The Monster in the Jungle:
Lost as American Gothic
The Gothic as a genre, literary or otherwise, is a slippery beast: on the one hand, critics argue that it represents escapist impulses; when a culture seemingly threatens its inhabitants with upheaval through change, most often linked with advances in technology, the gothic offers a fantastical world of otherworldliness as refuge. On the other hand, there are those, such as Teresa Goddu, who argue, “Instead of being gateways to other, distant worlds of fantasy, […] gothic stories are intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (2). Additionally, disagreement arises about what the dislocation and unease characteristic of the gothic represent-- psychological distress, social disorder, or perhaps a combination of both? The television show Lost can be understood as a twenty-first century adaptation of traditional gothic elements in order to create a world where the characters whose backstories frequently reveal great personal turmoil are constantly contending with vague menacing “others,” an assortment of exotic, dangerous animals, including a polar bear, and a compound where the technology fails to offer any solutions and in fact serves to sink the castaways further into the mysteries of the island. Here, the gothic acts as a prism for refracting personal and social anxieties and suffuses the landscape with familiar, though menacing, conventions that recall the early days of America when the seemingly endless forests symbolized both promise and danger. Originally a genre pessimistic about human nature, the Gothic conventions employed by Lost suggest mystical properties that can ultimately act as a positive force for the characters.
Gothic literature originates in Europe in the mid to late 18th century, where decaying castles and sinister monasteries created a backdrop for stories where ghosts apparently lurked in the attics, mysterious aristocrats threatened innocents with intentions unmistakably sexual and predatory, and psychological torment rose to a fever-pitch, verging on and at times descending into madness. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is arguably the most famous of this literature, but scores of lesser known works met the popular demand. The popularity of the gothic genre also contributed to its devaluation as a literary genre because of its association with sentimentality and excess (and perhaps its largely female audience). The gothic is sometimes interpreted as a repudiation of proper middle-class values and the ideals of the Enlightenment, which postulated that all could be understood in light of the rational mind.
An offshoot of the European tradition, the American Gothic had no decrepit castles or ruined abbeys to inhabit; the gothic in America took over the wilderness as its setting. Transplanting the gothic into American soil made it all that much more of a radically subversive genre; Using the myths of the New World as a land of innocence and a promised fresh start for its settlers, to imbue the promised land of the Puritans with the suggestion of sinister forces afoot called into doubt the most fundamental aspects of American identity. Although the setting for Lost is a remote southern hemisphere island where the airplane crashed after its departure from an Australian airport, the show takes its gothic conventions from American rather than European tradition. Most of the primary characters are, in fact, American, Jack, Kate, Locke, Sawyer, Hurley, Shannon, and Boone all hail from the United States, and Claire is the only central character actually from Australia. The setting is a wild no man’s land, evidently tropical but like the American forests, these are not gentle dells and garden groves; lurking in these environs are dangerous creatures, menacing “Others,” and bizarre apparitions.
The rise of technology is often identified as a contributing factor in the re-emergence of the gothic. A society experiencing fundamental challenges to its relationship with the physical world may reflect that anxiety through gothic conventions. During its early Gothic period, America was witnessing perhaps unparalleled technological advances, and the landscape was literally being transformed from a vast wilderness to tamed farmlands and burgeoning cities. Faced with this rapid change, American writers used the gothic to reflect elements of the profound anxiety the culture felt about a phenomenon and its yet undetermined impact on their lives. Peculiar to its American idiom, in the end, the technology helps to explain what otherwise seemed to be paranormal activity, restoring the assurance the world is understandable and that order hasn’t actually been disrupted. In Lost what initially seems like the characters’ entry into a world lacking basic technology is transformed by the discovery of the hatch and Locke’s subsequent attempts to open it. But, even opening the hatch only deepens the mystery, as found at the bottom of the hatch’s entry tunnel is a facility filled with technology of unknown purpose. Even the discovery of a fragment of videotape explaining the Dharma Initiative creates only further questions, as it issues directives but offers no solutions.
An exact definition of the gothic tradition proves stubbornly elusive, in large part because the core of the gothic is often a seemingly impenetrable mystery, one that can often be explained away by the end of the story. Thought to be the originator of the American gothic, the author Charles Brockden Brown used hypnosis and ventriloquism to account for the seeming paranormal in his stories. As Leslie Fielder observes:
For better or worse, then, Brown established in the American novel a tradition of dealing with the exaggerated and the grotesque, not as they are verifiable in any external landscape or sociological observation of manners and men, but as they correspond in quality to our deepest fears and guilts as projected in dreams or lived through in “extreme situations.” Realistic milieu and consistent character alike are dissolved in such projective fictions, giving way to the symbolic landscape and the symbolic action, which are the hallmarks of the mythopoeic novel. (155)
Lost back stories reveal the profound guilt that many of the characters feel, and their often striking moral lapses. The back story is often attached to a crisis of some kind that the character is experiencing on the island; the crisis acts a turning point to witness whether or not the character can redeem him/herself from his/her previous failing. In “The Moth,” for instance, Charlie struggles with his drug addiction, feeling invisible and worthless compared to his earlier life as a rising rock star. Having given his drugs to Locke to keep from him, Charlie is in the midst of withdrawl when a cave in traps Jack. We learn from the back story that Charlie as a rock star has given in to all of the temptations of the road, including using heroin, a complete change from the his pre-star life as a pious straight arrow. The peril of the cave in becomes Charlie’s chance at redemption, as he volunteers to crawl through a narrow hole to free the trapped doctor. Charlie locates Jack, helps free him from the rubble, and aids in snapping Jack’s dislocated shoulder back in place. Another cave in closes their escape route, but Charlie is able to locate another way out. The Charlie who emerges from the darkness of the cave is a different, stronger person than the heroin addict who was snorting in the plane’s bathroom when the wreck happened.
Initially, the lush tropical landscape of the island seems to offer the castaways a route to reclamation of lost innocence; mostly all strangers to each other, the survivors of the crash have an opportunity to withhold whatever damning secrets they may possess. The backstories reveal to the audience but not the other castaways that many of the characters have found themselves on the doomed flight for reasons they would likely prefer no one else learn. Certainly, the most obvious of these is Kate, whom we find out has been handcuffed on the flight and under the guard of a U.S. Marshal. Shannon and Boone have committed a seeming but not actual act of incest (a prominent motif in gothic literature), Sawyer has killed a man in cold blood, believing himself to have enacted revenge only to find out that he himself has been manipulated into murdering a stranger. Even Jack is returning to the U.S. with the body of his father, the son having betrayed his father, who then winds up dead in Australia. Hurley is convinced he is cursed, having used a sequence of numbers to buy a winning lottery ticket only to have his life and those around him endure a series of bad luck. Although the characters initially believe their rescue is imminent, for most of the survivors, their trip to Australia was a desperate effort to set their lives aright. The guilt of the characters surfaces in the crazy landscape of the island, the darkness of their lives reflected in the island’s mysteries. As Frederick Frank suggests, “While the English Gothic had dealt with physical terror and social horror, the American gothic would concentrate on mental terror and moral horror.” The main characters are all morally compromised in some way, and the island manifests their hidden sins, the question of why is one of the most persistent looming mysteries.
The potential of the gothic becomes realized when the characters appreciate that all mystery is not disguising evil; beneath mystery can be something quite positive. Edgar Allan Poe employed the elements of horror, many of which are gothic, in his short stories because, as he argues, they produce a quasi-mystical experience of sustained, intense emotion, as close to the sublime as one could expect on earth. Certainly the island has offered up terrors, but it also at times seems to supply the characters with mystical experiences that help them begin to resolve the burden of guilt they brought to the island. Early in the series, Jack, a surgeon, is stretched to the breaking point by the needs of his fellow castaways. The survivors turn to him as a leader, which he only reluctantly accepts. A critical water shortage is an immediate threat that has to be contended with. The demands of these days after the wreck leave Jack sleep-deprived. He believes that an apparition he sees in the jungle is his dead father. In the following clip, Jack winds up clinging for his life after charging after the apparition. Locke, who has gone into the jungle to look for water, rescues Jack.
Locke, whom we discover later has good reason to believe in the powers of the island, attempts to shift Jack’s attitude about the island. In a pivotal exchange, the man of science has to learn that even a situation that has a seemingly reasonable explanation may ultimately defy being reduced to a medical condition resulting from a lack of sleep. The shaman like Locke stops Jack from returning to the others until he finds what he’s looking for. Later, as Jack stares into the fire in a nearly trance state, and he (ironically) hears the tinkle of ice cubes in a glass, something characteristic of his father, he once again (though more cautiously) plunges into the darkness, finding a clearing where he discovers a sparking waterfall. He also discovers a casket, presumably his father’s, which he opens only to find out is empty. In a rage Jack utterly demolishes the casket, at once manifesting the delirium of his sleep deprivation but also symbolically destroying the very thing that prevents him from assuming the leadership role—the guilt that has impaired him even worse than lack of sleep is dashed at least enough to liberate Jack. The back story reveals Jack betrayed his father because he was following a higher moral law, denying his blood bonds to obey the Hippocratic oath, as a true leader has to forego at times familial allegiances in order to serve the needs of all. Though the Jack who has landed on the island is able to serve the physical needs of the castaways, he cannot provide the leadership they desperately need.
[FLASHBACK]:
JACK: I want you to listen to me, okay. Because I'm asking you a favor, Chrissy. I'm standing in front of you in the same suit that I'm wearing to my father's funeral and I'm asking you a favor. In 16 hours I need to land at LAX, and I need that coffin to clear customs because there's going to be a hearse waiting there. And I need that hearse to take me and that coffin to a cemetery.Why? Why, Chrissy, can't I just bring him to a funeral home and make all the arrangements? Why can't I really take my time with it? Because I need it to be done. I need it to be over. I just -- I need to bury my father.
[PRESENT]:
[Shot of Jack at caves looking at the coffin. He opens it and there's no body inside. He gets angry and beats it with a metal pipe.]1
The Jack who emerges from the forest primeval is reborn as a decisive leader whose words of inspiration begin to coalesce the group into a unified force that will work together for its survival. Although Jack’s trip into the jungle has been terrifying, dangerous, and painful, he has become the better man for it.
The gothic viewers encounter in Lost is not simply a retread of early American stories; instead, the adaptation of gothic elements creates a climate rife with ambiguity. The dislocation of the setting at times plunges the characters into the equivalent of a moral fog, forcing them to face their failings. But where the early American gothic frequently presented an ultimately dark vision of the human psyche with, as Leslie Fielder terms, “extreme situations,” Lost suggests these trials enable at least some of the characters to tap into their true natures and arrive at the end better for it. The initial promise of a fresh start the jungle island suggests is in a way fulfilled but not just in the fact of the castaways break from civilization. Classic in the American consciousness is the idea of wild landscape as symbolic of the unpredictable realm of the imagination. For early Americans still cowering under the shadow of Puritan influence, no good could come from releasing the imagination’s powers; for the characters in Lost, however, their greatest hope for salvation may come from jumping into the mystery head long.
Laura Dickinson
This paper was originally presented at the 2007 MidAtlantic Conference on Popular Culture in Philadelphia as part of the panel Lost: Poststructural Metanarrative or Postmodern Bildungsroman?
Notes
1“White Rabbit.” Written by Christian Taylor. Directed by Kevin Hooks. ABC, October 20, 2004. Transcript by spooky at http://lost-tv.com/transcripts/White_Rabbit_Lost.htm.
References
Fielder, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966.)
Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.)
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition,” (1846); available at bartleby.com, http://www.bartleby.com/109/11.html