HERE IN AMERICA, only three weeks separate us from season two of the hit
television programme Lost, while British viewers who have tuned into
the show have made it only halfway through season one. Given that Lost
is a show famously shrouded in mystery and suspense, this would normally
grant me the cruel power of the spoiler. But where would I begin? Having
watched an entire season, I suspect that I’m more confused than you are.
And that’s the beauty of Lost, hands-down the creepiest show that
has ever been seen on American network TV, and also one of the best.
Lost is the story of 48 survivors of a plane crash who find themselves
struggling to stay alive on a remote island in the Pacific. Early in the
season, we learn that something is not altogether right on the island: some
sort of mythic beast devours the plane’s pilot at the end of the first
episode, and the survivors pick up an SOS signal broadcast in French that’s
been playing for 16 years, with the message: “They are all dead, it killed
them all, please help us.”
With a cast of about 20 main characters, led by an earnest young doctor played
by Jack Shepherd and an inscrutable mystic named John Locke (the brilliant
American character actor Terry O’Quinn), Lost may be the
clearest example yet of the structural complexity that has become
increasingly common on prime-time American TV, traditionally the province of
punchline-every- 30-seconds instant gratification.
By genre, Lost is a disaster narrative — closest in spirit to the
aircraft disaster movies of the 1970s, 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
breathtaking 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 30 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 “back-stories”; 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 20-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 throughout the season, in
flashbacks and reminiscences. Thirty years ago, of course, no American show
would have dared to put 20 recurring characters into a network drama. Even
the socially complex prime-time soaps such as 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
neighbour 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 hit in the early 1990s — compares to Lost’s
entanglements.
Indeed, Lost came close to disappearing off the map itself: executives
at ABC and Walt Disney, its parent company, had so little faith in the
project that they fired the network chairman who had originally proposed to
Abrams the idea of a plane-crash epic.
Only the lavish budget already spent on the pilot — $12 million (£6.6
million), several times larger than the TV 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 instalments with a tantalising cliffhanger. But when
American TV 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 would never
have 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 seem to have a
history of attracting castaways?) and historical ones (why has that SOS
signal been playing for so many years?).
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 30 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 now.
I’m not convinced yet that there’s anything terribly meaningful lying at the
bottom of Lost’s murky plotlines. The season ends with a memorably
eerie exchange, and one line in particular that will haunt you for days. But
it doesn’t offer up much in the form of answers, so the question of Lost’s
aesthetic achievement will probably remain open for at least another season.
It’s possible that Lost will turn out to be the equivalent of 24
— a show of great formal complexity and inventiveness that is
nonetheless not terribly profound, a show that’s more interesting for the
way it works than for what it actually says.
Still, it’s great entertainment. In the United States, season one ended just
as a particularly depressing summer of underperforming blockbusters arrived
in cinemas.
There’s been a lot of speculation as to why Hollywood has had such a hard time
getting people to the movies this year: are they all holed up at home
playing Grand Theft Auto and illegally downloading music tracks? But
watch any of this year’s big thrillers — Mr and Mrs Smith,
Batman Begins, Dark Water — and you’ll see in an instant that
there’s nothing that compares with the weird, seductive popular artistry of Lost.
Part of this is a function of time — your average successful TV drama has
more than 100 hours to develop its storylines over multiple seasons, while
movies are limited to three hours at the very most.
The complexity of a show such as Lost (or The Sopranos and 24)
doesn’t just bombard the viewer from the outset; it usually takes four or
five hours for these shows to get their footing, as the various plotlines
develop and intersect. At 100 hours, they are much closer to the scale of
the novel than traditional TV fare.
But until recently, the storytelling possibilities opened up by that kind of
tableau were largely ignored, thanks to American network TV’s
lowest-common-denominator mentality.
There used to be a vast gap in quality and sophistication between Hollywood
productions and TV fare. A decade ago, the boutique network HBO began to
narrow the gap with shows such as Larry Sanders and then The
Sopranos and Six Feet Under. Now, with shows like Lost and
24 running on the big networks, the gap has disappeared altogether:
American TV is now routinely more challenging and entertaining than what you
find in the multiplex.
No wonder everyone is staying at home. With 42in TV screens and surround sound
becoming staples of the American living room, why bother trekking to the
cinema? It’s almost a cliché now to refer dismissively to the pundits who
predicted that the rise of TV in the 1950s would kill off the cinema. But
watching Lost makes me wonder whether they had it right all along.
- Steven Johnson is the author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Todays
Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (Allen Lane)
AND THE ANSWER IS...
Solution: They all died in the crash. The island is purgatory.
Evidence: Large number of survivors; themes of enlightenment and
redemption.
Inside view: “I love that theory, but it isn’t what it is,” says the
creator of Lost, J. J. Abrams. “I’d be frustrated if that were the
answer.”
Rating: 3/5
Solution: There was only one survivor. He or she is dreaming about the
island and the other characters while in a coma.
Evidence: Surreal elements could be aspects of someone’s subconscious
mind.
Inside view: “This is not a fictional reality that is playing out in
someone’s brain,” says the co-writer Damon Lindelof.
Rating: 2/5
Solution: The island is a giant laboratory. A mad genetic scientist or
covert government agency is experimenting on humans and animals.
Evidence: Explains the polar bear and the monster in the woods.
Inside view: “There are explanations,” says Lindelof. "We’re
not going to have polar bears running out of the jungle because it’s
cool.”
Rating: 3/5
Solution: Aliens caused the crash. and put the survivors on the island
to observe human behaviour.
Evidence: Some believe the mysterious hatch is the entrance to a
spaceship.
Inside view: “There aren’t aliens in there,” says Lindelof.
Rating: 2/5
Solution: Humanity has been wiped out. The island is the last inhabited
place on Earth.
Evidence: Isolation could have protected the survivors from a deadly
virus.
Inside view: “That is a possibility,” says Lindelof. “What’s amazing is
that we can do an entire season without answering what happened in the
outside world.”
Rating: 4/5
