LOST frustration
Feb. 22nd, 2007 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stefanie_beanSome of my thoughts regarding my current disappointment with Lost (a third of the way through Season 3 with "Stranger in a Strange Land," 3x09), and how that came about.
It was so promising. I was so hopeful that all the eerie spookiness, the strange coincidences, the *glamour* - to use the old Scottish word referring to magic - was going somewhere. On my whiteboard near the computer I had drawn out all these charts with "circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what each one was." The latest was a "map" of all the major themes: the passages from order to disorder with the "original sin" event of opening the mysterious "Dharma Initiative" hatch; love/sex; work; food; honesty; fertility.
One reason I was watching this show was because it seemed to be getting into matters of faith / belief / metaphysics. Other than a few like "Touched by an Angel" or cute minister-family sitcoms, it's really rare to find that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did, I guess, but I never got into watching that.
The last TV I remember with unabashedly "deep themes" was Stephen King's miniseries based on The Stand. Then when I read that the Lost writers were inspired by, and were offering "tribute" to The Stand, I got even more interested. Because what makes The Stand great, IMO, is how it seamlessly merges the horror/sci-fi elements (the superflu, the end-of-the-world story) with the "deep story." But unlike Lost, in The Stand King is consistent. When you see ravens, for instance, you *know* what they mean - if you've "read the right books," to quote Peter from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Actually, the mythic parts of Lost hung together pretty well. I loved the way animals and (so I thought) animal symbology was woven into the story. The developing keenness of everyone's senses seemed to fit in with the healing theme, as well as another theme of "waking up" to yourself, "waking up" to reality (thus the references to the film Abre los ojos, remade in the US as Vanilla Sky.)
But once those elements were laid out there, the creative team seemed to backpedal - as if they'd opened the bottle, let the djinn out, and didn't know what the heck to do with him. I can see where people began to think that they were being conned.
The story itself, with all its cliffhanging mystery, was surprisingly coherent - up till the last minute of the Season Two finale.
Up till then, the story seemed to be a magical-realism moral allegory about two powerful themes. The first was redemption, regeneration, and healing in one's life. Each of the major characters had a serious flaw - some terrible. One woman (Kate), for instance, is a murderer. Another (Sawyer) is a murderous con man. Non-custodial parent Michael "snatches" his kid and ends up killing in his anxiety to get him back. Rose and Bernard have finally found each other in a late marriage, but Rose has only a year at most to live. Hurley struggles with mental illness and compulsions.
Basically, people are offered a "second chance" on The Island - but what they do with that second chance depends on their character, and their free will. ("You make your own luck" vs. "Yes, you *are* cursed." Both women in their own way are correct.) The "outward and visible signs" of this redemption are the various miracles attached to various castaways - Locke's recovery from paralysis, Rose's from cancer, Hurley's from his malignant "alter ego" Dave.
The second theme was purity of heart. Who the "pure in heart" were was surprising: one was the Iraqi soldier Sayid, a torturer with the Republican Guard; the psychic child Walt; the inept but "gentle giant" Hurley.
During the last few episodes of Season Two, however, it seemed that more and more, the creative team took the show from a magical-realism realm to one of "ordinary" science fiction, where The Island *was* revealed to belong "to our world" (after dropping numerous allusions that it wasn't), and "explaining" all the strange events by an "electromagnetic anomaly." Yawn.
When I saw all the stuff about the Pearl Station, about the Swan Station being "an experiment," I began to lose heart but I soldiered through the rest of Season Two anyway.
To me, when Lost introduced this "Dharma Initiative" think-tank element (run by those evil Scandinavians, ha!), that was one thing. It's kind of fun to think of the chain-pullers themselves having their chains pulled by something more powerful. But when I saw the last few moments of Season Two, with that snowbound research station, and the Widmore heiress somehow involved in monitoring and tracking The Island (which as a kind of "Avalon" should never be trackable in any way through human means), then I just went, Ugh. Because that means we now have human puppetmasters who will seem in one way or another to be calling the shots.
Someone said to me, "It's like a reverse of X-Files. In X-Files, what we thought was a gov't conspiracy actually turned out to be aliens. In Lost, what looks to be mysterious is actually a government conspiracy."
About the Eucharist, Catholic "southern gothic" writer Flannery O'Connor said, "If it's just a symbol, to hell with it." I would reverse that, and say about LOST, "If it's not a symbol, then to hell with it." The "god from the machine" is only tolerable if one can feel assured that, regardless of what theatrical puppet masters construct of wood and canvas, there really is "something else" to the story, beyond the props.
I guess I too would have liked a bit more commitment up front to whether or not the story was scientific/sociological (and thus rational) vs. magical realism. It's just that I have a deeply soft spot for the latter; just a personal preference. If the writers are going in a different direction, well, that's how it is, then.
It was so promising. I was so hopeful that all the eerie spookiness, the strange coincidences, the *glamour* - to use the old Scottish word referring to magic - was going somewhere. On my whiteboard near the computer I had drawn out all these charts with "circles and arrows and a paragraph explaining what each one was." The latest was a "map" of all the major themes: the passages from order to disorder with the "original sin" event of opening the mysterious "Dharma Initiative" hatch; love/sex; work; food; honesty; fertility.
One reason I was watching this show was because it seemed to be getting into matters of faith / belief / metaphysics. Other than a few like "Touched by an Angel" or cute minister-family sitcoms, it's really rare to find that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did, I guess, but I never got into watching that.
The last TV I remember with unabashedly "deep themes" was Stephen King's miniseries based on The Stand. Then when I read that the Lost writers were inspired by, and were offering "tribute" to The Stand, I got even more interested. Because what makes The Stand great, IMO, is how it seamlessly merges the horror/sci-fi elements (the superflu, the end-of-the-world story) with the "deep story." But unlike Lost, in The Stand King is consistent. When you see ravens, for instance, you *know* what they mean - if you've "read the right books," to quote Peter from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Actually, the mythic parts of Lost hung together pretty well. I loved the way animals and (so I thought) animal symbology was woven into the story. The developing keenness of everyone's senses seemed to fit in with the healing theme, as well as another theme of "waking up" to yourself, "waking up" to reality (thus the references to the film Abre los ojos, remade in the US as Vanilla Sky.)
But once those elements were laid out there, the creative team seemed to backpedal - as if they'd opened the bottle, let the djinn out, and didn't know what the heck to do with him. I can see where people began to think that they were being conned.
The story itself, with all its cliffhanging mystery, was surprisingly coherent - up till the last minute of the Season Two finale.
Up till then, the story seemed to be a magical-realism moral allegory about two powerful themes. The first was redemption, regeneration, and healing in one's life. Each of the major characters had a serious flaw - some terrible. One woman (Kate), for instance, is a murderer. Another (Sawyer) is a murderous con man. Non-custodial parent Michael "snatches" his kid and ends up killing in his anxiety to get him back. Rose and Bernard have finally found each other in a late marriage, but Rose has only a year at most to live. Hurley struggles with mental illness and compulsions.
Basically, people are offered a "second chance" on The Island - but what they do with that second chance depends on their character, and their free will. ("You make your own luck" vs. "Yes, you *are* cursed." Both women in their own way are correct.) The "outward and visible signs" of this redemption are the various miracles attached to various castaways - Locke's recovery from paralysis, Rose's from cancer, Hurley's from his malignant "alter ego" Dave.
The second theme was purity of heart. Who the "pure in heart" were was surprising: one was the Iraqi soldier Sayid, a torturer with the Republican Guard; the psychic child Walt; the inept but "gentle giant" Hurley.
During the last few episodes of Season Two, however, it seemed that more and more, the creative team took the show from a magical-realism realm to one of "ordinary" science fiction, where The Island *was* revealed to belong "to our world" (after dropping numerous allusions that it wasn't), and "explaining" all the strange events by an "electromagnetic anomaly." Yawn.
When I saw all the stuff about the Pearl Station, about the Swan Station being "an experiment," I began to lose heart but I soldiered through the rest of Season Two anyway.
To me, when Lost introduced this "Dharma Initiative" think-tank element (run by those evil Scandinavians, ha!), that was one thing. It's kind of fun to think of the chain-pullers themselves having their chains pulled by something more powerful. But when I saw the last few moments of Season Two, with that snowbound research station, and the Widmore heiress somehow involved in monitoring and tracking The Island (which as a kind of "Avalon" should never be trackable in any way through human means), then I just went, Ugh. Because that means we now have human puppetmasters who will seem in one way or another to be calling the shots.
Someone said to me, "It's like a reverse of X-Files. In X-Files, what we thought was a gov't conspiracy actually turned out to be aliens. In Lost, what looks to be mysterious is actually a government conspiracy."
About the Eucharist, Catholic "southern gothic" writer Flannery O'Connor said, "If it's just a symbol, to hell with it." I would reverse that, and say about LOST, "If it's not a symbol, then to hell with it." The "god from the machine" is only tolerable if one can feel assured that, regardless of what theatrical puppet masters construct of wood and canvas, there really is "something else" to the story, beyond the props.
I guess I too would have liked a bit more commitment up front to whether or not the story was scientific/sociological (and thus rational) vs. magical realism. It's just that I have a deeply soft spot for the latter; just a personal preference. If the writers are going in a different direction, well, that's how it is, then.