'Getting Lost' Identifies the Major Themes of Lost
If there ever was a television series that was tailor-made for a collection of essays exploring its various elements, it would have to be the ABC drama Lost. With so many plot-lines, slow-burning mysteries, philosophical innuendos and baggage-heavy characters, volumes could be written about the show. The first to appear was in 2006, when the series was only two-seasons old, but the majority of the essays in Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage and Starting Over in J.J. Abrams’ Lost (BenBella Books) reflect many of the themes and fan reactions that has been part of Lost throughout its six seasons and beyond.
Joyce Millman, for instance, engages in that time-honored tradition of theorizing about Lost in her essay “Game Theory.” Seeing similarities between events on the island to the various levels of video games, she speculates that the series itself is a game being played by unseen forces. Millman goes so far as to advocate that Lost is an amalgamation of two previous and highly popular video games, Myst and The Sims. “Like Myst players, Lost viewers (and the show’s characters) were plunged into the action with no preamble, left to negotiate a disorienting environment that has its own murky rules and logic,” she writes, while in The Sims “players control the daily lives of characters that are imbued with individual personalities, needs, wants, fears, and aspirations.” Much like the characters on Lost.
In “The Lost Book Club,” meanwhile, Bill Spangler explores the various tomes that characters on the series are often seen reading. Even though Lost was only partially through its second season when Spangler wrote his essay, the list of books spotlighted on the series was already impressive. From Watership Down to The Third Policeman to The Brothers Karamazov, the author correlates how the plots of these books correspond to the storyline of Lost. Spangler does not firmly believe, however, that the mystery of Lost can be revealed by reading these numerous volumes but that they simply add to the enjoyment that is Lost. “It’s a way of learning about the writer’s influences and getting a different perspective on the events of the show,” he suggests.
But it’s more than just books that provide insight on Lost, and Bill Spangler acknowledges that fact by also discussing the various philosophers that creep up on the series via the names of the characters themselves—John Locke and Danielle Rousseau being the most obvious. Other writers also explore the philosophical implications of Lost, most notably Robert Burke Richardson’s “Doubt, Descartes, and Evil Geniuses” and Amy Berner’s “Double-Locked.”
Not all of the essays in Getting Lost are philosophical or focus on various theories regarding the series as a small handful offer comedic observations instead. Glenn Yeffeth, for instance, writes a highly-amusing, thoroughly entertaining treatise entitled, “The Art of Leadership.” Starting with the basic premise that most of the current crop of “leadership” books on the market are forgettable, Yeffeth argues that one could learn a lot about leadership by instead studying the actions of Jack Shephard. But as soon as he begins to analyze the good doctor, he realizes Jack is not a very good leader after all. He moves on to John Locke and James “Sawyer” Ford, only to reach the same conclusions, causing him to eventually settle upon Hugo “Hurley” Reyes as the true leader of the castaways.
Adam-Troy Castro, meanwhile, compares Lost with another television series involving stranded castaways on a deserted island, Gilligan’s Island. In “The Same Damn Island,” Castro points out similarities between the main cast of both shows and how their characters overlap. Hurley, for instance, is “absurdly wealthy,” just like Thurston Howell, while actress Ginger and rock-star Charlie are both famous celebrities. Castro doesn’t end his analysis with these archetypes, however, but also points out similarities between the plots of both shows.
“We all know that despite its ‘uncharted’ status, it is far from uninhabited,” he writes in regards to the island on Lost. “It is home to crazy French ladies, guys buried in underground chambers, and mysterious Others.” The island on Gilligan’s Island, meanwhile, had “a pilot named Wrong-Way Feldman stranded for ten years,” “a Japanese Soldier still fighting World War II,” “a feral Jungle Boy,” and “the famous painter Alexandri Gregor Dubov” all living on it. Coincidence? Adam-Troy Castro obviously believes not.
Die-hard Lost fans have the tendency to explore and dissect every little detail revealed in any given episode, and often spend hours perusing the Internet looking for clues and searching for meaning even when there are none to be found. G.O. Likeskill takes this even further than most, believing that since there are connections between the characters on the show—Sawyer, for instance, shared drinks in a bar with Jack’s father in season one—the same could very well be true of the actors who portray the characters. In the form a diary, he writes about his twenty-nine day lunch-break quest to find those connections. While he eventually is able to link all the major actors from the first season to each other via films and television shows they previously appeared in, the entertaining aspect of his essay is the conclusions he often makes because of these connections.
“Do actors who do guest appearances on CSI: Miami stand a fifty percent greater chance of having their characters killed off if they are later regulars on a different hit series?” he asks on day five, while day nine causes him to wonder, “If the actors are connected at a one-step remove by two other actors who play husband and wife, does that increase either actor’s chance of playing a drug addict?”
Although Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage and Starting Over in J.J. Abrams’ Lost was published barely a third of the way through the ABC drama’s six-season run, it still does a remarkable job of highlighting the many key elements and discussion topics the series has attracted through the years. While it may not contain any discourses on four-toed statues, time travel or the mysterious Jacob, Lost still provided the book’s authors a multitude of things to write about—from smoke monsters to Others to the Dharma Initiative—and the resulting essays are not only educational and entertaining, but have withstood the test of time as well.
Anthony Letizia (February 1, 2010)
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