Paradise LOST

JUST A QUICK WORD to say bravo to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, head writers on the television series Lost. Bravo on such a well-crafted ending to a superb series!

In retrospect it seems obvious that the final sequence should return to the beginning; that the last image should mirror the first as seen in the pilot. Obvious, but nobody seemed to predict it. Ahah, to understand the creative process you need the reflexes of a writer, not the couch critic!

I came late to the Lost cause – I watched the first episode a couple of months back, and then subsequently lost a week of my life watching all episodes up through season six. And I don’t do television. So bravo on creating a smart, thought-provoking contribution to popular culture – that is so rarely seen on mainstream networks. All those clever-clever references to Rousseau, Hume, Lock, Steinbeck, the Others... we got ’em. If I ever teach philosophy, Lost will definitely be on my curriculum. (There is actually a collection of scholarly articles on the series “The Island has its Reasons,” some iffy, some pretty solid.)

I do half wonder if the bulk of its mainstream audience was not more interested in the nerdy details of the smoke monster’s powers and the flash backwards, sideways and time travel continuum rather than the Bigger Picture, but so what..? One of the show’s greatest feats is seamlessly blending a semi-realist aesthetic (yikes, we survived a plane crash!) with a fictional, fantasy narrative. In doing so it meshes together the two central strands of cinematic fiction which since the beginnings of cinema - the Lumière brothers filming unsuspecting passengers getting off a train (wow!) and Méliès sending his clay man to the moon - have been considered opposing forces. And it works ...

Personally I was more gripped by the survival/reality aspect of the first few series and would have taken the drama further in that direction. And my one unanswered question is; where and when did they went to the toilet? Hmm... I have a few other gripes too. At times the drama was painfully melodramatic, and the music score was oh-soooh-way over-the-top, cringe cringe. But full credit to the actors, especially Josh Holloway for making “son of a bitch! I’ll be damned!” sound as if that wasn’t written by ABC censors! (Although Charlie’s favorite expletive “sodding” was last used I think in the UK in 1989 ...)

But being damned, of course, turned out to be what it was all about. Damned, lost, and finally redeemed. One blogger lambasted the series for being “Bible TV” and while the series draws on very diverse mythologies and philosophies, it is astonishing how many theological references there are: the 23rd Psalm, Jacob and his twin (Isaac?), notions of the soul, afterlife and purgatory. Jack’s father is called “Christian Shepherd” (“seriously?!” laughs Kate ...) Yes, quite seriously as it happens.

I think this is highly revealing about where American drama and thought is at the beginning of the 21st century – still asking the God question, and framing it in distinctly Existentially-Christian terms. Sartre may be “discredited” in the eyes of postmodern theoriests, but Huit Clos (which in view of the Lost finale surely offers the closest literary analogy) stubbornly refuses to bail out of the hatch.

Lost is a Homeric story-telling epic for the modern day. I would not go as far as to say television has risen from the dead, but there is hope. Bravo!