Lost Succeeds by Tapping Into Our Collective Cultural Psyche
Lost
is a cultural phenomenon. Not only do million of viewers tune in each
week for new installments, but online viewers on both the ABC.com website
as well as iTunes regularly make it one of the most watched shows on
the Internet. More significantly, a mixture of water cooler conversations,
online message board debates and audio podcast discussions make the
ABC drama one of the hottest topics in both the real and virtual worlds
we now inhabit.
How—and why—did this come to pass? Author J.
Wood, in his book Living Lost: Why We’re
All Stuck on the Island (Garrett County Press, 2007), speculates
that it is because of the show’s ability to symbolically reflect
life in post-9/11 America. “Lost draws on a specific
21st century isolation and distress,” he writes. “It taps
into some here-and-now concerns, and speaks to the audience’s
deeper lizard-brain psyche as it weaves its sophisticated tales.”
From Wood’s point of view, references in Lost to “the
sickness” and “quarantine” directly correlate to the
bird flu pandemic of a few years ago, while the use of torture on the
show reflects events at Abu Ghraib. Although Wood does not believe such
allusions are intentional—“The writers and the audience
are all influenced to a degree by what is happening in our broader culture,
and the elements of those events naturally work their way into our cultural
productions”—he does believe this unconscious political
and cultural commentary is the show’s greatest strength: “What
Lost does so successfully is take these very real concerns
straight off the front pages, abstract them into their psychological
impression, and then crystallize that sense back into the framework
of the narrative.”
Because Wood’s thesis is primarily based on an anti-Bush Administration
bias, the exact extent of influence that real world events have on Lost
Island more than likely varies depending on one’s own political
viewpoints. There is, however, a more subtle correlation in Living
Lost between what we see on the screen and what we experience in
our lives that equally, if not more so, makes us all “stuck on
the island”: Lost’s ability to tap into our collective
consciousness and shared experiences, not on a political level but strictly
cultural, especially in regards to those born between 1961 and 1981
and who are more commonly referred to as Generation X. As Wood himself
remarks, “It’s this generation that makes up the median
age group of the survivors on the island, as well as the show’s
writers and directors. At a deep level, in terms of references, language,
presentation, and narrative strategy employing mystery, this is a series
that speaks to Generation X as few others have.”
The character of thirty-five year old James “Sawyer” Ford
is a prime example. Although a high school drop out from economically
challenged Jasper, Alabama, who turned to a life of crime at age nineteen,
Sawyer is extremely well-read and culturally versed, evident not only
by his habitual reading of literature on the island but also through
his many quips and nicknames throughout the series. This litany of pop-culture
induced monikers include: Hot Lips, Underdog, Rambina, the Artist Formerly
Known as Henry Gale, Shaft, Chachi, Thelma, Colonel Kurtz, International
House of Pancakes, Mr. Ed, Rerun and Tattoo.
Star
Wars, arguably the largest pop culture phenomenon of the past thirty
years, is given particular emphasis by Sawyer: Ben (Yoda), Hurley (Jabba)
and Jin (Chewie) have all been given corresponding nicknames. In the
season three episode “Not in Portland,” Sawyer berates Aldo
for having fallen for the “old Wookie prisoner gag,” while
in “The Brig” he kills Anthony Cooper in the same fashion
that Princess Leia killed Jabba the Hut. But it’s not just Sawyer
who has a penchant for the George Lucas epic, as the “Enhanced”
episodes of Lost (which utilize a pop-up screen to give viewers
additional information) have illustrated: Hurley’s rescue of Bernard,
Jin and Sayid with the Dharma van in “Though the Looking Glass”
was a homage to the original Star Wars when Han Solo saved
Luke Skywalker via the Millennium Falcon, while Hurley’s luring
of Kate and Sayid into capture by Locke in “The Economist”
was a homage to Lando Calrissian luring Han Solo et al into capture
by Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back.
It does
not stop there, however, as homages to other pop culture staples abound
in Lost. The 1996 meeting between Desmond Hume and Daniel Faraday
in “The Constant,” for instance, is reminiscent of the 1955
meeting between Marty McFly and Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the
Future, while that entire episode was heavily influenced by the
series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“All
Good Things”). While many fans have accused the producers of Lost
for “being lazy” and simply “stealing” such
plotlines, these references and “tipping of the hat” actually
help to further connect viewers by drawing upon our shared cultural
psyche. Wood remarks that for the writers of Lost the show
“became a way to recast their vocabulary and references into a
kind of mythology,” a mythology that we can thus more easily relate
(if not always understand).
Furthermore,
this pop-culture based mythology provides fuel to our desire to decipher
that mythology. Lost is infamous for its ability to raise question-upon-question,
which in turn churns out an amazing—and equally infamous—amount
of fan-based speculation and theorizing on the Internet. Although grumblings
often arise that the show is not answering enough questions, these unanswered
queries actually play a role in keeping the audience engaged. “Those
questions are the kind which draws audiences deeper into the mythology
of the narrative,” Wood writes. “Audiences want answers,
but more than that, they want to search for answers, whether they know
it or not.”
This search,
however, would not be as appealing if it were not rooted in our collective
consciousness. The producers of Lost know this, and thus pepper
the series with both literary and cultural references that assist fans
in deciphering the various mysteries of the island. “The clues,
the Easter eggs and hints provide answers where the narrative of the
show doesn’t,” Wood continues. “In conspiracy-theory
fashion, if audiences watch closely and pay attention to the details,
they can find an archive of material in literature and pop culture that
further develops the mythology of the narrative.”
It’s
that “attention to detail” of the familiar that truly resonates
with fans of Lost and has made the series the phenomenon that
it has indeed become, while likewise shattering many preconceived notions
about it’s medium. Lost is, after all, television at
its most challenging, most literate and most intelligent. Yet its ratings,
although having fluxuated through the years, mark it as a success, and
the shows online fanbase is among the largest and most loyal—as
well as passionate—in history. To again quote Wood, “It’s
proof positive that Lost is a show that can grab the imagination,
turn people to literature, scientific and esoteric research, and engage
them in a broader dialog exercising the same critical faculties that
television is often blamed for shutting down.”
Which makes
being “stuck on the island” not such a bad thing after all.
March 10,
2008
