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.