Living Lost by J. Wood

Living Lost: Why We're All Stuck on the Island
by J. Wood
2006
ISBN: 978-1891053023
$14.95 + postage

Excerpt from
Living Lost: Why We're All Stuck on the Island
by J. Wood

How does smoke stomp?

If you watch the television show Lost, and if you’re reading this you most likely do, figuring out how smoke stomps is just one of the puzzles within the puzzle that keeps you Krazy-glued to your couch Wednesday nights and frustrates you when the episode is a repeat (which you watch anyway to see if there’s something you missed the first time around). From its ground-breaking pilot episode onward, Lost has become something of a television and pop culture phenomenon on the level of Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure or The X-Files. It’s an oddly-structured series that taps directly into your imagination – it hooks you even before you have a chance to decompress during the commercials. This is a strange new show that ruptures presumptions and expectations. It’s a show about strangers stuck on a strange island dealing with strange events, people, creatures, and conditions. At its core, this is a show about estrangement.

This short book looks at how and why Lost manages so thoroughly to mesmerize its audience. It digs into the show’s creators’ unusual and innovative storytelling methods, suggests some new ways for you to “read” the show, and offers discussions and arguments that will enrich your viewing experience, whether you’re watching the new episodes as they’re broadcast, or binging later on DVD. It deals with both the show and The Lost Experience, the alternate reality game that feeds the show’s mythology. These suggestions may not solve all of the show’s puzzles, but hopefully they’ll provide some new ways to get lost in Lost.

The real place to begin is before the show ever aired. In 2004, Lloyd Braun, the then-chairman of the ABC Entertainment Group, had an idea for a show that might help spike ABC’s flagging ratings. He wanted to produce a drama that was a hybrid of two of the big hits of 2000: the reality TV show Survivor and the Tom Hanks film Cast Away. Braun was not happy with the initial scripts he received, and turned to J.J. Abrams, the creator of ABC’s then-hit Alias. Abrams wasn’t on board until he confirmed he could write the show in a near-science fiction manner reminiscent of The Twilight Zone. (In fact, the blurry title that twists into the screen from a distance is a homage to Twilight Zone.) Abrams then met writer-producer Damon Lindelof, who had worked on television projects like Crossing Jordan, Wasteland and Nash Bridges. Abrams and Lindelof got to work on a Monday and soon discovered they shared a love of 1970s/80s pop-culture, comic books, and science fiction that gave them instant creative shorthand. Within a week they had churned out the outline of what became the pilot episode. “By that Friday we had written a 20-page outline. And they green-lit the pilot on Saturday. At that point, we didn’t even have a script, but in less than 12 weeks we had to start shooting.” Score one for deadlines wringing creativity out of a couple of guys.

Braun declared the pilot the best piece of writing for television he’d ever seen, and approved a $12 million budget – the largest budget ever for a pilot. This did not please parent company Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner or its president Robert Iger: Not only were they unhappy about the budget, but they thought it simply wouldn’t succeed. Eisner called the idea a “crazy project that’s never going to work.” Iger said, “This [show] is a waste of time.” They were especially unhappy that whatever the island’s mysterious “thing” was had been left unexplained to the audience (and unknown by the writers) at the end of the pilot. The pilot was shot for around $10 million, nearly $2 million under budget, but Braun was fired before it even aired. When Lost premiered on September 22, 2004, it brought in nearly 18 million viewers, three times the expected audience, and with the help of Braun’s pre-planned ad campaign, became wildly and immediately successful. One year later, the show’s first season was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards, including “Best Drama Series,” which it won (along with five others, including one for J.J. Abrams’s direction of the two-part pilot episode). By the end of September 2005, Eisner, who was already on the outs with Disney, stepped down – a year before his contract was up. Braun went to work for Yahoo!, Eisner ended up with a cable TV talk show, Conversations with Michael Eisner, and Iger took over at the helm of ABC, dismantling much of what Eisner had established.

The writing of the show has involved its own behind-the-scenes drama. After directing the pilot, J.J. Abrams continued writing until the second season, when he had too many other projects already scheduled (including the feature films Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek XI) to keep up with the hit show’s demands. Lindelof, along with fellow creator Jeffrey Lieber and producer Carlton Cuse, wrote and continued to produce the show through Abrams’s company, Bad Robot Productions. It’s fair to say the writers never quite anticipated what they had gotten themselves into; this was, after all, just supposed to be a pilot, and the initial disapproval of Eisner and Iger suggested it wouldn’t go much beyond that. They had originally planned to have surgeon Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) die in the pilot, then made the last-minute change to keep him alive, and even considered replacing Fox with Michael Keaton. When the pilot proved to be much more successful than Eisner & Co. ever expected, the writers had to scramble to build on this strange pilot that had bent so many rules of television.

The show (and the island) itself works like a video game, with a back-story that the players have to enter and deal with. Some time in its narrative history (in the 1970s), the Dharma Initiative set up the hardware on the island with some instructions, and the people who would eventually populate the island functioned both as the software used in that machine (without necessarily knowing it), and the users of that software. This is rather appropriate, since much of the feel of the puzzles in Lost is inspired by the computer game Myst, and some shots echo visuals from the game. Furthermore, the generation stuck with the tag “Generation X” was the first big video gaming generation. Those of us who cut our teeth on Pac Man and Donkey Kong (and Oregon Trail, if you had an old Apple computer around) grew into more complex individuals who demanded more complex games – up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start eventually wasn’t enough of a challenge – and by the late 1980s new games demanding strategy and the ability to closely follow a narrative emerged. These games required the intellectual faculties of a literary critic with the finger reflexes of a court stenographer. Teenagers who could barely follow the thread of a square root could sustain a logical thought process for weeks on end in order to make it to the Mother Brain in Metroid. And 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.

Lost’s creators were hardly the first TV writers to use strategic mystery to keep their audience watching. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, famously withheld information from his audience at the commercial breaks, at the ends of episodes, and even within characterizations and storylines to generate a sense of narrative lack that the story (hopefully) would later fulfill. For Whedon, this was more or less to satisfy his own sense of story, rather than what producers felt audiences wanted, and it worked: Whedon’s shows developed cult followings well into syndication. Abrams, Lieber and Lindelof similarly tease their audience, and go further by populating their own series with a web of characters, methodically revealing each character’s back-story in ways that inform their interactions with the other survivors on the island. The writers constantly repeat and add information, most of which took place before the characters ever boarded Oceanic flight 815. So initially, the audience doesn’t necessarily understand a character’s real motives as they witness their actions, and this guessing game is part of what is so engaging.

Another level of the indirect character revelation happens as a result of the way the writers structure individual shows. Each episode is basically one-to-two days on that island. Over the course of a season, there are 24 episodes; the first season covered just under two months’ time on the island (48 days, about two days per episode) and the second season covered just under a month (23 days). In most episodes, the main story is inter-cut with a side story, usually a particular character’s back-story. The back-stories and the main stories are paced both to interrupt and to inform each other, creating an internal tension that satisfies fans by keeping them unsatisfied.

This use of narrative lack goes on at many levels, particularly when it comes to the dangers that torment the survivors. It takes a month and a half on the island (meaning a year and a half on television) to see what is stomping through the jungle – Is it a dinosaur? A polar bear? A monster? When viewers finally got an answer, it raised even more questions – it was literally a thing that couldn’t be grasped: smoke. And other island dangers are just as puzzling. Why are there polar bears on this tropical island? How does one person’s “hallucination” become visible to others (like Sawyer seeing Kate’s horse)? What happened to Rose’s cancer? How was Locke able to walk after the crash? Where the hell is Danielle? Who operates the Dharma Initiative, and what have they been doing on the island for decades? What about Hanso? What makes Walt so special? And just how did these people survive the crash in the first place?

And what’s up with those numbers?

The show succeeds, in part, through radical twists on classic story-telling – it goes to the root of what makes for solid narrative, and invents elements to adapt those means to a televised episodic format. Fans get it all: Frame stories. Pastiche. Stream-of-consciousness. Metanarratives stretching from the main stories to the back-stories and back again. An omniscient narrator in the back-stories who competes with a limited third-person narrator back on the island. The narrative time structure goes straight back to Homer, dropping the audience in medias res, into the action right after the plane crash. And most of all, conflicts. Conflicts exist within a character him or herself (Charlie, Eko, Ana-Lucia), between two characters (Locke and Charlie, Sawyer and Jack, Jin and Michael), and between a character and the group (Sawyer, Jin, Charlie). There are conflicts with nature (the polar bears), with the supernatural (the smoke monster), with technology (the hatch’s computer), existential conflicts (Locke exclaims in the first season that “each one of us was brought here for a reason,” whatever that reason may be), and finally intellectual conflicts (faith vs. science, the social contract vs. the state of nature, and the conditions of justice). Many of these questions are further alluded to by consistent name and literary references.

In short, this is one literary and literate television show.

But these literary qualities alone aren’t enough to sustain such an obsessive interest in the show. Arguably, this show wouldn’t have had the same appeal in the 1990s U.S. or earlier. Lost draws on a specific sense of 21st century isolation and distress; it taps into some very here-and-now concerns, and speaks to the audience’s deeper lizard-brain psyche as it weaves its sophisticated tales. The pilot begins with a close-up of Jack’s eye as it opens and the pupil contracts, drawing the audience in, and drawing our attention to the importance of perception; from the outset, scenes are framed through detailed, personal lenses. As Jack’s eye opens, the plane has just gone down, leaving a number of survivors stuck on an isolated island unable to communicate with the wider world. Something unseen on the island seems to be hunting them, and they don’t know when the next attack may come, in what way, or by whom. At first this “ghost fear” of an impending attack seems to come from something monstrous, then becomes more tangible with the arrival of the Others, characters a lot more pirate-ish than dinosaur-ish. By the second season, new threats emerged from within their own group, and the specter of an unknown disease requiring quarantine loomed in the background. These story elements, which continue to be written on a week-by-week basis, are phantom parallels to our real concerns since September 11, 2001. 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. These characters aren’t being threatened by otherworldly aliens or vampires, creatures normally only seen on the screen or in pulp fiction; this situation involves the psychodynamics of terrorism that the contemporary audience experiences in the everyday world and plays it out on television 24 times a year. As such, Lost performs a very necessary function: It gives a narrative (and a safely-distant context) to a real-felt sense of trauma. By giving these abstract ideas a tangible narrative with a beginning and ending each week, that sense of terror is contained by the show, and thus becomes something that might actually be manageable.

Arguably, the reason Lost “works,” the reason it developed such an obsessive now-global audience searching for clues everywhere they can find them (including outside of the show itself), the reason it is able to sustain its hazy and demanding storyline is because the show is framed on these specific psychodynamics. Viewers are already experiencing this tension en masse (almost no matter where they live). In North America, most haven’t yet had the space to develop the language needed to understand those psychodynamics, but Lost arguably helps the audience to do just that.

This book considers how the show tells its story, and how those unique methods help make the show work so well. The first section introduces a number of concepts that the narrative returns to on a regular basis; it also examines how the writers develop each concept in relation to other concepts as a way of mapping out the narrative structure. The second section builds on the first section, discussing how the overall narrative of the show abstracts and co-opts our very real concerns over the War on Terror(ism), and looks at how Lost became a repository for the sense of distress that has been generated, rightly or wrongly, through our media, government, and the collective cultural response to such voices. The last section is an appendix covering the major characters; each entry gets into what drives each character, and develops some larger points on how that character works into the overall narrative, and is meant to be as much reference as analysis.

If you’re already caught in Lost’s web, this book can function as a kind of manual, with in-depth discussions of the characters, examinations of the themes the narrative returns to, and an explanation of the show’s larger meaning. It will hopefully broaden your understanding of the mythology of the show and the way the narrative functions, and may just be a handy reference to grab when you want to find some quick information on a point you already understood (or at least thought you understood). If you’re a casual viewer who isn’t yet sure what has made Lost’s narrative such a phenomenon, or wants to get a better grip on the story so far, this book should help you get up to speed and on what’s going on in the narrative. Ideas herein are not intended to be any sort of final analysis, but rather to identify entry points into more areas of this increasingly complex narrative. Few primetime television shows have received so much theorizing by their audience (and most of this theorizing has already proven inaccurate, which speaks to the show’s power to engage the viewers’ imagination).

From the outset, though, here’s what won’t be seriously entertained or proved:

The survivors are dead and in hell or Purgatory;
They’re caught in some space-time warp;
Their fates are being controlled by aliens, demons, god, or mad scientists;
They’re the unwitting participants in some big Truman Show rip off;
They’re all part of someone’s dream;
They are the subjects of some conniving government test;
Finally, that this is all a patchwork of Michael Crichton and Stephen King stories.

There are scads of websites and forums dedicated to disclosing the inner secrets of Lost like it’s The Bible Code. One site, Lostpedia, utilizes the open source MediaWiki software developed for Wikipedia, and is invaluable as a repository of information from the various websites, forums and other media concerning the show. Lostpedia is a great resource for anyone who really wants to dive into Lost. There are also podcasts debating these issues for your MP3 listening pleasure, including an official one from the creators of the show where they continually drop bait for their rabid fans.

And the creative team openly admits that is what they are doing – dropping bait. They know their audience (demographics are a wonderful thing). They have recognized the fans’ obsession, and are incorporating it into the framework of the story. They may in fact be changing previously-laid plans in order to maintain engagement and suspense. The hardcore jacked-in fan base is privy to revelations and distractions that at once acknowledge their chatter and interest, and use their willingness to follow certain lines of thought to distraction; it keeps them in the hunt, but not necessarily on the right trail.

Of course finding the answer isn’t the point, it’s the process of searching – Lost wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if we were given quick and easy answers as to what’s going on; it’s the supense that keeps our eyeballs pinned to the screen. One such example is “the Hurley bird.” At the end of season one, Hurley, Jack, Kate and Locke were heading to the inland slave ship, the Black Rock, when a large bird swoops by them. Later, in the January 9, 2006 official podcast of the show, writers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse were asked why there were no birds on the show, and they mentioned one bird on the island that they’d dubbed “the Hurley bird” because its call reminded them of Hurley’s name. In the second season finale, the bird appears again, squawks twice, and Hurley asks, “Did that bird just say my name?” The writers and producers were paying attention to the audience contingent digging for gold through all the paraphernalia surrounding the show, and in this case threw them a bone. A similar distraction concerns the theory that the Lostaways are in purgatory. Despite the writers firmly denying the purgatory theory, in the summer of 2006 Hyperion actually published Bad Twin, the manuscript of a writer named Gary Troup who supposedly died in the crash of flight 815 (and whose name is an anagram for “purgatory”); Sawyer found a copy of the manuscript on the beach and was reading it until Jack tossed it in the fire. Hyperion published this fictional-space manuscript in the real world. The audience has become a thread in the fabric of the show, and as we know from the second season, part of the Dharma Initiative’s mythology entails psychological tests and games. Through such distractions and clues in both the fictional space of the show, cyberspace and real space, the audience itself becomes part of that mythological fabric, essentially participating in the story similar to the way the characters do.

Am I saying there is no key to unlocking the mysteries of the island? No. Am I saying there is some key? Uh-uh. I am saying that to focus on solving Lost’s puzzles is partly to miss the point of what makes the show so effective and enjoyable, like Samuel Beckett’s Godot or Stanley Kubrick’s black monolith. The entire enterprise becomes a kind of Rorschach test, reflecting what’s already going on in the mind of the viewer, both culturally and historically; that’s what makes it all so interesting, and that’s what the following pages are about to get lost exploring.

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