(Never) A Final Word Part 2

Hello again. My last post took into consideration the circumstantial factors that went into bringing LOST to light. It also considered the personal experience of watching the show by this writer, who shared it with other viewers over the last 3 seasons. I continue my main proposal that by re-watching the series actively, one gains a new layer of interpretation and earns a critical re-appraisal of the show's structure, form and even fashions a skeleton key of sorts for all it's unanswered questions! Well, perhaps it won't go that far...

This post is dedicated to Alex K., who is looking for answers.

XVI. LOST as a novel-film that approaches/attempts to walk the seam between literature and the cinematic arts in the early 21st century

I began to compose notes once I started my second viewing of the series. I was motivated by the intensity of the reactions to the ending, because it was big. That was the question I needed to answer - why these equal extremes of disdainful hate and passionate praise? I was not so much left with a feeling of being cheated or having had been lead into a corner with Cuse and Lindelof's writing - indeed, as a student of literature I saw themes and familiar story lines that have graced pages under the nose of humanity for centuries. This was what was so perplexing: with decades of television at our fingertips and centuries of texts with recurrent relationships and forms of stories from numerous cultures available, what kept fans from seeing LOST in a disinterested way? It would certainly help lower one's blood pressure and give oneself an opportunity to develop some objectivity in hindsight.

This is when I made some lists. Being a fan of lists, I had no trouble utilizing one for the books. Every season there was a finite amount of books shown on the show. When a book appeared it was framed, the camera lingered, or a character even directly spoke about it and/or touched it. Our first example is Kate picking up a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on the beach among clothes. Sawyer emerges from his morning dip in the nude and proclaims "It's about bunnies!" I rather like his exclamation, because it's deceptive. Sawyer's still a hick, a character self-conscious of the appearance he has to the other survivors (as a way of keeping advantage & distance) but he's a reader too. This appearance of Book #1 is in the first episode we get of his flashbacks, episode 8, "Confidence Man," the title itself which can be taken as a literary reference to Herman Melville's novel of the same name. On the other hand, Sawyer's "commentary" on Watership Down could be a young man or woman's take on the entire book after it was assigned to read in school and they hadn't even opened the cover page by the time the book report was due. A different person, an attentive viewer, might ask about connections between the episode and the novel, that is, if one had indeed read the book or is in fact reading the book alongside the show. Very demanding, yes?

Books insinuate themselves throughout the series. Some books are only the titles of episodes, such as above, as with "Exodus","A Tale of Two Cities" and "The Little Prince." My list however was not comprised of those books, but of books handled by characters in frame. Some correspondences stood out: Dostoevsky is the only author on the list twice with The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground; Joseph Heller's Catch 22 is the only book to have appeared in an episode in which the book is also the episode's title; and Watership Down, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle and Lancelot by Walker Percy are the only books to reappear together and with the original person who handled them: our reader, Sawyer.

There's something more to a facile list of books appearing on LOST. Each book has its own theme, narrative and many other structures which comprise its form. Each episode, each season and the whole series also has these very same things but to a higher degree of complexity and inter-relation. Plenty of shows don't even bother with displaying the reader and his relationship with books, but this is central to all literate human activity, and essential even to watching television. With television or screen narratives usurping a greater part of the attention that was once placed on the page, LOST's goal or moral modus operandi seems to be in hindsight to strike a visual balance between page/screen. One could argue further that the entire series is nothing more than an attempt at pushing viewers back upon themselves in some honest self-reflection. No wonder Sawyer's favorite television show is Little House on the Prairie.

LOST's writing was very successful in combining multiple genres to the delight and dismay of the public. It encompasses and pursues plot lines as a murder mystery, a science/fiction story, a tale of horror & suspense, an adventure, a psychological drama, even includes a buddy cop scenario, a hospital soap, a comedy, multiple romances and a few drug trips for good measure. All common forms of narrative over the past several hundred years of public reading since Gutenberg's printing press are covered. This range and multitude is staggering. The writers paced it out among characters for six seasons and that's quite an accomplishment with relatively few new inclusions. In doing so LOST becomes thinned out, strained and stretched too far on many occasions, and the ratings history reflect these changes. But I cannot find an example in television (perhaps only in Chris Carter's The X-Files or Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Next Generation) that approaches and attempts to walk this seam of literature and the cinematic arts in our present time as LOST does. To put it plainly, nothing on TV has tried to sum up our collective story making history as the web spun by LOST. In order to avoid any network or fandom disappointment, we might not see one again for awhile. The most successful television shows are formulaic, predictable, take few risks, make few changes in cast and character, depicting a continuity of setting, situation and style. Mutable forms are shunned or end up surrounded by "cult" followings, as this show has with those fans it hasn't lost and most likely will with new viewers in decades to come.

XXIII. LOST as a mythic-religious epic made of the eternally repeating archetypes that have been with humanity since before art, history or literature

I paused again after seeing the series a third time. I was caught up in taking notes and found myself needing to put them down to immerse myself in the feelings displayed by characters and my feelings of their inter-relationships. There was so much struggle, such stubbornness, a lot of humor, sadness beyond sadness, joys shot out of cannons like fireworks, injustice and cruelty - and those unanswered questions. To be sincere, my utmost unresolved mystery is the nature of the Horace/Jacob cabin. But when I just stayed with the show, really tried to put myself in the position of the characters, I had experiences that were transcendent of my own subjectivity. Great literature does this and the greatest stories have remained with us in the form of epic narratives. But to be one's own witness to this process with audial and visual stimuli is something one does not receive from pages, but from film and television. It is more likened to rituals and dances of older cultures. The imagination cannot paint the picture which words suggest, because that relationship is not present. On the screen before our eyes, it's all provided for. The imagination is thereby rendered inactive or non-participant in forming an impression. The responsibility of the creators becomes fundamentally important again.

Jerry Mander is correct in stating that the rigidity of television does not allow for it to be a democratic instrument in his Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. The bandwidth is very narrow, and the Internet is really not much broader. Mander's concern is from a socially determined point of view. He believes that the content is a reduction and the constant slogans, advertising and programs have liquified any quality down to a nearly innutritious pulp. This then informs the way a person acts and behaves in the world. Can television provide something directly to and for a human being that does not make them more susceptible to such autocratic control? These concerns are still valid because the medium has not changed much at all (just picture quality, which is a factor of quantity, of pixels) and we're seemingly none the wiser despite Mad Men and any insight that show offers on the mechanics of advertising.

What could be valuable today is a television show which is self-referential about this potentially harmful influence. If it were to do this, the writers would need to cast a much wider net over their source material and likewise expose their viewers to a higher degree of philosophical and ethical problems which would also be present in the show. Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Berkeley, Bentham - the names are there and the true owners of these signifiers were writers and thinkers orbiting the social transformation of the Enlightenment. It was one of the first things I picked up on when I began the show and if any freshman in a liberal arts college was also watching the first season, she would too.

So what do we do with this? It's a cud to chew on for the first few seasons and then we start getting this Jacob character, Richard Alpert, Hawking, Faraday, Lewis, Dogen. More names and more associations - now spiritual, now scientific. The names do two things for us: they give us a real world anchor in whatever region the show's narrative structure has moved into and paradoxically pushes us out of the show and into discussion when the show's episode has ended. This works on the viewer much like the literary references. Even before literature was written down and disseminated by symbols, the issues which are brought up because of the names and the ideas surrounding them were passed down in oral traditions which graced or continue to grace all cultures the world over as mythology. As a commentary on how our society continues to think about and act out the results of our current linear events, LOST succeeds in isolating the main arguments: fate, destiny, free will, determinism, sacrifice, forgiveness, remembrance of the dead, and self-awareness. The last is distinctly Eastern in its origins, and ever since we see a bagua with the word "DHARMA" inside of it at the Swan Station, the correlations and differences between our world's two dominant hemispheres of civilization are also brought together.

The stories are always the same: the lovers whose love is unrequited; the genius whose downfall is his own ingenuity; the outcast whose true place is in the center of all activity - these archetypes play out the philosophical and ethical quandaries which have plagued and continue to plague the whole of history. Reconciliation of the opposites and establishing growth instead of degradation are the oldest narratives these archetypes play/live within. Jacob and his brother's roles are that of the narrative maker (the tapestry) and the game player (the Senet board). All the initial problems are shown as clear as that island light in "Across the Sea." At the end of the series LOST makes room for the utmost expression: that of the principal of renewal (or grace) which responds to the causes (or gravity) of the creation of the universe. Renewal and return to the source lies in the seedbed of all religious and mythic teachings. Giving of one's Self without seeking reward is the surest path toward this renewal (Jack) and doing so until one's physical death means putting your Self in the shoes of the Other (Hurley). Transcendence is the only true end which justifies the means of one's experience - all else is folly, as Joseph Campbell and the early 20th century mythologists taught (who do not go unaccounted for as an influence upon the writers c.f. the special features of S6 on DVD or Blu-ray). Take particular notice how many times the word "experience" is uttered in Season 6 and by whom. The game only ends once, but it is played by and through many.

What a massive undertaking of a storyline crafted in a post-9/11, war-plagued and severely dialogue-deprived world at the end of the first decade of the 21st century! What happens when we take into our hearts and cogitate with our minds the implications of such a narrative with such a deep focus? The way we live our lives may even be impacted by such force and resonance with this strange substance LOST leaves behind. It might even be the kind of television that need not be eliminated. Wait - can such a story be eliminated? Rituals, dances and rites of initiation tell the story of origins and actually inscribe these on flesh or in the memory - as if one inhabits but for a moment, that real space where all live eternally.

End of Part II

Terry Gilliam's Twin Fables

[ First and foremost, apologies to any readers who have been awaiting most of the second half of the calendar year of 2012, and the first half of 2013, for new transmissions from the Observatory here at Waves of Guide. To bring you something new has been to cull what is old and rotten, shake away its stink and musk, and enliven some fresh feelings and thoughts into this tapestry of Life. And so, without further ado, a piece entitled "Terry Gilliam's Twin Fables" ]

Few films project their own light free from a theater screen through the days of my youth and upon the years of my adulthood as do Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits (1981) and his Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). Perhaps it is because of this writer's constant exposure to Monty Python's absurd antics and particularly British humour by his father's incessant tuning-in to comedy channels on the TeleVision. Or, maybe the connection made between one's impressions received in youth and an awareness created later in life by certain stories, told by certain creators (whether "original" or "inauthentic") maintain something within that just keeps nudging you, over and over again, as your life goes on. From chance encounter to deeply intimate experience, there they appear with gentleness and honesty, the children of his fables - Sally of Baron Munchausen and Kevin of Time Bandits 

The Fable of Romanticism

The children in these films go on journeys apart from their "realistic" worlds, but as one knows, if one remembers, we were born from that world apart from the real world, the imaginal world, and are gradually pulled away, forgetting its sensation. [See the Introduction to the Work of the philosopher who coined this term "imaginal" at Henry Corbin Project] Sally lives in a world of war, pseudo-rationality, and the utmost evil of these conditions - bureaucracy - in the form of a magistrate played by Jonathan Pryce, in a vastly different (and French) role than his portrayal of Sam Lowry in 1985's Brazil.

In Munchausen, the risk of death is present not only in war, murder & disease, but also in the form of the Spirit of Death itself which continually seeks the Baron. Sally still senses/lives in the imaginal world, and so she is the only one who sees Death for what it Is, and sees through what it masquerades as in the end for the Baron - modern Western medicine. Sally carries this dark gift but is disowned of her story-telling heritage as the daughter who goes unrecognized, poster after poster, in the advertisements for her father's theater troupe. She is barred from the inheritance of imagination in an increasingly unimaginative world. We meet her father's troupe performing for the city's bombarded people the unbelievable "true" stories of Baron Munchausen. Sally needs Baron as much as the people need his stories, to show the length and breadth of a life lived with the thirst for love, for honor, and for the journey through it all, even facing danger - and death. Military science and the machine of bureaucracy is a wheel spinning just above the ground, and the city of Man which it's purporting to protect is falling...

Historically, Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Munchausen, was a real figure who served in the Russian campaigns against the Turks during the 18th century. The exaggerated stories of his travels were first published in England in 1785 by German exile Rudolph Erich Raspe. Gilliam mines Raspe's stories for the action of his film, but expands upon the intrinsic value of such elaboration as an essential elaboration to counter-balance the stolid reality of a modern world. The director wryly titles the opening scene as, "The Age of Reason," before we are brought into the siege of the city. In this way, he is inviting us to compare the level of destitution caused by the grim methods of warfare, paired with the increasing capacity for an idolatrous humanity to deem itself more learned, more rational, and more ethically justified to do "good." The Mind had now been raised higher than the Spirit. This is farcically shown by Pryce's character 'The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson' condemning a Heroic Officer to death, played by a young Sting, for going "beyond the call of duty," capturing cannons and saving men. Sting is a recognizable artist, and his character's death is also a parody of the artist's death (to some folk's subjective delight, but we're leaving that aside here).

Munchausen is the spirit of Sally's world and the very quintessence of the era of Catherine the Great of Russia, the energy of the French Revolution, the European world invigorated by Classical mythology and expounding Nature's affect in poetry. The world before the Scientific era (and oddly, the spirit of the reactive artistic movement after the Age of Reason, Romanticism). Sally maintains wonder for this old way being eclipsed by the new. When Munchausen-on-stage, played by Sally's father, is flayed of his prosthetic nose by the real Munchausen, the film begins a process of pulling the seams apart between the deteriorating theater of the world (which is literally being blown apart by Turkish cannon fire) and the true substance of our life that gives living whether in a "reasonable" war or in an unreasonable story any meaning. Munchasuen takes responsibility for the play and the war, then sets out on the adventures that shaped both. His faults throughout are his virtues. Sally won't have him give up his spirit to Death, because our Spirit is what's truly under siege, and death is always out to take it from us, wearing many disguises, all antithetical to the imagination. The end of the film is a hopeful one, Sally receiving her inheritance of place and name in the troop, though she could not keep Death from taking the Baron's soul. Time Bandits offers no such gift.

The Fable of Modernity

"So we create a world that isn't true to a realistic, naturalistic world, but is truthful" - this is Terry Gilliam on his film-making practice, and on storytelling. In Time Bandits, Kevin is a modern boy fascinated by the annals of history, his walls adorned with his drawings of ancient, medieval and turn-of-the-century images. They occupy his entire imagination. His parents watch a television show "Your Money or Your Life" and eat from ready-made meals of the Microwave, disinterested in their son's young life. Kevin has a taste for what has been lost in the sands of time, lost to the immediate present, and finds only the dessicated remnants of it in his books.

Enter the little people, the common stock, the otherworldly. The bandits of the film's title steal not time exactly, but a Map of points in space-time, where they plan to steal treasure from history's notables. The troupe of 6 are joined by Kevin, the 7th, and they fall through time, which takes them further and further away from the Supreme Being, whom they stole the map from, and towards the Evil Genius (played by David Warner). Evil's intentions are quite different than the small bandits for the wealth of the world they created, or Kevin's for a life of substance - he wishes to acquire the knowledge he needs of the latest machinations made by man, to understand computers, and become as a supreme being himself. This is taking Horatio's conception of the world to its logical extreme.

It is worth noting that when Kevin and the bandits make for the Time of Legends, space between what "happened" and what is lost in story, is bridged. This is also where and when the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, where the Evil Genius dwells, is accessed from; a bridge where mythology and history meet has, from a modern standpoint, little meaning, only for archaic or faddish New-Aged knowledge. This is the trick of Warner's character, that he lures them into believing that the greatest treasure is beyond the edges of the Map of space-time, the very same intriguing idea that lures many a person to religion, mysticism, sorcery, etc. Metaphysical truths are the seeds of physical experience. The "beyond" is where they do find the Supreme Being, or rather he finds them, but his characterization is nothing more than that of a watchmaker-type God (played by Ralph Richardson) whom neatly cleans up and makes orderly where mistakes of his own were made. "Why does evil exist?" Kevin asks him. He momentarily walks off behind a broken pillar and comes back to answer, "I think it has something to do with free will." So begins and ends any theological considerations in the film. The bandits are then re-instated as the workers of the World, and Kevin is sent back...

What is most vexing about Time Bandits, if you will sympathize with my own vexation, taking notice of not my review but poor synopsis of the film's parts, is that in the end Kevin is not allowed to stay with Agamemnon in antiquity or anywhere else but ends up back in his own time - as his house is burning. One single chunk of the Evil Genius remained and traveled back with him, lodged in the Microwave. His parents touch the chunk and are incinerated before his eyes. The camera lifts away and we are left much as how we are in Gilliam's other film about time travel, 12 Monkeys (1995), with the child alone and dispossessed of a future. Where will Kevin now be sent? To live with a Munchausen-like relative who like an indemnitor gives him new hope for a coming age? Or like James Cole, will he now have the greater grief of succumbing to a human movement underground because of a new plague of our creation which wipes out most of the world's population in 1996? The questions raised in Time Bandits are unresolved, being a film about modernity's own unresolved complications. 

Conclusions(s)

Complication is essential, as simplicity is co-opted by that very evil with which the modern era touts its own ideologies for the sake of any number of conveniences, to the debilitating effect of complacency and disinterest in the individual - as it was with Kevin's parents. The Imaginal world, as Corbin shows, has not a fable of its own, for the true substance of our imaginations are made of its material and are woven in this reality. Film, and I think Terry Gilliam would agree with me, exemplifies this transcendent notion of Ideas expressed in the Forms of the World, that very dear Platonic teaching. The images and sounds fabricated remind us that the actions upon the screen of the theater are as the activities of our Imaginations which manifest themselves in our worlds and our lives. The questions is: What stories are worth telling well? Gilliam has at least been consistent enough to give a thoughtful and era-appropriate answer with each one of his works, even up through 2011's web-only release of his 20-minute short film "The Wholly Family" (available to 'rent' for $2.99 at terrygilliamweb.com). There is a much different outcome for this new 21st century child Jake than for Kevin, but I will withhold my spoiling of that cinematic fruit and instead shall urge you, the receivers, to view, reflect, and make something of your own in response.

Library Visit

Transcendence in art

Highlighter, sharpie, and ink pen on card catalog entry

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