making the Man in Black what he was, what he became.

Comments

[inlaterdays.livejournal.com]

That clip from Wings of Desire is lovely.

You are making me feel almost sorry for the Man in Black (being a self-fulfilling prophecy), which I did not expect.

[stefanie-bean.livejournal.com]

Have you seen the movie? It's wonderful. I'm due for a re-watch.

I know about feeling sorry for MiB, and at the same time being horrified by him. It's quite a conundrum.

(Nice to see you again BTW!)