Haunted by Lost

I recently revisited William Goldman's classic 1981 book on the ins and outs of Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade.  There was lots to like about the book, but the thing which most stuck with me was his description of a "comic-book movie."  (Ever since Star Wars, he felt only comic book movies were being made--not that he disliked them.)  On his terms, a comic-book movie was any movie that didn't have death at its center.  So the TV series M*A*S*H was not a comic book TV series, but it would become one if the doctors were moved stateside, where they'd just be "wacky."  The constancy of death and suffering from the Korean War bumped the show out of comic book status.

Lost has death at its center.  (To say the obvious: I'm going to talk at least a tiny bit about its finale, so stop now if you don't want to know yet.)  Viewers realized by season 3 that death was an intriguing and malleable thing in this show.  Beloved characters died, but then continued to pop up to, for one, Hurley, who could talk to dead people (as could Miles soon after).  And they made creepy reappearances on the island, like Jack's dad and Hurley's friend Dave.  And by the last season or two, it seemed like not an episode could go by without at least one murder.

Lost is so close to being a comic book series.  In fact it's easy to imagine it as a graphic novel.  And it's full of loopy sci fi plotting.  But, for me, its finale decisively removes it from the comic book realm.

Lost forces its regular viewers to ask whether they like or hate the show.  It's so willing to frustrate expectations and it's so committed to its cool reversals.  (One of Grace's favorite lines at the ends of a Lost episode (said in utter frustration): "That's so Lost!")  And, seemingly at this stage of things, it was all-too-willing to bite off more than it could chew plot-wise.  (Maybe these questions have been answered, but...why can't women give live birth on the island again?  What was the point of kidnapping Walt?  All that Widdemore/ Ben fighting with all the brutality...what was all that about again?  Naomi being knifed in the back by Locke?  And the temple: WTF?  I could go on, but it might just be my dense-ness.)

But in the final analysis of "love it"/"hate it," I've arrived firmly in the "love it" camp.  At the moment, for all its loose ends and flaws, it might be one of my favorite story experiences ever.  The surprising turn of events at the end of the finale were bold and beautiful and seem, to me, to situate the entire show right at the heart of the sorts of issues we talk about here.

Each of these "lost" souls was recruited to the island, a purgatory in itself, in order to either band together about issues of ultimate concern or "die alone."  If they could pull that off, their sins would be forgiven (Jack for his many wrong and damaging [often messianic] decisions; Sawyer for his alienation of other characters; Kate for her game-playing; Sayid for his many murders; Sun for her adultery: Jin for his dominance and control; even devil-trainee Ben).  They'd learn to love, and that love would become their "constant" on their eternal journey.  I don't remember many other contemporary examples of that kind of cosmological fable.  

 
Grace cried at the beauty of some of the flashback montages of true love not dying, particularly Sawyer holding onto Juliet and shouting "Don't you let go!"  Might have been a little close for comfort as our good friend Val held onto her dying husband Andrew in much the same way, only to watch him--as with Juliet--let go.  But there Sawyer and Juliet are, finding themselves together again as they "let go" into the next world.

The sideways world seemed not only to have lots of profound things to say about purgatory, but seemed to have a close connection to Philip K. Dick's haunting novel Ubik, in which the main characters live in a sort of dream world into which flashes of "the real world" jolt them to a brief life.  (It led to one of the more arresting biography titles I've run across, I am Alive and You are Dead.)

What's the point of living?  What's our hope for where it's all headed?  Those are bold subjects for a TV series.  Perhaps as its characters have their sins forgiven, I find myself forgiving the sins of the series itself and, instead, focusing on the beauty and poetry of Jack closing his eyes at the series' end just as he opened them at its beginning and remembering the dying Jean Valjean singing in Les Miserables "forgive me all my sins and take me into glory."  I wonder if that's the only ultimate story there is.

Thoughts?