NEXT TO LAST LOST POSTS?, PART 1

I anticipate the possibility of doing a wrap-up LOST post once I've seen whatever add-ons appear on the DVD of the sixth season. After that, the only future in LOST blog-commentary would consist of a LOST re-watch to re-examine whatever substance there might be for my earlier speculation that LOST might be one of the few television serials to merit its entering the canon of High Art, alongside, say, film "thrillers" that have entered said canon, like Hitchcock and Chabrol. But such a rewatch is only a vague notion at present.

I don't expect much from whatever little add-ons appear on the DVD set, just as I got little from some of the conciliating comments recently uttered by Lindelof and Cuse (timed, it must be admitted, to help hype DVD sales). I did find it interesting that their stated motive for having put the castaways through the purgatory of Timeline B had to do with their desire to give their beloved characters a sort of second birth, the better to know them all over again from a different angle. (Hmm, sounds a lot like Chris Claremont's X-MEN!) This ties in with what I've termed LOST's "eternal recursiveness," in which dominant patterns in the characters' lives kept recrudescing over and over, not just to satisfy narrative demands (though that was certainly a consideration) but also to give the audience a sense of each character's essential nature. A well-thought-out purgatory sequence could have provided, if not a resolution, then at least a catharsis of self-knowledge as each character comes to grips with his or her essential nature. In every purgatory-fantasy I've ever seen, this is the whole point of characters being in purgatory in the first place.

Unfortunately, perhaps because LOST had an embarassment of richly-drawn characters, the show did not offer audiences an equal wealth of *peripeteias,* in which the characters all came to self-knowledge as a result of the parts they essayed in "Timeline B." That timeline was not a learning-experience but a last temptation of *maya,* or at least of the scriptwriter's version of Hindu/Buddhist illusion. Instead of individual self-knowledge, the characters attained a knowledge of their fatedness to be parts of a rare and special community, which might be extra-diegetically read as the fatedness of the actors and/or the audience to be a part of the LOST experience.

As I've said before, I don't have a problem with any form of wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the notion of being part of a special community doesn't offend me as such. But I do think that even in Hindu/Buddhist terms the illusions banished by the LOSTcharacters don't make a lot of sense, insofar as some seem very desireable (Hurley as a super-lucky guy) while others seem merely capricious (Sun and Jin not married and even more under the thumb of Sun's father than in reality). I tend to believe that the LOST scripters understood the narrative demands of the purgatory concept but that they chose to undermine those demands in order to protect their "hand," as poker players say. I don't feel, as some LOSTfans did, "betrayed" by such skullduggery, nor did I feel like I wasted six years of my life following a show that yielded a somewhat disappointing resolution. But I wish they'd taken a subtler route to hoax the audience, one that still played fair with the underpinnings of the purgatory-fantasy.

Of course, when you play fair, you take a chance that some audience-members will guess the secret. Some people guessed the "big reveal" of M. Night Shyamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE, and some did not. But Shyamalan still comes off better than the LOST scripters in this regard, because he used subtle storytelling to misdirect the audience rather than giving them "clues" that had no real application to the solution of the "mystery."

More on the LOST finale in Part 2.