Lost

We had a lot of good discussions about Lost here over the years, so let’s relive old days.

I watched the show faithfully for the first few seasons,  intrigued by the frequent religious and literary allusions (I’m sure, somewhere, there’s a list of all the books Sawyer is shown reading), the conflict between faith and reason,   as well as the obvious theme of redemption, so clear as the series focused on the Losties’ backstories. I was interested in all the various mysteries, fairly confused by them, and had little faith that the creators really had an endgame in mind – in terms of those mysteries.

I didn’t watch season 6 after Mike died – the mysteries of my own life were enough to figure out without having to wrestle with fictional ones. And I didn’t watch much of this season until the last three episodes, relying on my daughter to explain things to me.

(I did, however, perhaps perversely, go through a period where I rewatched all the Six Feet Under episodes, obsessively, a series that I think has one of the best season-ending episodes ever, and one that also takes us, at the end, into a character’s eyes.)

Watched the finale, though. In one of the several articles about  and interviews with the creators that have appeared over the past few weeks, one mentioned the fact that in an episode last season, Jacob was seen reading a book – the Flannery O’Connor short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge.

(Clayton Emmer’s post from the time on the use of the book is here. I’d know he’d covered that ground already if I’d been following the show!)

That particular story itself doesn’t seem to have much to directly say to Lost: it’s the one about the snooty, educated son escorting his mother to a weight-reduction class at the Y on a bus, and he being determined, as O’Connor’s young, overeducated characters tend to be, to show his mother how provincial she is. The conflict in this story centers on race.  And at the end, the mother dies and the son is struck by loss:

The tide of darkness seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.

If you are determined to find something in this collection that has some sort of more apparently overt connection to this finale, you’d look to the story Revelation, one of the two most commonly anthologized O’Connor stories (after A Good Man is Hard to Find) in which the prideful protagonist has a vision:

“Until the sun slipped finally behind the tree line, Mrs. Turpin remained there with her gaze bent to them as if she were absorbing some abysmal life-giving knowledge. At last she lifted her head. There was only a purple streak in the sky, coming through a field of crimson and leading, like an extension of the highway, into the descending dusk. She raised her hands from the side of the pen in a gesture hieratic and profound. A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faced, but she remained where she was, immobile,
“At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.”

And which reflects more obviously the source of  O’Connor’s title for the collection and that first story – de Chardin’s thought (which she was quite taken with) and his sense of all creation moving toward (evolving, he would say) an “Omega Point” – Christ. Everything that rises must converge.

So in a way, the ending was satisfying, in that it brought those themes of reconciliation full circle. I didn’t watch, as I say, the last 2 seasons, basically, but what I’m picking up is the conclusion that the side-realities were Purgatory, in a sense? I don’t know.

I also don’t know if that satisfaction in terms of the general theme totally outweighs the suspicion that all the little mysteries along the way were not worth  the energy expended it trying to figure them out.  I have no idea if everything that was thrown at the viewer during the course of the series actually fits together at all.  There was an  urgency to those mysteries at the time that isn’t satisfied by seeing Claire and Charlie together in heaven and Jack reconciled with his father. You know? It’s really not enough.

But is there an existential/theological point to that as well? That the details, the specific mysteries don’t matter in the context of the final ending? But see, I don’t believe that.

So I liked it for that reason – in that the fundamental themes were there and consistent – that (and the creators have said this) in community we find reconciliation and redemption. We help each other toward that end.  I have to admit, though, I found the gathering in church a little bit lacking in imagination, and even formulaic, but could I do better? Nope, probably not.

I don’t think it was an epic fail, but I don’t think it was a fantastic, rousing success either, by any means. The creators set the expectations bar way to high for this kind of ending to be totally satisfying.  I like Megan McArdle’s thoughts, here. Except for her final take-away of the “tragic” nature of life, which just goes to show you the difference a worldview can make.

So there it is, in my limited view, and perhaps both O’Connor stories have more to say in relation to this episode that I thought when I first started writing this post:  We enter into this world of guilt and sorrow and often act in ways that only bring more.   Tossed together in this place that is an inexplicable mix of free will, determinism and nature , we’re in community and we help each other discover reconciliation and redemption, and on we march, on we go, through fire, upward.

I mean, remember the title of this show? Lost? Not just the plane, not just the passengers as numbers, but as individuals.  Frequently throughout the series, I would think of how passengers are referred to in aviation. Souls.  155 souls on board, and so on.

When Jack enters the back room of the church, I laughed aloud because of the riot of global religious symbols – it was almost too PC for words, at first glance, but then I adapted because, of course, all world religions posit some sort of continued existence (in a way, even Buddhist nirvana or extinction is a continuation of existence for individual non-existence is a continuation of our true selves…etc…) but then, on further reflection…it doesn’t wash in the end because what Lost was about – the particular shape of the necessity of redemption and reconciliation in order to be whole – is not anything you’re going to find in all of those various world religions.  Christian hope is unique – shocking! – and it’s not about a vague hopeful expectation of an afterlife, it’s not about merging the particular into ultimate reality, it’s not about a pleasure-centered reward for obedience to divine will and  like it or not and intentionally or not, it’s that more specific Christian hope that Lost echoes, ever so faintly.

The most intriguing element to me was Ben, declining to enter, saying that he still had some things to work out.  Not ready.Not yet. That whole “genocide of the Dharma initiative” thing probably had something to do with that.

Dorian!

Beautiful – the overall idea of redemption and the purgative nature of suffering…and then the contrast with every other new show being advertisted on “ABC Summer” – seriously, people, a vampire gated community?