For No Good Reason

Five Things to Love About LOST, Day One

Well, today I kick off a (hopefully) week-long series, Five Things to Love About LOST.

Before we start, let's get a few things straightened out:

First, there will likely be a few groups of people I refer to. "The Survivors" are a group of 40-odd characters who survived the crash of a commercial flight from Sydney to Los Angeles and are now awaiting rescue on an as-yet-unnamed island somewhere in the Pacific. I might also call them "The Castaways," because "The Survivors" is probably going to get boring. "The Natives" are a mysterious group of people who were already on the island and who the survivors understand to be malevolent kidnappers. On the show, they are called "The Others," which has obvious sociological implications. There are other characters that may come up, but I can explain them as they come up, and with one exception, they are only significant in their relationship to the survivors and the natives.

I'm warning you up front: every entry in this series will contain spoilers. If you aren't caught up with the show and plan on watching it eventually, skip this. Seriously. I don't want to ruin the fun. We're on the honor system here.

Today's topic: The Fact That We're Four Seasons In And Still Don't Really Know What The Show Is About.

Whenever I talk with someone who isn't familiar with the show, the first question they always ask is something along the lines of, "How long can a show about people stuck on an island be interesting?" That's a hard question to answer, because LOST stopped being about people stuck on an island and whether or not they are going to get rescued less than halfway through the first season.

The scene: The camp's resident hunter (the mysterious, miraculous John Locke) and his inept acolyte (island prettyboy Boone) are walking through the jungle, looking for a survivor who has been kidnapped by a native. Locke tosses Boone a flashlight. Boone fumbles the catch, and the flashlight hits the ground with a loud, metallic clang that changes the premise of the show.

The two freeze, look at one another incredulously for a moment ("What was that?" Boone asks. "Steel," Locke replies.) and then start sweeping away the dirt and vines on the ground to reveal a hatch door, sealed and locked from the inside, with no handle. For the rest of the season, the two secretly work to excavate the hatch, and after they find that it is immense and must lead to some kind of underground facility, they begin to try to open it. While the rest of the survivors are hiding from the natives, building rafts, and overcoming their deep-set guilt, shame, fears, and neuroses as each hang-up is conveniently personified in events happening around them, the question the audience really has is no longer, "Will they get off the island?" but rather, "What's in the hatch?"

Over the course of the next three seasons, the show evolves (organically!) from a weekly morality play dressed up as a psychological thriller about surviving against the unknown into a domestic drama into a military story into a Grecian-style epic about industrial espionage and quantum physics in the face of the gods.

By the time we learn that some of the survivors do, in fact, get off the island, and start seeing what their off-island lives are like, not only do we not even care that they got off, but we are beginning to realize that our main characters aren't even significant to the real story driving the plot. In fact, the showrunners have said that while they have always known how the series would begin and how the series would end, they've given themselves leeway in the route the story will take to get there. This flexibility comes naturally from your audience not realizing how irrelevant the characters they are most invested in actually are.

The fact that the writers waited until the start of the third season to introduce the real central character, and then waited another year before beginning to reveal the important role he plays in the "real story" of the show, speaks incredibly well of their patience and of their trust in the audience's attention span. I know that there are people who will say that they were making it up as they went along, but it's easy to see that the seeds for everything--I mean everything--that has developed during seasons two, three, and four were planted during season one.

And it all started with a dropped flashlight.

And Now, A Taste Of Things To Come.

Well, now that we’re more than a month into the summer, I figure it’s time to roll out an ambitious slate of topics for summertime posts.

I’ve set a(n arbitrary) goal of thirty posts for the summer, assuming that the summer ends with the beginning of October:

First up is the hard-hitting five-part series Five Things to Love About LOST. Like all great journalism, this series is going to contain spoilers—Upton Sinclair spoiled the meat industry, I’m just following in his footsteps. I swear, if this hastily-written, poorly-thought-out series of posts on a blog with a weekly readership that literally reaches into the ones and sometimes even beyond doesn’t win me a Pulitzer, I don’t know what will. (Sadly, ABC is considerably touchier about posting covert LOST clips on YouTube than they are about Sports Night, so I won’t be able to provide A/V aids.)

Next up is an idea that occurred to me as I was preparing to leave work this evening but that seems decent enough: a ten-part series re-visiting the movies that I most consistently list as my “top ten” and deciding if each one still deserves to be there or if it should be kicked to the curb, forced never to come ‘round here no more.

Also, starting this month, I’ll be introducing a new monthly series called Just As I Thought! Each month, I’ll be featuring a book, album, movie, or TV show that is exactly as bad as I thought it would be. (I wanted to kick this off with the latest movie from the director who inspired it, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, but I think I’ve missed my chance to catch it in theaters.)

Those of you who paid attention in pre-calc may be able to see that I’ve only accounted for eighteen of the thirty posts. Well, my count is retro-active, so those two other posts I did in June count (though this one does not). That brings us to twenty, leaving plenty of space for me to deliver all of the lightweight political and theological commentary you’ve long-since given up hope that I’d be producing. (In fact, in one of those rare instances in which I don’t have to inject my faith into a political story, I’ll be back within 24 hours with my thoughts on Mr. Obama's terrible idea.)

I’d also like to commit one of those posts to the first draft of a new short story in order to get feedback, but I don’t know if I have the discipline necessary to get a draft out in the middle of what promises to be a busy couple months. Until next time, vote Edwards/Huckabee in 2008!

In Defense of Plot

Last weekend, I had a conversation with someone about Flannery O'Connor. I said that I had read A Good Man is Hard to Find a couple years ago, and while I appreciated her insight in a general way, I didn't find her way with words particularly stirring.

The person I was talking to seemed disappointed, and the conversation moved on. However, the conversation was enough for me to bump Everything That Rises Must Converge to the top of my "To Read Next" stack.

I'm blown away.

It took one sentence on the second page of the first story--"He decided it was less comical than jaunty and pathetic."--for me to realize that I had had no idea what I was talking about. Who could possibly have thought to rub "jaunty" and "pathetic" against one another like that? I've spent the last few years worshiping at the altar of Amy Hempel.  It's hard not to marvel at the subtle, delicate flavor of her sentences, which comes from so many words, clauses, and thoughts being patiently boiled off like excess sherry.  A sentence by Amy Hempel leaves you with the essence of each thought on your palate, wanting more but having more than enough to know what a great meal you're having. However, "less comical than jaunty and pathetic" is a marriage of words that I would never have expected--a truly surprising moment of language that, in context, feels inevitable.  What other pair or trio of words could possibly evoke what the active words in that sentence evoke? 

I don't know exactly where or when it happened, but somewhere over the last few years I came to believe that good short fiction with elegant, powerful language and true depth of insight did not deal with plot.  I felt that in the 21st century, short fiction had moved beyond plot.  Maybe it was Amy Hempel and Jane Avrich's statements that they start with voice (and Hempel's confession that plot is the least element she thinks about).  Certainly Gary Lutz's declaration that film was the perfect story-telling medium and so short stories should now be about psychology and syntax contributed to the prejudice. Plot was now the stuff of low-brow short fiction. If you wanted a gripping plot, read a novel or go to a movie. (Because he is a satirist, George Saunders was allowed to use plot in his short stories and still be taken seriously. But no one else. Just him.) And, to be honest, some of the contemporary short stories I had been reading lately reinforced that opinion--they were plot-driven and bad.   

O'Connor, though, has washed away my ability to hold that prejudice. Her stories are rich, full-bodied, and intricately textured.  True, they were written some seventy years ago, in the same half-century that yielded the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but reading these pieces, it's impossible for me to delude myself into considering the possibility that short fiction has lost its claim to plot as a central story-telling element.  In true O'Connor fashion, it was a prejudice I wasn't even fully conscious of possessing.  

It's been said that when we read something that excites us, it doesn't feel like we are being moved with a new idea or insight so much as it feels like an idea or insight we never realized was in us was being dislodged and brought into sight.  O'Connor's collection, though, does something entirely different: it dislodges and drags into sight the things in us we had hoped to keep safely locked up and hidden. Petty bitterness, hypocrisy, dehumanizing prejudice, deluded superiority--this is a fearless collection of fiction. Fitzgerald may have lamented what he saw the generation around him doing, but O'Connor lamented what the people around her were on a fundamental level.  And not just the people around her, but herself, as well.

It has to be debilitating to look not only at the inner failings of those around you but of yourself as unflinchingly as these stories indicate O'Connor had.  To be able to accept that we are all that vile, that wretched--more wretched than we could ever admit or imagine--you would need some kind of external assurance that you were more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope.

I wonder where O'Connor got that affirmation from?

Bloodless

No, this isn't a blog about that "Twilight" movie.  Rather, it's a post about the fact that everything I've written for the past month or so feels bloodless and inelegant.  I have a week to finish my projects at my current job, because I start a new one a week from today, and I'm going into it with dull, blunt, clumsy writing.  

If anyone is wondering what to get me for my birthday, a more disciplined and consistent relationship to my talent would be a fantastic gift idea.

Stacked

I have a big stack of books that I "want to read next." Typically, I never get around to reading anything from this stack--maybe it's because the stack seems like an assignment and high school and college got me in the habit of always forsaking my assigned work for the benefit of extra-curricular work. Instead of reading the books that are piled up next to my bed, I often find myself re-reading Tumble Home or taking up my roommate's advice when he urges me to read whatever the latest quirky book about words he read is.

However, as I was heading to bed tonight, I realized that I'm more excited about my stack right now than I have been in a long time.

As well as Bauckham's academic apologetic tome (which I've been swearing I will return for six months now) and a classic theological hardcover by John Stott, I'll also soon be reading a "classic of modern Jewish theology." I should be polishing off collections of short fiction by Fitzgerald, Julian Barnes, and Miranda July soon, plus a new translation of the complete fictions of Borges. Round that out with a roommate-recommended novel and some surely-eloquent letters and speeches by our most articulate president (those were the days, right?), and it's finally becoming clear to my inner slacker that my stack is not an assignment, it's a wish list. And I get to read it. How awesome is that?

First, There Was Darkness...

About a month ago, I spent Friday and Saturday on the couch watching seven or eight movies. (It's not as sad as it sounds--I was sick.) The highlight of the weekend was getting to re-visit a movie that has actually had a discernible impact on my life, Dark City.

The movie, for those of you who haven't seen it, follows amnesiac John Murdoch, who can't remember whether or not he's a serial killer. In pursuit of a mysterious doctor who offers answers about his identity, Murdoch flees from the police (who think he's guilty) and a group of long-coated strangers (who want him killed). The movie begins in the visual and story-telling traditions of classic film noir, but as the plot weaves its way toward resolutions, the story becomes a fusion of German expressionism and classic early science-fiction.

Revisiting the movie was a fantastic experience, and I was going to write a blog entry about it, but I was lazy.

Two years ago, Roger Ebert mentioned in the boilerplate of a review on his website that he had just recorded a new audio commentary for the director's cut of Dark City, but there has been no mention of it anywhere since, including in the studio's annual Upcoming Releases schedules. I had honestly given up hope that it would ever actually be seen, envisioning it sitting on a shelf somewhere between the master print of Chimes at Midnight and the original ending to Kubrick's The Shining.

Well, I'm glad that I didn't write that blog entry a month ago, because this morning I got an e-mail from a good friend letting me know that the Dark City director's cut will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray on July 28 (and I am now saved from needing to do two entries on Dark City in a month)!

It's long been rumored that the director's cut will not just restore a scene or two but will actually present the story with an entirely different pace and editing style (and, mercifully, without that blasted voice-over that kicks the movie off by revealing everything the viewer is supposed to learn at the end). As released, the film's editing was frenetic and left the viewer as de-centered as Murdoch, so I'm interested in seeing it at a more contemplative pace, having the opportunity to let my eyes linger over locations and environments that I only got to see in brief flashes before.

I know this may not be too exciting to the five of you who know that this blog exists, but the day this thing comes out is actually going to be pretty exciting for me. I just thought I'd share.

You can read the original news at dvdactive.com.