proximoception

Leftovers postmortem:

( . . . )

But of course what I really mean is that the intense feelings we feel when scripture or screenwriting leads us beyond the edge of the world of causes that fit their effects are not useless errors. God and piled-up coincidences, while lies, can be shortcuts to the true and truly blessed state, where you remember that you matter because you're in the world and that the world matters because it's in you. That positive feedback loop of mattering (the "big" of Little, Big) has as its endpoint not a foolish narcissistic fantasy but the limits of our potential to both take and give, perceive and do, which are not only nowhere near where we typically are but far beyond where we imagine them to be. The one thing unforgivable in a story that brings us back some part of what we are when we really are is its own belief that we aren't that, not really - that the story itself is either a lie or depends for its truth on some force greater than nature (that is, on a lie).

If the shortcuts didn't think of themselves as shortcuts, as cheats ... then they wouldn't be. "By the incantation of this verse": I was not only capable of thinking I was more, but I put that thought into words that, read by anyone, make them think it, no matter how many times, no matter where, no matter when. There are parts of the world (words are part of the world) out of which the mind can make what will make the mind more.

The story must believe in itself. The most efficient, though not the easiest, way to do that is to be right. There is much to be right about. Much that we have been made to forget, because the intruder in our minds, the one that keeps us living (in general) far beneath our potential, would lose its power over us if we remembered and kept remembering.

Lindelof understands this, in part: the seekers of god or death are made to see that the ones they love are more than god or death to them. The immensity of their losses has in fact created the false, respectively positive and negative peaces they crave, proving the immensity of what they had had in the lost ones - and have still, or can gain again, in others. The true God, reality, isn't the one they've sought, and true death isn't the rest they've dreamed it into. Other people, too, are giants in time. Most moments make them and us seem like pygmies because most moments are distorted, are rippled, puff themselves up into convex mirrors to diminish our reflections.

Stories of the sort I mean are glasses, not blinders, correcting the lies of our eyes. Which is more wrong about the world, what we see out the window or the globe on the shelf?

Proust did what Kafka did in a different fashion, and to do that to Kafka was why Proust came. In reality parable's gain need not be reality's loss. Tripping over the invisible wire at our feet is quicker than throwing a world's worth of ink on the world. But it's crucial to know there's a choice.

The Leftovers 3.3

( . . . )

Rewatching all Lost was mostly a horrible slog. Rewatching Breaking Bad is a nonstop delight. We started with season 3 but immediately regretted it. With Lost, even on the rewatch, each episode felt like empty calories - what little value there was was projective, and of course the projective value turns out to be near nil since the deferred satisfactions don't arrive. Hard going once you know it. There was value to it once, it's true. But there can't be again, at least for me.

With Breaking Bad the disappointment of each episode ending, of having no time for more, is dwarfed by our gratitude for what we've been seeing. For being made full. It's great to be noticing new things, but everything that was great last time is there undiminished too, because none of it was mirage. All was load-bearing, and the load borne wasn't simplistic or late Lost's sixty-five tons of bullshit.

And how it improves as it goes is one of its impossible secrets - somehow you start to feel that's happening episode by episode, not just season by season or even cluster by cluster. And not as an average of each episode's scenes - it's just that each time a scene or character or situation that's been away for a bit recurs it's a better shot and written, more thought through version of itself.

Some of this has to be illusory - where critical mass, pun intended, is reached you start looking for new ways to love what you love. You work on its behalf. And you fucking love doing that.

Though while I'm one of the fierce finale-lovers I will say that there were stretches that didn't give the sense of being better versions of (whatever) than had appeared before. Victim of its own success, in that sense, though there's room to be grateful even there, since a send-off as beyond perfect as Ozymandias or beyond new as Granite State would have made withdrawal anguish, which I for one am still feeling acutely, even less bearable. Here's how acute it was: I'd been feeling restless and heart-achy a few weeks ago and couldn't figure out why. Then noticed it had been exactly one year since we'd watched the finale. I'm feeling withdrawal while watching and loving and responding with full fresh awe to each minute of season 5 again.

Another secret, maybe the secretest, seems to me to be knowing exactly what "grain" to aim for. TV shows' worst sin is not attending to, often because not knowing, the place any part has in the show as a whole - which matters because our brains look for such wholes. Obviously other shows, and certainly seasons, have had completed arcs, but since individual episodes have these, scenes within them do etc. there's a tendency to return to some Platonic set of norms and just inflect key moments and/or endings. The time-stamp's on pretty much everything in Breaking Bad. Maybe it has the writers' strike to thank for that, for throwing it off of season-sized arcs so early? Or the garden path aspect of the middle (Gus) third, where two motivations are presented for all of Walt's choices, forced and elective, such that our minds are taken off of his (d)evolution? Probably that progress itself is what keeps the show understanding how close to its ending to feel. Things will get as bad as they can and then - do another thing. And for some reason we do know how long doing another thing takes, even if Kennedy didn't. It takes one twenty-fifth as long. Forget this and we'll be annoyed at you forever - I'm looking at you, Ghost and A League of Their Own.

I think this is one of the reasons style is so important, too. We want artworks to look and feel distinct, not just conceptualize distinctly, so that they can more easily stand out as memories - the way memories do among other memories, in fact. Even within artworks we want that to be the case. A change in location, in pace, in the sorts of things one sees happening; all twinned with continuities, recurrences. That's all very basic, but when you understand it well enough you can do a lot of it at once, and simultaneously do it more subtly. Having it all seem natural while at the same time nudging every stray or confused thought of the appreciator back to where it should be. Intelligible nature, that nuttiest of paradoxes, or anyway hardest lightning to herd.

This may be mere serendipity too - steadily growing viewership leading to a higher budget for sets, sound editing, cameras, art directors etc., which change the ambience gradually enough that the changes seem organic, purposeful. And of course the writers and actors also are likely enough to know what they're doing better the longer they're at it. That's the silver lining to the relative chaos of the early days of any show, even Breaking Bad: the natural shift toward order and self-consciousness will feel like the movement toward mystery from out of the-mystery's-what-the-mystery-is of a good story. But eventually someone starts to suck, is how it mostly goes. That there was a sense of an oncoming ending, and not just a stopping that could be made to look like one, must have discouraged sucking as powerfully as positive attention incentivized new awesomeness.

This post has lost its own sense of where to end and has in general fallen into intolerability, so I'll wrap up. Three cheers for Breaking Bad!

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.

Lost is annoying me again. How can we kill time now, the writers think, then think, have him find and convince all the others in world B. Having someone go and convince X number of others of something--anyone not sick of this device by now?

Association of Ideas Theater: I saw a few minutes of Eddie and the Cruisers on Fuse the other day and realized it's not just a determining influence on Velvet Goldmine--past the point of plagiarism, thinly veiled by Haynes' attempts to reference Citizen Kane as cover (as I've mentioned before here)--but also quite a large one on The Watchmen, of all things. Conceptually, I mean; it's by no means a good film, but the premise had promise. Surely it and The Big Chill have some shared ancestor movie--one schematically closer than Kane? They're from the same year but awful similar.

Perhaps both owed something to The Man Who Fell to Earth, since in its bizarre way that movie, too, was a descendant of Citizen Kane--a debt alluded to and/or dodged in its overt Third Man obsession, I guess. There are only three failures there, but every good screenwriter knows three occurrences suggest infinity.

Looking for sparks among the scattered ember-members of something that once seemed real isn't unrelated to the falling away of a normal society or questing band, one by one (maybe inaugurated by "Childe Roland" and immediately echoed in Idylls of the King?), found in or varied on in The Grapes of Wrath, The Crying of Lot 49, Catch-22, Blood Meridian and elsewhere. The And Then There Were None tradition and the horror movie paradigm it spawned is another, less interesting cousin. Does Moby Dick predate "Roland"?

The last movement of The Last of the Mohicans movie is a striking example of cast attrition, though I don't know how closely it sticks to Cooper.

The broader attrition tradition must go back long before Cooper. Something's hovering near my consciousness. A Christmas Carol? Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Perhaps something in Shakespeare--progressive isolation is important in King Lear and Macbeth. Not insignificant in Julius Caesar and Richard III, either...

Oh, duh, The Odyssey.

I think I really must be forgetting some link or links in the Eddie part of the family tree though. I don't mean mere Kane imitations, like Lenny or whatever, but ones connecting the dead or missing Kane figure with a lost American innocence, the '60s, something like that.

They're framing Jacob as good and his pet evil (white and black shirts, the favors Jacob does the island-bound, the pet's irateness and cynicism about people etc.), and will then dally with the possibility of it being the other way (like they did with Widmore vs. Ben in seasons 3-5). There are already undertones: "What about you?" addressed to Ben had more of a 'puny insect' than 'selfish villain' ring.

Although: Sayid could be another trojan horse--perhaps the monster, after Jacob's death, was able to appear as Jacob to Hurley. He can't enter Sayid till Sayid dies, but if the Others drown Sayid while waiting for Jacob-magic to come out of the pool, magic which died with Jacob, the monster can once again fool everyone by animating Sayid's corpse. Though does he ever animate corpses, rather than reconstructing them? Maybe Sayid had already died and he's just pretending to be his body--was there some scene where everyone leaves Sayid alone for a while? I seem to remember there was. So Jacob really might be dead (though that's not the most compelling route dramatically), and the monster maybe now has access to the real temple and whatever's in it. Could Jacob be just a mortal-type immortal, a la Richard and the presumably very old samurai? We do see him eating fish, lighting a fire. Maybe he just got control of the monster way back when and is using him to pursue grandiose plans, like a boy finding a genie in a bottle.

Smoky wants to go home, perhaps "somewhere beyond the sea", while Jacob wants to make a sort of progress. That implies he's behind the breeding experiments, and his desire to be worshipped in statue form and compel medicinal ziggurat construction fits the notion he's up to something big and long-term. Walt has been let off the hook, and perhaps also Aaron, so Ethan and Claire (birthplace?) are the likeliest candidates for hosting Jacob or parenting his super-race or what have you. Not Sun surely? Unless her daughter's brought back. Though her father's pretty shady...Christian was probably really in on all this somehow, so what if him too?

What are the rules to Smoky? 1. Don't kill master, 2. Come when called, 3. Don't pass cocoa powder...He retinal-scanned Juliet at one point so maybe he can't hurt island Others? Also he backed down from hurting Locke, so perhaps he has to respect the lists. Though he can clearly destroy the off-island cultists. He also couldn't help Locke up when Locke's leg was broken from the fall down the well--perhaps the order extends to even touching Others?

What does he want with Sun? Clearly her ring and Christian's shoes--mailed mysteriously--somehow routed her and Locke's body to the present, so a "but that's not my ring" scene might be coming, or one in which Jin is given the ring by a Smoky stand-in. What routed Ben to the present? Probably simply not being one of the people Jacob needed, so he was stuck with Jeff Fahey and other inconsequential people.

Again they tease us with that damn watch. Did the comic book show up? Years ago we went frame by frame through Hugo's plane scenes to see if it was his, finding that every shot was deliberately constructed so you couldn't quite tell.

The quantum physics parallel worlds notion is so exasperating.

They've done nothing with Ben's lost love in quite a while. Ditto Libby's madness.

Jacob's symbols appeared when the numbers ran wild, belying the apathy everyone else displays toward the Swan button-pushing project.

Are Jacob & his dog from space or homegrown? The show whistles innocently around the possibility that one or both are behind monotheism. Faith and obedience ultimately get everyone in trouble, in these storylines. "Christian" indeed.

I forget the details of my theory--something about a nonexistent entity manipulating probability to make itself exist? Kind of a parody of the 'if you can imagine a perfect being it must exist, since how can something that fails to exist be perfect' argument. Exploiting micro-currents of quantum temporal instability to push the things around in the past that could lead to the one future in which it dwells (could any of these people have read Little, Big)? Something like an unreal lake swimming back up the river that would have created it if it existed, sucking its waters into the relevant changing of course. But the energies employed to accomplish this (big coincidence magnet-furnace) can be used against it--the same free play at a tiny level that it's exploiting to braid itself into being has spilled into (e.g.) Desmond's head, so the Thing will ultimately be defeated by Free Will in some probably fairly cheesy way.

Not sure how well that fits with the Jacob-as-mere-human theory. Probably not too well.

Questions I have:

1. Were the killers of Sayid's wife aiming for Sayid? Doesn't seem particularly in line with either Jacob's or Facob's plans for Sayid to die.

2. Did Widmore have and raise Penelope just to enamor Desmond, getting him onto and keeping him off of the island at two crucial points? He was needed to change how history was supposed to go, and then he was needed to go away and stop changing anything at all. Both Jacob and Facob seem dependent on people getting magno-charged enough to change the world, but once they've done so they're a threat to their plans. Whose needs did Desmond serve by pushing the button, not pushing the button, alerting '90s Daniel about time travel, getting Charlie to where he could shut down the signal blocker - Jacob's, because it got everyone off the island, or Facob's because they ultimately came back in a way that fooled Jacob into dropping his guard? I.e. who is Widmore serving.

3. Why aren't these entities allowed to kill? Facob can't kill Jacob, and needed the monster to kill Eko for him - perhaps he just led Eko to where the monster already was, even, and didn't actually give it orders. And we've seen that they don't actually possess corpses, more like reconstruct them. They do seem to be tangible, though, I seem to recall? Handing objects around and whatnot? My memory is failing.

Ethan actor b. 1965. Just saying. Also, who gives a damn about Ethan anymore? What a weak place to go with that. Though it's odd Jacob or something Jacoblike hasn't inhabited him yet; perhaps he'll come back as Christian's enemy entity.