Getting LOST

Series spoilers below if you haven’t yet watched LOST.

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"Not until we are lost, do we begin to understand ourselves" -- H.D. Thoreau

When I decided the actual act of blogging was less odious than the word blogging or the concept of being a—shudder—blogger, I made a pact with myself: alright, I’ll do this…but no writing about LOST. Until, I amended off-the-bat, it’s all ending.

The end of LOST is here. I’ve spent many an hour boring my girlfriend with endless musings about the direction of the show (which she didn’t then watch and does—for the sake of our relationship—now). I’ve gotten more than five friends addicted to it, consuming the DVDs happily and hungrily as I muttered ‘I told you so’ from the sidelines. In the last three years I’ve been to Hawaii, somewhat accidentally and almost always regrettably, eleven times…and found myself tied into LOST in ways I wouldn’t have imagined. It’s probably most succinctly captured in an afternoon I spent hiking a volcano alone on a day-off. I was spacing out on my hike trying to wrap my head around the mysteries of the show -- basically what has been my "default mode" intellectual masturbation for the last five years. Suddenly, out of the ether that was a jungle trail on that overcast Hawaiian Saturday, Michael Emerson (who plays ‘Ben’) comes down the mountain, just hiking for the day with his wife. I’m thinking about Ben and then suddenly he’s there: just the three of us there on the trail. I conjured him into existence. My very own LOST moment; a bit of island magic.

LOST is and always was a show about BIG IDEAS, and so it’s notoriously hard to summarize or describe to nonbelievers. Sort of like Scientology. It’s a philosophical show that owes its existence to a far-flung range of material (e.g., the video game enigma MYST, the standards-setting TWIN PEAKS, the intellectual series THE PRISONER). But unlike these sources (with the exception of season one of TP, and of course THE X FILES) it’s achieved sometime more commercial. Romance, action-adventure, even soap-opera…these genres are invoked in LOST as much as its weirder sci-fi status. So it’s a show that can be watched by a wide range of folks, be they Susie Q. Forever 21 (Cheerleader in Wantagh), Bryan James Uniqlo (Disaffected in Greenpoint), or Martin Van Heusen (Middle-aged in Middlebury). It has that elusive and financially-desirable thing: POPULAR APPEAL.

These two sides to the LOST coin (big ideas/popular appeal) has created quite a unique and heady brew. I love that LOST wants viewers to ask important questions about themselves and their lives. That being said, I also love that LOST is fun, fast, and eminently-digestible. There are sexy men and women shaking their goods, running from bad-guys, blowing shit up, banging one another, laughing, loving, surviving, falling, dying, growing, running, sweating. It’s a show of gerunds – a DOING-SHOW if you will– and moreover, a doing-show that’s meticulously thoughtful. It’s its own species in many ways.

Yet I’m going to argue that in being so uniquely crafted, LOST sacrifices a bit of its intellectual cohesiveness and creative finesse. The show wears its influences and philosophical-leanings on its sleeve – its characters are named things like Hume and Locke and Rousseau. But it never directly extrapolates on the IDEAS of these philosophers. It’s more of a postmodern philosophical pastiche, concerned with the IDEA of philosophy more than the endeavor if it. It has epistemological auspices but fails to provide the systematic rigor of analysis or deconstruction. So it’s a “smart show” for sure but, unfortunately, not one that has much to say.

Yes, LOST seems to not have much to offer. It’s a hard thing for me to sort of arrive at, and I definitely wouldn’t have imagined this in seasons one or three, but in the end I think what’s most important about LOST was the fact that it made us think it was important. It Jacobed us. And by that I mean it enticed us with an interesting, personal, eye-to-eye intellectual connection that never really materialized. AND THAT’S FINE. We weren’t actually candidates at all, and yet we couldn’t help pushing the button for six seasons straight. Listen, the secret to life is probably not going to be hidden in a show starring that douche-y guy from PARTY OF FIVE and some hot born-again Canadian non-actress. The secret to life isn’t going to be written by the people who brought us NASH BRIDGES (Lindeloff), WALKER, TEXAS RANGER (Cuse) or ALIAS (Abrams) – no matter how good those shows actually were or were not. LOST is a rube, a hell of a good one. It isn’t about the answers, it never was. It’s about the questions, how deftly the writers shifted our focus from what was important to WHAT IS IMPORTANT NOW. There is no secret answer, no meaning for the island, no perfect concept that will unlock the show. It’s as ethereal and mercurial as mystery itself; it’s own smoke-monster; formless, inchoate, lost itself.

So the very nature of the show goes against the very idea of ending it. Towards these ends, I think we were bound to be a bit let down by the final season. Closure is never an easy thing for a series, especially one of this creative caliber. But here, thematically, closure is about the hardest thing it can do. LOST is about endless cycles, passing stewardship of the island to future generations, going back in time and giving yourself the compass you went back in time to give yourself. Mobius strips of infinite nuance. I really did not love this season, and all the parts I didn’t love were parts that seemed more like lucid offerings to the answer-starved audience at home. I don’t WANT Smokey’s origins meticulously described. I don’t WANT to know the “rules.” I don’t want to know who the skeletons in the freaken caves were. Who the hell cares? LOST, being a populist show, had to kowtow a bit to its fans…and so I think it lost a little of what made it unique: deflection, slight-of-hand, withholding. It isn’t a show that gives; it’s a show that demands attention to detail, careful analysis, the frustration of feeling lost. Yes, LOST is the most perfectly titled show I’ve ever seen.

It also, in providing some undergraduate philosophy about the duality of goodness and evil, the interchangeability of such terms, the relativistic argument, created quite the pickle for its writers. We don’t know whom to route for anymore – both Jacob and the ‘Man In Black’ alternate as the “good guy” and the “bad guy.” As much as its brash iconography of white and black suggests otherwise, LOST as a philosophical text is offering that there is no true ‘good’ or ‘evil’…there is only perception. An eye opening, the overused perseverative image of the show, means just that: we SEE and we EXPERIENCE and that is how we choose sides. There are no others; we are the others; the others are the others. Its fertile philosophical ground, for sure, but it makes it hard to write compelling stories on a script-by-script basis. We need to care about characters fates (which is a bit undone by the “multiple realities” of this season) and we need to know who to route for (I certain don’t anymore, do you?) – screenwriting 101. It may be a logical place for the story to have gone, and it may be executed as well as these capable writers can muster, but in the end it’s simply not as compelling TV as previous seasons. So LOST falters on both sides of its unique duality: too populist to be truly intellectual; too intellectual to work fully as popcorn TV.

Despite this, despite Matthew Fox’s "acting", despite Nikki and Paolo, despite Eko’s untimely demise, despite Ana Lucia’s bitching, despite the bad, LOST matters. It isn’t THE SOPRANOS. It isn’t THE WIRE. But it matters. It matters because human beings spent hours of their limited time on earth watching it, sharing it, discussing it with friends and family. It matters because of what it was, rather than what it had to say. It matters because as a show it was fun, often well-written, popcorn entertainment. It matters because it made me love TV. It matters because Jacob told us so. It matters because we enjoyed getting lost so very much: we wandered back to the trail, we looked again into the jungle, we heard something rumbling out there. We ran. We pushed the button. We gave ourselves the compass we gave ourselves.

IRON SINKS

Blog entries lambasting flaccid and disappointing sequels are a dime a dozen on the internet these days, so by all means stop reading now. Your time is probably better spent trying to get the plastic off a Polly-O string cheese (that you’re not even going to eat) while watching Jeff Francoeur strike out looking AGAIN against the freaken San Francisco Giants for the love of Christ. You're killing me Francoeur! Sorry that’s just what I was doing.

Still with me? Fools. Anyway, yes, I have to say I’m disappointed by IRON MAN 2, which falls into all the trappings of what can succinctly be dubbed ‘sequel-itis’. It’s bigger…it’s grander…it’s MORE EXPLOSIVE….and all at the mere cost of everything that made the original off-beat, exhilarating, and enjoyably simple. To the IRON MAN franchise, Robert Downey Jr. is the sexy salesman whose charm is indistinguishable from the product he’s selling. If the movie biz doesn’t quite pan-out, RDJ has a viable career hocking Rube Goldburg culinary apparatuses on late-night TV. Surely he and his ilk are the reason anyone in this great country owns something as head-scratching as the As-Seen-On-TV ‘Slap Chop.’ But after a couple of years shining your shoes they can appear a little over-buffed; and thus, as with any salesman, peddling the same act after a while ends up feeling a little sad. I’m not accusing RDJ of not having any fun with the role, I’m just musing on the idea that the role is so utterly fun that he sort of neglects there’s anything else he can be doing.

Not that the failure here is RDJ, he’s the best Tony Stark this mediocre script could have conjured forward. Justin Theroux, whose on-camera work I admire so much in David Lynch films, seemed an odd duck choice to pen this sequel – but, hell, I was game. Not sure Mr. Theroux was really up for the task, it seems, regurgitating up the same-old sequel tropes we desperately do not need to see another time. This is why Mickey Rourke is unremarkable here (I still thing he’s a fantastic in THE WRESTLER and definitely capable of more than we saw in this film). Avenging his father by killing the son of his nemesis is well-trodden terrain, fine, but the Vankos men are so unilaterally villainous here that there’s not anything in the way of dramatic tension – we know who are the good guys, we know who are the bad guys, we know what the outcome's gonna be, and that’s all fine and dandy.

I guess for some that’s as much as they can ask from a quote unquote comic book movie; some people happily divide their mashed potatoes from their beef Wellington on their plate, and won’t start on one until they’ve had the last bite of the other. But I’ve always enjoyed complicating it a bit – having villains who, even if ultimately beyond salvation, at least emerge into villainy from empathetic circumstances. Ivan Vankos senior turns out to never have been the one to create the arch-reactor; it was always Tony Stark Senior (a well-cast John Slattery) -- he's as brilliant and unimpeachably sanguine as we were always led to believe.

It’s boring. Give us a struggle where Tony has to cognate the idea that his all-mighty father may have been a fraud. In other words, give us human weakness. And then, from that lowest of low points, givs us human triumph. Of course this is what IRON MAN should be about, the fragility of the human beneath the iron. The inability of man to control these outsized weapons, because man himself is beyond control. Hence the real struggle in Tony Stark’s life should be what it is in the comic series—his very-real alcoholism—and not the preposterous construct of Polonium-sickness or whatever radiation poisoning Tony was fighting for three-fourths of the film. This is another scripting problem: what’s the point of giving Tony this disease when there’s no chance in hell there isn’t going to be some eleventh-hour cure, making everything right, saving the day. Had Tony’s problem been alcoholism, the struggle is at once more human but also more thoroughly insidious: Tony is the KIND OF PERSON who can lose control. And a gun in the hands of that kind of person…

Maybe I want too much, it’s just the original film had so many individual delights that I enthusiastically pre-purchased my Saturday night tickets for IRON MAN 2. It’s not a slap in the face it’s just boring in a flashy way. And I almost prefer genuine , quiet, library-boredom over tedious explosions and high-octane ennui. Thank goodness for the smarmy performance by Sam Rockwell as Stark’s chief industrial competitor, a definite highlight for me (Gwyneth, Don Cheadle, Scarlet Johannson are all fine…there’s just not much for any of them to do but sit around and wait for the sequel).

Perhaps IRON MAN 2’s failings are best illustrated by its uninspired handling of what can be called the “secret scene.” The secret scene, as a concept, is a gift to the Fanboys: a tacit contract between filmmaker and comic book nerd that promises that, just for a moment or two, we won’t pander you with back-story because we know you know. But when the wink-wink moments are reduced to such brash iconography—the toss-away appearance of Captain America’s shield, the final glimpse of Thor’s hammer—the loving enthusiasm is a bit harder to muster. I felt like I was being advertised to; hell, I was being advertised to. Surely you don’t need to be a frequenter of "Aint It Cool News" to at least have SOME awareness Hollywood is gearing up for the next round of Marvel superheroes; hell, they’ve been beating us over the head with The Avengers movie since the first IRON MAN. Listen, I get the point here, brand marketing and the appeal of the tie-in and whatnot, but I’m just a bit sick of the artifice. It most certainly aint cool. It’s business. Give us something surprising, not just a tag to the next in a succession of Marvel Studios films. I know CAPTAIN AMERICA is coming and I know THOR is right around the corner, the question is why should I go see these films. Because, if they’re taking their cues from this movie, I very well might not.

The other film I saw this weekend was the latest torture-porn touchstone THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. For all the dramatic press and buzz among horror fans, the whole outing came off as rather a lame attempt to be shocking, but I guess that’s what you can expect when a film wears its conceit so unabashedly on its sleeve. In that way IRON MAN and THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE (I’m sparing you all the details on that one by the way—google it if you really want to know) have more in common than I had expected. Both have severely limited ambitions to be nothing more than exactly what you’d expect.



And I'll leave you with that, to piece together.