LOST IN TRANSCENDENCE

Where will viewers be left once they reach the center of the teleliterary labyrinth that is LOST?

Back in this comments-thread Charles Reece said, "I don't see how anything but a determinist outcome would be more than a cheat for the show," and went on to aver in this essay that he hoped that the producers were not setting viewers up for "some simplistic Manichaean battle" between godlike manipulators Jacob and "Nemesis."

I would agree to some extent that a "Manichean" good-vs.-evil conclusion would not be in tune with previous themes expressed on the TV show, and I also agree that I don't think it's likely that the producers will go in that direction. I don't agree that such a conflict is inherently "simplistic," though: just that such a conflict is not suited for the *mythos* to which LOST belongs, as it is for, say, C.S. Lewis' NARNIA series.

Of the four Fryean *mythoi*, LOST is in essence a drama with elements of irony, comedy, and adventure, just as in this essay I described BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER as an adventure-serial with aspects of the other three mythoi mixed in. This judgment as to LOST's narrative mythos-category means that its myth-radical is the *pathos,* which emphasizes all forms of suffering, whether they take the form (to use two of Aristotle's examples for tragedy) of the outright tragic death of OEDIPUS REX, or that of an intense suffering that is overcome through some reversal, as seen in the conclusion of IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAUREANS.

This mythos-categorization means, at the very least, that a drama can go either way in the spectrum of happy or unhappy endings for the dramatis personae, though in Western culture there is a marked critical preference for the "unhappy ending," which many feel to be more realistic and "bracing." Drama's opposite number, the comedy, is associated more strongly with the happy ending, though one can certainly find any number of comedies that end unhappily for this or that protagonist, albeit in a humorous way that takes away much of the sting one gets from the "unhappy drama." In contrast, irony almost always emphasizes an unhappy ending (even if the principal characters are vaguely content with their lot, as at the end of CANDIDE), while adventure-stories almost always end happily for their protagonists.

Further, as if to highlight the ambivalence of their chosen narrative mythos, the producers of LOST have situated their drama to be a mammoth debate about the function of "free will" vs. "determinism." As seen in the quote above, Reece feels that "anything but a determinist outcome would be more than a cheat for the show," which is a valid emotional response to the way in which the producers would seem to have tipped the scales more in one direction than the other.

I have a notion, however, that the LOST-men have a more subtle goal in mind than the mere validation of determinism, and that this goal will be fulfilled in presenting, if not a "happy ending" as such, a sort of "happy medium" between the two extremes.

More on these speculations anon.

LOST UP A TREE

So why at the beginning of LAX PART 1 does Kate Austen (who was on the ground with everyone else at the end of Season 5) materialize in the branches of a tree near the Swan site?

The most functional reason was that her initial sense of dislocation and her danger of falling are much more engaging to viewers than simply seeing her wake up on the ground.

Another possibility is that the producers wanted to remind everyone of Kate's affinity for climbing things (trees, cages, bad boys), because it's going to be important to some story in future.

But maybe they also had in mind an earlier film's use of similar dislocation-- a film which just happened to be made by the company that now owns ABC.





Think about it.

DUMBO copyright Disney of course.

AS YOU LIKE THINGS

Why do some members of an audience like a thing, while others do not?

In pre-industrial times, it was assumed that great literary works contained a certain virtue. People who were either born attuned to that virtue or worked to become so attuned were people who had "good taste." Aristotle, father of literary criticism, opined that a "complex" play was inherently superior to a "simple" play, but the main difference was structural: the former had two storytelling features that the latter did not: peripeteia or reversal, and anagnorisis, or recognition. Aristotle's argument for preferring one type of play to another on the basis of plot-content gave way in many post-industrial societies to criteria based on superior style. And yet,even those in the highbrow cadres could have severe differences over what sort of style should be followed by superior artists, as seen in this essay by James Miller, in which he contrasts the approaches of George Orwell and Theodor Adorno:

...when it came to assessing the need for clear language in social criticism, they parted ways dramatically. In "Politics and the English Language," Orwell asserts that to write and think "clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration." In his 1956 essay "Punctuation Marks," Adorno asserts, just as boldly, that "lucidity, objectivity, and concise precision" are merely "ideologies" that have been "invented" by "editors and then writers" for "their own accommodation."

Mr. Miller cites a number of biographical reasons as to why the two writers might have had such disparate responses to style, and I don't dismiss those reasons, especially in relation to the picture given of Adorno:

Although Southern California in the 1940s was teeming with illustrious European exiles, including Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Igor Stravinsky, Adorno disappeared into his writing and research, repelled by the vainglory and vulgarity of the people he was expected to get along with amiably, in the American style. Outside the émigré community, Adorno's painstakingly acquired storehouse of knowledge--about modern opera, German philosophy, and the evils of the cash nexus and the commodity form--impressed no one.

However, while my personal tastes are closer to Orwell's party than to Adorno's, I would note that I don't think purely biographical factors, particularly regarding events that occured late in an author's life, could ever be determining factors in one's tastes. I have no interest in exploring the childhoods of either author, but I feel sure that it is there that one would see in both future authors the incipiency of their later tastes: Orwell's for plain talk and Adorno's for hermeticism. Had they both been born in the backwoods of Tennessee I think it feasible that these authors' disparate tastes would have manifested in some fashion, however much environment would have altered the expression of those tastes.

For all the supposed breakthroughs of cognitive science and its fellow travelers, the reasons why one person likes a thing and another does not remain as mysterious as when Socrates discoursed on the passions of the "soul" in the PHILEBUS.

With respect to comics-criticism, of course, this comes into play with the notorious (in my view) concept of the Pedagogical Paradigm. Bloody comic book elitists, unable to analyze taste as a complex matter, generally resort to this paradigm when faced with comics-fans who do not like what they like. They assume that a genre-fan (not necessarily a superhero fan only, though typical invective is always careful to apply this label) must be clinging to what he liked as a child out of either simple nostalgia or, in the Adornite mold, subservience to a conservative ideology.

In fairness I will note that the populist defense of popular genres is no more well-informed regarding the motivations of the elitists, as the populist usually assumes that the elitist doesn't really like what he likes for its own sake, but for whatever perceived status those tastes may seem to confer on the elitist.

In both cases these accusations, whatever partial truths they may incarnate, should not be used as a substitute for understanding the root-causes of disparate taste, which for me come down to differing perceptions of resonance and concomitant dynamization.

In his book THE FANTASY PRINCIPLE Michael Vannoy Adams argues that Jung's analysis of dream-images was superior to that of Freud and Klein because Jung avoided the "referential fallacy" of assuming that a dream automatically signifies something other than itself. This would be a desireable hermeneutic for budding pluralists to follow: that there exists no formula of "standards" (Gary Groth) or its populist parallels (Gene Shallit, perhaps) that signifies one's possession of "good taste" of any kind.

One likes what one likes. The reasons why are no more separable from one's embodied life than Yeats' dancer is separable from his dance.

FANTASY IN THE RAW

"Whereas directed thinking is an altogether conscious phenomenon, the same cannot be said of fantasy-thinking. Much of it belongs to the conscious sphere, but at least as much goes on in the half-shadow, or entirely in the unconscious, and can therefore be inferred only indirectly. Through fantasy-thinking, directed thinking is brought into contact with the oldest layers of the human mind, long buried beneath the threshold of consciousness."-- Carl Jung, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION,p. 29

"[the Frankfurt School scholars] poo-pooed the type of industries that make some stuff that's related to things you like."-- Charles Reece's take on my objections to the Frankfurt School, seen in more detail in this comments-section.

Though I debated Charles' statement in the comments-section to some extent, I want to draw particular attention here to his incorrect statement that the Frankfurters were objecting only to the "industries" that made and still make popular fiction, which organizations were subsumed by Mssrs. Adorno and Horkheimer into one satanic majesty designated as "the culture industry." The elitist Frankfurters were opposed not just to the culture industry but to popular culture as such, by invoking the fallacy that it was all controlled "from above" and thus in no way represented the true culture of the people.

From THE DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTMENT:

"Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts."

I've devoted no small effort to demonstrating the untruth of this statement: of showing how some popular works are indeed purely functional and represent little more than an assemblage of cliches, while others are clearly "superfunctional" in terms of not only how they function under the critic's microscope but in their public reception. That Adorno and Horkeimer could actually believe that the "cliches" could be "slotted in anywhere" speaks to their inability to grapple with the question as to why one popular work, be it song or soap opera, should be more popular than another one.

I think part of the reason is that these Frankfurters had no real idea of the creative process: they simply worshipped a concept of "art" that was so wonderfully hermetic that it could be easily divorced from the sort of "cliches" that pleased the hoi polloi. I'd be surprised if either Adorno or Horkeimer, steeped in their doctrinaire Marxism, showed any cognizance of the human faculty that Jung calls "fantasy-thinking:" the faculty which accounts for the capacity of both storytellers and their audiences to enjoy stories for their own sake, apart from their status as "art"-- even though, in the inclusive sense of the word, Donald Duck is ever bit as much "art" as Adorno's beloved Kafka.

It's significant that Jung, who was not a literary critic but who probably shared much the same highbrow education of the Frankfurters, was able to "step outside the box" of High Culture to such good effect. Jung wrote very little on popular culture but his intuitions about how creativity takes place, whether in high art or low, have stood the test of time through the explorations of lit-critics like Leslie Fiedler and Raymond Durgnat. In contrast, Marxist critics today, appropriately enough, are the ones who are ceaselessly repeating a "rigidly invariable" form of criticism.

I'll have more to say in a future post about the silliness of the "things you like" part of Charles Reece's rhetoric.

MY SECOND LIST O'LOST QUESTIONS

Starting with new numbering:

1) Sayid, convinced by Ben that Widmore is responsible for Nadia's death, kills several people at Ben's behest. Then one day Ben just says thanks for playing, I don't need you any more. Sayid, instead of using his "mad ninja skills" to personally go after Widmore without Ben's help, just gets very glum without a boss to tell him who to kill. Then he gives up on the revenge thing and goes off to build houses in the Third World. Some time after the death of "Jeremy Bentham" Ben again approaches Sayid, offering him the chance to kill kill kill. Sayid wants nothing to do with Ben, but whereas Locke's invitation to return to the island and save the island-bound garnered only indifference from Mr. Jarah, Ben's revelation that Hurley's being watched by a Widmore-agent is enough to motivate Sayid to pick up his gun once more. I really didn't think Sayid and Hurley had much to do with one another back on the Island, so I don't see Sayid having some great protective instinct toward Hurley. Is the real reason he accepts the Mission to Help Hurley because Sayid really wants to be set back on the path of fighting Widmore, even though he won't accept Ben's help any more?


2) We know that Sayid felt pissed when Ben gave him the big kiss-off, but is that the only reason he has such a massive distrust for Ben later? In the dock-scene Sayid warns Ben that if Ben approaches him again things will become "extremely unpleasant," i.e., Sayid's ready to kill Ben dead as a Tex Avery roach. That seems a more extreme emotion than he showed when Ben just gave him the air. Did Sayid find out something new about Ben's manipulations? Does he subconsiously suspect that Ben might actually be the one behind the killing of Nadia, but he won't quite let himself consider the possibility that he was so completely fooled?

3) Did Ben have anything to do with the killing of Nadia? It seems unlikely, since in between his turning the donkey wheel and his popping up in Tunisia, the events relating to Nadia's death have already transpired. Mastermind though Ben is, it's hard to see him pulling strings during his ten-month trip to temporal limbo. I suppose that either he or Widmore might have set up the killing long in advance due to foreknowledge given them by time-travel, though Ben doesn't act like he has THAT much foreknowledge. Widmore still seems the more likely candidate, though both of them share the motivation of wanting Sayid back on the Island.

4)Why is Widmore such a pussy during Season 5?

I mean, Widmore in Season 4 is fricking Lex Luthor. He calls together three top specialists to deal with the Island's freakazoid propensities (granted, maybe he calls them together because his past self KNOWS that he WILL call them together). He outfits a freighter with a helicopter and a shitload of C4, plus a shitload of deadly mercenaries. And though the Island's crazy-making radiations seem to keep the freighter's people off in some cases, Widmore's people do end up capturing Ben, killing Alex and doing other dastardly stuff.

But in Season 5, Widmore, knowing that Desmond's brought his daughter back to America, can't do shit to intercept Ben from trying to kill her: Penny's saved only because Ben muffs killing Desmond, who then beats Ben to a pulp before collapsing. Ben also kills Abaddon with complete impunity once Abaddon's helped Locke make his first attempts at O6 enlistement. Maybe it would've been a good idea to send at least TWO men with Locke, Charles W? One would think he could afford another whole squad of mercenaries to keep Locke safe-- though again, maybe Widmore "knows" that Locke's destined to die and (sort of) return to the Island. However, there's no textual support for THAT foreknowledge.

5) What's Miles' role in all this? Faraday performs lots of calculations that help the freighter mission, and he and Charlotte together neutralize the poison-gas weapon so that Ben can't use it as he used it on the Dharmas. But the only reason Naomi gives for Miles being enlisted is that they want Miles to be able to talk to dead bodies on the Island. Once there Miles does this a few times on his own recognizance, but he never explicitly does so looking for particular info that he's been assigned to ferret out. Since dead people aren't much of a resource for helping Widmore's people locate Ben, was there ever a mission-justification for Miles to be on the Island, or is he going to perform a more crucial action in Season 6, one that Widmore knows or suspects he must be there to perform?

It's also interesting that on one occasion Miles does seem to be able to partially read the mind of a living person, as when he declares that "Kevin Johnson" is not Michael's real name. This may have been nothing more than a cutesy throwaway, though. At the very least Miles seems to have far more ability to read dead people.

That's enough for now.

MAKING A MEAL OUT OF MELIORISM

I'm not the first to wonder to bring up "meliorism" in connnection with LOST, that would be Houston Chronicle blogger Therese Odell. I don't recall the specific essay where she brought it up, but will try to find it later.

Here's the handy Wiki definition of meliorism:

"Meliorism is an idea in metaphysical thinking holding that progress is a real concept leading to an improvement of the world. It holds that humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one."

Now, here's the closest Jacob comes in Season 5's THE INCIDENT to making a philosophical statement in conversation with "Esau:"

Esau: “...They come, fight, they destroy, they corrupt. It always ends the same.”
Jacob: “It only ends once. Anything that happens before that…just progress.”

Meliorism would seem something of an alternative to determinism, although of course one has no way of knowing what WOULD have occured if humans had not taken action.

MY FIRST LIST O' LOST QUESTIONS

Season 6's first episode of LOST is less than a week away. I'm expecting to be blown away by some revelations as well as to be frustrated by shortcuts and cop-outs. This state of affairs should make LOST the ideal TV show of all time, incorporating the best and worst aspects of series TV.

I even thought of starting another blog just to take care of LOST questions-- and perhaps reach out to a LOST-specific fandom. But I decided that it was easier to post them here: at this late date, most of the LOST-blogs already have their following.

SPOILERS for everything, of course.

1. Will the writers EVER explain why pregnant women began dying if they conceived on the Island? It doesn't seem like an edict from Jacob that they should die, for it's implicitly a peril Sun faces as well from having conceived there (though she escapes before the hammer comes down). For similar reasons it seems unlikely to be a direct consequence of Jughead's presence: radiation underneath Dharmaville wouldn't affect Sun over on the beach-- although maybe one could blame some freaky interaction of nucelar radiation and the magnetism beneath the Island. The dual explanations seem at war with one another, like the dual explanations Bram Stoker gives for vampirism in DRACULA.

2. In season 3 Richard isn't the least bit concerned about the mortality of pregnant Other women, and seems to think all of Ben's tests are a waste of time. He intimates that he expects John Locke to do something different, but what? And will Richard's plans for Locke ever be resurrected now that Locke appears to be Really Quite Sincerely Dead?

3. Faraday states in Season 5 that people can change time because they are the "variables" in the mathematic equation. This would seem to be a development from his Season 4 observation that Desmond was "special" and somehow not subject to the rules of space and time. So far that "specialness" has eventuated mainly in Desmond being able to "talk to himself" across space-time, but he hasn't actually changed the past, to the audience's knowledge, and his changes to the future were minor, in that he prevented some Charlie-deaths but not The Big One.

4. Does Charlie's vision of Aaron as some sort of Holy Child mean anything? Aaron, like Sun's kid, was pretty much sidelined in Season 5, and in contrast to Walt, Aaron was played as Ordinary Kid. Did the whole schtick about the importance of his not being raised by someone other than Claire mean anything in the larger scheme, or is it one of those things that will get "LOST" in the shuffle?

More later.