In
Defense of Lost
“Lost
returns February 7th, with sixteen new episodes and no repeats.”
Such news—the
return of one of TV’s most seductive and popular thrillers—should
get the heart of any television fan beating fast with anticipation,
but is instead being met with wide-spread indifference. Potential water
cooler questions like “How will Kate and Sawyer escape off ‘Alcatraz
Island’?” and “Will Jack let the former Henry Gale
die?” have turned into “Does anyone even care anymore?”
Which is a shame, because despite its apparent fall from grace, Lost
is (and can continue to be) one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking
shows on television.
When the
series premiered in September 2004, creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof
preached relentlessly that they had learned the lessons of two predecessors:
Twin Peaks and The X-Files. The former fizzled fast
when its “who killed Laura Palmer” premise went unanswered
too long, often teasing resolution but never delivering until it was
too late. The X-Files, on the other hand, fell victim to the
reality of network television: the networks own the series and can keep
it on as long as they see fit. Thus unable to resolve the conspiracy
web that FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley found themselves
entwined on his own terms, creator Chris Carter could only spiral that
conspiracy into muddled confusion.
The current
criticisms regarding Lost allege that the executive producers
of the show have actually not learned from these lessons of the past.
Too few questions have been answered while too many new ones have been
raised, the argument goes, while the mythology is weighted-down with
smoke monsters, the Dharma Initiative, the Others and even the remnants
of a four-toed statue.
In truth,
“who killed Laura Palmer” was too minuscule of a storyline
to last very long, and comparing Lost (which has a much larger
story to tell) to Twin Peaks doesn’t do justice to the
latter series. Twin Peaks should have done what Veronica
Mars did with its season one “who killed Lily Kane”
plotline: resolved the initial mystery by the end of that inaugural
season, then introduced an equally-compelling mystery for season two,
allowing Dale Cooper to remain while still being able to explore the
off-beat characters populating the region.
The latest
heir-apparent to the genre thrown, NBC’s Heroes, is a
perfect example of such season-specific storytelling. As Caroline Edmunds
recently wrote of the series (Flak Magazine, “Lost
vs. Heroes”), “Future seasons have the potential
to become like individual issues of a comic, with arcs featuring the
same great characters thwarting new evil plots.” Lost,
however, does not have such a luxury. Unless rescued at the end of every
season, and then marooned on yet another island with its own set of
mysteries, it’s impossible for each season to have a truly definitive
self-contained story. But that also doesn’t mean each season of
Lost doesn’t have a season-specific focus.
The producers
of Lost often compare their show to a novel, with each new
episode being a chapter in a larger story. In reality, Lost
is more like a series of novels, each with its own “theme”
to explore. The Lord of the Rings, arguably the most classic
trilogy ever written, is a perfect example. A main story resonates through
all three books—the destruction of the ring and defeat of Sauron—but
that plot does not get resolved at the end of The Fellowship of
the Rings or even The Two Towers. Yet no one feels cheated
by of either of those two books. The Lord of the Rings is an
epic after all, and some epics simply take longer.
Season
one of Lost was thus the first in a series of novels telling
a grander story, beginning with the plane crash and ending with the
opening of the hatch, and served as an introduction to the characters
and the mysterious island they suddenly found themselves stranded upon.
In season two, the focus shifted, exploring the mythology of the island
and its recent history (i.e., the Dharma Initiative) while using both
entering the hatch and imploding it as bookends. And with season three,
a shift has again occurred, this time with the spotlight on the Others.
In the
early days of independent film, writer/director Allison Anders commented,
“It’s like you have a clothes line in your backyard with
clothes on it. The line itself is plot, and the clothes are characters.
For me, I find the clothes more intriguing than the line.” The
executive producers of Lost seem to have the same mind frame,
because the series isn’t so much about revealing answers but telling
a story through its characters. It’s not the destination that
matters, if you will, but the journey.
As mentioned
earlier, The X-Files is often cited as an example of a show
gone astray. Each season, the mythology of the series kept expanding
to the point where it was confusing, defied logic and didn’t even
make sense. But it had nothing to do with not giving answers; it was
about complicating to prove the creator of the series could make the
show more complicated. Chris Carter, in a lot of ways, missed the point.
The mythology didn’t matter; it was the journey. It was watching
Fox Mulder search for answers he could never really find, fighting a
system that one could not really fight. In simplest terms, The X-Files
was the story of each and every one of us.
We may
never get all the answers to all the questions that Lost has
raised. The big ones, yes; they obviously have to be answered. But there
are also a lot of little questions, the ones that we should be asking
and speculating upon in front of the water cooler, which may indeed
go unanswered. Not because they can’t be answered, but because
they shouldn’t be answered. In essence, Lost is a new
breed of television, one that challenges us to watch it differently,
to get lost in the story and the characters and to fill-in-the-blanks
ourselves.
On the
liner notes of the classic 1974 Bob Dylan album, Blood On the Tracks,
New York journalist Pete Hamill writes, “To state things plainly
is the function of journalism; but Dylan sings a more fugitive song:
allusive, symbolic, full of imagery and ellipses, and by leaving things
out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His
song becomes our song because we live in the spaces. If we listen, if
we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work
of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.”
The true
answers of Lost may actually reside within the genius of Bob
Dylan. We just need to watch the show differently, welcome the challenge
and fill in the spaces ourselves. And there should be nothing wrong
with that; we should be challenged by television. After all, if you
want your entertainment to be easy, there’s always some CSI
just a remote click away.
(This article
orginally was published in Flak
Magazine.)
February
6, 2007
