ABC’s TV series Lost, whose fourth season premieres
tonight, has multileveled mysteries and a cruelly withholding
storytelling style that inspires passionate love and passionate
frustration.
The love comes from the show’s fascinating and compelling
adventure-intrigue-SF storytelling. The scenario: plane crashes on
an uncharted island. Some passengers, most with a fair amount of
dark intrigue in their past, survive and try to forge a workable
civilization — and to escape. Previous inhabitants of the Island
bedevil them. Everything ensues.
The frustration comes from the fact that halfway through the
show’s entire six-season arc, the viewer can be certain of very
little — neither what lies ahead nor precisely what’s already
happened — and certainly not the meaning of what’s
happened.
The search for meaning bedevils characters and viewers. No
element of the show is as suggestive and aggravating as its heavy
reliance on political philosopher references.
The show stars a John Locke, which initially just seemed a
curiosity. But as the show progressed, we were introduced to a
Danielle Rousseau, a Desmond David Hume, a Mikhail Bakunin, a
Richard Alpert, and even an Edmund Burke.
But what does any of this mean?
IN THE CASE of Locke, obvious references and ironies
abound. Like the philosopher, he stands for political and personal
liberty within a civic context.
Locke “leads” generally through service to the commonwealth —
yet sometimes acts imperiously and dangerously, pursuing a personal
vision of what is best for them all, in a disturbingly Filmerian manner.
He claims to be an empiricist — a real “meat and potatoes” guy
— but comes to a seemingly mystical belief in the island’s power.
Complicating his role as the “man of faith” in the island is that
his mysticism is based in his experience of healing from
the island, and his personal encounter with the smoke
monster — so character and philosopher might be able to get along
as fellow empiricists.
Most significantly Lockean is island John Locke’s mantra: “Don’t
tell me what I can’t do,” the cry of the man who despises
paternalism and unjust government. (In what is probably more an
in-joke, Locke’s evil father is “Anthony Cooper,” after philosopher
Locke’s mentor, the first Earl of Shaftesbury.)
Lost fans love clues, and if Locke’s name is one, it
likely suggests that what Locke thinks he has empirical evidence
for, he probably does.
DANIELLE ROUSSEAU’S link with her philosopher is obvious: she is
the lone savage on the island, separated — by choice — from the
human societies available to her. Her primary skills are sheer
survival and the trapping and killing of animals and other
humans.
Her personality is more stunted and weird than the apotheosis of
human capabilities and sensibilities her namesake seems to promise
from the “noble savage.” Her being “Rousseau” is both obvious and
ironic. If it’s a clue, the viewer can wonder whether Danielle had
her child taken from her, as she claims, or abandoned it, as the
philosopher did with his five children.
The philosopher Mikhail Bakunin believed in a socialist
anarchism, freely-organized worker federations controlling the
social order. Lost’s Mikhail Bakunin has an uncanny
ability to survive fatal injuries, and is a brutal enforcer for his
boss Ben (the sinister leader of the “Others”).
If the name is anything more than the creators having fun, the
clue may be that, as with Bakunin’s rivalry with Karl Marx over
taking over the existing state, the show’s Bakunin might have a
serious difference of opinion as to how their community should run
with his “master” Ben.
The real Richard Alpert, former Harvard partner to Timothy
Leary, represents using modern science to achieve religious
transcendence, and later, renaming himself Baba Ram Dass, going
straight for the religious transcendence.
The character Alpert is seemingly ageless. If his name is
meaningful, it could relate to the apparently religious mission of
his group — the “Others” — compared to the almost parodically
scientistic pre-crash Dharma Initiative that they seem to have
superseded.
ALL SUCH SPECULATION is hazardous, however, since Lost
almost asks not to be trusted. It loves season openings and closers
deliberately designed to confuse the viewer as to what he’s seeing,
where and when.
Lost’s constant use of the number “23” indicates a love
for the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson. The philosophical science
fiction novelist celebrated “guerrilla ontology” — wild techniques
to make people question the nature of the reality they are
perceiving.
Despite all the political philosopher namedrops, Lost
doesn’t show much of a functioning society, and definitive answers,
both narrative and philosophical, continue to slip away.
Ultimately, the show sells classic sociopolitical anxiety: the
world is mysterious and strange, with inexplicable forces that
might save your soul or might kill you, and you’ll never know why;
scientific planners and religious fanatics alike have complicated
plans in which they use humans as pawns; the wealthy and powerful
pursue secret agendas that may either save or destroy us.
By naming characters after philosophers, Lost reminds
us that the conflicts of ideology, power, and social relationship
are timeless, perhaps “eternally recurring” — like character
Desmond Hume’s re-cycling through his own life, like the seeming
series of “powers” rising and falling on the island (from the
creators of the 4-toed statue to the Black Rock crew to
the “Hostiles” to Dharma to the “Others” to…?).
With its echoes of everything from Homer’s The Odyssey
to O’Brien’s Third Policeman, Lost’s intricate
webs of meaning and suggestion make it not only an exciting example
of post-modern referential bricolage, but also the most significant
pop adventure tale of our time.
Even in a “state of nature” on the island, its flashback-strewn
storytelling reminds us that none of us have a Lockean “blank
slate.” Our past choices, failures, sins and obsessions will always
shadow and influence our present. Built the heart of the viewer’s
relation to the show’s mysteries is a faith that its writers, our
“leaders” — the gods of the fictional universe we are watching —
are careful, caring, omniscient and omnipotent, that not a plot
thread or mysterious reference is dangled that they won’t ravel
together with care.
We may be saps to believe it — but Lost fans know that
attitude makes experiencing the show more delicious.
