The Ultimate Lost and Philosophy

Think Together, Die Alone

Sharon Kaye, William Irwin, Sharon Kaye

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470930786
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Health Economics and Financing

What are the metaphysics of time travel?
How can Hurley exist in two places at the same time?
What does it mean for something to be possibly true in the flash-sideways universe?
Does Jack have a moral obligation to his father?
What is the Tao of John Locke?

Dude. So there's, like, this island? And a bunch of us were on Oceanic flight 815 and we crashed on it. I kinda thought it was my fault, because of those numbers. I thought they were bad luck. We've seen the craziest things here, like a polar bear and a Smoke Monster, and we traveled through time back to the 1970s. And we met the Dharma dudes. Arzt even blew himself up. For a long time, I thought I was crazy. But now, I think it might have been destiny. The island's made me question a lot of things. Like, why is it that Locke and Desmond have the same names as real philosophers? Why do so many of us have trouble with our dads? Did Jack have a choice in becoming our leader? And what's up with Vincent? I mean, he's gotta be more than just a dog, right? I dunno. We've all felt pretty lost. I just hope we can trust Jacob, otherwise … whoa.

With its sixth-season series finale, Lost did more than end its run as one of the most talked-about TV programs of all time; it left in its wake a complex labyrinth of philosophical questions and issues to be explored. Revenge, redemption, love, loss, identity, morality—all of Lost's key themes are examined in this fully updated guide, which reveals the deeper meaning behind every twist and turn in this historic, one-of-a-kind show.

PART ONE

F IS FOR FORTUNE

1

LOST IN LOST’S TIMES

Richard Davies

Lost and Losties have a pretty bad reputation: they seem to get too much fun out of telling and talking about stories that everyone else finds just irritating. Even the Onion treats us like a bunch of fanatics. Is this fair? I want to argue that it isn’t. Even if there are serious problems with some of the plot devices that Lost makes use of, these needn’t spoil the enjoyment of anyone who finds the series fascinating.

Losing the Plot

After airing only a few episodes of the third season of Lost in late 2007, the Italian TV channel Rai Due canceled the show. Apparently, ratings were falling because viewers were having difficulty following the plot. Rai Due eventually resumed broadcasting, but only after airing The Lost Survivor Guide, which recounts the key moments of the first two seasons and gives a bit of background on the making of the series.

Even though I was an enthusiastic Lostie from the start, I was grateful for the Guide, if only because it reassured me that I wasn’t the only one having trouble keeping track of who was who and who had done what.

Just how complicated can a plot become before people get turned off? From the outset, Lost presented a challenge by splicing flashbacks into the action so that it was up to viewers to work out the narrative sequence. In the fourth and fifth seasons, things got much more complicated with the introduction of flash-forwards and time travel. These are two types of narrative twists that cause special problems for keeping track of a plot and that also open a can of philosophical worms about time itself.

Constants and Variables

To set the scene about plot complication, I want to call on some very influential thoughts first put forward by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.).

In his Poetics, Aristotle discussed tragedy, a form of theater written for civic and religious celebrations, in which the best plays were awarded prizes. Because ancient Greek tragedy was designed to gain the approval of the judges and the public, it followed certain formulas (think the Oscars, rather than Cannes or Sundance). Aristotle’s analysis of these formulas can provide us with pointers for assessing the difficulty with Lost.

Most tragedies are based on well-known historical or mythic events. For instance, Ajax by Euripides (480 B.C.E.–406 B.C.E.) concerns a great hero of the Trojan War who commits suicide in a fit of shame and self-disgust when he does not receive the reward he thinks he deserves.

Using this example, Aristotle argued for two principles. First, every tragedy should deal with a single episode in the life of its main character. The audience should follow a clear causal chain from start to finish. Let’s call this “the principle of closure.” In line with this principle, Euripides’ play begins with Ajax’s coveted reward being given to someone else and ends with his death.

Second, there should be some unity to the action, which is to say that merely accidental or unrelated events should be excluded. Let’s call this “the principle of relevance.” In line with this principle, Euripides’ play does not recount Ajax’s boyhood, regardless of how interesting this topic might be.

Does Lost follow Aristotle’s principles of closure and of relevance? At the outset of the series, Oceanic flight 815 crashes, providing a clear starting point for the succeeding chain of events. We are introduced to the survivors, who all share the same predicament. Although the flashbacks begin right away, they are all carefully designed to shed light on the island narrative.

Complications, however, arrive with the Others. Although at first they function merely as antagonists for our survivors, they soon take on lives of their own. For example, through the character of Juliet, we follow a causal chain that begins before the crash of Oceanic flight 815 and ends before the resolution of the survivors’ predicament. Aristotle would not give up on Lost so easily, though.

In addition to single tragedies, Aristotle discussed longer poetic compositions, known as epics, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey of Homer. These are big stories, the former dealing with the Trojan War and the latter with the ten-year journey home of one of its heroes. In epics, the narrative structure is much more complex than that of the standard tragedy. Yet Aristotle notes that even here, the story concentrates on a sequence of interconnected phases of action.

Thus, the Odyssey effectively begins, in Book One, not by focusing on its hero, Odysseus, who has not yet returned from the war, but on his son Telemachus, who is told to go and track down his father. The two don’t actually meet until Book Fifteen (out of twenty-four). In the meantime, they are wandering around the Mediterranean and often find themselves recounting their travels to others, thus supplying the hearer/reader with backstories. For example, during his journey (and before the time of the events recounted in Book One), Odysseus outwitted the one-eyed monster known as Cyclops, but we find out about this only much later, in Book Nine, when Odysseus narrates his trick to the Phaeacian king. In this way, even though many events are presented out of their chronological order, we don’t have too much trouble constructing a coherent time line.

It seems that Lost is not so much a tragedy as an epic. Any given episode of Lost features a single individual who stands at the center of attention and who is the primary subject of the flashbacks and the flash-forwards. Although many episodes finish with cliff-hangers, the principles of closure and relevance are still at work over the longer run.

So Juliet’s causal chain can become part of the story as long as the audience cares about her connection to the survivors of Oceanic flight 815. If her mud fight with Kate wasn’t enough to make us care, then her relationship with Sawyer was.

A blur of unrelated incidents that is spread out over too long a time and that involves too many characters will not hold our attention. The point seems obvious. On the other hand, a story that is too simple is just boring. The hard part is finding a balance between narratives that are challenging and those that are merely confusing.

We’re All in This Together

Aristotle has a lot of other rules, and perhaps Lost does occasionally break them. But so did Shakespeare, and we can gain more pointers from what critics have said about him.

Taking a cue from a brief passage in Aristotle’s Poetics, some critics have objected that many of Shakespeare’s plays bring together an inappropriate array of characters. For example, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nobles interact with “rude mechanicals.” Although there may be more than a little elitism behind this concern, we can take a point about the importance of portraying plausible social relations.

The premise of Lost deliberately throws unlikely people together. For sure, there are differences between those who were previously mixed up in crime (Sawyer, Kate, and Jin) and those who had been “pillars of the community” (Jack, Marshal Mars, and, in a sense that might make Americans uncomfortable, perhaps Sayid). But we’re on the Island of Second Chances, and such distinctions have been erased by the crash of Oceanic flight 815.

Aristotle made the further claim, however, that tragedy properly concerns noble persons (not merely those with noble titles), whereas persons of little worth are the suitable subjects of comedy. After all, why would an audience cry over someone they didn’t care about? And how could they laugh at someone they did?

Clearly, Lost evokes both laughter and tears, but there is an easy out here. We can consider it a tragicomic epic that involves both noble and ignoble characters, or—better still—both noble and ignoble phases in its characters’ lives. We do laugh at those we love in their lesser moments, and we cry for those we don’t love in their best.

The same readers of Aristotle, however, have further objected that Shakespeare’s plays do not observe the so-called unity of genre. What this means is that Shakespeare often alternated scenes of dramatic tension with knockabout farce and facetious wordplay.

And, of course, so does Lost. For example, scenes of Hurley building a golf course are interspersed with scenes of Sayid being taken prisoner (“Solitary”).

Yet who says genre should be unified anyway? Would Aristotle really have approved of a play that was unrelentingly tragic? Unlikely. Surely, even Ajax could provoke a giggle or two, depending on exactly how the actor played the part.

Another Aristotelian rule concerns realism. Thus, someone might object to Shakespeare’s The Tempest on the grounds that it demands that we believe in a magic island where witches and various types of monsters lurk. Likewise, the polar bear and the Smoke Monster of Lost might put viewers off.

But who’s to say that what we’re doing when we are watching these sorts of productions should be described as “believing” anything? For my part, I don’t find Shakespeare’s magic island any less believable than the Dharma Initiative. Yet I’d have to be very literal- (not to say narrow-) minded to let that get in the way of my enjoyment. Indeed, suspending disbelief is an important part of the fun. More on this to come.

The Aristotelian tradition has two things to say about the presentation of the characters in a play. One is that there should not be too many, and the other is that they should be consistent during the course of the action.

The first of these can be applied to Shakespeare’s King Lear, a chaotic business in which lots of men with the names of English counties shout at one another. For sure, telling your Northumberland from your Westmoreland takes a bit of work to begin with, but it is a labor of love! Consider the average soap opera. Although soaps repeatedly introduce “your-mother-is-your-sister-but-your-uncle-doesn’t-know” sorts of complications, they are followed by millions of uncomplaining viewers.

Of the forty-eight survivors of Oceanic flight 815, only relatively few—hardly a quarter of the total, when you think about it—come into any sort of focus. The rest have little more than walk-on parts. Likewise with the Others: most of them do little more than stroll about on the lawns. In this sense, Lost is hardly more abundant in characters than the average TV show.

As to the idea that the persons depicted should be consistent over time, Aristotle seemed to mean by this that each person should correspond to some virtue or vice or other stable character trait. Yet we have to be very careful not to interpret this in a way that contradicts Aristotle’s rule about realism. After all, people don’t stay the same; they change, as does Shakespeare’s Henry V, when he goes from listless prince to brave king. Aristotle may simply have meant that the decisions a character makes at any given stage should be psychologically plausible. In any case, if, again, our point of reference is the epic (or the soap), lapse of time and variation in influences can make significant differences to temperament.

We may consider a couple of cases where the stability-of-character criticism might be applied to Lost. Perhaps the least problematic is that of Kate. Once we grasp why she led the tear-away life she did before being arrested, we can understand why, on the island, she behaves, as Jack testifies at her trial, as someone who cares for others (“Eggtown”). It’s not Kate who’s changed but her circumstances. Perhaps something of the same can be said about Sawyer.

Slightly more demanding is the case of Locke. In terms of psychology, his rugged individualism remains pretty constant. What does, of course, change is his physical state. He was in a wheelchair on boarding Oceanic flight 815 and gains the use of his legs once on the island. It’s only when we first see him in flashback (“Walkabout”) that we begin to have ominous thoughts about the healing powers of the island. If anything, this transformation—not to mention the later one when he returns to the island in a coffin (“There’s No Place Like Home: Part 3”)—is a challenge to what we are prepared to believe. But, as I said before and we shall see again, strict believability is not really the point: once we grant Locke’s situation, his responses to it are what catch our interest.

The case of Ben is altogether more puzzling. As we try to find some principle or project that drives his various behaviors and attitudes, we suppose there must be something. he’s up to, but it is hard to tell what. At some level, much of his motivation derives from his vendetta against Charles Widmore. Yet the various positions and expedients he adopts seem to fall into the category of the predictably unpredictable. Ben makes me think of Shakespeare’s character Iago: someone whose actions, for good or ill, seem underdetermined. As with Iago, what makes Ben interesting is that it is hard to guess what he’ll say or do next.

Two other rules laid down by the Aristotelian tradition deal with limits on space and time. Concerning space, Aristotle suggested that the action of a play should take place in a single location. This follows from the physical configuration of theaters from Ancient Greece down to at least the time of Shakespeare: the substantial lack of props meant that it was hard to signal clearly that the action had moved from, say, the royal court to a tavern or a graveyard. But with the modern means to make obvious the difference between a scene set on the island and one set in an L.A. psychiatric institution (even when they are both actually filmed in Hawaii), this sort of criticism is a bit hollow if leveled at Lost.

A more aesthetic consideration in favor of the unity of place derives from the idea of the unity of plot. Yet also in this case, we may say that the island provides the spatial focus for everything else that goes on, and the backstories set elsewhere help us understand the problems of the individuals we find there. Even though they are spread out in space from Iraq to Australia, from Britain to the United States, these background episodes are funneled through the check-in at Sydney Airport. And on the island itself, we come to identify certain sites, such as the camp on the beach, the Dharma bunkers, and the Others’ compound, as being places where the action is most decisive.

I submit that Lost is in the clear with regard to space and the other Aristotelian rules so far considered. Although Lost may sometimes push up against the limits of what viewers can handle by way of coordinated action and coherent character, it is not in flagrant breach of the Aristotelian standard of evaluation. Neither Aristotle himself nor Shakespeare and his admirers should object to the complexity of Lost, whatever some readers of Aristotle may say.

What about time, though? This question deserves careful attention.

“We Have to Go Back”

According to Aristotle, a tragedy should recount the action of not much more than a day. Although a television series of 120 episodes need not be this limited, a single episode that observes this rule helps the viewer keep track of things.

In its first three seasons, Lost uses flashbacks much more than most TV shows do. This doesn’t cause real headaches, because the survivors come to life more if we know about Jack’s “Daddy Issues,” Kate’s criminal deeds, and Hurley’s lottery win. Yet the final scene of the last episode of season 3 (“Through the Looking Glass”) introduces a very unusual sort of complication.

We’ve been watching s...