CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT. 3

In ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE and related essays, I’ve noted that though most focal ensembles are composed of characters who share the same cause, there are assorted exceptions. In SUBS AND COES PT. 2,  I noted that on occasion some teams, such as the Teen Titans and the Omega Men, who have a “stealth enemy” who functions as part of the ensemble for a time even though said traitor plans to destroy the other characters. Thus all the stories in which Terra pretends to be a superhero still place her, like the other Titans, in the narrative position of a defender, while whatever villains she battles alongside her team are the challengers of those stories. Only when Terra reveals her true intentions and joins with Deathstroke to destroy the heroes does she become a challenger-type.

“Opposed ensembles” present a knottier problem. Most such ensembles consist of two opposed characters who receive equal emphasis within the narrative. This stands in contrast to the many narratives built around a defender battling a formidable challenger (Sherlock Holmes/Professor Moriarty) or a challenger meeting his match in a canny defender (Dracula/ Van Helsing). Typically, opposed ensembles share a similar dynamic in terms of engaging the audience’s sympathies. For instance, in viewing the final fight in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, most viewers are likely to see the Wolf Man as a relative “hero,” given that the Frankenstein Monster looks like he’s about to do nasty things to a helpless female. But the entire narrative shows that both monsters are equally dangerous to humankind. Thus, even though the monsters end up fighting one another, in a greater sense both of them are challengers to the peace of humankind, whose defenders are represented here by a handful of imperiled characters.

Most of the opposed ensembles I’ve cited concentrate only upon two characters, where one is strongly antipathetic and the other may be somewhat sympathetic. M. NIght Shyamalin's GLASS is a rare exception, though it's preceded by two other parts in a series that are configured in more standard ways. The first film in the series, UNBREAKABLE, follows the standard dynamic of the superhero story, in which David Dunn fits the role of the defender and Mr. Glass, that of the challenger. SPLIT, the middle film, is patterned more on the dynamic of the monster-film, so that Kevin Crumb takes the role of challenger and his main victim is the defender. However, GLASS posits a situation in which a mysterious cabal takes the role of “challenger” to all three entities—hero, villain, and monster—and, despite the fight between Dunn and Crumb, the three of them have to defend their independence against the ruthless organization. However, it's very atypical for films in a series to shift the roles in this manner.

LOST'S LABORS LOVED

I used the above title because, occasional complaints aside, I do love the incredible mind-blowing work that the LOST producers put into giving viewers one of the few serial television programs that might have some claim to the cachet of High Art.

At the same time,I came close to entitling this essay, "LOST's loves labored," because I did feel the writers were a touch laborious about introducing the notion that love could breach the barriers between the rival timelines. I mean, take Libby's line in "Everbody Loves Hugo": "Have you ever felt you were connected with someone-- like soulmates?" That deserves at least a minor ARGHH.

So as of now we have five "Timeline-B" characters-- four male (Charlie, Desmond, Faraday, Hugo) and one female (Libby)-- who have definitely experienced intimations of the original "Timeline A," where three of the five (Charlie, Faraday, and Libby) have perished. But it should be noted that some of these intimations have involved *thanatos* as well as *eros.* Charlie has his vision of a beloved blonde inamorata (presumably Claire) while choking on his stash, and Desmond has his "flash" of Timeline A while battling both for Charlie's life and his own. One could venture that either love or death can awaken one's knowledge of the original temporal cosmos, and that this is why Desmond runs down John Locke with a car. "Sorry, brutha, yuir love life is jus' runnin' too smooth!"

Desmond is of course the only one who's likely to sense his simultaneous existence in both timelines, though I think it's likely that the timelines will remain separated until (possibly) the climax. I'll be as surprised as anyone if we actually see two Desmonds meeting face to face a la THE TIME TUNNEL.

A quick segue about Desmond, based on Sean Collins' 4-7-10 remarks:

Desmond's the kind of character I'd call "Internet-beloved" and mean it as a sneer, I'm afraid. He strikes me as what people who hate Jack wanted Jack to be: A hero. Desmond will never let anyone down, which is what makes him much less interesting to me than Jack.

I don't agree, for I don't deem Desmond all that much of a "hero." He's a good guy, no doubt, but to me he's just as prone to anxiety and doubt and self-questioning as Jack Shephard ever has been. Desmond's first arc begins with his letting Penny down by letting himself get sucked into a dominance-ritual with her father Charles Widmore-- and it's a fairly pointless ritual at that, which may have ended up serving Widmore's ends more than Desmond's. At least when Odysseus left that other Penelope, it was for definite goals: to retrieve the bride of Menelaus and sack Troy.

In further arcs, we also learn that Desmond wusses out in other contexts. The earliest thing we know about him is that he leaves a woman at the altar out of "cowardice," goes into hiding in a monastery but by dumb luck meets the woman of his dreams there. And AGAIN he leaves the girl, though to be fair some of his angst is provoked by a scary old lady who tells him he's gonna fuck up the universe if he doesn't do so. Still-- leaving two lady-loves in the lurch isn't especially knightly. Jack Shepard may have married neither wisely nor well, but he had the stones to attempt a commitment.

If Desmond resembles any heroic figure from the classics, it's probably less Odysseus than Parsival, the Holy Fool. The fool's "heroic" action is to act on impulse in such a way that he bollixes up anything that smacks of the customary and the expected, including the course of fate. This brings me back to my earlier analysis as to whether or not LOST's ending would end up siding with "free will" or "determinism."

In this essay I stated that I thought LOST's conclusion would chart a middle course between the extremes of the ethos of determinism (represented by Sartre's NO EXIT) and the ethos of Christian free will (represented by the works of C.S. Lewis, whose name, incidentally, informs that of LOST-character Charlotte Lewis). I think the recent images of *eros* and *thanatos* breaking down the barriers between worlds supports my contention that the LOSTguys will give us some sort of transcendence of cruel fate in the end, and so they will reject the ethos of Sartre. However, the LOSTguys will also not pursue the kind of overt transcendence seen in Lewis, and so their championing of "free will" will likely take a somewhat figurative character, not unlike that of M. Night Shyamalan's THE HAPPENING. So far I've no idea what form this will take, but "Everybody Loves Hugo" indicates that I may be on the right track.

BTW, I'll note that I consider this "middle course" as I envision it comparable to the one Immanuel Kant charted when he sought to build a philosophical bridge between the extremes of idealistic "rationalism" and realistic "empiricism." Of course, given the fact the LOSTguys are likely to leave a mountain of questions unanswered, the completed show may prove to be the sort of Rorschach test into which anyone can read pretty much anything...

LOST IN TRANSCENDENCE PART 2

"We either live together or we die alone."-- Jack Shepherd, LOST

"Hell is other people."-- Sartre, NO EXIT.

There have been any number of literary attempts, from Sartre to Norman Spinrad, to construct fictive worlds where the ethos of determinism holds court, essentially abolishing the illusion of Judeo-Christian free will. Yet Sartre avers that an individual can still possess a sort of heroic will insofar as he can make his peace with the Sisyphean rock of a pitiless reality, and become reconciled, even "happy," on those terms.

I recognize the intellectual conviction behind these fictional worlds, but in the end they are no less the symbolic projections of what the authors wanted to believe than the Christian triumphalism of C.S. Lewis. Lewis would probably make Charles Reece's shit-list in that Lewis molded a fantasy-world where all conflicts are sorted out in a concluding "Manichean battle," from which the final book in the series, THE LAST BATTLE, takes its title. In Lewis "free will" *is* paramount, though it's the kind of will described in the old canard: "Perfect freedom is perfect service," e.g., do what's right in the first place and you and God will get along.

I bring in Lewis' orthodox-Christian vision of free will as a contrast to the one I theorize that the LOST producers will give their fans when the series ends. I haven't a clue as to what shape that vision will take: I only assert that I think that the show's constant iterations of determinism-- "Whatever happened, happened"-- are a setup for some sort of turnaround that will transcend doleful determinism.

But how to do that, without the kind of "cheat" that Reece and others started to suspect as soon as LOST's Season 5 revealed that the Island is inhabited by at least two superhuman beings? Given the existence of these "demigods" it's natural enough to suspect the old deus ex machina, though I'm guessing that the LOST producers aren't going to try anything as obvious as Lewis' Aslan.

So I suspect that if indeed free will transcends determinism in LOST, it will be a transcendence more figurative than literal-- or perhaps, to pilfer the terminology of Immaneul Kant, one of the few philosophers not (to my knowledge) referenced on the show-- more "a priori" than "a posteriori."

Kantian terms aside, how can transcendence, even a figurative one, be made to have a validity that does not cheat on or otherwise annul LOST's own ample testimony as to "pitiless reality?" The deaths of Boone, Shannon, Ana Lucia, Juliet and many others seem to this watcher as arbitrary and meaningless as anything in Sartre, for all that these cruel fates also reflect behind-the-scenes exigencies of plotting or even actor-availability.

So how might the LOST-makers do it? Could it be that some horror-film, released in 2008 and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, might suggest an example of such narrative transcendence?

*****

Even when films are designed to be viewed first on the movie-theatre screens, I'm not sure that all of them are best seen that way, in contradiction to being viewed on the (relatively) small screen in one's home entertainment console.

I did see Shyamalan's first two major films, THE SIXTH SENSE and UNBREAKABLE, on bigscreen. I liked both, though I had some problems with the latter, but both worked well on the large movie-screen.

I didn't see THE VILLAGE or LADY IN THE WATER on the large screen, and didn't like either, so my opinion of Shyamalan in recent years has not been high. I've still never seen SIGNS and only in the last few months did I check out a DVD of 2008's THE HAPPENING out of mild curiosity. I had and have no memory of any favorable reviews and had the general impression that most audiences hated it.

I thought HAPPENING was Shyamalan's best film yet (except for that awful title). Possibly my seeing it at home freed me of the thrillseeking expectations shared by many theater-audiences, most of whom justifiably want a thrill-ride for their ten-dollar tickets. In any case, I enjoyed the fact that it treated a major catastrophe, full of action and human suffering (i.e., *pathos*) in a cerebral and philosophically provocative manner-- not unlike the teleseries LOST.

To be sure, there are ample differences between LOST and THE HAPPENING, apart from that of medium. LOST's "island survivors" catastrophe happens to an ensemble comprised of over a dozen central characters. In HAPPENING,a catastrophe befalls a vast section of the U.S.'s Northeastern Seaboard, not unlike the scenario in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS, but with something like human beings involved. However, HAPPENING focused only on two viewpoint characters, Elliot and Alma Moore, a young married couple played by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Their status as the two central characters informs the film's outcome, which is the main point of my comparison.

Because I'm concerned here with the ending, I'll merely sketch the bulk of the film.

In brief, Shyamalan's movie gives viewers a world where Hobbes trumps Rousseau. The social contract that enables human beings to live peaceably in a society breaks down when a mysterious malady sweeps over the northeastern states, and those infected become exemplars of Hobbes' "war of all against all." Indeed, not only do the victims become aggressive enough to attack others flagrantly, they even "war" against themselves, committing suicide by leaping from buildings, crashing cars, and so on. The Moores are among the many people who flee the cities for the countryside, only to suspect that the source of the malady is Earth's plant-life, some of which has started to manufacture and spread toxins able to break down human volitional controls.

In some ways, HAPPENING shares elements of both horror and suspense films. The idea of city-dwellers thrown into a mammoth catastrophe evokes the suspense-oriented narrative of the disaster film, with a side-dish of terrorist-fantasy flavoring. However, the theory about the source of the malady is presented in so oblique a way that it partakes less of the well-defined threats of a suspense-film and becomes more of a *mysterium,* as seen in HAPPENING's nearest horrific genre-neighbor, George Romero's 1968 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. There, too, humanity doesn't know what force has caused the dead to walk, and though the protagonists of HAPPENING make some correct conclusions about the airborne toxin, Shyamalan never allows the threat to become easily predictable.

Now, the 1968 NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is in essence an ironic horror-film, as is demonstrated by its black-humor conclusion. HAPPENING, however, is a dramatic horror. To build upon Sartre's aphorism, the constant breakdown of the social contract evinces just how hellish other people are to one another in the raw-- even in the case of some individuals not affected by the toxin! But in Shyamalan's film, other people are a hell one needs.

There's probably no way to describe the film's salvative turning-point (which is not precisely the ending, thanks to a coda) without it sounding sappy. Film has for over a century exploited the mythic image of reunited lovers as the image of transcendence, and countless bad "clinches" have given the essential archetype a bad rep.

Again, in brief: the turning-point comes when the Moores take refuge on an isolated farm. The owner of the farm is one of the latest victims of the spreading toxin, so Elliot and Alma, having become separated, each barricade themselves in separate buildings. However, this is clearly not a plan for long-term survival, and so, in a Sartreian embrace of their potential fate, the Moore both leave their hiding-places and embrace, ready to live and die together rather than living and dying alone.

But-- in a moment of figurative transcendence-- the Moores are spared, as the toxin abruptly ceases to have any further effects.

Understand: at no time does Shyamalan step outside the Cartesian box to suggest that the expression of love caused the plague to end. Within the diegetic narrative of the film proper, it's merely a coincidence, and Shyamalan makes this clear in the coda, where it's suggested that the toxin has stepped up for another whack at humanity. But in the extra-diegetic symbolism of the film, humanity is temporarily spared because the Moores come "un-moored" from their desire to protect their personal selves and to join as one, despite any fatal consequences.

To my mind, this figurative transcendence is not a "cheat" to anyone of the determinist party. It makes clear that the protagonists would seem to have "no exit" by any rational criteria, and yet the film gives them an exit through an exercise of free will that isn't indebted to the stoicism of Sisyphus and his rock.

In the conclusion of LOST, will there be a redeeming act of free will on the part of one or more LOST protagonists? I think that we have already seen a few. In Season 3 Desmond is tempted to a Faustian bargain by his psychic flashes. He comes to believe that if he lets Charlie die as seen in his vision, Desmond's beloved Penny will come to the island. Desmond comes very close to letting Charlie perish, but does save Charlie (just barely). Diegetically, it's seen that the figure Desmond thought would come to the island is not Penny, is someone else entirely-- but extra-diegetically, it's as if Desmond's breaking of the bargain cost him the chance to be with Penny again. Admittedly, since Desmond is reunited with Penny at the end of Season 4, it's something less than a supreme sacrifice, but Desmond doesn't know that in Season 3.

I'll close by clarifying that I'm no way implying that anything the LOST-makers do will be directly influenced by the works of Shyamalan. But I do think like-minded creators seek narrative answers in parallel ways, and that's what keeps me hoping that the conclusion of LOST will be at least as moving and satisfying as that of the Shyamalan film.

P.S. For some reason I can't remember if the Moore's little daughter is with them when they do the big climactic clinch. But whether she is or not, that detail doesn't change my interpretation of the figurative transcendence.