Monday, May 24, 2010

Summing up "Lost"

I'm not a Lost fan, but my wife is, so I asked her "What happened?" and she told me. I just listened with the emotion of a court stenographer, not even pretending to care about the idiotic characters left. (I'll never understand killing off Michelle Rodriguez so early. Why not give the axe to some unmemorable blonde? That was when I completely lost interest, but I digress....) I had a two followup questions for her, first off, what happened to Hurley? She told me that Hurley became the keeper of the island, or whatever. So... neat.

My second followup question was "What was the point?" I don't think she knew what the point was, except that she told me that everyone ends up in a church at the end--whether they had died or not--and they have a big group discussion to try to figure it all out. To me, that's almost perfect. For the perfect way to sum up the series, we must go to the Solomon of our times, the Great Jack Handey of "Deep Thoughts" fame:

I think a good novel would be where a bunch of men on a ship are looking for a whale. They look and look, but you know what? They never find him. And you know why they never find him? It doesn't say. The book leaves it up to you, the reader, to decide. Then, at the very end, there's a page you can lick and it tastes like Kool-Aid. (Source)

"There's a page you can lick and it tastes like Kool-Aid." That's what Lost means to me. If you disagree, then great! It's wonderful that we can all have our own points of view and the world is beautiful. Or ugly, whatever you're into.

It's really easy to start a story and really hard to end it. So my hat is off to the Lost creators: they made a lot of money selling advertising and aborted the thing before it got any sillier.



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10 comments:

  1. Rumor at the time was that Michelle Rodriguez got thrown off the show because of her DUI.

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  2. Michelle Rodriguez's character was offed so Sawyer could screw different women. The thing was just a soap opera and so many people simply failed to notice that fact.

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  3. I'm astounded by the straight-faced kudos offered to this soap opera. OK--the script was half decent and the characters were interesting, but comparing it to Tolkien? The biggest irony about that is that most serious Tolkien readers know that he *loathed* the use of "magic" in mythopoeic stories, therefore he limited any use of "magic" in his tales. He saw it as a "cheat", an uncreative, lazy way to get from one place to another. But this was stock-in-trade for LOST--a pillar of smoke killing the African dude, a bunch of people disappearing from the plane, the time travel, the whole island disappearing, etc. All this paranormal phenomena is unexplained, and therefore qualifies as magic.

    If you want to say the show was as good as, say, the A-TEAM, I'll buy that. It had vivid characters, too.

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  4. the magic stuff is my problem with harry potter. it seems like a "cheat"

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  5. Tolkien would almost undoubtedly detest the Harry Potter books--he famously disliked the Narnia books, but didn't go into much detail because Lewis was such a great friend. Rowling admits that the Narnia series was a definite inspiration for her writing.

    The magic exercised in Harry Potter is done so within a community wherein everyone possesses the same gifts and rules abound to govern the use thereof. The children even have to learn how to adhere to an ancient code to make the magic work. The lack of any rules or reasons for the paranormal phenomena in LOST is what has triggered my disgust with the show as being something to take seriously as "literature" and to attempt to draw some deeper meaning from.

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  6. "The magic exercised in Harry Potter is done so within a community wherein everyone possesses the same gifts and rules abound to govern the use thereof"

    I never got far enough in the books to really figure that out. I could never discern any "rules", esp. since Harry seemed to perform magic without meaning to, IIRC

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  7. PS I didn't like Narnia either, even as a kid. I must be too left brained

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  8. Yeah, it seems like you didn't read too far. Later on in the series (book 6 maybe), you find out that the bad guy, Voldemort, also used his magical gifts before he knew any of the rules, yet he used it to terrorize kids at the orphanage where he grew up. Harry used it to defend himself from bullies and Voldemort used it to bully people.

    I just put up a new LOST post. The HotAir article is a must-read.

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  9. Being "too left-brained" might cause you to miss out on some things artistic. OTOH, it may protect you from garbage posing as art. Where television is concerned, I'd put my chips on the second possibility.

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  10. I made some of my own observations here on my blog http://literaryfalcon.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/lost-for-those-who-were-not-so-lost/

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