Finding Lost

In my list of weird coincidences, this has got to rank pretty high: earlier this year, I'm flying to London to do the publicity tour over there for Everything Bad. I'm sitting next to a British guy, and and an hour or so into the flight, we start chatting. He asks if I'm flying over for business or pleasure, and I say business, and he asks what I do, and I say I'm promoting a new book.

Him: Oh really? What's the book?

Me: It's this funny little thing called Everything Bad Is Good For You.

Him: [smiling] Ah yes, I've read it.

Me: No way! It hasn't even come out in Britain yet!

Him: Actually, the paper where I work bought the first serial rights.

Me: How amazing. So you worked at the London Times? What do you do there?

Him: [somewhat sheepishly] I'm, um, the editor-in-chief.

Crazy, huh? I said later that not only was he the first person I'd randomly sat next to on a plane who'd actually read one of my books -- he was also the first person I'd randomly sat next to who had bought the first serial rights to one of my books.

I say all this because during the flight I was also watching episodes of the ABC show Lost on my laptop, and I brought it to my seatmate's attention because there are often shots of the original plane crash interspersed through the episodes, and I didn't want him looking over and thinking I was some kind of a freak who liked to watch footage of plane crashes while actually flying in a plane. So we got started talking about Lost, which had not made it over to the UK at that time. And then three months later, I get an email from an editor at the Times saying that the show is now airing over there, and that his boss recalls me saying something interesting about the show and did I want to write a piece about it.

I thought it sounded like a great idea, because in many ways Lost embodied a lot of the themes I was exploring in the book, but I didn't get around to seeing it until the manuscript was done. (As is so often the case, I was prodded into watching it by my longtime pop culture confidant, Alex Ross, who was a huge help when I was writing the book.) So I wrote a nice little column for the Times, which for the life of me I cannot find on their website. But about half of it will be familiar to most of you who have followed the Everything Bad discussion. Given that ABC is about to start airing season two of Lost next week, I thought I'd quote a little from the Lost-specific parts of the piece:

By genre, Lost is a disaster narrative -- closest in spirit to the airplane disaster movies over the seventies, which were as a genre so awful that they spawned an entire sub-genre of parodies. But Lost's creator J. J. Abrams -- who co-wrote and directed the show's breaktaking two-hour opening episode -- announced in the very first seconds of the show that this was no Airport 77 remake. If the networks had made Lost thirty years ago, it would have followed a fixed narrative flight path: introduce all the passengers and the pilots and the feuding stewardesses; learn each of their “backstories;” and then have the engines fail. Abrams did away with that entire prologue: Lost begins seconds after the crash, and so from the very beginning of the show, the twenty-odd survivors that we focus on are complete mysteries to the audience. We know nothing about them, and so the narrative pleasure comes from watching these interlinked histories being slowly revealed over the course of the season, in flashbacks and reminiscences.

Thirty years ago, of course, no American show would have dared to put twenty recurring characters into a network drama. (Even the socially complex prime-time soaps like Dallas tended to max out at around ten primary characters, while the sitcom's sweet spot seemed to be at around six: just enough for a nuclear family and the wacky neighbor next door.) But no show back then would have dreamt of submitting the audience to so much deliberately murky narrative information. Only the notoriously opaque Twin Peaks -- a minor network hit in the early nineties -- compares to Lost's entanglements. And indeed, Lost came very close to disappearing off the map itself: executives at ABC and its parent company Walt Disney had so little faith in the project that they fired the network chairman who had originally proposed the idea of a plane crash epic to Abrams. Only the lavish budget already spent on the pilot -- $12M, several times larger than television norm -- persuaded the network to give the show a chance.

Mystery, of course, is a staple of much serial drama. (Dickens, after all, compulsively ended his installments with a tantalizing cliffhanger.) But when American television has withheld information for the purposes of suspense, it has historically focused on a single unanswered question, “who shot JR?” being the canonical example. As uncanny as it was, Twin Peaks itself would have never attracted a mainstream audience without a central, catchphrase mystery at its core: who killed Laura Palmer?

The genius of Lost is that its mysteries are fractal: at every scale -- from the macro to the micro -- the series delivers a consistent payload of confusion. There are the biographical riddles: why was the beautiful Kate accompanied by a federal marshal on the flight? There are geographic riddles (“why have the rescue teams missed the island, and why does it appear to have a history of attracting castaways?”) and historical ones (“why has that SOS signal been playing for so many years?”) And then there are existential riddles: are these people even alive at all? Perhaps there were no survivors, and these characters are just ghosts haunting an island of lost souls. Or does Abrams have up his sleeve an elaborate homage to The Island Of Dr. Moreau?

These are only a handful of the unanswered questions that arise in the first six episodes. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with roughly thirty genuinely mysterious plot elements that season one offers up. I won't give anything away, but each of the main characters turns out to be, well, more complicated than they initially appeared, and the island itself turns out to be the most complicated of all. Narratives by definition work by withholding information about future events; you tune in to find out what will happen next. But with Lost, the mystery lies in the present tense: half the time, you have no idea what's happening right now.

Comments

[Brian1625]

Coincidences are both detrimental and a credence to science. On one hand the odds don't quite match up, on the other, “Life as a random occurrence is possible”

[Dagon]

Having read your Interface Culture, I'm wondering whether you're going to comment on Nintendo's new controller scheme, announced yesterday. Seems like something that would interest you...The Revolution controller and the Gameboy DS seem like two steps in a similar new direction.

[Suw Charman]

I have been absolutely in raptures about Lost since I saw the first episode. I've got a pretty solid interest in scriptwriting and story structure, and was just completely blown away by the way in which Lost is written and filmed. It reminds me a bit of Shaun of the Dead, a film which you really *must* see if you haven't already as it's by far the best British film ever made (in my horrifically biased opinion).

I think both Lost and Shaun of the Dead work on a whole number of levels. Firstly there's the basic narrative: What's going on? In both, we know little more than the central characters do. Frequently the audience is in a priviledged position of knowing something that the characters don't, and the suspense is in finding out how they find out what we already know. In Lost and SoTD, we're pretty much all in the dark.

Then there's the 'what's *really* going on?' level. In SoTD the story is less about zombies and more about broken relationships. In Lost, it's less about survival and more about the weirdness.

Add on top of that an incredibly dense information flow, where tiny detail might be relevant in future, and you have to take notice of things you normally only glance at. In SoTD, the set dressing is possibly the most relevant set dressing I've ever seen - everything from the posters on the wall to the extras almost out of shot, everything has something to say, if you know what it is. If you don't - if you don't recognise the posters for example - it doesn't matter. If you do, it's a whole nother layer of meaning. (A bit like the Matrix, in that respect.)

In Lost, I rapidly learnt to take notice of throwaway lines and glances at things. If the camera settles for a moment on a photo, then I know that photo's going to be relevant later on. The question is, how? And when? I'm always on the alert, always trying to process as much data as possible. I can't let myself get too emtionally caught up, (although I cried like a baby in episode 11, I think it was, over Charlie), because I need to keep my eye on what's going on.

Then there the complexities of relationships and personalities. Lost, I think, portrays the difficulties of human relationships astonishingly well. There's such a temptation amongst writers, I think, to create very flat characters and to have interactions between them stay very simple because that makes it all a lot easier to write, and in the first episode of Lost it was tempting to see that happening. Jack the MD hero, Hurley the fat boy intersted in food, Clare the dizzy Aussie mom-to-be... but as the series goes on, so our flat, two dimensional assumptions about these people get shattered. Charlie has the most wonderful character arc, and even Jack's character is shown to be much deeper, more nuanced than we could have expected.

SoTD, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, these are all setting new and astonishingly high standards which Hollywood desperately needs to match if they are to save their industry from the doldrums that it's in now.

I don't have access to a TV at the moment, so a friend of mine gave me all the episodes of Lost for my laptop. I can't describe how tempting it is to just sit for a day or two and binge. But I've managed to ration them out, because half the joy of Lost is the suspense from episode to episode. It's in thinking about it inbetween times, mulling over what you've seen, trying to posit new explanations.

Aaah, delayed gratification. Where would we be without you?

(PS Sorry for the long comment, probably should be a blog post on my own blog, really...)

[Nekai]

Couldn't figure out how to post anywhere but here so comments are far-flung.

Enjoyed your talk at Books, Inc. I am one of the "nobodies" who watched and appreciated "Hill Street Blues" from the very beginning and cannot relate in any way to "Lost" despite liking many of the other TV shows and the movies (like "Memento") which play with time/multiple story lines etc.

Re: Bush - sorry to plug another book here but BUSH ON THE COUCH by psychoanalyst Justin Frank is a must-read. He explains why Bush is so useless when the so-called perfect storm hits.

Lastly, in your comments about reading vs. video games at Books, Inc., your read your mock diatribe against reading, written as if video games had been the intellectual stimulation of choice for the past 300 years.

You posited that we could say reading is problematic because it is a solitary activity and we cannot control the story's outcome or participate in any active way except with the imagination. We are carried along by someone else's narrative passively.

The brilliance of reading someone else's story without changing it to suit us is that by reading we gain insight into other people's thoughts, feelings, motivations and actions. Tolerance, understanding, the realization that our way is not the only way, are only a few of the benefits gained by reading. Reading is a social activity because the lessons we learn are ones we can apply in our interactions with others.

Video games allow for no such broadening of our views and the lessons we learn from them lead to less, not greater social harmony. They allow us to be the star of our own story and obliterate anything that threatens us. Makes for a self-centered view of the world, I believe. Just look at the current "hurry up and give it to me NOW," and "what's YOUR problem??" attitudes so prevalent today.

[Alex Ross]

And then there is...The Wire!

[Roo]

What's going on? Don't ask me, I'm lost...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3562-1760194,00.html

[John]

Mr. Johnson,

Having actually bought your book and devouring the first 100 pages as soon as I got home, I am very interested in its premise. So much so, that I would be quite appreciative of the chance to speak with you further about it.

I am a Master's degree student at Johns Hopkins' graduate Communications program, and would like to further explore a piece of the argument in your work: that television, comedies in particular, from the 1950s to the present have become increasingly dependant upon the referential.

After looking around your site, I realize you are quite busy. However, seeing as it was your work which provided the basis of my proposed topic, I would like to know whether you would consider being a Field Advisor for my thesis.

If you are available for and interested in the role, please contact me at the email address provided with tis comment.

Thanks for your time.

[Scott Johnson]

That must have been quite a pleasant encounter--meeting the editor of the London Times on the plane. Very cool!