proximoception | (no subject)

From a website ranting about the worst 50 people of the year - Lost writer Damon Lindelof gets an entry somewhere in the middle:

Lindelof first conjured a confusing yet entertaining sci-fi epic but then, despite its mechanical sound, the “Smoke Monster” turns out to be the ghost of the father of liberal philosophy, side plots about mental illness and alternate universes go nowhere, paper-thin characters inexplicably commune with the dead, and finally, in a clichéd, Old Testament-inspired supernatural battle, evil is defeated when a big rock dildo is crammed into a shiny hole by a handsome, emotionless doctor. And the whole damn thing—concocted entirely on the fly, with no eye toward resolution—from the plane crash to the time travel was actually just some brightly-lit, stained glass, feel-good, new-age, ecumenical afterlife delirium. Right. Fuck you, Damon Lindelof. Fuck you, for stealing 127 hours of our lives, giving us hope that television needn’t be utterly awful, and then shitting out the most hackneyed, series-diminishing, spiritually pandering, lowest common denominator deus ex machina to ever air on TV. Fuck you. Fuck you with a fake beard.

I don't understand the beard part. But I agree with the rest. I am still angry.

But after actually reading what I pasted: what does he mean the whole series was delirium? No it wasn't. All the dead people go to the Coexist afterland as they die is all, though starting out in a Swedenborgian foyer. The series stuff actually happened, it just wasn't explained. Other than the light in the hole being presumably the same vague benevolence that runs the next world. I had less of a problem with the afterlife tangent than with them not even trying to tie the plot up. That's the narrative sin we didn't even have a name for, pre-Lost, because it had never happened. (At least in the ranter's hallucinated version the whole thing was a dream, which would at least be a halfway-coherent cop-out.) We speak of plot holes, sure, but never a hole a whole plot's flushed down.

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Wow, this makes me really glad I never watched it. Smug, even.

Watching the first three seasons and then stopping might be ideal.

I think the fake beard is the end of Season 2, no. When it turns out that the bearded guy (can't remember his name -- Tom?) isn't leading the Others: Ben is.

Oh right! Tom, yes.

I could never get into this show because I found the dialogue and character dynamics incredibly tedious. Tou were able to get around this?

Yes, you learn to screen out the generic ABC stuff: absurdly cliched handlings of love triangles, musical montages, torture, revenge-mindedness, medical sequences etc. Actually at times they do too. It's there most strongly in the beginning, but recurs as a sort of cancer that eventually kills the show.

It's probably less tolerable on Lost than on other network shows because it's completely cynical there. The writers care about most of that as little as you do but just insert it. Pretty much contractually.

The thing it's hard to explain to people who weren't sucked in is its "giving us hope that television needn’t be utterly awful" - no one claims Lost was great always, or on average. It was just unspeakably great in what it was able to hint at.

And it backed away from its own self-knowledge. The show made a near approach to something, to a lost Lost, and not by accident. But there were too many ties on it and it had to let that go.

Hunh.

its "giving us hope that television needn’t be utterly awful"

I would, of course, argue that shows like Twin Peaks and Mad Men more than accomplish that.

It was just unspeakably great in what it was able to hint at.

What do you think that was? A way of telling stories? Some kind of deeper truth?

Well, the blogger's words, not mine - but the feeling is accurate. Mad Men gives a different version of that feeling, though in my experience also its own version of the let-down feeling whenever writing-by-numbers resumes. While Twin Peaks is the primary precursor of Lost in every respect, including its particular form of failure, alas - when Lynch wasn't around to make it his again.

The sense that the world is other and more than we just now felt it to be, is what we seek in some form in art, we who are more than just diverted by it in passing. There's two approaches, though I think they can ultimately meet up: Mad Men starts with the world we're in and makes little sparks where bits the hardness of the world we expect it to be and the solidity of the world we suddenly recognize it's always been grind against each other.

Lost, and the fantastic/allegorical tradition generally, follows the method of creating a world impossible in one or many aspects, then lets us know by flarings or gradual heating that the world we live in is this world, as it were under a mask, a recognition coming simultaneously with the knowledge that what we thought was our world is a mask as well, since what we took for impossible's proved somehow true.

I think if you go on long enough you're going to be talking religion or what religion usurps. Psychology and cosmology meet because the issue is what we are in relation to it, it in relation to us. Lost finally fell back for financial reasons into bad religion, into safe lies about what we are, what it is. Mad Men's keeping it live so far: there, It is history, is every dark thing in us that history's continuing existence proves we can't yet stomp into shape.

But Lost did truly amazing things with sudden flarings.

I just read your reply for the second time. It's great. You nail what's great about Mad Men by explaining what's great about Lost.

Thanks for this. Somehow I had never (Had I never? It seems absurd!) articulated my relation to art in this way. It makes complete sense.

I'll be damned, I think you just explained the purpose of fiction.