THE LOVER, THE DILETTANTE, AND THE CLINICIAN

 For once the new terms I'm tossing out are not full-fledged aspects of my personal literary theory. They're just approximations of the different orientations I find in different creators. 

THE LOVER is the type of creator who finds something deeply important to him/her in whatever fictional narratives he/she encounters, and who seeks to reproduce those moving elements or tropes in his/her own works. That doesn't preclude working on projects that do not excite the Lover personally, but if the Lover has a sustained career, the Critic can usually see one or more favored tropes, often a "master trope," repeated again and again. As a kid Jack Kirby (born 1917) belonged to the first generation of American juveniles to be exposed to periodicals centered upon the still gestating genre of science fiction (beginning with AMAZING STORIES in 1926). The totality of SF-tropes, far more than the related tropes of horror and fantasy, became an endless resource for Kirby, and I would venture that his creative "master trope" was the ceaseless exploration of all the most famous sci-fi scenarios-- lost cities, prehistoric domains, alien worlds. I for one see this trope in everything from TUK, CAVEBOY to FANTASTIC FOUR to CAPTAIN VICTORY.

 THE DILETTANTE might sound like a putdown in comparison to the Lover, but it merely signifies that the creator in question didn't become strongly cathected to a particular theme or trope. From what I've read, Stan Lee probably enjoyed the SF/adventure pulps of his time as much as did Kirby, but I don't see any particular trope from any particular genre looming large in Lee's oeuvre. That doesn't mean that he didn't have particular tropes that he used again and again, only that he used them more for professional convenience, rather than for personal expression. I might argue, hypothetically, that over time Lee became invested in using the trope of "the suffering savior" that one can find in his fifties SF-stories (like this one) on through SPIDER-MAN and SILVER SURFER. But I can't really claim that trope dominates his work anymore than that of the "quarreling best buddies" trope I see in pairings from "Millie and Chili" to "Ben and Johnny."

For THE CLINICIAN I cheated on my categories a little, for my initial example is Timely/Atlas publisher Martin Goodman, who was not to my knowledge a creator of any kind. However, the ALTER EGO article referenced establishes that at times he did show a rough, if not always correct, instinct about what sort of stories would prove popular with his target audience. Of course, Goodman is most famous for indiscriminately flooding newsstands with quickly produced titles, purely to grab shelf-space, so it's fair to say that he didn't make many, if any, decisions based on what moved him personally. I call him a Clinician because I see in him a clinical attitude toward creative efforts. 

       

But of course I can find many more examples of all three types in all media. Michael Carreras, who wrote and directed several movies for Hammer Films (founded by his father James), strikes me as another Clinician. I've never read a biography of MC, but from looking over the movies he did before and after the birth of Hammer horror, I get the sense that he like Goodman just went with the flow most if not all the time. In my review of THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, I took note of how he used a complex Egyptian myth-tale for no better purpose than to make one more mummy-movie. A Clinician type of creator can produce exemplary work, though in Carreras's case, CURSE and the risible PREHISTORIC WOMEN are probably at the top of his creative roster.

In line with some of my recent ruminations on LOST, I tend to think that some of its blown potential stemmed from the different creative types involved. In the early seasons, I might have believed that head honcho J.J. Abrams to be a Lover ensorcelled by a multitude of tantalizing tropes. But exposure to his work on the STAR TREK and STAR WARS franchises showed me that he was at best a Dilettante. Had he remained active in guiding the six seasons of LOST, the show still might have emerged as a media landmark. But the producers to whom he relegated LOST were in my estimation just Clinicians with not much skill at keeping the tone and content consistent-- which is why, in this month's LOST essay, I said that the only way I could analyze the program would be to go armed with both a "good shit" detector and a "bad shit" detector-- or words to that effect.        

MYTHCOMICS: "ATONEMENT" (HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY, 2013-14)

Manga-serials strongly based on fantasy-premises vary widely with respect to how assiduously their creators elaborate the rationales for those concepts. Some serials toss out a very basic premise and never develop beyond what is strictly necessary, as with Masakazu Katsura's SHADOW LADY. Another group of serials will explore their premises in a thorough and linear fashion until reaching a logical conclusion, as with Lynn Okamoto's ELFEN LIED. Still others articulate and follow a strong premise in one arc and then go on to develop the underpinnings of the fantasy-world in even greater detail, as fans saw when Nozomu Tamaki followed the first "super-arc" of DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND  with the shorter arc of SCARLET ORDER.

Suu Minazuki takes a more roundabout path to his premise in his most famous work, HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY. His narrative approach somewhat resembles that of the American teleseries LOST, which teased its watchers to the very end with expectations of a great "here's-the-explanation-for-it-all" revelation. Readers of PROPERTY do get a better explanation of that manga's fantasy-world than did the audience of LOST. Still, detailed explication was not one of Minazuki's priorities, though the manga's final arc-- which I've titled "Atonement" after one of the installment-titles-- succeeds in achieving a high level of myth-concrescence anyway.

PROPERTY's setup resembles that of many Japanese fantasy-based harem comedies: a relatively ordinary young man, ranging in age from middle school to college, has a bevy of supernatural beauties converge on his place of residence, sometimes with one or two regular Earth-girls around for variety. All the babes are in love with the main guy but their competition for his favor brings about an enforced chastity, since none of them get anything more than basic canoodling. 

In PROPERTY, middle schooler Tomoki Sakurai finds himself playing host to three young women who look like a cross between Judeo-Christian angels and Victoria's Secret models (even if one of them is closer to the measurements of Twiggy than of Heidi Klum). All three are beings called "Angeloids" and they come from a mysterious island in the sky called "Synapse," possibly derived from Swift's Laputa, but they can't talk about their place of origin-- which works out fine for Minazuki, since he wants to keep the nature of Synapse under wraps for most of his epic. The name "Angeloids" implies that the girls are androids, which is confirmed by the fact that all three have weapons-systems built into their bodies. However, they might also be cyborgs, since if you bonk them on their heads they get the usual mushroom-sized lumps. A few other Angeloids intrude on Tomoki's sanctum for shorter lengths of time, but the main three throughout the story are Ikaros (beautiful but bereft of expressive affect), Astraea (beautiful but stupid), and Nymph (beautiful, but was last in line when they were handing out funbags).

Prior to the Angeloids' advent, Tomoki lives by himself in the small Japanese town Sorami, his parents away on extended travels. His solitude may stem in part from his motto, "Peace above everything," meaning that he doesn't like to be stirred by anything. He has one friend, next-door neighbor-girl Sohara, who as I observed in my review of the TV show, often seems more like a discipline-minded mother than a potential girlfriend, often punishing Tomoki for offenses real or imagined. Sohara's plainly in love with Tomoki, but he just wants to go to school, laze around his house and read porn. He does have an odd recurring dream where a mysterious woman pleads with him to help her daughter, but this doesn't have any definite meaning for Tomoki.

Two of Tomoki's fellow students, Sugata and Misako, more or less con him into intercepting a predicted celestial event. Thus Tomoki is out in the wilds when an armor-garbed winged woman crashes to Earth. Tomoki's tempted to leave her to the authorities, but his basic decency asserts itself, and he takes the Angeloid Ikaros to his home.

Two traditional myth-narratives are conflated here. One, obviously, is the Christian myth in which former angel Lucifer/Satan is exiled from Heaven and flung down to Hell. The other is the Greek story of the great craftsman Daedalus and his son Icarus, who manage to escape the prison of King Minos by flying into the sky with artificial wings. Icarus, unlike his father, crashes when he flies too near the sun, so that his wings break apart and he falls to his death. Neither fate is meant to seem beneficial, but in the case of Ikaros, it turns out to be a "fortunate fall," since by staying with Tomoki she begins to learn about her own potential humanity. (Incidentally, the woman from Tomoki's dream, loosely responsible for sending Ikaros to Earth, sports the name "Daedalus.")

For most of the PROPERTY narrative-- both before and after the next two Angeloids are added to the cast-- most episodes seem like what I DREAM OF JEANNIE would have been if Major Nelson had been a sleazehound. Tomoki soon learns that Ikaros and her friends have vast super-scientific powers-- which gives the youth the chance to carry out the pursuits dearest to his heart: ogling pretty young girls and fondling pretty young girls. (For the most part, he seems uninterested in any girls but those in his own class, including Sohara.) In one episode, Tomoki has his body transformed into the water in a swimming pool, retaining just enough solidity to fondle the girls' nubile forms. All of these pursuits end with Tomoki reverting to his normal form at the wrong time and getting mercilessly pummeled by Sohara and the other girls, though none of the beatings dissuade him from trying the same thing again in some other form. Late in the series it's suggested he gets his extreme sleaziness from his mother's genes, but Minazuki is careful to show that when he's not overwhelmed by horniness, he's actually a decent enough fellow-- and the combination makes Ikaros, Nymph and Astraea all fall hard for him.

While all these hijinks are going on, Minasuki teases out little bits and pieces about the world that birthed the Angeloids. Hardly any non-android inhabitants of Synapse are seen, except for the winged (but implicitly organic) ruler of the floating city, whose name is finally revealed to be (naturally enough) Minos. Minos is the epitome of the bored autocrat, torturing his own flunkies-- particularly the naive Nymph-- just for entertainment, and he regards earthbound mortals as "bugs." He sends both Nymph and Astraea to recover Ikaros, but Tomoki's kindness converts them. Minos continues to send other Angeloids to kill his mortal foe, and most are killed or otherwise compromised by Tomoki's trinity of protectors. Only one Angeloid becomes a recurring menace: a child-like cyborg named Chaos, curiously dressed in the traditional outfit of a nun (though this doesn't seem to signify anything more than a little casual nunsploitation). Chaos is fascinated by the "love" that has changed the loyalties of the other Angeloids, but she thinks it has something to do with physical pain, which makes for lots of sadomasochistic schtick.

After a minor Angeloid character is slain by Chaos, "Tomoki's Angels" finally decide to make a frontal assault on Synapse, which is where "Atonement" begins, and where Minazuki finally decides to unveil the nature of the floating city. Chaos, temporarily allied with Sugata, takes him to Synapse and shows him "The Rule," an arcane column with many writings on the surface. Chaos explains that these were wishes inscribed by citizens of Synapse, but unlike the idle fantasies of Tomoki, these wishes had deep costs, both for the mortal world-- which gets remade by these wishes-- and for the Synapseans. It's revealed that the reason most Synapseans aren't around is because they've all entered cryosleep, deeply disillusioned with having too much control of the world, so that everything comes too easily. And now the world is about to be reset once again, eliminating everything in Tomoki's existence.

Tomoki and his Angeloids assault the floating city, but the cost is high. Astraea perishes fighting Chaos, Nymph expires while destroying Synapse's defenses, and Ikaros is erased by the act of venturing back to the place of her "exile."

In the end, though, they still participate in the defeat of Minos, for when Tomoki faces the corrupt ruler, he wields the core taken from Ikaros's dissolved form, which contains the spiritual force of their evolved humanity. After defeating Minos, Tomoki receives the guidance of Daedalus and is able to inscribe one last wish upon the Rule column. His lesser self tempts him to alter the world to reflect his own needs, but in the end he does the right thing and remolds the world to what is was before the attack. Despite all his desire for a "peaceful life," he's once more got a houseful of unruly Angeloids and a quasi-girlfriend who karate chops him all the time. A coda suggests that the bond between Tomoki and his first angel Ikaros is really the "true love" of the tale, but like most harem stories, the movement into adulthood will never take place.

Because this post is long, I'm glossing over two major subplots, one involving the backstory of Sugata, and the other an unexpected connection between disciplinarian Sohara and "mother of angels" Daedalus-- who in some ways seems like a "good mother" substitute for the "bad mother" who actually birthed Tomoki. Both of these subplots share the same concrescence as the Synapse revelation, and are brought to fruition in the "Atonement" arc. 

LITTLE LAST LOST POST (probably)

"I think there’s this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, “I want to unlock the single secret to Lost.” There isn’t any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for Lost, nor do we think there should be, because philosophically we don’t buy into that as a conceit... The great mysteries of life fundamentally can't be addressed."-- Carlton Cuse, WIRED, 4-19-2010.

I watched all of the LOST Season Six extras last month, but to put it mildly there's not a lot of bang for the LOSTphile's buck in the DVD collection. The producers of the show, notorious for their aversion to definitive statements about the series-mythology, don't really provide any earth-shattering answers in the vignette-sequel "The New Man in Charge," but the commentary-tracks, at least, gave a clear picture of the producers' trickster-y mentality.

For instance, on the track for "Across the Sea," the producers have the chance to address one of the late-blooming mysteries they tossed out in that episode-- to wit, was the adoptive mother of Jacob and the Man in Black herself a smoke-monster? Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof hem and haw, admitting that it would've been really tough for a middle-aged woman to slaughter a whole villageful of people without Smoke Monster skills. But ultimately they refuse to answer the question, claiming (rather absurdly) that such a divulgence would compromise the audience's ability to debate the nature of evil.

One would think that with the series finished and not much likelihood that either man will helm a recrudscence of the franchise, the two men would just 'fess up and admit that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and got out of it with a bit of typical LOST obscurantism. Of course, that admission could raise more problems than it would solve. Were Cuse and Lindelof to affirm that Unmamma was a Smokey, the consistency-minded would ask: "Then why didn't Unmamma just slaughter the unwanted visitors to her island the first time they came?" Certainly Unmamma had no problem killing Claudia, mother of the two brothers. Logically, a surgical strike on the remainder of the colonists (or whatever they were) would have prevented the trespassers from luring Man-in-Black away from Unmamma's sheepfold. I for one would've respected the producers a bit more if they'd just said straight-out: "We screwed the pooch on that one."

At the same time, I can appreciate that creative people are always, in one sense or another, tricksters of a sort. I don't buy it when Cuse and Lindelof tell audiences that they were wrong to devote their attentions to the mysteries Cuse and Lindelof raised, because they the audiences ought to have been really focused on the human stories involved. But I *can* appreciate that some superlative creative talents are a lot better at establishing mysteries than they are at solving them, and that on one level these talents are justified in talking any kind of talk that helps them sell their wares. In comic books, I find that Grant Morrison and both Hernandez Brothers fit the same category. Morrison and the Hernandezes don't have the excuse that they're working alongside dozens of other creative collaborators-- writers, actors, musicians-- but the pattern remains the same. For any creator whose strength lies in the evocation of mystery rather than its solution, the (re)solution is always going to be of secondary importance.

I can also appreciate what Cuse says re: "the great mysteries of life." Most of the authors who have ascended to the ranks of canonical literature do so in part because they capture a sense of the imponderable nature of life, to whose questions there are no "answers," as there are so often answers to fictional questions. And by and large, I think there were many times that LOST's producers succeeded in catching that sense of imponderability. One of my favorite such scenes appeared at the conclusion of Season 1, Episode 12, "Whatever the Case May Be," wherein Shannon labors to translate the notes of Danielle Rousseau. As she realizes that the notes are the lyrics of the French song "La Mer," she sings them, and the pathetic tonality of the song symbolizes the gulf between the intent of Rousseau when she wrote the notes and the reception they receive from a stranger, Shannon, desperately trying to interpret the meaning. This would be remain a strong moment of "mystery" in a positive sense even if the producers had never troubled to follow up Rousseau's backstory.

Similarly, I didn't care that much if some characters, including the godlike Jacob, were often bound by arbitrary rules, which were inevitably concepts devised by the writers to make the narrative work. For instance, such rules had to be in force to both keep the Man in Black confined to the island and yet prevent him from killing off the candidates who might take Jacob's place should MIB kill Jacob. I don't even mind that we don't know precisely why Ben *could* kill Jacob-- whether it had to do with the location of the murder, or Ben's state of mind, etc. A precise explanation in that case would if anything dissipated the sense of a profound mystery, patterned on (but not limited to) the betrayal of Jesus by Judas.

OTOH, there are times Cuse and Lindelof used the "no united field theory" as a crutch to avoid narrative problems rather than to sustain the sense of mystery. In one of the commentaries, Cuse and Lindelof wander off into a windy rumination about MIB's motives: "does the MIB choose to follow the rule, or does he *have* to follow it?" But while this could have been a valid question in other narrative circumstances, it's not supported by the LOST narrative. I was highly amused, after hearing this, to come across a deleted scene in which Smokelocke directly tells Sun, "Do you think if I could break the rule I would still be HERE?"

With that bit of Cuse-Lindelof flummery in mind, it's not surprising that "New Man in Charge" takes a dismissive attitude to fans' remaining questions. I can only say that I for one never cared much about why Dharma used polar bears, and while the explanation for the "Hurley-bird" was mildly interesting, that too was a mystery that I could have simply chalked up to the Island's imponderable nature. As for the revelation that the pregnancy-problems were caused by the island's wacky electromagnetic effects, this is, like the matter of the Smoke-Unmamma, an answer that just raises more questions. Why did the pregnancy-problems manifest at some times and not others? Pierre Chang talks as if the negative effect is confined to creatures brought near the Orchid (implicitly for the time/teleportation experiments), but by the time the castaways arrive it's affecting every conception on the island. And how much are we supposed to think Ben Linus knew about the island's magnetic monstrousness? If he knew a lot, he wouldn't have enlisted the help of baby doctor Juliette, as she'd have no resources capable of quelling the effects. But if Ben knew very little about the Island's electromagnetism, that makes the character look like a dunce unable or unwilling to research the very cynosure to which he's devoted his life. Offhand, I'd say he had to know *something,* as he seems pretty unsurprised in the episode where he witnesses the Oceanic plane being shreded in mid-air. But of course what Ben knew and what Ben did were largely governed by the convenience of the writers.

As I said, I expect trickery from creators at all times, and have my own standards as to what are good tricks and what are bad tricks. I'd certainly say that LOST managed far more good ones than bad ones in its complicated evolution, and that's probably my last word on the serial, aside from finding ways to work the show into my own personal "united field theory" of literary production.

ADDENDUM: Ahhh, I forgot to mention Walt's return. Yeah, I guess it's nice to establish that he'll apparently play some part in redeeming his dad's lost soul, but c'mon! NOTHING about his bilocation skills?? For shame!

NEXT TO LAST LOST POSTS, PART 2

"...what if it is precisely this "happy" denouement of [THE TRUMAN SHOW] [...], with the hero breaking out and, as we are led to believe, soon to join his true love (so that we have again the formula of the production of the couple!), that is ideology at its purest? What if ideology resides in the very belief that, outside the closure of the finite universe, there is some "true reality" to be entered?"-- Slavoj Zizek as quoted by Charles Reece here.

"Ideology is not evil. It's something essential to human life. The thing is that it has to be subordinate to the very simple and primary things that the imagination is about: life, love, freedom, dignity"-- Northrop Frye, CONVERSATIONS WITH NORTHROP FRYE, p. 213.

It would be interesting to essay a cross-comparison of Zizek the militant intellectual atheist and Frye the unmilitant yet unapologetic intellectual Christian, but at this point I haven't even read the cited Zizek article, "THE MATRIX, or Two Sides of Perversion," except to get a sense as to how his reference to TRUMAN SHOW fit in with his overall program of analyzing his titular subject, THE MATRIX movie. That little bit was all I could take once I beheld the dread spectre of Lacanianism hanging over said artice, whereupon I recoiled from the threat of utter and complete boredom.

Still, there's enough Zizek cited in Charles Reece's sum-up article on the LOST finale to make a limited comparison between this excerpt and one of Northrop Frye's crucial ideas: the opposition between "the myth of concern" and "the myth of freedom," which also has certain applications to the TV show LOST.

Here's a cogent summation of Frye's theory of the two myths from Jonathan Hart's extensive and well-researched online essay,
"Northrop Frye and the End(s) of Ideology:"

In The Critical Path Frye says that whereas the myth of freedom is liberal, detached, and individual, and emphasizes tolerance, correspondence, and objectivity, the myth of concern is conservative and communal and stresses belief, coherence, and authority. Together these two myths produce the social context of literature. Primary concerns are made up of four areas: food and drink, sex, property, and liberty of movement. Secondary concerns grow out of the social contract, such as patriotism, religion, and class attitudes, and, in Frye's later phrasing, "develop from the ideological aspect of myth, and consequently tend to be directly expressed" (Words 42).

These two myths-- of fulfilling integration within a community, or of fulfilling escape from that community (with or without a concomitant desire to reshape it)-- respond to the stereotypical political ideals of "conservatism" and "liberalism" respectively. Yet Frye does not content himself (as does Roland Barthes) in a facile opposition, but rather endeavors to show how both mythic patterns grow out of the desire for the aforesaid "primary concerns," articulating "secondary concerns" as a means of attaining some or all of the primary ones. In the above quote from an interview Frye defines these concerns in a more abstract manner but it should be evident that the abstractions of "life, love" et al are fundamentally grounded in experience.

In contrast to this viewpoint, Zizek's quote posits a view in which both myths in TRUMAN SHOW are wrong. Title character Truman's manufactured community is one stressing coherence and authority, against which Truman quite rightly rebels, and thus it is what Frye would call the "demonic" vision of the myth of concern. However, though the movie probably does not intend any demonization of the escape-- which can hardly embody any other Fryean concept but "the myth of freedom"-- Zizek theorizes that this myth is wrong too, because it suggests that Truman has found a "true reality," so that Truman's "myth of escape" is no less an ideological manipulation than his "myth of concern."

Even putting aside such tiresome Marxist formulations as "the production of the couple," I'm not a great fan of analyses in which the extra-diegetical spins so completely free of the diegetical substance of the work analyzed. But as I haven't read all of Zizek, I'll refrain from further comment on his interpretation of the two myths.

But since I have read all of the Reece essay, and since I believe that I do understand how Reece is using Zizek to critique the TV show LOST, that essay I can look more fully at in Fryean terms.

Like both TRUMAN SHOW and MATRIX, LOST does depend on a conflict of the two myths.

The "myth of concern" is clearly represented by the ersatz community that the castaways form, initially for reasons of pure survival, though it will prove to be a community that to an extent transcends the original reasons for its formation. By the characters' having "lived together," their souls do not "die alone" even if their bodies still do. In Jacob's last speech to the surviving castaways, it's strongly implied that if none of the castaways had been hurled onto the Island, their "flaws" would have kept them from experiencing a true community, even if they had grown old within the sphere of ordinary civilization.

And yet, the very thing that makes the community possible is the thing that the castaways seek to escape, which action incarnates Frye's "myth of freedom." Reece correctly points out that many of the "laws" of both Jacob and his Island seem chimerical and that, extra-diegetically, their objective correlate can represent the chimerical desires of the serial's writers. Yet, precisely because the Island is chimerical, it cannot be a place where a community can thrive, save in extreme temporary circumstances. The castaways, though they don't know it, have built their community on something akin to the burning-grounds where Shiva meditates, or the wild deserts in which young Amerindian men essayed their vision-quests. On the Island the castaways will experience insights into the nature of reality, but the only use they can make of those insights is to find a way back to the reality where they became flawed in the first place. Whatever insights they take from the Island are not meant to be understood intellectually, as one might understand the Christian apocalyptic thought behind C.S. Lewis' NARNIA books. The Island throws the castaways with Heideggerian force into a reality that forces them to re-learn their own primary needs for "love, life, freedom and dignity."

After detailing many of the chimerae of the Island that present him from taking it as face value as incarnating "some great Truth" for the castaways, Reece goes on to say:

What I dislike about the onto-theological reading of the ST -- despite granting that it's a valid interpretation -- is that when taken by itself it reduces Lost's entire shambolic story arc to the ideological yearning that Žižek points to in The Truman Show's conclusion. The mere promise of a transcendent Truth (behind the curtain, outside of the OT) is supposed to free the characters of choices made and acts committed. Similarly, the audience is supposed to forget all the dangling plot threads, finding closure in the characters having finally discovered their purpose, whatever that might be.

I don't think that the white light at the end of "The End" promises a "transcendent Truth," except maybe in the Kantian sense of "transcendence." True, established narrative tropes will prejudice most viewers to assume that the Losties are going to Heaven or that they'll re-enter the cycle of reincarnation. But there are no literal gods or angels in LOST; only mortal beings freakishly transformed by forces that may or may not be magical, and ghosts who apparently can construct their own afterlife waystations before moving on to what could as easily be peaceful oblivion as Heaven.

At the end of Reece's essay, following one of Zizek's MATRIX conceits about two equally-undesireable "realities," Reece asks for a "third pill would enable [Neo, and by extension Jack Shepherd] to see reality's dependency on its ideological/fictional/fantasmatic support." I think, rather, that LOST shows that man's spirit is essentially *independent* of all these things. Taking each in turn:

1) Their immersion into primary concerns of survival, community and ultimate liberty transcend all of their ideological conceptions, whether rooted in culture, religion, or empirical thinking.

2) Extra-diegetically they cannot help but *be* fictional characters, but diegetically the only "fictions" in their lives are the ideological personas they make for themselves. Whether they individually succeed in "rewriting" themselves is open to debate, but it seems to me that "The End" implies that even "the sucker" John Locke has succeeded in rewriting the fiction of himself a lot better than "the skeptic" Man in Black does.

3) As for "fantasmatic," I won't touch that one right now since it's a specialized term that Reece has apparently drawn from some unstated source, but if he cares to clarify it, I'll lay odds that I can show how the castaways transcend that too (though only in the most Kantian manner).

NEXT TO LAST LOST POSTS?, PART 1

I anticipate the possibility of doing a wrap-up LOST post once I've seen whatever add-ons appear on the DVD of the sixth season. After that, the only future in LOST blog-commentary would consist of a LOST re-watch to re-examine whatever substance there might be for my earlier speculation that LOST might be one of the few television serials to merit its entering the canon of High Art, alongside, say, film "thrillers" that have entered said canon, like Hitchcock and Chabrol. But such a rewatch is only a vague notion at present.

I don't expect much from whatever little add-ons appear on the DVD set, just as I got little from some of the conciliating comments recently uttered by Lindelof and Cuse (timed, it must be admitted, to help hype DVD sales). I did find it interesting that their stated motive for having put the castaways through the purgatory of Timeline B had to do with their desire to give their beloved characters a sort of second birth, the better to know them all over again from a different angle. (Hmm, sounds a lot like Chris Claremont's X-MEN!) This ties in with what I've termed LOST's "eternal recursiveness," in which dominant patterns in the characters' lives kept recrudescing over and over, not just to satisfy narrative demands (though that was certainly a consideration) but also to give the audience a sense of each character's essential nature. A well-thought-out purgatory sequence could have provided, if not a resolution, then at least a catharsis of self-knowledge as each character comes to grips with his or her essential nature. In every purgatory-fantasy I've ever seen, this is the whole point of characters being in purgatory in the first place.

Unfortunately, perhaps because LOST had an embarassment of richly-drawn characters, the show did not offer audiences an equal wealth of *peripeteias,* in which the characters all came to self-knowledge as a result of the parts they essayed in "Timeline B." That timeline was not a learning-experience but a last temptation of *maya,* or at least of the scriptwriter's version of Hindu/Buddhist illusion. Instead of individual self-knowledge, the characters attained a knowledge of their fatedness to be parts of a rare and special community, which might be extra-diegetically read as the fatedness of the actors and/or the audience to be a part of the LOST experience.

As I've said before, I don't have a problem with any form of wish-fulfillment fantasy, and the notion of being part of a special community doesn't offend me as such. But I do think that even in Hindu/Buddhist terms the illusions banished by the LOSTcharacters don't make a lot of sense, insofar as some seem very desireable (Hurley as a super-lucky guy) while others seem merely capricious (Sun and Jin not married and even more under the thumb of Sun's father than in reality). I tend to believe that the LOST scripters understood the narrative demands of the purgatory concept but that they chose to undermine those demands in order to protect their "hand," as poker players say. I don't feel, as some LOSTfans did, "betrayed" by such skullduggery, nor did I feel like I wasted six years of my life following a show that yielded a somewhat disappointing resolution. But I wish they'd taken a subtler route to hoax the audience, one that still played fair with the underpinnings of the purgatory-fantasy.

Of course, when you play fair, you take a chance that some audience-members will guess the secret. Some people guessed the "big reveal" of M. Night Shyamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE, and some did not. But Shyamalan still comes off better than the LOST scripters in this regard, because he used subtle storytelling to misdirect the audience rather than giving them "clues" that had no real application to the solution of the "mystery."

More on the LOST finale in Part 2.

LOST OPPORTUNITIES

Re: the LOST finale-- I called a fair number of developments, but obviously, not The Ending.

Elsewhere I said that I felt that LOST would end with some sort of figurative transcendence. Technically I wasn't wrong, but given all the philosophical issues with which the program dealt, I had hoped for something more substantive.

At some point I recall reading a quote from one of the producers, either Cuse or Darlton, asserting that he didn't think viewers should consider either Timeline A or Timeline B to be "unreal." I don't have the quote to hand any more, but assuming that I'm remembering it correctly, the producer in question may have prevaricated a wee bit. Again technically, "Timeline B" is not "unreal," since it's apparently a way station for souls struggling to connect with their forgotten lives. Thus it's "real" in the metaphysical sense. But I'm reasonably sure that the guy who made that statement knew that his audience wouldn't be thinking in those terms. Said fans were probably thinking more along the lines of, "Is this a timeline that has to be sacrificed, like the Edith Keeler timeline in CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER?"

Now it's perfectly legitimate for authors to dissimulate to keep their audience from guessing where a given story (particularly a continuing story, and particularly in the Internet Age) is going to go. So the maybe-Cuse/maybe-Darlton quote as such doesn't bother me.

I am a little bothered, thought, that they set up a question within the boundaries of the show and didn't conceive a solid answer. I could have lived with simple ambiguity, but after six seasons of hinting to audiences that determinism and/or causality were not the only game in town, the producers stepped back from the implications of their philosophical setup.

I wrote here:

A happy medium betweeen free will and determinism would have to acknowledge the reality of all of the empirical factors that make a deterministic worldview possible, much as Kant acknowledges the reality of the contingent. LOST has made this acknowledgement consistently-- "Dead is dead," "Whatever happened, happened"-- but the show has also consistently suggested that, though contingency can't be abolished as it is in a C.S. Lewis apocalypse, it can be suspended for a time.

I'm not objecting to LOST's decision to rule in favor of contingency. It's certainly their right to portray such a world. But when Sherlock Holmes exposes the untruthfulness of vampirism in "The Sussex Vampire," the detective doesn't do so by resorting to guys whose psychic powers give them the power to temporarily change the future. Sherlock doesn't say things like "Don't mistake coincidence for fate;" he says that coincidence is all there is and fate is just man's attempt to see connnections where none exist.

Frankly, though there were some touching moments all through the finale, I would have preferred a resolution like the one propounded by many LOST fans: that somehow the two continua would be merged. Some characters would still be dead, some might be alive but changed, and so on.

At the same time this "third world" would have been very difficult to intimate to the viewing audience, since it would've occured at the climax, when there wouldn't be much time to expound on what had changed and why. When DC Comics started getting into multiversal matters, they'd confine themselves to a few turned-around touchstones-- the new Flash lived in a different city from the old Flash, or Benedict Arnold was the first president of the United States. But this sort of turnabout is appropriate to story-beginnings, not conclusions.

The "limbo-LOST" explanation of Timeline B had the advantage of making it possible for all of the characters to revisit moments that the hardcore fans loved, and that may have been the bottom line, even more than exploring the themes of "letting go" or of "celebrating the moments of your life." But more than the jillion and one continuity questions that'll (mostly) never be answered, I'm bothered by the LOSTguys bringing a gun onto the stage and never firing it.

THE LAST LOST CHANCE SALOON

(The title will mean nothing to anyone who didn't grow up on western-spoof cartoons, where some character would find himself out in the desert, where he'd pass by a sign reading "Last Chance Saloon," followed by a "Really Last Chance" one, and finally a "Honest, Really Really Last Chance" indicator.)

Having said nothing about Timeline-A in my last post, I figured I might as well take a really really last shot at that one today.

Back in this post, I argued that LOST's finale should, going by the themes its producers have tenaciously pursued, comprise a "happy medium" between the C.S. Lewis type of narrative world, where "perfect service" leads to an apocalyptic "perfect freedom," and the Sartre-style narrative in which Pure Necessity rules all, and the only thing man can control is his attitude toward that fact, be it the happiness of Sisyphus or Nietzsche's "amor fati."

Desmond, whom I've called the Holy Fool, is possibly the key out of the Locked Room of Necessity. In "What They Died For" both Widmore and Unlocke speak of Desmond's status as a "fail-safe" which is something of a double-edged sword. Prior to his rather abrupt departure from the world, Widmore had some plan to use Desmond to defeat or kill the Monster, but now the Monster, who was perfectly happy to put a bullet in Desmond's head a few stories ago, suddenly seems to think it's a good idea to use Desmond to "destroy the island." Jacob has also apparently informed the castaways of the need to destroy Smokey, though I'll be surprised if Jacob has actually given them anything approximating a plan to do so. STAR WARS is the George Lucas film most often quoted in LOST, but on the whole the producers seem much more inspired by the philosophy of Indiana Jones ("I'm makin' it up as I go along!")

A happy medium betweeen free will and determinism would have to acknowledge the reality of all of the empirical factors that make a deterministic worldview possible, much as Kant acknowledges the reality of the contingent. LOST has made this acknowledgement consistently-- "Dead is dead," "Whatever happened, happened"-- but the show has also consistently suggested that, though contingency can't be abolished as it is in a C.S. Lewis apocalypse, it can be suspended for a time. The stone of Sisyphus must always fall, but where Sartre's stone always falls the same way, LOST's metaphorical stone sometimes turns up new ground in the WAY it falls. Desmond can't prevent Charlie from dying somehow, but the way Charlie finally DOES die discloses to the castaways information about their world that they would not have known, had Charlie died by lightning or by drowning. Faraday's pyrrhic use of the Jughead bomb doesn't get rid of the old, undesireable world, but it does spawn a new world right alongside it. The producers have been quoted as saying that it's wrong to see "Timeline-B" as less real than "Timeline-A," which I take as a warning that we're NOT going to see a reprise of "dueling realities," such as we get from the classic STAR TREK episode, "City on the Edge of Forever." I think it's quite likely that we will see one or more grand gestures of renunciation-- Sawyer looks like a pretty likely "candidate" at this point. But the notion some fans expressed, that Jack or others might have to choose their current Sisyphean lot over a more wonderful-looking life in "Timeline B," seems incongruent with the themes that the LOSTguys have diligently explored. Some sort of merging of the two worlds looks more promising for the "end" postulated by Jacob.

"It always ends the same," says the Man in Black, and this endorsement of cyclic repetitiveness would seem to reflect much of the recursiveness of LOST, where characters continually behold evidence of being trapped in patterns no less repetitive than the punishment of Sisyphus: Hurley's numbers, Charlie's multiple deaths, Jack's Christlike wounds (I'm going to guess that the neck-wound that B-Jack is experiencing reflects something that will happen to A-Jack, but it may be only a symbolic death a la Harry Potter's big finish). Jacob takes the Christian position, saying that there will be an end beside which all of the earlier repetitions will seem like mere "progress." But what form can transcendence take, if one does not nullify the world of the contingent? Surely it will be more than just Sartre's attitude change, or Kant's "immanent metaphysics." Even the extra-diegetic thematics I mentioned before, re THE HAPPENING, may not be enough.

"We shall be changed," insists First Corinthians. So I'm expecting some change in the finale. If it won't be a Lewis-style apocalypse, it should be at least as momentous as the changes wrought by Desmond and Faraday.

ONE LOST CHANCE

...to speculate where LOST will end up as of Sunday, May 30. Since I haven't done too badly in past posts I may as well take some shots.

My biggest maybe-spoiler relates to what the "unLosted" characters in Timeline-B are going to do for their part of the resolution. Given all the stuff about time-travel and teleportation I can't help a tendency to imagine a STAR TREK-y scenario in which all the "unLosteds" get together and their bodies give off an ILM light-show as they magically transpose the two continua. I know intellectually that's NOT going to happen, but I have to say it to get it out of the way.

A friend and I recently brainstormed a more likely scenario based on what the type of narrative stratagems that the LOSTguys have already used before.

Start with the notion of "eternal recurrence," as expressed in Nietzche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA:

'Everything straight lies,' murmured the dwarf disdainfully. 'All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.'

Now, in place of Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence," LOST gives us what I'll term "eternal recursiveness," in which patterns continue to propagate themselves in different arrangements. LOST's attitude toward the repetition should probably be distinguished from Nietzsche's concept, since for Nietzsche the only expression of "free will" in this situation was "amor fati," the love of one's fate. I think that the LOSTguys might be moving toward some less Classical, perhaps more Postmodernist conception of fate, but in any event, "eternal recursiveness" isn't quite the same as "eternal recurrence."

Now, how did the Oceanic Six work to alleviate the problems of the Island (even if they alone didn't effect the cure as such). By going back to the Island.

So how will the "unLosteds" right whatever's awry in two universes? I'm guessing that they, too, will have to get on a plane again, and fly to where an island hasn't "disappeared," but where one supposedly has never existed.

Where it goes from there, who knows. But that's the sort of established narrative motif I could easily see the LOSTguys repeating.

Other stuff:

Jack and Claire are apparently going to the airport to claim their father's body. Since Desmond is the source of the message the coffin may or may not actually be there. If it is, I don't see that this stratagem leads much of anywhere, unless the siblings discover a clue to the mystery of the music box in the coffin. I'd speculate that both of them will be shanghaied at the airport by Desmond but it would seem to be more important that they should be at the concert the same night Desmond calls Jack about the body. If Jack finally gets to see his dead father laid to rest, though, that may provide some sort of important closure for the series.

Also, Desmond is apparently going to the concert with Kate. Kate will almost certainly have an "ah-ha" moment with Claire once more. Maybe she will repeat her delivery of Claire's baby? Good: I definitely did not want to see Ethan putting his hands down there.

Hurley is off with Sayyid again, doing their ADIOS AMIGO thing. I'm laying heavy odds that they're going to coerce Jun and Sin into leaving the hospital (probably ABANDONING THEIR POOR KID AGAIN), which might be somewhat feasible with Sayyid along for the ride, in that Jin knows he owes his life to Sayyid.

It's vague as to where the concert is, but possibly it's at Pierre Chang's museum, though that sounds like an odd setting for a concert. That would make it possible for Sawyer, Miles, Chang, Charlotte, Kate and Desmond to be there at the same time, as well as Jack and Claire if they indeed don't get hung up at the airport. Charlie might even find some excuse to show up, and my friend suggested that Jack might invite John Locke to the show, though the act sounds a little out of character for Jack. Odds are also fair that David's mom will be there, and that it will be Juliet, who will in turn meet Sawyer for that coffee she suggested back in Timeline-A.

That leaves Ben, Daniel, and the Widmores with no particular reason to be at the concert, but I'm sure they'll get in somehow.

As for Timeline-A-- well, maybe I need another post for that after all.

RETURN OF LOSTIN' THOUGHTS: SEA-CHANGE

One hopes that with the airing of the next to the next to last LOST episode, no one will again fret about the creators of the show suddenly turning the show into a LORD OF THE RINGS-style good vs. evil contest.

At most, "Across the Sea" gives viewers a vision of the powers behind the island-happenings as being pretty much like the castaways themselves: intermixed with elements of good and evil. All three of the characters-- Jacob, the Man in Black, and the woman I'll call the "Unmother"-- perform acts of evil for reasons that can be viewed as partially good. The Unmother commits murder and deceives her adopted sons in order to protect a treasure from impious mankind. The MIB ends up killing her, but only because she foils his plans to escape the island. Jacob assaults his brother and consigns him to a living death, because of MIB's murder of their mother.

But then, this vision of interwoven good and evil was pretty much the same as what the creators presented through the main characters, so I never quite understood this Tolkien-phobia. Or maybe it's a King-phobia, since I've seen various sources cite Stephen King's THE STAND as an influence on LOST.

I haven't read THE STAND for years, so offhand I don't know what aspects of the show the novel is supposed to have affected. But although THE STAND's moral opposition is fairly simple-- much simpler than what one finds in the worlds of Tolkien or, for that matter, J.K. Rowling-- I can't see why some fans of LOST had so little confidence in the creators who gave them such a complex new playground.

Maybe that's the disadvantage of their not being-- "men of faith?"

Or at the very least, being people a little too afraid of being considered "suckers."

SON OF LOSTIN' THOUGHTS: TEMPTATION ISLAND

I suppose I may continue to post this or that item on LOST once it's all been wrapped up (even though I know intellectually that it won't REALLY get "wrapped up.")
But it'll be different once LOST solidifies into a Canon of Known Stuff, much like what happens when a famed author dies and critics can finally start talking about his work in such terms. The message is clear:

Canon= Death.

Before talking about "Across the Sea," a prediction: now that Unlocke has made his nature known to the surviving castaways, they're certainly not going to let him get near them. Given that he probably can't assault them directly or trick them further, that can only mean-- It's Catspaw-Usin' Time!

But who can devilish Unlocke tempt?

Surely not Richard. Richard almost surrenders his soul to Unlocke in "Ab Aeterno," but is pulled back from the brink by the ghost of his dead wife. Richard's not likely to listen, though he is likely to get his earlier wish about dying before the series ends.

Miles, being no angel, is a stronger possibility, but down deep he's essentially a good guy. He's also probably too suspicious for Unlocke to manipulate. Additionally, it's marginally possible that with concentration Miles might be able to read the thoughts of Unlocke, since Unlocke, as "Across the Sea" informs us, is really if not sincerely dead.

Ben Linus, then, is inevitably the favorite. Unlocke knows all of Ben's weaknesses and will probably think he can exploit them again. A typical LOST dramatic moment would be Unlocke giving Ben some powerful motivation for knocking off the candidates, not to mention wild card Desmond. What would the tempter use? Giving Ben sovereignty of the island has already failed. Vengeance for his slain daughter, in the form of Charles Widmore's death, would probably be more likely, which might theoretically put Desmond in the position of saving his bastard father-in-law. But will Ben Linus go even lower than he ever has before? Methinks not. Heroic death through helping defeat the "villain" seems more probable.

I feel good about this prediction. Earlier I predicted that Unlocke would use some catspaw to penetrate the Temple: I only erred in guessing the wrong catspaw. (And I mighta selected Sayyid instead of Sawyer had the writers not SPUN OUT OF WHOLE CLOTH the sudden revelation that the Temple's security depended on Dogen's continued life!)

Next: A Sea-Change.

LOSTIN' THOUGHTS: COUNTDOWN TO FINITE CRISIS

I hate it when I foresee one of LOST's Machiavellian narrative motifs but I don't get around to saying so in print.

As soon as Unlocke dropped Claire the hint that maybe Kate was still a possible target for vengeance once the group was aboard the plane, I thought, "It's the old shell game. Unlocke can't kill the candidates, though we know from previous episodes that he wants them dead-- but he can maneuver them into killing one another."

As it happened, the possible setup of Claire going after Kate wasn't even a vital part of Unlocke's plan. To be sure, I don't think any viewer could've foreseen the way Unlocke's actual plan would unfold, though, since it hinged on this whole "leap of faith" concept that Jack Shepard is now preaching, as received from the Testament of the One True John Locke.

It's a kind of "rock paper scissors" game of one-upmanship. One presumes that, had Jack managed to persuade all of his companions to ignore the bomb's countdown, the bomb would have failed to detonate as did the dynamite in the Black Rock when Jack played "truth or dare" alongside Richard. But because he couldn't persuade them to his newfound faith, the bomb goes off and Saint Jack is as much at risk as the others from being either blown up or drowned.

I have various problems with "The Candidate" episode, but I do admire the turnaround on Sawyer. At season's beginning Sawyer laid a heavy, and not fully justified, guilt trip on Shepard for Jack's alleged responsibility for Juliet's death. Later, Sawyer cops to his own survivors' guilt, but in "The Candidate" Sawyer is arguably pretty damn responsible for the deaths of Sayyid, Jin and Sun. (Maybe Lapidus too, though I find it hard to believe the writers dragged him across two islands without intending to make better use of him.) Will Sawyer walk a mile in Jack's shoes? He probably doesn't have the time to walk anywhere, much less expound on what he knew or didn't know about the "no kill the candidates" meme.

Jin and Sun's deaths-- I didn't call them either, but I pretty much expected them to "die together" after having "lived alone," or at least apart, for so long. The actors did a good job with what they were given but the setup wasn't especially resonant. Guess Widmore will do without whatever info he wanted from Jin.

Sayyid's death is more frustrating because I saw some openings whereby the writers could have resolved a lot of the vexing narrative questions about the whole "Nadia's death/Jacob's semi-intervention" business. While the topic might be touched upon in the remaining eps, I've a feeling that whole plotline is going end up as more fodder for DVD-commentary.

Hurley rescuing Sawyer from the briney deep reflects a little on the accident that originally caused Hurley's trip to the nuthouse, wherein Hurley's weight is a factor in the deaths of two innocents in the sea. Still, like the deaths of Jin and Sun it seemed more functional than poetic.

The incompetence of Charles Widmore's people seems to know no bounds, at least when it's convenient to the story. I certainly hope Charlie has something better up his sleeve than what we've seen so far.

Another journey into the dark night of John Locke's soul? Been there, done that.

At least we get more Man in Black next week.

SMOKEY UNLOCKE AND HIS TEMPTATIONS

The 4-20 episode of LOST, "The Last Recruit," reminds me of words I wrote here in response to the notion that Desmond Hume was more of a hero than Jack Shepard.

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.

I don't retract that, but I will qualify it in light of "Last Recruit" and its newest wrinkle in the program's long-running theme of temptation. The particular scene involves Sayid, who has given in to the blandishments of Unlocke in search of a prized goal (his wife's restoration), and who has been told by Unlocke to kill Desmond. In relation to Sayid, Desmond certainly is more of a "hero," and their interaction underscores this. Says Desmond to Sayid:

This woman, when she asks you what you did to be with her again… What will you tell her?

Viewers don't see whether or not Sayid shoots Desmond, but we're pretty strongly led to believe that Sayid doesn't do the deed. If Desmond does indeed succeed in helping Sayid throw off Unlocke's influence, then I would affirm this as the act of a hero. More, it's an appropriate one for Desmond, as he faced the temptation himself.

In the third season ep "Catch-22," Desmond has a psychic flash that seems to suggest that he will be reunited with his own lost love if he allows Charlie to perish in a death-trap. Because Desmond heroically rejects this temptation-- albeit only a moment before Charlie's killed-- this gives Desmond's confrontation with Sayid special resonance beyond the immediate concern of whether or not Sayid will pull the trigger. So in respect to overcoming temptation, I will say that Desmond's pretty heroic, though he's not any less messed-up than Jack.

Speaking of Jack, he surely seems the next target to be offered his heart's desire by Unlocke, since at the end of "Recruit" Jack's the only castaway that Unlocke has still in his power. But the question is-- does Jack even have a heart's desire?

What do you use to tempt a man so screwed up with his daddy issues that he can't stay with the woman he loves over them?

My guess--

You get him daddy's absent love.

(Or an unreasonable facsimile thereof)

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...

LOSTIN' THOUGHT: PAIK'S PIQUE

Verisimilitude is far from an absolute value in my literary cosmos. I don't think Shakespeare's JULIUS CAESAR is less a work because the Bard has clocks striking the hour back in ancient Rome, and it doesn't matter to me that whenever Batman gets captured, his captors stick the hero in some death-trap and leave him to his devices rather than putting a bullet through his Bat-skull. In fact, verisimilitude is a secondary value next to what Frye calls the work's "total vision."

Still, some logical lapses are more annoying than others.

Take LOST's 10th episode, THE PACKAGE. We learn here that on Lostearth-2 Jin and Sun have come to America but are not married as they are on Lostearth-1. The genesis of the trip is a little hard to suss out but from their dialogue it seems as if Sun got permission to go on a "shopping trip" to the States and to take Jin along as apparent bodyguard. Sun has a ulterior motive, though, as she and Jin have slept together out of wedlock and she's hoping to talk him into staying in the States to escape her father, sinister crime-boss Paik. To that end she's even established a secret bank account to facillitate their escape.

However, Daddy Pike knows all about the liaison prior to the trip, and boy, is he piqued. (I just had to repeat the pun for any pun-haters reading.) Apparently having figured out what Sun has planned, he lays plans to give his little girl an object lesson of his power. To this end he both closes Sun's secret account and gives Jin an errand to perform during the trip. This errand, rather like Bellerophon carrying the letter that is intended to provoke his execution, is to deliver a sum of money to a group of assassins who plan to whack Jin. (One presumes that they would then send Sun back home duly chastised, though this isn't stated.)

But the money intended for the hoods doesn't get to them-- allowing for more narrative tension and necessary delaying of the execution-- because the money's confiscated by airport security when Jin and Sun enter the country.

So--

Why?

Maybe Jin knows nothing about the laws about proper declaration of money entering another country.

But why wouldn't Mr. Paik know, or have experts who would so advise him? The LOST writers want the delay, of course, but there's no reason for Paik to want it. He wants the gangsters to get their money expeditiously so that they kill Jin dead.

And it would have been such a simple fix! Instead of Jin trying to check through the money with no paperwork, how about he comes through with the requisite paperwork but it's been screwed up in some minor fashion. (It's not like Capricious Fate has ceased to operate on Lostearth-2 just because Jacob seems to be gone!) Then the same scenario plays through the same way, but nobody has to think that the ruthless crime boss Paik doesn't know the proper way to get someone killed.

I mean, jeez-- at least when the Joker puts Batman in his latest trap, the villain wants not just to kill the hero; he also wants the satisfaction of knowing the Bat dies without managing one of his vaunted escapes.

I'll note that on the whole the episode was pretty well executed. I enjoyed the fact that Sayid didn't simply cut Jin free, but simply enabled Jin to escape on his own. Sayid had enough to worry about with his own setup, and had no reason to borrow someone else's troubles.

GETTIN' SLOPPY THERE, LOSTBOYS

While I've always admired LOST for not spoonfeeding its viewers tons of exposition, I think the show's writers have stayed away from that narrative strategy so long that they've forgotten how to provide exposition when they have to, as seen in the last episode, "Ab Aeterno."

1) PROBLEM 1: The Black Rock ship, impelled by a storm that may have been conjured up by Jacob, the island or just Mother Nature, smashes the statue of Tawaret to smithereens, but is not itself smashed and zooms all the way into the jungle. This really strikes me as a desperate writer's ploy: "Hey, we've got to explain both of these things: let's combine them. Two great tastes taste better together!"

2) PROBLEM 2: Jacob seems somehow responsible for the ship being there-- at least he admits to having brought others to the island prior to Richard's ship-- but not only does he do nothing to prevent the killing of the slaves by the ship's officers, Jacob seems unaware of Old Smokey's invasion of the ship, his killing of the officers and the Temptation of Richard. The result is that everybody aboard the ship is dead except for Richard, and Jacob seems to conceive of Richard's potential usefulness at the last moment, rather than having planned things out as he did with the Oceanic castaways. Assuming that Jacob is some sort of deity who has a jones for experimenting with humans in an island/ant-farm, you don't learn much from the ants if you let them be killed off so quickly.

3) PROBLEM 3: The God of Ricardo's faith lays down laws and then expects his flock to take the moral superiority of those laws on faith even when the god doesn't come to his worshippers' defense at the drop of a burning bush. In contrast, Jacob brings his ant-subjects to the island and then-- what? Tells them nothing about why they've been brought there? Apparently the Others are an experiment in which Richard goes forth and recruits people from the outside world instead of trying to build a society out of stray Egyptians or Spanish slaves or whatever. But all the Others get from Jacob via Richard seem to be oracular commands rather than moral laws. Does a god who dispenses no moral laws have any moral high ground to judge the choices his followers make?

4) PROBLEM 4: And Nemesis seems to be even stupider. He's trying to convince Ricardo to go after Jacob and kill him. To that end, he materializes the spectre of Ricardo's lost love Isabella, and then makes it seem like the Smoke Monster abducts her. (Can Smokey's split off parts of himself, like DC Comics' Clayface??) THEN-- Nemesis tells Ricardo that he IS the Smoke Monster, but hey, all that roaring from me and that screaming from Isabella had nothing to do with one another: she was really captured by "the devil," who is Jacob. Of course the main reason for this odd strategy is that Richard in 2007 knows that Jacob's unnamed enemy is the Smoke Monster, and so someone's got to tell him. And since Jacob's character can't be allowed to break his super-secret "I'm too cryptic for my shirt" attitude, the writers had Nemesis do the reveal instead. Brilliant!

I'm perhaps crabby because I miss seeing the ensemble, and really didn't care that much about Ricardo/Richard and his problems, but I really thought the writers flubbed this one. Plus points: Hurley as "ghost whisperer" continued to be awesome, and it was interesting that the destiny mapped out for Ricardo by the slave-trader-- that of a servant/factotum-- is the one he accepts from Jaocb. I hope this sloppiness doesn't mar the Big Ending.

MY THIRD LIST O' LOST QUESTIONS (AND COMMENTS)

So Widmore found his way back to the island after three years of searching. The writers may not bother with many explanations here, knowing that the Lamppost is a convenient enough explanation. The more important question is, what does he want?

Ben tossed out a cock-and-bull story about Widmore wanting to use the island for profit. But everything Widmore himself has said speaks to a real passion to be back on the island again, presumably as ruler of the Others. By coming back after roughly fifteen years since his exile, does he plan to be judged by "the Monster?" Or is that sort of thing a ritual that has come to an end now that Smokey's making plans to be free? Widmore may be part of those plans, though when Jacob first says, "They're coming" in the Season 5 closer, Nemesis doesn't exactly look thrilled. But was that "they" the same "they" he mentions to Hurley later? (Just to prove the writers are really screwing with us, sometimes Jacob says "he" is coming, sometimes "they.")

One poster on a certain LOST board said he didn't think Ben could reform due to the malign influence of the rebirth pool. I can't prove it but I think Ben is capable of reforming despite the pool's influence, for which we only have Richard's word-- and he may have been going on faulty info given him by Jacob. It's an interesting mirroring: Sayyid, who wants to believe he's a good man but is fairly easily sucked back into the assassination game by Ben, finally gives up and surrenders to Darkness, implicitly for his heart's desire. But Ben, whose protestations of being a "good guy" always have an ironic tinge, may be the one capable of reform. The fate of "Doctor Linus" would imply as much. Also, if Timeline-A Ben is beyond redemption, why did Jacob (according to Miles) hope that Ben wouldn't be corrupted by Nemesis?

Miles seemed to have become less self-interested in earlier episodes, but it may be that we saw his better side because he was working with a guy whose leadership he respected (i.e., Sawyer), but he's still no angel. As with many LOST characters, he has a humongous revelation (hey, my dad was a noble soul and not just an uncaring deadbeat) but you'd never know it. If the Brits invented stiff upper lips, I think LOST has one-uppered them.

I definitely approve of both "crazy Zen Jack" and the notion of Ilana strangely gravitating toward the killer of her surrogate father, insofar as he is forgiveable due to the manipulations of "evil incarnate."

it's almost guaranteed that in the next episode or so we'll finally tie up the last loose end of Season 5, wherein the Locke-Sawyer group of 2004 come across the deserted camp, find an Ajira bottle (Ilana's), steal an outrigger and get pursued and shot at by the group in the other outrigger (Ilana's people).

Wonder who in that group gets shot by Juliet?

THE QUICK LOST POST JUMPED OVER THE LAZY BLOG

So. Unlocke's last line to Sawyer in "The Substitute" is something about their just leaving the Island, like Lenny and George perhaps. But we can be sure that they won't just "leave." (And Sawyer is one of the least inclined to just leave, anyway.) Clearly Unlocke has some scheme in mind that makes it possible for him to leave, possibly getting a replacement like unto the one he claims Jacob wanted from among the "candidates."

Here's a possible scenario that might turn up:

In "What Kate Does" Sawyer gets a gun and forces his way out of the Temple. Dogen appeals to Sawyer to stay, and when that doesn't work, sends people to bring him back. One assumes that Dogen's figured out that Sawyer's a valuable candidate even though his name may or may not have been on Hurley's guitar-ankh list.

In addition, we know that if there's someone that the Temple-ars DON'T want in their Temple, it's Smokey, as witness their barricades on the doors and their spreading of ash.

So the Temple-ars don't want Smokey--

But they do want Sawyer--

Can you say, "Trojan Horse?"

(It just seems fair that the Iliad should get a little mention after all the Odyssey-stuff from Season 5.)

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.

A CRIMINALLY HORRIBLE SEGUE

I'll be addressing more theoretical speculations about the conclusion of ABC'S LOST in part 2 of LOST IN TRANSCENDENCE. But because these speculations involve a compare-and-contrast with a significant horror-film of the 2000s, I'm taking the opportunity to explore some long-unexplored thoughts about how well certain problematic genres conform to Northrop Frye's schema of the four principal narrative mythoi.

The two genres I have in mind are "horror" and "the crime story." For some time these genres have caused me almost as much aggravation as they did Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, those long-dead ideologues whose spectres still haunt modern elitist comics-criticism. However, my frustrations, unlike those of Mssrs. Legman and Wertham, have nothing to do with considering either genre as "bad to think." Rather, they're simply "tough to categorize."

Of the two, the crime genre eventually proved the less difficult task. I showed in this essay that Frederic Wertham was wrong to use the term "crime comics" as a rubric for all comics that had any hint of violence in them. I demonstrated that the crime story, even within the humble medium of the comic book, had an approach to violence very different from what one sees in the multifarous adventure-genres. However, in that essay I wasn't concerned with exploring the crime genre in terms of Aristotelian power-of-action. In my system power-of-action is the factor that shows best how a given genre stacks up with respect to the overruling mythoi.

With some genres it's easy to see that they're essentially monovalent, as with the "sword-and-sorcery" genre. This genre is so devoted to all-out adventure that it may not even have any manifestations in the ironic and dramatic mythoi, while the genre's comedic renderings are few, with pride of place going to GROO THE WANDERER. Other genres are clearly multivalent. So-called "science fiction" embraces a wealth of adventurous, dramatic, comedic and ironic works. Thus in science fiction no single mythos defines the genre in the minds of its audience so much as to thoroughly marginalize other mythoi.

After some consideration I decided that the crime story-genre was also essentially monovalent. Whereas a science-fiction story with a larger-than-life heroic protagonist can belong to the adventure-mythos without its audience thinking that all science fiction is normatively adventurous in nature, the crime story seems to lose its identity when it takes on aspects of any of the four mythoi but that of the drama. When a crime-oriented serial work takes on a strong heroic presence, as one sees in Chester Gould's DICK TRACY, it ceases to follow the generic expectations associated with the crime genre. Said work becomes less focused on crime as such and more focused on the hero, arguably birthing a separate genre: that of the "cop-action" narrative. Comedic and ironic takes on the crime genre do appear without generating offshoot genres, but the crime story remains dominated by the dramatic mythos seen in most of the famous Hollywood gangster-films, one of which I critiqued in this essay.

I played around with the notion that the entire genre (or supergenre?) of horror might be dominated by irony's myth-radical; that of *sparagmos* or destruction. Here I categorized various CDMs (comics-derived movies) according to their adherence to one mythos or another, electing to view 1972's TALES FROM THE CRYPT film as sharing narrative company with artier ironies like 2001's GHOST WORLD. I did so because they both shared the tendency to render power-of-action as a nullity in an arbitrary and perhaps deterministic universe.

In most of the tales from that EC crypt, power-of-action exists in an ultimately futile state, for it resides in the talons of living corpses that can kill mortals but can't undo their own deceased status. But not all horror tales present power as so compromised. Bram Stoker's DRACULA is a classic horror text if any work is, but though its protagonists are not quite dynamic enough to be adventure-heroes, they are resourceful and they do succeed in vanquishing their foe. Still, agonic conflict takes a back seat to the radical of *pathos* in DRACULA, which I would say is also characteristic of those horror-stories where the heroes strive but fail pathetically (but not ignobly), like Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. Thus I theorize that the majority of classic horror-texts, whether they have somewhat-happy endings like DRACULA (and its rough Aristotelian parallel IPHIGENIA AMONG THE TAUREANS) or unhappy ones like FRANKENSTEIN (and OEDIPUS REX), follow the dramatic pattern, even if some classics may be exceptions (Stevenson's JEKYLL AND HYDE, possibly).

The horror-genre is perhaps less strong in terms of the adventure and comedy mythoi, but these two have their own identity within the generic parameters. The Van Helsing crew aren't dynamic enough for me to deem them adventure-heroes, but I would hardly say the same of their powerful epigoni, BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. I said earlier that DICK TRACY, by choosing to emphasize the cop over the crime, essentially stepped away from the narrative mythos that defined the monovalent crime-genre: the drama whose radical is *pathos.* But because the horror genre is multivalent BUFFY can keep a kickass foot firmly planted in the adventure-mythos without being divorced from any aspect of the horror-genre. Indeed, though I disagree with many of Peter Coogan's contentions about superheroes in this book, it's significant that he disallows Buffy's status as a superhero due to her ties to what he considers a distinct genre, that of the fighter against supernatural horrors.

Lastly, comedy-horrors are as much a part of the overall genre as the other three mythoi. Whereas one may have to think hard to come up with a significant crime-comedy once one puts aside everything by Damon Runyon, the genre of horror has nurtured any number of humorous horrors who are icons in their own right, and are sometimes improvements on the originals. I certainly consider Charles Addams' Morticia a more significant figure (in more ways than one) than her likely model, "Luna" of Tod Browning's 1935 MARK OF THE VAMPIRE.

Now, LOST does not belong to the horror genre, but despite its own multivalence it does line up fairly well with a genre that has related narrative concerns: the genre of the suspense-drama. Most of the time LOST does not seek to scare, but to startle and disorient, as do most of the classic suspense-texts. Thus I feel comfortable in speculating that the outcome of LOST may take a form not unlike that of a prominent but not-well-liked film of the 2000s--

--which I'll talk about in my next installment.