Posts Tagged ‘ Paradigm Shift ’

Songwriting for a 24-Hour Theatre Project

May 19, 2013
By

The Invitation

In mid-March, my friend and colleague Kat Koppett asked me if I’d be involved in a pretty unique way in the 3rd Annual Capital Region / Berkshires 24-Hour Theatre Project, which premiered last night, Saturday, May 18, 2013.

In this project presented by WAM Theatre and The Mop & Bucket Company, a crowd of theatre artists gather in a big room on a Friday night. Five playwrights are each teamed with a director, a stage manager and a cast of from three to five actors, with everyone’s names (and the cast size for each play) selected out of hat/bowls. A “prompt” is given — a brief phrase — and the playwrights have until early the next morning to delver a new one-act play inspired somehow by the prompt. The five plays’ brand new companies, along with a full complement of designers and technicians, rehearse and produce the plays throughout the next day and present them in a show that Saturday night.

Two years ago, I was involved in the region’s first 24-Hour theatre project as a composer/musician, making myself available to whatever the production might need. I didn’t end up being asked to compose anything, though I did play a number of well-known songs as pre-show music and for two of the five plays.

This year, I was asked to participate as a songwriter responding to the same prompt as the playwrights, writing original songs for performance as musical interludes between the one-act plays. It was a pretty irresistible invitation. I felt that my experience in writing challenge-based songs as a past participant in the SpinTunes songwriting contest and some related endeavors, as well as my work improvising songs with The Mop & Bucket Company, would serve me well. Since it was an experimental addition to the project, I got to be involved in figuring out just how it would all go. It turns out that the situation we put into place worked out really well.

Preparing For What You Can’t Prepare For

For simplicity, we decided to leave the songwriting aspect of the project out of the random name selections, instead teaming me with two members of the Mopco improv theatre group in which Kat and I work together. Peter Delocis and All Over Albany‘s Mary Darcy are both veterans of not only musical theatre performance but also improvising songs and musical theatre pieces with Mopco, and they were both already involved with the 24-Hour project as assistant producers. Initially brought on as singers, it became natural to get them involved as co-lyricists, though we would be doing “real” songwriting, getting everything set ahead of time and rehearsing, instead of improvising anything for the very first time only once in front of the audience.

Discussing how things would go with Kat and with WAM Theatre Artistic Director and Co-Founder Kristen van Ginhoven, we decided that the goal would be, ideally, to create three songs, since three plays comprised the first act and two plays were in the second act, making for three set changes in front of the audience that could be made more entertaining with a song, like in many classic stage musicals. We also decided that the songwriters would work only on the songs for the musical interludes, as opposed to also being made available for music and/or songs for any of the rest of the production.

Mary, Peter and I met for dinner a few weeks before the event to discuss how we might want to go about things, knowing that nothing we said would be set in stone, and especially knowing that we could end up inspired in new directions once we heard the prompt. We came away from that dinner with some basic notions. The first and most basic was that it would probably be nice if Mary and Peter each had a solo, with a third song being a duet.

Another idea was that it would be neat to take three different songwriting approaches — lyrics followed by music, music followed by lyrics, and music and lyrics written together. This didn’t really suggest anything about who would do each role in each of these three approaches, since it’s possible to write music and lyrics either solo or collaboratively. So that brought us to the question of who would be doing what for each song.

While I enjoy collaborating a lot, and Mary and Peter both liked the idea of it as well, my inclination was that, given the time pressure, it probably wouldn’t be wise to try to do any full-on collaboration on any aspect of a song. The kinds of back-and-forth discussions and deliberations collaborators often have could suck up a lot of time that we just wouldn’t have to spare.

Coincidentally, Mary really liked the idea of writing lyrics that I would then set to music, Peter had long wanted to try to write lyrics to a piece of music, and I often have them both evolve together when I write. So it seemed to make sense to just break down the three songs that way, with it being natural for Mary and Peter to write the lyrics to each of their own solo songs and for me to write the lyrics to the duet.

Beyond that, the only other possible preparation any of us could really do was just making sure we were up on our craft. With only a few weeks to go — and Mary about to be knee-deep in preparing for the moment of lifetime in a one-on-one interview with Stephen Sondheim — we were just going to have to trust that whatever got us involved in this project in the first place would carry us through.

Prompt and Ideas

During that dinner, Peter noted that the prompt for the first 24-Hour event was “Crossing the Line,” while the one for the second event was “Double Whammy.” Reading that first prompt as if someone placing first in a race, it seemed like the prompts had something to do with the year of the event, and Peter predicted that this year’s prompt would be related to the number three. Lo and behold, Friday, May 17, the prompt is announced, and the connection noted to this being the third annual event: “Three’s Are Funny.”

Though the number of songs was determined by the number of breaks we needed to fill between the plays, it seemed a nice coincidence that there were to be three songs.

Many ideas were bandied about, much brainstorming taking place that evening.

Peter decided he wanted to write himself a comic song, and he doesn’t want any more specific lyric idea in either of our minds as I prepare music for him to set to lyrics. I decide that, in honor of the prompt, I’ll give him a light waltz, and I start casually pondering some musical bits that evening.

Having made that choice, I remember that the Sondheim musical A Little Night Music is filled with variations on waltz time, and so in a further nod to the prompt, I decide that I’d like to do the same with all three of our songs for the project.

One of the more general ideas I talked about with Mary was, believe it or not, the Hegalian dialectic, in which some thesis idea is responded to with an opposing antithesis idea, and the tension between the two somehow finds resolution in a synthesis. A third option transcends a duality or dichotomy. I felt like this could play out in any number of ways in our songs.

Mary and I discussed how it would be nice for there to a be a more poignant song as a contrast to Peter’s comic number, and she feels that that’s the kind of tone she’d have wanted to take anyway, so that falls into place as natural for her solo. She’ll go to bed Friday with one idea, but on Saturday morning a new idea comes to her and she decides to go with it.

A woman falls in love once but doesn’t get what she wants. She looks for someone very different but still doesn’t get what she wants. Finally, she falls for the man who was there all along as a good friend and has everything she wants. The third’s the charm. Mary adds another nice layer to the motif by having three friends who comfort the narrator each time her heart is broken, and one of those friends is the guy she’ll fall for in the end.

It turns out I’m the only one of the three of us to settle on an idea Friday night that I’ll actually stick with the next day. Mary and I had talked about how the three might not actually exist yet, that there might be some relationship with two people pondering getting a third involved. The two situations that came to mind were a couple seeking a threesome or new parents having their first baby.

Before listing any number of other such situations, though at least an hour after the ideas first came up, somehow, I made a connection. What if the song sounded like a couple debating whether or not to have a threesome, but it turns out there’s a twist ending, with the threesome they were talking about all along actually being a baby and not another romantic partner? As soon as I made that leap, I thought, this is a great idea for a song, and it may be too ambitious for this short time-frame. But I went for it.

One thing that especially pleased me about this idea was that it would end up being like a mini-musical. I’d hoped from the start that there might be an opportunity for this, since the event was, after all, a night of original theatre pieces. I was sensitive to the fact that we needed to keep the songs as songs, though, and not turn them into something bigger that would really start to seem like a theatre piece. I imagined that a duet could either be a more traditional song simply sung by two people, or that it could lend itself well to a musicalized dialogue if the right idea presented itself. This was definitely the right idea for that.

I brainstormed different kinds of things that a couple might consider about a threesome that could have a double-meaning in referring to a baby, leaving out anything that might more obviously refer to only one or the other of the two situations. It seemed natural that one person would bring up the idea with the first verse involving the idea being shot down. The second verse would change the dynamic with the dissenter bringing up more cons but each being met with a pro to break down defenses. A bridge could reference how “three’s are funny” but we can make it work, helping the persuasion along. A third and final verse would get to the heart of the matter, some more emotional reasons for hesitation, then revealing the twist ending, and in the end a decision to have the baby. I figured that, to keep up the ruse, I’d go with the man being the one pushing the threesome, since that would be the stereotype for that, even though it might not be the stereotype for wanting a baby. I went to bed Friday night with a pretty good list of raw notes, with essentially no particular ideas for how they’d end up as lyrics.

Saturday morning, hearing our ideas, Peter decides to do something very different as contrast, going meta by singing about the event itself and the role the songs play in distracting the audience from the set changes.

The Songs

My first priority when we all get together is to give Peter the music he needs as the basis for his song. I flesh out the ideas I’d been imagining, writing a melody that itself is based on phrases of three notes at a time, which goes pretty naturally with the waltz feel. Peter gets right into it and comes up with amusing results. He realizes that he could keep riffing on ideas as long as needed for a set change, but he settles on, not coincidentally, three verses. It’s soon decided that it’s the clear opening number.

As Mary gets into writing her piece, the story is fleshing out really well. We realize that the song provides a good opportunity for a verse-chorus structure, with the verses being the romances, and the choruses being the opportunities for comfort from friends. This further suggests that the song should have a title which can mean one thing at first — the three friends — and another thing after she finds her true love — the “three,” the third man. Eventually, Mary seizes on “My Three,” with the narrator always being glad to have her three at each step of the way.

Mary also had a melody in mind as she was writing. I’m really pleased that, when I hear it a cappella and then start to flesh it out with an accompaniment the way I imagine might sound nice, Mary likes the results. It’s got an upbeat 6/8 or 12/8 feel with a contemporary musical theatre sound, contrasting well with Peter’s more traditional Strauss-like waltz. Mary hadn’t had any different music in mind for the choruses, so I come with a contrast, and she develops a new melody to go with it. We all agree that Mary deserves co-composer credit for the song.

As I get into writing the duet, the first thing I settle on is the refrain — not a true chorus, but a refrain for the end of each verse that fills a similar role, giving us a hook to latch onto. We’re turning two to three, and that rhymes with “you and me.” They don’t know if the third will be a boy or a girl, and that itself could be a point of contention in either a threesome or parenting. So one person will always end up saying “Turning two to three / With you and me / And her,” and the other one immediately counters with “Or him,” and that would be followed with some other two-syllable phrase to cap the sequence, changing depending on the context and rhyming with whatever line immediately preceded this whole refrain phrase that began with “turning.” The title of the song becomes “You and Me and Her or Him.”

I also know that I want this song to have an amusing and racy feel to it, and what immediately comes to mind is a swing waltz like John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things.” In playing up the discomfort of the situation, I ponder some quirky melodic rhythms, and it leads me to push things toward the similar rhythm in Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” though that, of course, is in 5/4 time. So the song is suddenly constantly shifting between 5/4 and 3/4. Of course, though, this particular 5/4 really feels like a 3 attached to a 2, which goes nicely with the idea of “turning two to three.”

Then it becomes a matter of seeing which ideas fit best in each verse — arguments in favor to be rejected, arguments against to be countered, then more potentially emotional ideas (such as jealousy and concern for not enough love to go around) that will serve well to dovetail with the big reveal. Sorting goes well, and then it’s all a matter of turning it into rhyming lyrics that go with my quirky rhythmic phrases. Eventually it takes shape, with a handful of nice punch lines throughout, and hopefully enough of a setup at the beginning to keep people’s minds squarely in the gutter until I let the cat out of the bag near the end. Though there are no recordings as of yet for any of the songs, I have posted the lyrics to the duet.

Discussing the order of the songs, it seems like it will work really well for Mary’s song to follow Peter’s so that Act I has the nicely contrasting solo numbers, with the duet waiting for the one song slot in Act II.

All three songs ended up with three verses each, and there’s a bunch of dialectical flavor going on beyond that. Mary’s song and mine both have it somewhat in how their stories evolve through the three verses. The creative processes — music then lyrics, lyrics then music, both together — show it. Then there’s a comic song, a poignant song, and a song that starts comic and becomes poignant. And, of course, two solos are followed by a duet between the two singers. And all are in variations of waltz time. So lots of dialectic and lots of threes.

Getting It Done

In terms of getting everything done for the show, it turns out it that we’d made some very wise decisions in how we’d go about this.

Having collaborators made things easier in a number of ways. The sheer project of writing three songs in that short a time would have been, it turns out, probably somewhat overwhelming, or at least it would have meant sacrificing some quality.

Beyond that, though, it’s somewhat inevitable that, when you write a song, you get to know it pretty well. Having the singers involved in the songwriting meant that they each had a pretty big head start on the rehearsal and performance of their own songs. We certainly needed to rehearse their solos, but that was much easier than rehearsing the duet, which Mary and Peter both had to learn from scratch.

It would not only have been harder for singers to have to learn multiple songs from scratch if all the songs had been written by someone else. The rehearsal process would be harder simply due to timing and the inevitable fact that they wouldn’t be able to rehearse any songs until the songs we’re written. By having everyone working on the three songs in parallel, it meant that all three songs could get done sooner, allowing for a larger amount of time to be spent rehearsing each song than would have been possible if the singers weren’t themselves involved in the writing. Not to mention that it meant that singers weren’t waiting around huge amounts of time for a songwriter to give them something to do.

All of that, then, meant that it was extremely wise that we’d decided to limit collaboration and have each of the three of us responsible for writing a lyric on our own. Though some actual songwriting work did continue into mid-afternoon, the bulk of it was done through morning and the early afternoon, giving us a few hours before the 5:00 p.m. dress rehearsal to focus simply on rehearsing our performances together.

Of course, all of this means that it was also wise that we songwriters were declared off-limits to the rest of the production. Had we made ourselves available to try to provide music and/or songs for any of the five plays, any other segues, etc., it would have been a serious imposition on time that turned out to be very precious just for our three songs.

The songs went pretty well during the show. Alas, the duet had some technical challenges, since the microphone that Mary and Peter were sharing kept flopping down. Managing the single microphone without a reliable stand was hard enough for them in a duet, and it complicated their ability to turn pages as they followed the lyrics. But their solo numbers went well, and hopefully the duet came across well enough, too.

In the end, there was a lot of positive feedback for the songs. They seemed like a really nice addition to this kind of event. So it looks like the experiment was a success, and maybe the way we went about it can serve as a model for how other 24-Hour theatre projects can get songwriting involved.

You and Me and Her or Him

May 18, 2013
By

This song was one of three songs written for the 3rd Annual Capital Region / Berkshires 24-Hour Theatre Project. For more information on that event and the process of writing the songs for it, see Songwriting for a 24-Hour Theatre Project.

Music and lyrics: By Mark S. Meritt

Lyrics

Intro

He: There’s something I’ve been hopin’
And I hope your mind is open
In the past the subject’s left you less than gleesome
She: I know that our relation-
ship could use some lubrication
But I don’t think I’m ready for…
He: A threesome?

Verse 1

He: It would be exciting
She: But I would be so scared
He: That’s the way adventure goes
She: But I’m just not prepared
He: It would add such color
She: I like us as we are
He: So much possibility
She: It just might be one step too far

He: It would be so novel
She: But we are both so green
He: It could forge a stronger bond
She: Or drive a wedge between
He: I believe the benefits would outweigh the occasional spat
Turning two to three
With you and me
And her –
She: — or him –
He: Like that

Verse 2

She: We are both so busy
He: But we could make the time
She: Working fewer hours a day?
He: It wouldn’t be a crime
She: It would be exhausting
He: Good exercise, my dear
She: Do we have the stamina?
He: Not getting any younger here

She: Keep us up at nighttime
He: There’s so much we would learn
She: Two more lips upon my breast?
He: I’ll gladly wait my turn
She: This whole thing has got me antsy — I’m afraid I’d live to regret
Turning two to three
With you and me
And her –
He: — or him –
She: Not yet

Bridge

He: I know that three’s are funny
She: Sometimes rainy
He: Sometimes sunny
She: They’re a blustery thunderstorming of emotion
He: If we’ve got fears, we’ll face ‘em
She: Both together?
He: We’ll embrace ‘em
She (spoken): Promise?
He (spoken): Yes
She: Then I just might be warming to the notion

Verse 3

She: What if we get jealous?
He: No-one can take our place
She: Someone in the bed with us
He: It’s king size — lots of space
She: Would he –
He: — or she –
She: — love us both?
He: You’re jealous
She: Just a touch
He: We would each love everyone
She: But maybe someone not as much

She: I can’t be a mother
He: I know you’d be just great
She: I would be no good at it
He: You’d be the best — just wait
We’d be in it, both together, finding love in every day
Turning two to three
With you and me
And her –
She: — or him –
Both: Okay

Lost, Found: Finally

May 23, 2011
By

If You Don’t Have Something Nice To Say…

On May 23, 2010, Lost signed off with The End. Finally, the finale, after years of mystery. A few days later, one of my local libraries hosted a discussion. Someone there told of how she thought the last season’s Sideways world was real, the result of the series’ characters having successfully changed history by thwarting the Oceanic plane crash that began the series and changed their lives. Then it was my turn. After I shared my take on the final episode, this other person said she could not stay. She got up and left.

I hadn’t started watching the series until after the fourth season ended, catching up on the entire series-to-date in about a month. After that, I decided to blog episode by episode. With so much ground to cover once again and a fairly busy life, time wasn’t on my side, and I gave up on it indefinitely. Toward the end of the series, I wrote a few more posts and intended to write about the finale, in the service of at least getting to some of my bigger ideas.

Between the finale itself and various things show-runners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse said over the years, in particular in a New York Times article run 10 days before the finale aired, I felt that most of the real substance of my take on the show was, well, substantiated. With so much else written about the show and the finale, in particular the great coverage by Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff Jensen, I felt that there wasn’t much to be said, or understood, that hadn’t already been taken care of. So why should I say anything at all? Plus, pressed for time from other things, I let some time slip by and grew to feel that it might be pointless for me to write anything.

Several weeks after the episode aired, a friend asked for my take. When I gave it, he felt my thoughts would be worth sharing, that there was no “too late” for a show that would probably be discussed for years. I didn’t get to it right away. Now it appears it was just as well that I waited for this anniversary, because since that first airing I’ve gained some additional support and perspective on my thoughts about the series and its finale, and from a very relevant source, which I’ll get to later. So now, finally, the finale post.

Heaven on Earth

Flashback, whooosh, to the library.

Someone is giving her reasons for thinking the Sideways world real, the plane crash timeline averted. She acknowledges that all are dead by the end of the Sideways story and poses that each characters’ moment of illumination is their moment of death. I don’t remember other details, only that there were holes in her reasoning. After pointing some of them out, I got to have a turn saying what I thought.

When I first posed my MacGuffin Theory nearly two years before the finale, I said that the truth about the island was not likely to ever be fully revealed and was in any case beside the point. Rather, as I said, “In the end, I think the point is to revel in the mystery, to participate in it, and thereby to learn to do the same for the mystery of our own lives… It’s a mystery that is answered somewhere along the way, by every individual who is inspired by the show to engage in the questions of their own lives and seek harmony.”

Now, having the seen the finale, I naturally think about it in this light. What I said at the library was along the following lines.

What good, I wondered, would the show possibly be doing anyone if it were to present a story about people who went back in time and found a way to stop undesired events from happening? What would that offer us? We can’t go back to right what we later perceive to be wrong turns in our lives. The series had all along been, in effect, about this very conundrum, grappling with how flawed characters could break from their past and find redemption. Surely, I felt, the answer the show would provide to this question would have to be consistent, rather than in conflict, with the truth that real people simply cannot go back. Anything else would render the show fundamentally useless beyond escapist entertainment. This seemed impossible for a show as rich as Lost.

Even before the finale aired, the writers said that the ending would be open to interpretation. Any number of things could be somewhat open. But Sideways world as a real and alternative history, when it ends the way it ends? Its various moments of illuminating remembrance as the characters’ respective moments of death? Locke and Jack touch after the surgery, Locke is illuminated but Jack is not. Can this mean that Locke is dead while Jack lives on? What in that situation would cause Locke to die, and how could a dead Locke still be there interacting with a still living Jack? Same goes for any character’s illumination and the others around them at the time.

Before the finale, I’d predicted that, rather than actually being sideways from the island timeline, the Sideways world was instead a followup to it. In some sense, I was right. Sideways world showed what happened to everyone after their deaths in the real world, including but not limited to all the events of the series’ main timeline. Is it Heaven? This seems entirely unlikely. The Sideways story is one of characters literally not having yet gone into the light, a light they can only even approach after coming to an important realization, so that they are “in the dark,” so to speak, even after their realization, and all the moreso beforehand. Sideways seems to be some kind of purgatory, a place where souls must stay until they are ready to move on. We will only even see some of the characters, not all, reach that point of readiness. But what is it that actually gets them ready to move on?

The Sideways world took the form of a sort of wishful thinking on the part of everyone, but a wishful thinking in which nobody was inclined to make terribly big wishes. The suggestion is clear. They hope beyond hope to erase the past because they think their lives will be so much better. The past, though, includes events prior to those that led to the Oceanic crash. That crash was never the sole cause of pain for any of these characters. In the absence of the crash, some things are a bit better for some characters, some things merely different. Life is not a grand paradise but the usual grab-bag of good and bad. Troubles remain, and characters must grope their way past those troubles to small victories.

Take Jack, for example. He still had a fairly poor relationship with his father, Christian. It led him to have a strained relationship with his own son David. The sins of the father (Christian) became the sins of the son (Jack), who himself was now the father. The old pattern was in danger of perpetuation. In the end, though, he found a way to get on a positive track. David pursues his own authenticity, even if he must do it in secret. When Jack learns the truth, he wants to encourage rather than stop David, and David realizes he need not keep things secret. Better than things went with Christian? Certainly. Still, some fairly modest wishful thinking when it comes down to it. But such modest good things are perhaps all any of us really need when it comes down to it.

The enlightenments led each character to realize the truth of their Sideways wishful thinking, to realize that it was only wishful thinking after all, that none of it had ever happened, that everything from the main timeline, every last bit of it, is what really happened, including their own death. In those moments of realization, they could finally acknowledge, I’m dead, and so be it. Death isn’t horror, it’s nothing to fear. Fearing it all along is what had me so messed up, what had me messing up others. I had some bad experiences long ago when I wasn’t ready to cope with them, and from then on I’d lived my life informed by those experiences, doing all I could to avoid ever having to remember the fear I felt when they were occurring, no matter how much pain I’d bring to myself and others as a result. Now I can face that it all happened, embracing the totality of my past, the good, the bad, the things I couldn’t help, and my own role in the things I could have helped but didn’t. I can finally be content and stop wishing that the past was different. The past is all there, it’s all real, and I can be at peace with it, even my own death. I don’t need the past to have turned out differently.

Those enlightenments could only come through connection with another, with someone who proved a fateful force for them in the “real world,” in their actual lives. These characters needed each other to get beyond who they thought they were, because they obviously were unable to do so on their own. Had they been, they would have done it already.

In the real timeline, then, all there was to do was take the present moment as a new opportunity to change gears and let go of whatever was preserving an undesirable status quo. That would seldom mean completely abandoning who one believed oneself to be. More likely, it would mean a new perspective, carrying certain things forward but in new ways to achieve new results.

This is just what Jack seems to have done. Fixing everything had always been based on some dysfunctional agenda he had, one that would never satisfy him. With the island, he had to completely let go of that agenda and give himself over to the island. The island that was far more supernatural than his Man of Science ever would have liked. The island that for a long time he wanted nothing more than to leave, only then to want nothing more than to get back, only then to question why he bothered. The island that clearly had its own agenda.

In the end, Jack did let go of his agenda, but he didn’t let go of his capacities. He applied his strengths toward a new agenda. What better is there to do than take the best of the past and carry it forward into the future, but a new future that isn’t burdened by the worst of the past? Jack may have “repeated the same pattern” by remaining a fixer, but he did it in a completely new way. He broke the Hypocratic oath by finishing off the Man in Black in order to contribute to a larger healing. He completed that larger healing through his culminating fixes, his climactic doctoring — rescuing the near-dead Desmond, and replacing the island’s stone plug just as if suturing an open wound. Soon after, having fulfilled his purpose and become the hero, the one who genuinely saved everyone in the way that counted most, he dies, and he does so with peace of mind.

But if Jack dies in the main timeline with such fulfillment, why in the Sideways world is his still conflicted, resistant to learning the truth and moving on? Well, it’s one thing to come to accept what is and what you don’t feel you could ever have changed. It’s another thing entirely to come to a similar realization even after having had the opportunity to change things. The Sideways world story is there for the audience, to reinforce the point about acceptance and embracing life in this absolutely crucial way. It tells us not only that it’s possible to accept things as they have already turned out but that there is no point in doing otherwise, that there is no point in wishing for things to have turned out differently. Yes, wish all you like, but if you want change, the only place it will come from is where you are. That is the only place you can move forward from. This is what Jack had to do in the wishful thinking Sideways world just the same as he had to in the main timeline.

Lindelof and Cuse no more propose redemption after death than they propose going back in time to alter the course of events. They don’t want us to think redemption is possible only by going back in time, as the characters hoped to do through their Jughead plan, or only in death, as the Sideways world was revealed to be in the end. What they propose is, in effect, Heaven on Earth, the possibility of a life lived without the burden of terrors past, even if those terrors actually happened. They propose that one cannot deny one’s past but that it is possible to keep it in the past, where it actually is, instead of dragging it continually into every new present moment. You can come to a point, as you live your life, where you can stop fearing death. Indeed you must, because only then can you actually live your life.

Truth in Fiction

I didn’t say all of this in exactly this way to that person at the library talk, but this is more or less what I said. And as soon as I did, she excused herself and left.

Was I judgmental, offensive? Was I self-righteous in poking holes in her reasoning and supporting my own stance? She seemed to think so. More likely, I imagine something else. It will at first sound judgmental, but I mean it in just the opposite way. I say this from a place of compassion. More likely, she herself had things in her own life that she wished she could have changed and was not yet ready to accept their unchangeability in order to move on from them.

I say this as someone who knows all too well how this can be true. I’ve worked hard for some time to face such things for myself, and who knows how much I may still have left to face for myself. It’s likely true of most of us and most everyone we know. Some people simply have a harder time than others facing such things, and some people simply have a harder time than others even acknowledging that there may be anything to face in the first place. Again, this itself was depicted in the show, with not all the characters capable of readying themselves for a Sideways world illumination.

These are not just issues for individuals, either, as I’ve come to understand far more deeply as a result of something that Lost itself led me to.

Months after the finale, I was watching the extras on the final season’s DVD set. One was called “A Hero’s Journey,” exploring how several of the characters played out the archetypal hero’s story, particularly as it has been described by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. I’d been a Campbell fan but had only scratched the surface with his work years ago. This Lost featurette combined with a number of other things on my mind over these last years to inspire me to study Campbell more. I’ve read quite a lot of his work over the last several months.

One of Campbell’s key points is that mythology is of central value to people, providing symbols and metaphors that are supposed to guide people and societies spiritually and psychologically by putting us in touch with the insoluble mystery of existence itself. Since we are part of that existence, we ourselves are part of that mystery along with everything else. In this sense there is little distinction between ourselves and others, even non-human or non-living others, and in this sense there is little distinction between life and death. The great mystery of existence transcends all of it.

Campbell also continually discusses how much ill comes from failing to understand mythology’s purpose. Some people write myth off by equating it with lie and falsehood. Others concretize their myths, believing them to be historically or cosmologically true. In either case, people fail to recognize myth’s identity as metaphor and its purpose as pointing toward spiritual and psychological truths. In either case, people end up failing to connect with any experience of spiritual awe or psychological health. As a result, instead of abiding in our common humanity, those who misinterpret myth as either history or lie end up just fostering enmity, willing to dehumanize and even to kill and die for their “truths.”

And here I was arguing about the primacy of the meaning of Lost over the theories about the island, suggesting that people who spent so much time engaged in debating the “truth” of the series were actually missing the point. My MacGuffin theory was, all along, a mythological theory, the theory that Lost was intended to function as mythology, to point its viewers toward profound mysteries and truths that could make a difference in their lives, just as mythology has always intended to do. Instead, ironically, so many fans reveled in the “mysteries” of the series, but only as mysteries to be solved, puzzles to be completed, various solutions competing until one might prove itself to be “the one.” Just like so many religions, philosophies and ideologies have done throughout the history of civilization.

Why would they do so, missing out on the real mystery that the show tried to put them in touch with, the core that lies deep inside each and every one of them? Because that core is not all that is inside. Something happens to us, and we become afraid. The fear stands in the way between us, between our conscious minds, and that core. When those things happen to us, we cannot cope with that fear, so something yet else stands in the way, protecting our conscious minds from the fear. It was useful to protect us for a time, but the protection ends up outliving its usefulness. What was true is no longer true, but we hold onto it as if it were — a concretized myth. Then there is flaw, neurosis, dysfunction. The layers within recognize what is offered by something like Lost, the possibility of reconnecting, to something beyond the fear, to what the myth is actually pointing to. Those inner layers cannot give up their interest in such a thing. They keep us watching. But the protector continues to mediate, reinterpreting our interest for the conscious mind, deflecting it away from ourselves, from the core, making it about the entertainment, the puzzle.

When I picked up again talking about Lost toward the end of its run, I wondered if the show was going to disappoint me as other works of art had, promising something profound but then betraying itself. I don’t think it did. It boded well that Lindelof and Cuse decided to bring the show to an end on their terms, at a specific time, rather than let it go on indefinitely on the basis of ratings. When they ended it their way, it brought things to a mythologically satisfying close.

Unfortunately, even when artists get it right, it’s still up to audiences to get it at all. Obviously, all too often, audiences are fairly likely to miss the point. Just as all too many people in all corners of the world have, throughout history, failed to get the point of their own mythologies.

Maybe that person’s walking out on me at the library demoralized me. Maybe that’s why I didn’t bother to write about the finale in its immediate aftermath. Maybe what I had to say was worth saying after all, but maybe I didn’t like that such things all too often fall on deaf ears. So why bother saying anything? Here’s why. Because not saying anything definitely can’t accomplish a thing. Saying something at least has a chance, however small.

Quotes

I could talk more about any number of details from the finale in terms of analyzing the text of the story, but I just don’t think there’s much point. This would all just be the trees, and it’s the forest that’s important here. I think I’ve said enough about that myself, so I’d like to start to wrap this up by including some things that Lindelof and Cuse themselves said in the New York Times article I mentioned earlier, all pretty a propos to everything I’ve been saying here:

LINDELOF: If there’s one word that we keep coming back to, it’s redemption. It is that idea of everybody has something to be redeemed for and the idea that that redemption doesn’t necessarily come from anywhere else other than internally. But in order to redeem yourself, you can only do it through a community. So the redemption theme started to kind of connect into “live together, die alone,” which is that these people were all lone wolves who were complete strangers on an aircraft, even the ones who were flying together like Sun and Jin. Then let’s bring them together and through their experiences together allow themselves to be redeemed. When the show is firing on all pistons, that’s the kind of storytelling that we’re doing.

I think we’ve always said that the characters of “Lost” are deeply flawed, but when you look at their flashback stories, they’re all victims. Kate was a victim before she killed her stepfather. Sawyer’s parents killed themselves as he was hiding under the bed. Jack’s dad was a drunk who berated him as a child. Sayid was manipulated by the American government into torturing somebody else. John Locke had his kidney stolen. This idea of saying this bad thing happened to me and I’m a victim and it created some bad behavior and now I’m going to take responsibility for that and allow myself to be redeemed by community with other people, that seems to be the theme that we keep coming back to.

CUSE: It’s far more about the character relationships that resonate. The thing is that people talk a lot about the mythology of “Lost,” but we probably spent 85 percent of our time in the writers’ room talking about the characters, and I think that’s why the show was a broad audience show as opposed to a genre show. While the mythology was important, first and foremost the show was about the characters. I think that a lot of people care much more about what’s going to happen to Kate. Is she going to end up with Jack, is she going to end up with Sawyer? That’s why we feel like a lot of shows that have tried to imitate “Lost” make the fundamental mistake of having the characters just focus on the mythology. If you watch certain shows like that, you’ll see all the characters are talking about is, “What’s that dinosaur in my bathtub?”

LINDELOF: The thing about that episode is it’s very simple storytelling, but very, very complicated storytelling at the same time. The simple part is that this episode is called “The Constant,” and the whole point of it is, is that there is somebody else out there that is your other half. And again, it plugged into, in this very sort of obvious way, this theme that we were discussing earlier, which is: Nobody can do it alone. Desmond was unhooked or lost, he was a castaway bopping around through time, and his only possible salvation was finding the woman that he loved and telling her so and saying, “I need you to rescue me because I’m lost.” This fundamentally tapped into every single theme of the show. You’re basically saying emotion trumps mythology.

Of course, what Lindelof means in that last sentence is that the transcendent connotation that myth as metaphor points to, myth as something fostering of spiritual and psychological growth, trumps concretized mythology, trumps the literal denotation that the myth seems to be about on the surface, which is of course not mythology at all.

Finally, to really put a bow on this, another quote, this time from the lyrics to a rather famous song. I can only hope that more and more of us wretches make an effort to save ourselves and others by finding a bit of Amazing Grace:

I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Lost, Found: Last Tuesday

May 19, 2010
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Last night, the final new Tuesday episode aired. As much as it moved things forward and set up the finale, I don’t have much to say other than this:

  • I remain pretty convinced of the general direction I posed the show taking in last week’s post and the post from the week before.
  • For a show so much about history repeating itself, and usually to people’s detriment, the ending can only be satisfying if “the curse is broken” — i.e., if in the end nobody remains “trapped” on the island, whether as protector or Smoke-Monster-prisoner or otherwise. If anyone stays on the island at the end, it must be because they truly want to be there.
  • Perhaps the very fact of the finale taking place on a Sunday instead of a Tuesday supports my perspective. A change is taking place. The old patterns are coming to an end. Indeed, the series ends on a traditional day of rest — a day for as many characters as possible to find a resolution to their age-old conflicts.

Also, the four remaining lostaways — Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley — not only include, as I noted last week, one of the key conflicted pairs of the series, i.e., Jack vs. Sawyer. They are the very same four who were captured by the Others several seasons ago. And back then, Hurley was “set free” to carry a message to the remaining lostaways, leaving a love triangle captured. That love triangle has become more complicated since then, but there may be an interesting parallel between Jack/Sawyer/Kate and Jacob/Man-in-Black/”Mother.”

Jack and Jacob practically share a name and now they do have the island protector role in common.

The Man in Black has in common with Sawyer a stereotypical “bad guy” persona that is both caused by and tempered for the audience by past traumatic events. There is further the apparent namelessness of the Man in Black paralleling Sawyer’s having over time adopted many different names through his work as a con man.

Kate and the “Mother” share the killing of another inspired by some notion of higher good, and, of course, they find themselves the apex of a strange triangle relationship with the two conflicted males they most deeply relate to.

With Jack having already taken on the protector role and this larger set of parallels between these triangles of characters, I can’t help but wonder just how much else may repeat itself. I’d already suggested last week the possibility of Sawyer’s future as a Smoke Monster. Could Kate’s life be in danger, too?

With the importance of the old cycles becoming broken, I believe we will be in for either another repetition of “curses” followed by a breaking of the curse, or, perhaps preferable, a near-repetition of past pattern, averted in favor of something new to break the pattern without the need for a further repetition.

We shall see.

Lost, Found: Light at the End of the Tunnel

May 12, 2010
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Good and Evil and In Between

The third from the last episode, and we start to see, literally and figuratively, a light at the end of the tunnel. And I believe more than ever in what I’ve said about Lost providing a complicated, atypical look at “good” vs. “evil.”

A Woman kills the twins’ Mother, apologizing to her right before smashing her face. She raises the kids as her own and lies to them about their origins, telling them they are from the island, that there is no place else in the world, that there are no other people in the world. Later, she’ll smash her “son’s” head with an apology as well, to prevent him from leaving the island, even though she needs only one successor to protect the island. She then kills all of the people in the Man in Black’s settlement after learning of their plans to leave the island.

The Man in Black sees his dead Mother — sees a truth Jacob cannot. He hears what she has to say and wants to honor it. If the other people on the island are his people, he wants to be with them instead of the Woman who killed his mother and lied to him all along. If the island is not his home, he doesn’t want to stay, he wants to find a way to leave. When the Woman subverts his goal, he kills her — an act that doesn’t really help him, but one that is understandable as something other than unadulterated evil.

As for Jacob, he smashes his brother’s face in when his brother wants to go live with the other people (the “Others,” in contrast to the Woman, even though later there will be “Others” serving Jacob himself). Instead of facing the truth, he chooses to stay with the Woman and her lies. When the Woman wants to pass the torch onto him and have him replace her as protector of the island, he does not want the job. He seems insecure and frightened. When he accepts, she says they are now the same — he is now the same as the Woman who has done all the not-so-nice things she has done. Later, when the Man in Black has killed the Woman, Jacob once again smashes his brother’s face in, and punishes him by sending him into the light in the tunnel, the place the Woman described as “Life, death, rebirth. It’s the source, the heart of the island,” right before telling him to never go down there, since a fate worse than death awaits. The fate worse than death is what Jacob wishes upon his brother.

Who is good and who is evil here? It would be too strong to say that the Woman and Jacob are “really” evil and the Man in Black really “good,” but it is equally misguided to pose it the other way around.

The Man in Black merely wants to face the truth about himself and find his way home. The Woman and Jacob are willing to lie, hurt, even kill, all in the service of a story the Woman tells about the source of the island, despite Jacob (and we, the audience) having no real idea whether the story has credence, or how she knows what she says she knows.

It seems that all these characters have elements of what we think of as “good” and of what we think of as “evil.” In other words, they are people, and the fact that they have conflicts merely means they haven’t figured out how to get what they all want collaboratively.

Procreation, Longevity and Power

The episode begins with a birth, of twins. We know that there are issues on the island with fertility, with pregnant women losing their babies. Claire was able to give birth on the island — because of the Others’ medicine, and/or because she was far enough along when she arrived. The twins’ Mother obviously received no such medicine, so her giving birth on the island can only be the result of either the fertility issue not having begun yet or of her having been far enough along.

In any case, consider that the island is known simultaneously as a place where fertility is problematic and where immortality is possible to some extent. Jacob and the Man in Black seem to live forever, even though they may have weaknesses that can cause their death. Richard receives the gift of immortality from Jacob. Even Locke’s having his paralysis cured seems to be of a piece with these phenomena. The island seems to be something of a Fountain of Youth, a place where health, vigor and longevity can be cultivated.

In the mid-1990s, I came up with an idea for a screenplay about Ponce de Leon and his quest for the Fountain of Youth. Some scientists in the modern day conducting experiments in the Bermuda Triangle would somehow discover that their actions have caused an old ship to appear, and on that ship would be Ponce de Leon. He would be grateful for having been freed from the triangle so he could resume his quest for the Fountain of Youth in Florida. Eventually, the story would make clear that the Bermuda Triangle was itself the Fountain of Youth, and that the only way to take advantage of it would be to relegate oneself to it’s parallel-universe-like existence in the middle of the ocean, a place where “real life” simply cannot be lived, since “real life” includes death.

On Lost, the island is, in addition to having these properties of longevity and health, also a place where fertility is an issue. Just as in the story I’d come up with years ago, perhaps wishing to live forever is an ultimately selfish thing that can only be done in a place cut off from the reality of the rest of the world, a place where the normal cycles of life, of generations, cease. The island’s troubles with procreation may be a necessary condition of the presence of longevity/immortality. To be cut off on the island and living forever, one can easily imagine people going mad and wanting to leave, to get back to “life” as it really is. In some sense, the island’s brand of immortality could be tantamount to death itself, a denial of life as it is.

Indeed, what to make of the Woman thanking the Man in Black as her final words, despite him having just killed her? Could she have felt trapped in a too-long life on the island herself? Is this why she killed the Mother and took the babies, grooming them to succeed her — simply to find her own escape? Perhaps she came to know that apparent immortality is more than it’s cracked up to be, and perhaps she needed a loophole to have herself killed, just as the Man in Black sought a loophole, getting someone else to kill Jacob on his behalf. Collateral damage may be necessary to escape the immortality of the island.

In contrast, what do we know of life as it really is, off the island? From most characters’ backstories, we know that they’ve got issues. Problems they struggle with. Violence and heartache and confusion and tragedy. And also good things, too. It’s a mixed bag — just as the Woman, Jacob and the Man in Black appear to be. And, crucially, this is true not only in the original timeline but also in Sideways world. Whatever created Sideways world, it did not “make everything better” in any simplistic sense, as the lostaways had hoped would happen as a result of blowing up Jughead.

Perhaps this all adds up to the very simple message that life must be lived, with its ups and downs, for better and for worse, including the fact of its ending in death, and that any attempt to do otherwise is bound to lead to undesired results.

This is not a lesson learned only through experiences with the island — it is seen even in characters’ regular lives separate from their island experiences. Christian drives his son too hard with expectation. Jack is a compulsive fixer. Anthony Cooper conned people to ensure his own “ups.” Kate killed for the sake of her and her mom’s “ups.” Jin is willing to obey the whims of Mr. Paik for a shot at a decent life. The list could go on and on. At least so far in the story, essentially everyone has failed to find redemption, and this failure appears to be to the very extent that they fail to confront the things deep in their past that have saddled them with a too-strong desire to strive for ups and a too-weak ability to accept life’s downs. If only they could embrace both sides — the ups and downs, the “good” and the “evil” — and let go of the striving, the attachment to only the pleasant at the expense of the unpleasant, then maybe they’d actually get more of what they want.

Long ago, when first writing here about Lost, I talked about the show as a critique of civilization. Civilization is, most basically, a social structure in which power is unevenly distributed, with some having much and most having little. Now consider the island and the light hiding beneath/inside it. It is a place where a special kind of power has been consolidated, with much of the rest of the world lacking it. Originally I’d thought the island to stand in distinction to civilization. While in some ways it clearly does, in its own way it also now seems to just be one more place where the same old things play out.

In civilization off the island — and in various civilization-inspired social structures on the island — the unequal distribution of power leaves many people wanting, searching, striving to find more “ups” to make up for their experience of too many “downs,” while also giving a few people more “ups” than they deserve and leaving them exceedingly protective of their status against the masses who aren’t so lucky.

On the island, the light is a power that is warned against, to be left alone. Somehow on the island, extreme longevity — a surfeit of “ups” — is made possible, surely through something having to do with that light. And yet direct contact with the light can release a Smoke Monster — the inevitable extremity of “downs” that must go hand in hand with ever bigger “ups.” That, too, is true of civilization, where psychological, social and ecological ills increase right alongside — and often because of — the so-called “advances” of civilization.

Jacob described the island to Richard as the cork which keeps evil from being released out into the world. But we already see plenty of evil in the world, and we are starting to get enough information to doubt just how unassailably good and right Jacob may be. Further, if the island needed protection prior to the Man in Black becoming the Smoke Monster, then the Smoke Monster can’t be the evil being corked up.

Was there another monster, which gave the Woman her knowledge of what happens when someone goes into the light? Perhaps it was the Woman herself. Trapped by accident on the island, she stumbles upon the light cave. Drawn in by its beauty, she finds her fate worse than death: she is granted immortality and turned into a Smoke Monster. Unlike the Man in Black, she has no desire to go home — that is not something that must go along with being a Smoke Monster. She perhaps understands the nature of the island’s power and realizes that, rather than it needing protection from people, people may need protection from the island. She resolves to stay, but time grows long, and she wants to be freed from the endless prison of her life. Perhaps this explains why she steals the babies, how she can grant them their own near-immortality, and why she needs a loophole and thanks the Man in Black for killing her. That we never see her turn into a Smoke Monster in last night’s episode may be incidental, since we know the Man in Black only takes that form in particular circumstances. But even if she can grant immortality without Smoke-Monsterhood, wouldn’t she just be setting others up for the same too-long-life? Yes — hence the need for Jacob to find a successor — and the Man in Black’s own long-held frustrations.

Is there some way in which that light itself could somehow be evil as opposed to good, the evil needing to be corked up? Of course, we’ve witnessed two “disasters” on the island, under the hatch at two separate times, where massive explosions caused that Dharma station’s pocket of energy to be released — and in neither case was the world destroyed, as some said it would be in those circumstances. If the light is life and death and rebirth, then it surely must be good and evil wrapped together — pure power, not yet applied. Perhaps, then, rather than seeing the island’s light energy as either something to exploit — as perhaps Widmore and the Dharma Initiative might — or as something to protect — as the Woman and Jacob would — it should instead be understood as something to be released, once and for all, and thereby dissipated. Power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely — therefore enormous sources of power in some sense “should” be dissipated, to reduce the potential for corruption and therefore to bring more balance to the world.

Releasing the island’s energy, then, could be what causes the island to end up at the bottom of the ocean, neutralized, as we saw at the beginning of the final season. Metaphorically, it would show the way for people elsewhere, out in the “real” world, in whatever timeline, to lead better lives. Release power, the need to control. Let power be distributed to all rather than bottled up in small pockets where it can become volatile, corruptible, dangerous. Accept that we all live and we all will die — no immortality for us. Accept that we must do well by future generations — fertility for us, backed up with good parenting, unlike what we’ve seen so often throughout the series and especially in this episode by the Woman. Raise our kids so that they will know from the start that they should do their best but within the context of accepting both good and bad in their lives. Struggle to free ourselves from the resistance we’ve come to have about this very acceptance, so that we will be able to do all these things for ourselves, our kids and others, instead of striving for more and more control and power. Through all this, through this balance, there can be redemption — for the characters in the show, and for anyone who chooses this path.

The End of the Tunnel

I’ve so far avoided making any concrete predictions about the plot. So far, mostly abstract analysis and suggestions about the basic shape of things to come — about the show becoming much more nuanced in its depiction of good and evil and vaguely what a resolution of that dichotomy may look like as opposed to one side simply winning somehow. With last night’s episode having seemed to corroborate my perspective to some extent, and with so little of the series left, this may be a good time to pose some more concrete possibilities.

With Jacob having been killed, the conflict between “good” and “evil” seems difficult to resolve. With his project of finding a successor, though, that becomes more viable. Will a lostaway step in and duel with the Smoke Monster? In light of the nuanced handling of good and evil, this seems doubtful, or at least not genuinely climactic. Perhaps other oppositions will come into play. Most notable seem to be Jack’s man of science vs. Locke’s man of faith, and Jack’s “selfless leader” vs. Sawyer’s “island unto himself.” The former, though, has shown Locke’s faith to have made him a sucker, leading to his death and the ascension of UnLocke, while Jack has himself seemed to give up some of his compulsion while embracing the less “scientific” truths of the island — not quite a resolution, but certainly that conflict is not what it was. As for Jack vs. Sawyer, likewise, Jack spent a fair amount of time very concerned about himself getting off the island, and it only led to the massive guilt he experienced during the flash-forwards, while Sawyer did a lot of growing up during that same time. Jack and Sawyer, though, do remain among the few remaining lostaways/candidates.

In the end, could two lostaways, Jack and Sawyer or otherwise, end up replacing both Jacob and the Man in Black? Perhaps on some level this could happen willingly, mutually, without real conflict, both replacements somehow believing in a need to serve those roles and stay on the island. Perhaps there would not be willingness, no more than Jacob and the Man in Black had themselves shown. However it goes, the show has proved time and again what it’s willing to do to characters we care about — kill them, maim them, torture them. And we have seen that the Smoke Monster we’ve come to know and hate was, as UnLocke had said, once just a man, and not only that but a man who just wanted to be loved and find his way home. Don’t put it past the show’s creators to turn someone we really like into another Smoke Monster.

Given that the island ends up on the ocean floor at some point, I’d guess we’re in for a followup to Jack’s Jughead plan, something to bring closure to “getting a fresh start.” The series, so much about free will vs. determinism, so much about our inability to change the past, seems poised to affirm our ability to affect our future, to change. Juliet had said that the Jughead plan worked — and we have seen the Sideways world which may prove that it did. But we have obviously not seen enough to know the real relationship between the original timeline and Sideways world. The Sideways experiences of Desmond, Charlie, Hurley and Libby suggest it is not mere conjecture, a storytelling “what if,” but something real. Perhaps, and especially if there has been any taking over the roles of protector and Smoke Monster, someone may deliberately cause the destruction of the island. Once and for all, its energy could be released, bringing to an end the dichotomy of protector vs. Smoke Monster, leaving the original timeline behind to somehow cause the Sideways timeline.

The slight hints we have in the Sideways world timeline that things are maybe working out a little bit better for people may be all we get. Jack having a son and making an effort. Kate seeming to be on her way to another chance with a more understanding law enforcement officer holding her custody. Hurley’s success with money and with Libby. Claire and Jack finding family in each other. Locke getting Helen and accepting his limitations. Ben having sacrificed an administrative career for the sake of the success of the “daughter” he mistreated in the original timeline. Jin and Sun finding their way together. And so on. Here in the Sideways world, life is still a mixed bag, full of ups and downs. Sideways world underscores how this cannot be avoided. Accepting this leads not to some trite, pat, happily-after-ever good-triumphs-over-evil ending but, instead, to small, one day at a time improvements. Therein would lie the hope that, whatever else may not be working out in Sideways world, change may be possible. The glimpses the Sideways characters are getting of the original timeline may end up being no more than a reason for them to appreciate what they now have, the proof that any path would be a mixed bag and that there is far more a point in just doing one’s best rather than in always wondering, with regret, “what if.”

Obviously these aren’t totally concrete, specific predictions. Obviously much remains to be addressed — the origins of the temple, statue and lighthouse; the role of Desmond’s parallel-worlds mission; countless other things, many of which are sure never to be fully resolved because they just aren’t core to the main throughline of the story. In any case, these are least some suggestive notions about what may lie ahead.

Lost, Found: That Sinking Feeling

May 5, 2010
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Yes, I haven’t written about Lost for ages. Yes, I’ve procrastinated across the better part of the entire series in what was intended to be episode by episode commentary. Yes, this isn’t an episode-specific commentary. Yes, I realize nobody probably even reads this or cares much about my take on the show. But here are a few words, summing up why I thought I might have had an original take, why it may have been genuinely important if I was right, how the way things are heading toward an end may seem to go against the perspective I’d had in mind, how the show can’t really be ultimately satisfying except as pure entertainment if I’m wrong — and how it still may be possible that my take my be correct.

At the end of last night’s episode, The Candidate, in the preview for next week’s episode, we saw clips from earlier in the series. Locke explaining backgammon as a battle between black and white. Jacob (in white) and the Man in Black on the beach, the latter declaring how badly he wanted to see the former dead. And if that weren’t enough, there was even a title card in the preview, declaring a battle between Good and Evil in white letters on a black background. And today, The Candidate was described by Entertainment Weekly’s Jeff “Doc” Jensen as providing definitive clarity about a key issue. He says there “can no longer be any doubt about this: The Locke-ness Monster is pure evil.” It certainly seems that way, but in this show, things are often not what they seem. And here’s why I think the same may be true here.

Throughout its run, Lost has transcended the simplicity of black/white, of good/evil. The entire history of the show is filled with nuance, confusion, choices. Even though some characters may seem to be more at the extremes, more obviously “good” or “bad,” it’s hard to say of practically any character that they have been all good or all evil. If the show has seemed to be about anything, it’s the quest for redemption, with practically every character living in the gray areas, having their own past demons, their own transgressions, their own mistakes. All seek to somehow find a way to be free of those things and move into a new phase of life. And yet many of those past “evils” were wrapped up with “good” — Jack’s compulsion to fix and heal, Kate’s wanting to protect her mother, the list goes on and on. We simply cannot say that the characters’ redemption is about leaving evil behind to find good. The matter is always far more complex and real than that.

And so we’re supposed to believe that the Man in Black is just plain evil, and he will unleash terror on the world, and Jacob is just plain good, and he and his successor must somehow manage to keep evil all bottled up on the island, away from the world? When the world is already as filled with illness and damage as it is — evident in the very backstories of each of the characters, above and beyond our own everyday knowledge of the world — how can we possibly buy such a simplistic scenario?

Even if the Man in Black is a psychopath/sociopath, symbolically in the story, that’s just an extreme of immature selfishness. Yet there is in some sense just about as much immaturity in believing that the only thing to do in response to selfishness is to keep it bottled up. Children are naturally narcissistic, and they can grow up to become otherwise. Not when parents let kids run wild, nor when parents squash their impulses — those approaches just ensure that they “grow up” to stay as childish and selfish as they ever were, in one way or other, with demons they’ll have to wrestle with from that point forward, seeking redemption even if they don’t realize it, and yet not knowing how to find it. Kids become otherwise, they actually become mature, when parents help give those kids what they need so that they can get through the naturally more selfish early years and learn to become whole people who know how to balance their own needs with those of others. Selfishness indulged, properly and at the right time, allows a transcendence of selfishness. Nothing else can — especially not forcing selflessness and “maturity” upon someone not ready for those things.

The ambiguity of good/bad, indeed, has been one of the key themes of the show all along. It is there in the ways we’ve learned about each character. In the ways each character has interacted with those around them. In the ways those characters have seen how their choices didn’t always turn out to be wise. In the ways those characters have learned and changed. In the different and changing feelings characters had about being on — or off — the island. And, crucially, in the different feelings and life experiences the characters have in Sideways world as compared to the original timeline.

Significantly, it is also there in the nature of, and relationships different characters have with, “The Others.” The Others claim to be with Jacob, and so are opposed to the Man in Black. Yet Widmore seems opposed to both. Even without figuring in the lostaways, there is clearly a triangle here — and therefore a refutation of the simplistic division of good vs. evil. The lostaways find themselves at odds with all parts of this triangle at various times, though the only part of it they seriously entertain destroying is the weakest. Not the supernaturally powerful Man in Black, nor the financially powerful corporate titan Widmore, but the people who run about the island in rags and barefeet. And those very “others” are the ones willing to share the island, while almost everyone else at one point or other — not only Widmore and the Man in Black, but the Dharma Initiative and even the lostaways themselves — wished the others gone, banished, exterminated.

Who is the better or worse here, the good and the bad? Wouldn’t those who want to pursue harmony and co-existence deserve to be called good in comparison to those who would rather have the island world to themselves? Isn’t this the very difference just mentioned, between kids who grow up self-absorbed as opposed to those who truly grow up and know how to seek balance and harmony? Indeed, more than once we hear some “other” who seems suspect declare, “We’re the good guys.” Who are we to believe?

The inclination to extermination is just the extreme of selfishness, the inevitable conclusion of selfishness. And it is itself entangled with the very reasons certain groups define themselves in contrast to “others.” Defining people as “others” (as the lostaways do), as “hostiles” (as the Dharma Initiative do), as enemy, is a sign of dichotomous thinking. Self vs. other, us vs. them. “We” are always fully human, while “they” are always less so. We are subject, they are object, and they deserve less than us, perhaps even death. It doesn’t matter if they die, they aren’t us, they aren’t people, we owe them nothing. Perhaps we even feel they need to die, or at least to have less, in order for us to be who we are. It is, in terms of game theory, competitive, win-lose thinking — for us to win, they must lose, and vice versa. Again, narcissism is normal in early stages of human development, and even for mature people, this kind of thinking can have its place. But as a general approach to living in the world, it is wanting — evident from the strife we see on all levels through our own world, obsessed as it is with this kind of thinking.

From the start, though, the series has posed that only those who live together will not die alone. It has posed the opposite of dichotomous thinking. It has posed the cooperative, the win-win. This is the maturity toward which all the characters struggle. Some resist it consciously, others seek it actively, but seldom is anyone successful at reaching it or staying with it. Without this thinking, everyone resorts to seeing themselves as good and the other bad. Only with this thinking, only with an attempt to find harmony, can good and bad be transcended, and can we embrace the fact that things aren’t as black and white as we might have thought. This is the redemption the characters seek.

And yet there’s UnLocke, apparently having hatched a plan to have the lostaways collectively off themselves so he can leave the island — not with them as he claimed, not giving them their heart’s desire as he promised, but obviously with some other outcome. The destruction of the world, as Jacob and Richard suggest? Not clear. But what is clear is that he was lying to them about his plan to get off the island and has certainly proved to be something other than the beneficent entity he tried to make them believe he was.

Is the show becoming simplistic all of a sudden, and have I been wrong all along? This has happened to me before, thinking a piece of entertainment might be capable of showing the way toward a real understanding of harmony, beyond the pat contrivances of good and evil. But they somehow seem to betray themselves. Star Wars. Titanic. The Candidate, with the obvious heartbreak of the death of the Kwons and the back-from-the-dark-side Sayid, and the revelation of the nefarious plan of UnLocke, all presented through the sunken submarine, has given me a bit of that sinking feeling again.

However, I still believe there is much evidence on “my” side, and so I continue to hold out hope that something better, something more interesting, is in store for the series’ final hours. Crucially, we haven’t yet been given any idea what the show, the characters, actually mean by the terms “good” and “evil.” From the simplistic us vs. them frame, from a standpoint of win-lose, good and evil become immature and completely relativistic labels, where what’s good for us is evil for them, and vice versa. But growing up our notions and seeing our way to win-win, we don’t have to discard these opposites entirely. We can come to think of them in new way.

On one level, what’s “evil” is dualistic, oppositional thinking itself, and what’s “good” is holistic thinking, thinking that acknowledges the variety of our experience and attempts as much as possible to accommodate as many as possible, thinking that even allows for competitive, win-lose thinking when it’s warranted. From this standpoint, white and black stand together on the evil side, with a rainbow opposing them.

On another level, good and evil can simply be the pleasant and unpleasant things that happen to us, the desired and the undesired, the ups and the down, in which case it’s important to embrace them all as normal aspects of life. It is trying to only have the good in this sense, failing to embrace the bad, that often leads to there being more bad and less good. On the other hand, accepting them both for the opportunities they provide is precisely what allows us to create a bit more good all the time. Here, in some sense, white and black and all else stand together, worthy of embrace, with nothing left as truly evil — the only real evil is denying part of our experience, trying to separate one or more colors from the rest.

Both of these perspectives stand in contrast to a totalitarian view of good and bad as enemies which must duke it out until only one color, white or black, can triumph. And so it may turn out that the Man in Black is evil after all, as Doc Jensen suggests, but that may turn out to mean something different from what anyone expects.

This is where I believed the show was pointing. It seemed a sophisticated deconstruction of our typical notions of good and evil, and it therefore seemed to be heading to a surprising ending, one that might even be jarring or disturbing for those who may themselves be too wrapped up in dichotomous thinking. Such a conclusion could only lead the nuances from earlier in the series toward an unexpected, far-from-trite resolution. And that resolution would have the potential to have a positive impact on the many who watch the show. It would have the potential to actually transform.

It’s not over ’til it’s over. It’s still possible that the show could hand us this very kind of conclusion, a mature and transformative one. Even still, it seems somewhat likely to me. After all, with the story plotted out so far ahead of time and kept such a secret, with so much mystery and subtlety along the way, and with the show’s creators sticking to their guns to end the show both when and how they wanted, completely according to their terms, and repeatedly stating that they have no idea just how satisfied audiences will be, does it seem possible or reasonable that the grand finale could involve a cliche like white beats black? Given the amount of evil clearly already in the world even with the Man in Black already bottled up on the island, how could keeping him there be a satisfying triumph of good over evil?

If a simplistic ending is what ends up happening, though, then Lost will find a spot on the crowded list of entertainments that I’ve enjoyed and will always hold a fondness for but which nevertheless disappointed in the end because they failed to achieve the greater promise I saw in them. If that happens, then I suppose I’ll be pretty glad I didn’t bother spending all that time writing an episode by episode commentary after all. We shall see.

Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

September 13, 2008
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Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective
Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective
By Mark Epstein



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Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming Parent-Child Relationships from Reaction and Struggle to Freedom, Power and Joy

September 13, 2008
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Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming Parent-Child Relationships from Reaction and Struggle to Freedom, Power and Joy
Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves: Transforming Parent-Child Relationships from Reaction and Struggle to Freedom, Power and Joy
By Naomi Aldort



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Internal Family Systems Therapy

September 13, 2008
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Internal Family Systems Therapy
Internal Family Systems Therapy
By Richard C. Schwartz



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Mutant Message Down Under

September 13, 2008
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Mutant Message Down Under
Mutant Message Down Under
By Marlo Morgan



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