Finding Lost, getting lost1
I was a latecomer to Lost, its mythology, and its fandom. Confined mostly to the library and my computer desk’s chair through the autumn of 2004, my television viewing was restricted to the guilty pleasures of Reality TV. Made accessible precisely because I need not pay close attention or even necessarily see the previous episode(s), Reality TV programs like Survivor or The Amazing Race provided a welcome distraction and required little of my attention. Curiously enough, it was my interest in Survivor that led me to Lost in the first place. As Lost’s early ratings suggested a smash-hit in the making, the program’s Canadian carrier, CTV, launched a promotional blitz in the first week of December. To my shock and amusement, I had missed two months of what the network was now marketing as “the real life Survivor.” Despite the obvious absurdity of CTV’s claim – while many elements of Survivor are scripted or staged, it is as “real” as any game show; the same cannot be said of any serialized drama – the tagline proved too provocative to dismiss as mere hyperbole and Lost gained a new viewer.
CTV has good reason to situate Survivor as a precursor and major influence of Lost, and they were not the only media outlet to do so – USA Today, TV Guide, and Rolling Stone, not to mention dozens of bloggers, noticed the similarities almost immediately after the program debuted. And while any superficial comparison of Lost to Survivor and other Reality TV programming would fail to provide the fodder for deep analytical work, it deserves a brief mention. As in a typical season of Survivor, the cast of Lost is stranded on a tropical island; as revealed in the second season, there were also two groups of “losties” – a term that is used variously, and not without some confusion, in reference to both the characters and the fans of the show – referred to by fans as the “fusies” and the “tailies," respectively; the characters have engaged in competitions for supplies, not unlike Reward Challenges; and the first season of Lost has been measured variously at 42 and 44 days long, the longest season of Survivor also having run for 42 days. Lost’s creative team acknowledges the similarities in more self-conscious and explicit ways, as well. In the first season episode “The Greater Good”, Sawyer speaks the unmistakably Survivor-inspired line “you voting me off?,”2 and for some time the only link at The Fuselage – “the official site of the creative team behind Lost” – that was not affiliated with ABC was for an online Survivor fantasy game.
Of course, Survivor is by no means the only precursor or ancestor text to Lost. Co-creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof have cited influences such as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, and Star Trek, while ABC’s former chairman Lloyd Braun saw similarities with the Tom Hanks film Cast Away,3 and critics commonly compare Lost to cult-hits such as The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In describing the relationship of Lost to these inspirations, and disaster films in particular, Lindelof remarks that “Lost felt like our version. But it was not an homage, not a conscious thing."4 Whether conscious or not, Lost’s textual and televisual genealogy is a complicated and confusing reminder that influence is seldom a direct and obvious process, and that simply producing a catalogue of influences is inadequate to the task of explaining one text’s relationship to its individual and collective ancestors. For example: Mark Burnett did not simply invent the shipwreck survival story that underlies Survivor, nor was he the first to imagine the concept for the shipwreck game show. Rather, Burnett, purchased the American license for the Swedish Reality TV franchise Expedition Robinson – a show which, as the name implies, was largely inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – and repackaged it as his own creation, Survivor. Lost is an interpretation with variation, or revision, of a show that is itself a revision of a revision. (Of course, this is to assume that Defoe’s novel is not itself a revision, or that no other ancestor texts are in play – neither of which, I hope it is clear, is true.)
To restate this relationship in theoretical terms, Lost is a trope of Survivor, and so is also a trope of a trope. A trope can be defined as any sign – be it a name, an image, or even a more complex construction such as a character – with a meaning in excess of its literal interpretation. As such, Lost should be considered both a unique television program with a distinct set of themes and characters as well as an interpretation or revision of the themes and characters that have preceded and inspired it. In fact, Lost’s complex and often self-conscious relationship to its precursors in all varieties of genre and media – as well as its writers’ and actors’ acknowledgement of these links – lends the program particularly well to analysis as a product of “poetic misprision”: what Harold Bloom describes as “a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation."5 In its producers’ blatant act of misreading and misinterpreting canons of television, film, and fiction, Lost exceeds and revises the arbitrary boundaries of genre and narrative. Discontent to see their efforts go unnoticed, the creators, actors, and marketers are all too self-conscious of their audience and their response, and so also draw attention to these acts of misprision as they are occurring. In so doing, Lost’s self-reflexivity allows viewers to participate in piecing together and revealing the show’s poetic misprisions – a critical and creative act that has nearly always been restricted to professional television critics and academic theorists. To paraphrase Bloom, Lost presents the viewer with the tools necessary to learn how to watch Lost and why.
Lost provides the grounds for an imagined encounter between its various influences, implying an equivalence among its constituent genres and media by drawing inspiration from a vast expanse of ostensibly “high” and “low” culture. Regardless of their artistic status, diverse cultural products such as the Driveshaft internet fan-site, the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Turn of the Screw, and Flash/Green Lantern: Faster Friends must be treated as interpretive keys of equal importance with regard to Lost. While network television rarely expects such critical work of the typical television viewer, studies of Lost’s viewers would seem to indicate that either the networks have been wrong all along or that Lost’s viewers are in no way typical. Lynette Porter and David Lavery’s survey of Lost fans would seem to imply that the latter is indeed the case:
All fandoms, at some level, actively engage with the source text of their fandom. What makes Lost fans different is that they have formed a discourse community or knowledge network – a group of individual devoting time and effort into discussing, analyzing, and investigating their favorite series as though it were a distinct discipline of study.6
According to Porter and Lavery, during the first and second seasons fans devoted an average of 11 hours a week to various Lost-related activities, a great deal of which was spent discussing the series on message boards and considering theories that would explain the show’s mysteries.7
As an interactive experience, Lost allows and encourages its viewers to become agents and participants in the building of meaning – or at least allows them a glimpse of what sort of viewer they have the potential to become. Bloom explains that “the strong reader, whose readings will matter to others as well as to himself, is thus placed in the dilemmas of the revisionist, who wishes to find his own original relation to truth.”8 And while that “original truth” may not coincide with every revelation that the island provides, the point is in returning the agency to the viewers so that they may feel free, and even justified, in actively reading and misreading Lost – and television on the whole. Whether the viewer is ultimately right or wrong, the point is in realizing a critical and productive engagement with media. Indeed, to quote executive producer Carlton Cuse: "[y]our imagination is probably greater than whatever solution we'll give you.”9
In A Map of Misreading, Bloom expands upon the reach and range of misprision, suggesting that its use is widespread and by no means restricted to those who we would privilege with the status of producers of culture. While misprision is most commonly conceived of as a critical act that one writer’s text “performs upon another,” he adds that it “does not differ in kind from the necessary critical acts performed by every strong reader upon every text he encounters.”10 However, this is not to exaggerate the agency of the viewer’s imagination with respect to constructing the meanings of a TV show, as the show’s misreadings and revisions of its milieu and itself suggest a high-degree of creator reflexivity. As well, there is clearly something about the show, its marketing, and its personnel that encourages this sort of viewer participation. In The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom explains that “‘[i]nfluence’ is a metaphor, one that implicates a matrix of relationships – imagistic, temporal, spiritual, psychological… What matters most…is that the anxiety of influence comes out of…‘poetic misprision.’”11 Television series’ are especially and deeply entangled in this anxiety. In an industry where no success-story is without its clone – and the spawns of Big Brother, Survivor and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? are particularly numerous and, too often, loathsome – reinterpretation becomes part of TV’s survival code. In the simplest sense of the word, Lost’s reliance on the reinterpretation of older texts is not what makes the show unique or interesting. But as Bloom hints in the above quote, though relationships of influence and reinterpretation mark every text, misprision does not occur in every instance of reinterpretation. As such, it is not that Lost suffers from an anxiety of influence that is important, but rather that it is conscious and reflexive with respect to its relationships with those same influences. To quote Lindelof, working on Lost involves the self-conscious effort to take what might otherwise be a “boilerpot procedural” and “ask how to make something exciting, how can it look and feel different?.”12
While one might imagine that a break with the boilerpot procedural occurs only with some difficulty on the part of either the creators or the viewers, Lost manages the feat with relative ease. This difficulty managed, in part, by the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Lost appears to train its ideal viewer. Indeed, while subtle and complex acts of cognitive reorientation are required with every new clue that contradicts, enhances, or totally redirects our viewing attention, such evaluations and reevaluations can happen at multiple points in an episode, and Lost fans are surprisingly adept at catching and researching such clues. In fact, such critical skepticism and flexibility is demanded of the viewer with the very beginning of the pilot, which serves as a primer of sorts for what is to follow. As in a classical epic, the viewer joins Lost in medias res – as Abrams explains, “Damon said we should start on a guy who’s in the jungle…it had who, where, why, what – every important question was right there. So, clearly, you would want to see what it was like to have been on that flight. I think flashbacks were implicit, it came with the territory of starting with the guy in the jungle.”13 The questions of “who, where, why, and what” begin with the image of a man in a suit lying on the jungle floor and a shoe dangling from a tree above him, but they hardly end there. That he stumbles subsequently on to a beach with a wrecked plane proposes more questions than it answers – and the same could be said of every additional episode.
During the show’s second season, a significant amount of fan and creator anxiety was expressed over the revelations of the hatch and “the others”. An executive producer of Lost, Carlton Cuse admits that every new development and addition to Lost’s already complicated mythology “risks shattering the audience's suspension of disbelief.”14 First led to believe that the losties were alone on a magical island, the appearances of Ethan Rom and the Dharma Initiative hatch lead viewers to reconsider everything they thought they knew about the island. For instance, among the various fan theories, “They’re in Purgatory” has ceded considerable ground to “It’s a Science Experiment” – and invited new comparisons to programs like Big Brother and movies like Jurassic Park. Supposed influences are also alluded to in subtle fashion from within the narrative itself. Having advised the press that an obscure novel called The Third Policeman would feature in a future episode, writer Craig Wright told the Chicago Tribune that “[w]hoever goes out and buys that book will have a lot more ammunition in their back pocket as they theorize about the show.”15 While any viewer could have blinked and missed its momentary appearance on a book shelf, Dalkey Archive Press sold more copies of the book in the month after the episode was broadcast than it had in the previous 15 years.16 More impressive to note, the interest in The Third Policeman is hardly an anomaly. Lost Hatch.com includes comprehensive lists of every book, song, movie, and game that has ever appeared or been referenced in the show on the off-chance that one or some will provide the key to decoding the mystery.17 It is, after all, these viewers who are left the task of decoding the creators’ messages, and Abrams and Lindelof are more than willing to defer certain interpretive powers. To quote Lindelof, “[s]ome things are intentional in terms of clues for the show, other things are more subjective. If someone thinks it’s Locke’s shoe,” dangling above Jack’s head in the pilot, “who’s to say it’s not.”18 Whether victims of a prank or not, viewers had at least shown a willingness to engage with Lost on an entirely new level. Though it remains to be seen whether critical skepticism might eventually give way to an outright rejection of the show’s opaqueness, the creators’ balancing act seems to be working for the time.
Lost’s most idiosyncratic convention – the flashbacks that supplement a story occurring in the narrative present of every episode – certainly fulfills the need for something that “feels different” at the structural level. Often metaphorically linked – if not narratologically – to the events unfolding in the losties’ present, the flashback urges fans to constantly reappraise what they think they know of the characters in the here-and-now. More subtly, the flashbacks also often revise the show’s previous continuity, adding new significance to past events or even creating entirely new pasts. Indeed, Bloom further describes misprision as “[a] re-aiming or a looking-over-again, leading to a re-esteeming or a re-estimating…the revisionist strives to see again, so as to esteem and estimate differently, so as to aim ‘correctively.’”19 As an example, when Hurley assures Walt in the episode “Raised By Another” that he would get the $17,000 Hurley lost to him in a game of backgammon, the viewer could hardly be blamed for thinking it a joke or dismissive remark.20 But as the Hurley-focused episode “Numbers”, which aired later in the season, revealed Hurley to have won a $160 million dollar lottery, not only does “you’ll get it” take on an entirely different meaning, but Hurley’s seemingly rampant but innocuous sarcasm must be reassessed.21
While it would normally be prudent to avoid conflating the actors with their characters, such an act is not only unavoidable in a discussion of Lost, but necessary. Jorge Garcia’s Hurley offers perhaps the most explicit instances of narrative self-reflexivity as an ostensible mouthpiece for viewers and their concerns. Garcia suggests that “in many respects…Hurley represents the audience. He’s the everyman who asks the questions the audience is asking.”22 And indeed, Garcia would know better than most, as he regularly fields fan questions at The Fuselage website. John Fiske suggests that, to varying degrees, “television personalities merge into their characters or are submerged by them,” though this is mostly a “psychological carryover” in the viewer and not the result of explicit creator interventions.23 In the case of Hurley, however, creator intervention is both admitted and apparent, as several episodes give evidence to Garcia’s suggestion that Hurley “represents the audience.” In “Numbers,” Hurley hunts down Danielle Rousseau because he is led to believe that she knows what a seemingly cursed set of numbers might actually mean or represent. Hurley might just as well be speaking for the confused and frustrated viewers when he tells her that “I just go along with it because I'm along for the ride…Well guess what? Now, I want some friggin' answers!.”24 Similarly, when the audience discovers during the second season episode “Collision” that the white male “tailie” is, in fact, the husband that the Afro-American Rose has been pining for since early in the first season, their surprise is shared by Hurley, who admits that he “Didn’t see that coming.”25
Sara Gwenllian-Jones contends that television characters are essentially “incomplete and incompletable” as they “exist as liminal entities poised between tele-presence and absence.”26 The viewer, of course, performs the act of misreading that offers provisional completion to the character, and Abrams and Lindelof seem particularly conscious of this readerly function. In the case of Lost actor Terry O’Quinn, who plays John Locke, these absences which require intervention are perhaps as explicit and intentional as can be. While O’Quinn denies that Locke was created with him in mind, it is commonly reported that he was the first actor cast and he nonetheless admits that he is the only original cast member who won the job without an interview.27 Described variously as “a rangy man with a shaved head and a where-have-I-seen-that-guy? kind of face” and a “journeyman actor,” the conflation of Locke and O’Quinn – and even the actor, the character, and the 17th Century philosopher – is common among O’Quinn’s interviewers and fans. In fact, it is not uncommon for various interviews with and puff-pieces on the actor to be structured around Locke’s credo that “everyone gets a new life on this island” or the Lockeian concept of “tabula rasa.”28
O’Quinn’s Locke is somewhat ominously introduced in “Walkabout” as a hunter-gatherer-type with a case full of knives, and though, in a flashback, Locke’s boss later casts doubt on the veracity of John’s military credentials, he is called “colonel” by his friends and co-workers.29 Indeed, the reliability of Locke’s military credentials are simply assumed by the common television viewer, who likely recognizes O’Quinn from one or more of the twenty-one law enforcement and military officers that he has played and are most frequently associated with him.30 John Ellis explains that the tendency to project an actor’s body of work or personality on to a character – or vice versa – is entirely common, as “the two become very much entangled, so that the performer’s image is equated with that of the fictional role.”31 Rarely, though, does the conflation seem so appropriate or complete as with Locke and O’Quinn. Viewer and actor alike share in the entanglement and confusion, as O’Quinn admits to having a greater control over Locke than himself: “You create the character from a script and you control, to a great extent, how complicated that character becomes. But you yourself?.”32 Multiple sources from the cast and crew of Lost also report that O’Quinn actively blurs the distinction between himself and his character on set, at times distancing himself from the rest of the cast and even learning to throw a knife so as to better embody his character.33 In fact, it becomes difficult to determine whether Locke is a misreading of O’Quinn or the reverse. As Ian Somerhalder – Lost’s late Boone Carlyle – explains: “On this show art clearly imitates life and then life starts imitating art.”34
Speaking of his decision to accept the role of Locke, O’Quinn explains how he told his wife that: "'Things are at a crossroads. And if ‘Lost’ isn't the crossroads, it's the bridge to the other side'."35 For the critical viewer – Bloom’s “strong reader” – Lost is likewise a bridge, though what lies on “the other side” and how long it will take to cross it is as yet unknown. Unlike the faux democracy of Reality TV – where the audience is merely offered a vote, if any agency at all – Lost offers an enigma that demands some form of critical engagement and encourages its audience to actively misread and revise its many textual levels. In this rhetorical game of “real life Survivor,” viewers may miss various codes and their interpretations may lose validity as the series continues, but a correct answer is hardly the point – to quote Cuse once more, "[y]ou have to watch because you're enjoying the journey, not because you are waiting for the endgame."36 The viewer who is savvy enough to identify the hidden-levels of even a handful of Lost's tropes and interrogate their origins, as well as their purposes, may not find a truth at the center of the puzzle – and indeed, for Bloom one reader’s act of completion is another’s utter failure – but he or she will at least gain a greater appreciation for what it means to be lost.
Neil Shyminsky
Ph.D. student in Social and Political Thought
York University, Toronto, Canada
Notes
1 This paper is based on a short presentation at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference in Atlanta, GA on 13 April, 2006. I must thank my partner, Victoria Kannen, for her involvement with the crafting of this paper at every step. back
2 J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, and Damon Lindelof. Lost. “The Greater Good.” Written by Leonard Dick. Directed by David Grossman. ABC, 4 May 2005; and The Fuselage. The Official Site of the Creative Team Behind LOST. 2006. Accessed 29 March 2006. Available online: http://www.thefuselage.com/. back
3 Mark Cotta Vaz. The Lost Chronicles: The Official Companion Book. Interview with J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. New York: Hyperion: 2005. 79.; Craig, Olga. “The Man Who Discovered Lost – and Found Himself Out of a Job.” The Telegraph. 14 August 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/14/wlost14.xml. The comparisons attributed to critics represent only a small sample of recurring comparisons, and articles making such comparisons are easily found through a routine Google search. back
4 “Q&A: J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof,” 79. back
5 Harold Bloom. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973, xxiii. back
6 Lynnette Porter and David Lavery. Unlocking the Meaning of Lost: An Unauthorized Guide. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2006, 173. back
7 Porter and Lavery, 172, 170. back
8 Harold Bloom. A Map of Misreading. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975, 4. back
9 Quoted in: Joanna Weiss. “How ‘Lost’ Reinvented Television.” The Boston Globe. 6 November 2005. http://www.austin360.com/television/content/movies/television/2005/ 11/6lost.html. back
10 A Map of Misreading, 3. back
11 The Anxiety of Influence, xxiii. back
12 Quoted in: Vaz, 31. back
13 Quoted in: Vaz, 78. back
14 Michael Idato. “Asking for Trouble.” The Sydney Morning Herald. 22 August 2005. http://www.smh.com.au/news/tv--radio/asking-for-trouble/2005/08/20/ 1124435180515.html. back
15 Patrick T. Reardon. “’Lost’ Book Mention may be Good for Small Press”. The Indianapolis Star. 29 September 2005. http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050929/LIVING/509290361/1007. back
16 “Lost Revives Irish Novel Interest.” BBC. 24 February 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4746918.stm. back
17 Charlie and David. “Books Referenced.” Lost Hatch.com. 4 April 2006. http://www.losthatch.com/books.aspx. back
18 Quoted in: Vaz, 78. back
19 A Map of Misreading, 4. back
20 “Raised by Another.” Written by Lynne E. Litt. Directed by Marita Grabiak. ABC, 1 December 2004. back
21 “Numbers.” Written by Brent Fletcher and David Fury. Directed by Daniel Attias. ABC, 2 March 2005. back
22 Quoted in: Vaz, 43.
back
23 John Fiske. Television Culture. London: Routledge, 1991, 350. back
25 “Collision”. Written by Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Leonard Dick. Directed by Stephen Williams. ABC, 23 November, 2005. back
26 Gwenllian-Jones, Sara. “The Sex Lives of Cult Television Characters.” Screen 43 (2000), 86. back
27 Todd Gilchrist. “Lost Cast Interviews.” IGN. 6 Sept 2005http://dvd.ign.com/articles/648/648063p3.html. back
28 While there are many examples, I refer particularly to these: Bill Keveney. “Actor has a Lock on ‘Lost’” USA Today, March 29, 2005. http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/life/20050330/d_locke30.art.htm.; and the AP article “The Mystery Man of ‘Lost’.” CNN.com, March 2, 2005. http://www.lost-media.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=494 back
29 “Walkabout.” Written by David Fury. Directed by Jack Bender. ABC, 13 October 2004. back
30 This number is derived from the roles listed on imdb.com, and so includes any character whose name was preceded by a title that denotes military or law-enforcement – ex. General Nicholas Alexander, Assistant Director Kendall, etc. – and has been verified against online biographies or film and episode summaries when available. It is possible that the number is higher than 21 where such designations were not included on imdb.com, but it is not likely to be any lower. back
31 John Ellis. Visible Fictions. London: Routledge, 1982, 349. back
32 Terry O’Quinn. “Re: Are you at all like Locke?” The Fuselage. 23 January 2005. http://www.thefuselage.com/Threaded/showthread.php?t=4279. back
33 The knife throwing is recounted by stunt coordinator Michael Vendrell in Vaz, 49. back
35 “The Mystery Man of ‘Lost’.” back