'Lost,' One Week Later
Lost was a travesty. It was always a story of characters haunted and driven by their pasts, of absent fathers and shrewish mothers, of moral ambiguity in the guise of righteous conviction, of the struggle for free will in a universe in which your every action might be predetermined. And in the end, the writers went to extraordinary lengths to dispense with these complications.
In its early days, the one question I wanted answered more than any other was: “How did all these fucked up people end up on the same plane?” In an overly odd coincidence, most of the show’s main characters were convinced they were responsible for killing someone. Each conviction was, more or less, justified. And yet, the castaways, feeling terrified and besieged, went on to kill far more of the ‘Others’ on the Island than the Others killed castaways (at least twice as many, by my count).
The essential question the series asked in episode after episode was: you find yourself on a deserted island with a bunch of strangers. You can be anyone you want. Can you reinvent yourself? Can you leave your past behind? Again and again, the answer the show returned was a resounding: No. When a character made peace with their demons, his days were numbered. It was hard to tell if this was a matter of dramatic convenience or part of a grand design, but the body count rose at an impressive clip.
The women got the worst of it. Generally they were gunned down (off the top of my head, I count at least five), although one had her throat slit and another died of a brain hemorrhage. One character, introduced as cannon fodder late in the game, actually insisted on her competence just before she ineptly threw down a bag o’ dynamite and was promptly blown to smithereens. Only one of the women to buy it was granted a heroic death. Of the three left standing at the end of the series, one was sidelined throughout the last season (Penny); one was at best deeply unstable (Claire); and the last, once one of the show’s major characters, had been damn near reduced to a supporting role (while Kate was granted a part in taking down the story’s Final Boss Character, she was also required to suddenly profess her devotion to the corner of her love triangle she’d been ignoring all season). All of them were mothers. No doubt bound to nag, berate, and renounce their children.
After all, that’s what the mother of every single character did when we encountered them in flashback after flashback. Mothers on Lost were not to be trusted, and the show had an obsession for women’s ovaries along with a number of other pop cult totems. In hindsight, it looks like writer Brian K. Vaughan (whose graphic novel, Y: The Last Man , which ran from 2002 to 2008, notably addressed reproductive issues in a similar fashion to the now better-known 1992 book Children of Men) might have injected this motif into Lost. And concurrently with much of Lost, wombs and reproduction were also a topic of great interest to the remakers of Battlestar Galactica. This sense of crisis, of the need for control over the survival of the species, and of its dangers, haunts the culture.
Claire, the story’s teenage mother—who’d been doing her damnedest to give her child up for adoption before she was stranded on the island—was repeatedly schooled in motherhood by several male characters. They even seized control of the plot. The original plan had been to have a more motherly Kate become the leader of the castaways; instead the writers went with Dr. Jack. Even when they weren’t killed, the women were shoved to the margins.
Characters who weren’t white didn’t fare much better. The show’s Angry Young Black Man (a single dad, no less) was written out a third of the way in, only to be written back in later on, only to be killed off in a doomed, heroic effort to defuse a bomb. His son—set up as your standard Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter type—seemingly fell victim to puberty and was summarily exiled (but at least not executed). Lt. Daniels showed up in a bit part for no particular reason other than to get popped.
They even got in both a Magic Black Lady and a Magic Black Man, a rare twofer; when the actor who played the latter decided he wanted out, his character was brutally beaten to death. As for the aforementioned Magic Black Lady, she managed to make it over the finish line. But she was married to a white man, which always improves one's odds.
Which brings us to Sayid. Granted, fine—he was a former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard, and a torturer no less. Gotta be topical. He felt bad about it. He was tortured and smoldering and aggressive and competent, as good with a radio as a rifle, a richly realized character in an important role. It was a shock to see him on TV while Iraq was still reeling from shock and awe, as we denied the humanity of the ‘terrorists’ and ‘hajis.'
Then, in the final season, Sayid was inexplicably and meaninglessly declared ‘evil’ and then did his best to live up to the title—until in the end, to save his friends, he grabbed a ticking bomb, raced off, and blew himself up. This was a heroic death. A martyr’s death. It is somewhat tarnished by the image.
Thus began the great Minority Massacre of May 2010, in which the show’s beloved Korean couple also went down with the sub. Despite the fact that they had a daughter the husband had never met, he refused to leave his wife’s side, and the writers drowned them both. As the water level crept over them, they spoke most of their final words in English. Assimilation will only get you so far.
Just in case anyone missed the point, the only semi-significant white character who seemingly bought it on the sub turned up alive in the final episode, despite having been knocked unconscious and presumably gone with it to the bottom. Of the characters left standing at the show’s end, almost all of them are white. Sure, Hurley is Hispanic, but the sort of Hispanic who listens to Willie Nelson, not the sort who flies the Puerto Rican flag and blasts reggaeton out the back of his SUV. And then there’s Miles, whose parents were Chinese, but somewhere along the way he picked up the surname Straume. Strand the bomber crew on a tropical island, and in the fight for survival the White Folks still come out on top.
Of course, Lost complicated the usual hierarchy of survival that too often serves as a scaffold for genre work by resurrecting nearly all of its dead. Despite repeated hints throughout the series that its entire cast might have died in the plane crash with which the story began, and that the Island might be nothing more than Purgatory, the writers established, through a device too inane to waste time explaining to those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with it, an alternate timeline, or, wait, maybe it was just another Purgatory—watching it seemed like Purgatory—the waiting room before you get to Heaven, in which all the characters arrive when they die… even though they die years apart… Um…. Okay. It’s impossible to explain because it doesn’t make any sense. It was ‘the Other Show’ that kept interrupting Lost all season.
As the story drew to a close amidst a spasm of empty and largely Christian religious iconography, what this breathtaking stupidity, this profoundly cheap and lazy device, allowed the writers to do was to avoid the central challenge they’d posed: the question of forgiveness, of the past that’s always present. It’s easy to forgive yourself for strangling someone to death if that someone comes back to life and tells you you’re forgiven. It’s easy to live with the loss of someone you loved if you get to meet cute at the snack machine in Limbo. It’s easy to sacrifice yourself if you’ll be rewarded in the afterlife. We’ve had some trouble with this logic recently. It’s easy to leave the past behind if you get to wake up in an entirely different universe.
Genuine forgiveness is much harder to come by. In the spectacular pivot Lost pulled off during its fourth season, when the present suddenly became the past, there was a hint of one way we might find it. A taste of absolution in the dissolution of the past. For a while there, it seemed like the show might have something to say about the subject, or at least that it might offer, through the lives of its characters, a vicarious dose. Instead, it needlessly regurgitated some of the worst of what we’d like to leave behind. It comes as a shock, after all those episodes, that now we’re left still waiting for the show where a seat on the last plane out isn’t determined by the color of a person’s skin and the women are in the cockpit.
Nicholas Jahr is a freelance writer born and raised in Brooklyn and a founding editor of the Crumpled Press.
But the show was always really about the characters.
Just kidding! That is my favorite bullshit excuse being bandied about by the Lost finale apologists.
Whenever LindeCuse trotted that one out I laughed/barfed a little.
It's just such a fantastically empty, meaningful-sounding meaningless phrase.
Anyway, let's give Lost credit for this much: It was ambitious. It was the first time anyone ever tried to do a serialized long-form story so large over so many seasons on network TV, and as such, it was probably doomed to be a bit of a bust. But one hopes it laid some groundwork for a future success.
And even if that doesn't happen, the good news about our culture is that in twenty years, we'll get to enjoy the inevitable reboot, in which all the questions we want answers to are finally resolved.
My favorite bullshit excuse was "with all the questions the show raised over the seasons, of course they all weren't going to get answered." Fine, but admit that's a flaw!
mhememmhehhh….. but what about every soap opera ever made in the history of time?
Not as ambitious but similarly structured.
Look I THOROUGHLY enjoyed Lost. But I hesitated to watch it when it was first on because I was so stung by the suck factor of the X Files in its later years. It lived down to that legacy.
The smartest thing LindeCuse did was get that six year limit. Even then, they blew it a little, but perhaps it proves that the goals of networks and the goals of storytelling are, to say the least, at odds.
Moff all questions will be answered in the 3-D movie.
The finale SUCKED. Right Moff? Tell me I'm not crazy?
Everywhere I turn, i see Lost fans and TV critics talking about how great the ending was, and I think I'm going to lose my mind. It wasn't great. It was TERRIBLE. And I say that as a former fan who's been watching this show for six years!
Someon, please, tell me I'm not crazy!
Yes, I thought it sucked. But I don't know if I'm the best person to judge, because by the time I watched the finale, I so thoroughly hated both the show and all the characters that I would have hated the finale no matter what happened.
(Why did I keep watching, you ask, if I hated it so much? I don't know. If it had been more of a procedural with more self-contained episodes, I definitely would have quit years ago. But I have a really hard time giving up on serialized stories, especially after having invested so much time with it.)
@sunny: Eh, yeah, soap operas aren't a bad comparison, but even though they're network, they're not primetime. And they're not really "mainstream." There were certain implicit expectations about Lost, such as that it would have one main overarching story line that all the subplots would tie into, and that it would have an end (even before the fact that it would indeed have an end was announced). Whereas soaps don't really end, they just die after a long, long time. Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it too. I'm just disappointed; I wanted to see it all come together artfully and gloriously.
@Hippity: I don't know if it sucked, exactly, but it was a pretty big letdown after the fact. And no, it was by no stretch of the imagination great. What was interesting about it to me was how it managed to hit all the structural beats of an ending, even if they were completely divorced from much of a coherent structure within the show as a whole, thus providing the emotional sense and satisfaction of something coming to a close. I mean, I was simultaneously annoyed by the finale and filled with a sense of resolution, even though very little was actually resolved. Smoke monster and mirrors, I guess.
@major disaster: Why do we keep watching? At some point I think Kolsterman twittered that anyone who hated the show and kept watching deserved what they got. As someone who had high expectations for the show, but thought it had started to go off the rails during season 5 (if not 4, when if memory serves the writer's strike hit), and it still seemed to me that he missed the point. I read novels to the last page. I sit through the whole damn movie. How else to come up with an informed judgment? Particularly if the work in question had some amount of promise in its early stages, in which case I'll give it a chance to make good. And straight through season 4, Lost still looked like it'd pay off.
writers', dammit
@Nicholas Jahr: Actually, yeah, that's probably a pretty good explanation of why I kept watching. I'm definitely the same with movies and will watch even terrible ones to the very end. (I wish I cold say the same thing about books, but the sad truth is I have a very short attention span lately. Sometimes I don't even get around to finishing good ones.)
@Moff: "Smoke monster and mirrors" – Ha! I love this.
The end of "Lost" was terrible. Also, "it was all about the characters" is a godawful defense because the implication is, "we didn't have to resolve the plot because we wanted to give you happy character moments." This goes against every tenet of fiction writing there is.
@Mr. Hippity–most of the people I know hated the finale, so you're not alone. A few people I know did like it, which has actually strained their relationships with certain other friends, which is hilarious.
Co-sign on Moff's comment re "it's all about the characters!"
tl;dw
That took me a second, but is very funny.
There were two kinds of "Lost" fans: those who were in it for the characters, and those who were in it for the mysteries. The final season shit on both sets of fans with equanimity.
I was so disgusted with the finale's end that I wrote my own (http://rurl.org/2qkc) and will forever insist that the actual ending never happened.
I was in it for the ideas, and I was pretty content throughout the final season.
Also relevant: the portrayal of an Iraqi by a British/Indian actor. And I could go into the mutability of the Anglo-Saxon identity through the lens of American television watchers, but that's not quite as piquant as mother/minority issues.
But: "A more motherly Kate" = not a phrase I've ever expected to read.
While I enjoyed the new Star Trek, that screenplay hinted at what a mess the last of Lost was going to be.
Storytelling, once again, fail. You really can only enjoy this crap by shutting off the old logic circuits.
The best summary of Lost is that the writers introduced, in the first episode, a character/monster whose identity, purpose, even appearance, they had no idea about. None. The VFX artists had to invent it from whole cloth.
I think you're actually on to something with this. In interview after interview, the show's creators wholeheartedly admit that LOST got to air on the strength of the pitch "Survivor, but a drama, and with some supernatural shit." It was obvious, from at least the second half of the first season, that there was nothing approaching an overarching dramatic framework anywhere near lost.
LOST was a lot more like a comic book or a cartoon show than a novel. In fact, one of the show's story editors, Paul Dini, has a resume dominated by titles like Tiny Toon Adventures and Crypto the Superdog. Perhaps a more relevant credit of his is Batman: The Animated Series, a moody and engrossing take on the batman myth from the mid-90s. Lost was more like Batman than Scooby Doo, despite what many critics of the finale seem to believe. They wanted to have the rubber mask pulled off of the smoke monster, and find out it was Walt THE WHOLE TIME.
Lost lived episode to episode, and spent most of its energy trying not to repeat the mistakes of Twin Peaks. Namely, if your show is built around a mystery, and you answer that mystery, no one will continue watching it. It did a pretty good job on that score, throwing up 10 new mysteries for every one it "answered." The fact that it didn't wrap all this up in a satisfying way is less than surprising, and doesn't at all tarnish the joy all those perfectly-polished episodes gave.
Agreed in some respects. But here are my problems with this:
(1) Comic books and superhero cartoons do have endings, and in fact have pretty consistently excellent story structure, including resolution of unanswered questions. (I have a book of Paul Dini Batman comics to prove it! Or you can just watch some Justice League reruns.)
(2) If you throw up ten new mysteries for each one you "answer," and then don't resolve most of them satisfactorily, is that really, like, art? Or is it just a gimmick? Because with the benefit of hindsight, that trick — which, yes, Lost thrived on — seems like it'd be pretty easy to replicate. Before it quickly got boring, I mean.
1) They have endings in that someone wins in the end. Someone won on Lost.
2) I guess I would say that I think the moments of Lost that approach art are the acting, and the emotions that individual scenes and episodic arcs evoke in the viewer. All the "mysteries" are just McGuffins to allow those things to happen. So, no, I do not think the plot of Lost was art.
Actually that's a way interesting point! Here's the thing, though. I can't think of a comic book with that same mysteryness to it. With that penchant for setting up conundrums to be resolved, which is really the heart of what Lost originally was, claims of character aside. There are some truly magnificent serialized comics and cartoons – The Walking Dead being my preferred example. But it does not end, and it doesn't claim to be getting any closer to an answer to a Big Question (e.g. why are there zombies) – it just keeps on living in this world. A version of Lost (from an ALTERNATE REALITY?!?!) where this happened would be one I would watch! A plane load of survivors trying to survive on an island, and maybe shit is weird, but we are not lead to believe it is any more than ordinary people with bad luck. Instead of the endless attempts to inject meaning and surprise that made Lost suck.
@david: They have endings, actually, in that — particularly in the Paul Dini Batman comics I mentioned — there are questions raised and then satisfactorily answered. I mean, with the major exception of The Long Halloween, Batman really isn't different from Scooby-Doo: When the story is over, the mystery has been solved.
Anyway, the acting — as well as many other things about the show — is very good. My beef is that you can have good acting and good story, and that Lost implicitly promised a better story. I wanted the plot to be art, and held out hope all the way through Season 5 that it might be.
I'm still pissed off with Twin Peaks too.
Avatar sucked…just saying
So you spent years of your life watching a show that didn't resolve… does that really detract from the fact that for those many years you teased your brain trying to generate a grand unifying theory for all the mysteries?
I didn't ever get into the Lost, but the discussion here reminds me of the one that followed Twin Peaks' final season. I still love TP, and the fact that the storyline is disjointed and diffuse only makes it better after time… more resonant. (True, they did release a movie to tie up loose ends, but it only made me realize how little the show was about plot.)
But Lost was all about plot. It was shot through with plot. That was one of its great virtues (and why I think soap operas are a valid genre comparison). The characters were well-acted stereotypes – unlike Twin Peaks. And for all its narrative tricks, Lost did imply that there would be a conclusion, an honest-to-goodness resolution. I can understand why many people were unsatisfied.
Yeah, but Twin Peaks' aesthetic and overall tone seems to lend itself so much better to all the ambiguity. And while Lost may achieve some long-term resonance, the problem with the finale was that it just devolved into sap. Mawkishness is maybe the polar opposite of resonance.
(That was @ the admiral. And I concur, sunny.)
@admiral: Does it detract from time spent hashing out various possibilities and the themes of the show with my friends? Not really (well, maybe a little). Would I ever recommend the show to someone who hasn't seen it? Hell no.
As for Twin Peaks, while I don't think I've watched the show since it aired, I loved it to the bitter end. I think that was a show that benefited from its loose ends and the, to my mind, fairly bleak conclusion it reached. Lost didn't. And while I agree with sunnyciegos (@4:41), I could've imagined an ending to the show that didn't sacrifice Sayid, Sun, Jin, et al in an attempt to pull on the heart strings, left any number of mysteries unanswered, and was still vastly more satisfying.
That is not the case here.
There are many valid criticisms of Lost, especially the final season. This post includes none of them, and is one of the least original things I have read on The Awl.
Seriously, I am all about good, complex women and minority characters. But I have read so many blog posts, articles, and comments that point out all the women and minority characters that died on Lost, and all of them have been stupid. Almost everyone died on Lost! It wasn't the writers' fault that Walt grew two feet in a year or that Eko didn't like living in Hawaii! The first several characters to die were all white. Shannon and Boone were white and vapid and semi-incestuous and died pretty early.
If you want to bitch about the treatment of women and minorities in entertainment, Lost, with one of the most diverse casts ever, really does not deserve so much ire.
I dunno. I certainly don't think art has any obligation to be p.c., but what made me mildly uncomfortable was that indeed, it did have one of the most diverse casts ever — and that somehow, despite that, only the white people made it to the end alive. I don't expect everyone to share that discomfort, but it's still there.
That said, I can see Sayid's death-by-suicide-bomb as being some kind of metaphor. But if that's what it was supposed to be, I don't feel like the writers were in tight enough control to pull it off.
What you seem to forget is that a meaningful, tearful death is a lot more interesting to the actor, the writer (and often the viewer) than "making it to the end alive."
I don't forget that. I just find myself mostly in the camp that thinks the finale made a lot of those deaths not-meaningful.
Also, a death can be meaningful. But as Nicholas Sparks has taught us, it can also just be a cheap stand-in for genuine meaning.
Lost does deserve kudos for its diverse cast.
But for me the character of Sun was the most troublesome stereotype on the show. She seems to escape scrutiny and/or crazy hissing fits a la the screeds directed against Kate, for example, because she was uncomplicatedly "good." You can unpack Sun for a long time and be troubled.
@metoometoo: Yes, almost everyone died on Lost, but a good number of people didn't. They're all white. That's telling. Eko could've vanished into the jungle, he could've been sent off the Island; instead they killed him. As for Walt, while I wrote Walt off long before most people I know, bringing him back for the series finale in some way was certainly not out of the question.
As for Shannon and Boone, well, at the time I was impressed that Shannon caught that bullet and not Sayid. But ultimately that wasn't the way this story shook out. Sayid's 'transformation' (to use a word that gives the writers way too much credit) in the final season was both poorly executed and repugnant.
Lost may have had one of the most diverse casts ever (though outside Sayid it doesn't seem more diverse than your standard crew of the Enterprise); how you treat the characters who reflect that diversity matters. (If you think such things matter at all, which I do.)
As for my originality, or lack thereof, well, I haven't read much of what other people have been writing on the show. I only delved into the insanity that is Lostpedia after the show ended. But I'm making a broader point about how the treatment of the story's female and minority characters also reflects the writers spectacular failure to come to grips with the themes and questions they raised (which were a lot more interesting to me than who built the statue). Maybe I haven't made that point as clearly as I might, but that's a separate issue.
I think, if one is so inclined, it's easy to complain about many of the character arcs on Lost. But these issues with the writing are pretty consistent across the board. Muddling complaints about occasionally flawed or simplistic or inconsistent character writing together with insinuations of racism and sexism is a cheap hook for an argument, in my opinion. It's easier to be outraged about minority characters dying and white male characters surviving than to clearly and specifically articulate what was so unsatisfying about the final season, but I find it irritating and unfair to the show, which, although I wish certain elements had been executed better, still deserves admiration for what it did well.
But the show did exhibit both sexist and racist writing. This issue is linked to poor characterization, because most "Lost" characters were stereotypes. And this essay, by pointing that out, defuses one of the main arguments by "Lost" apologists–that the show was "all about the characters." Basically, the essay is all "O RLY? The characters? You mean these shitty fucking characters? Fuck you." And I endorse this message. The finale was all about What Happened to Jack, which was a terrible choice because Jack is one of the most loathed characters on "Lost"–second only to Kate. Why did we have to hang out with him? Because he was a Handsome Young(ish) White Male Protagonist. There was no logical or compelling reason to focus on him, other than the fact that he fits the mainstream cultural model for "hero." This was especially disappointing in a show that gave us so many unexpected heroic characters, like Sayid and Juliette.
I would contend that race and gender issues are being used to lend a facade of weight and righteousness to what is a fundamentally emotional response to Lost. This emotional response is common and understandable, but it is based on frustration with the story and the characters in general, not on any kind of rational examination of race and gender issues.
But the author is correct that the majority of female characters on "Lost" lacked depth. He is also correct that the show's two major African-American characters, Michael and Mr. Eko, were caricatures. Despite the strong performances of both actors, one character was essentially a deadbeat dad and the other a Magical Negro.
Your argument that "race and gender issues are being used to lend a facade of weight and righteousness to what is a fundamentally emotional response to Lost" might be correct if the author was wrong about "Lost" having sexist and racist elements. But he's not! The author's emotion didn't prevent him from making an valid argument; therefore, your contention that emotion has clouded the author's judgment is wrong.
Eh, I don't know if Michael was really a deadbeat dad. Honestly, I know what you're saying, but that's a bit of a stretch.
Well, maybe not deadbeat, but absent. It bothered the actor: http://www.buddytv.com/articles/lost/harold-perrineau-upset-with-lo-20058.aspx.
Mar, I was actually referring more so to your comment as being clouded by emotion. I totally get what you are saying, but I just don't think Lost is any more racist or sexist than any other television show or movie written primarily by white men, and in some ways, a good deal less racist. At least the writers attempted to explore characters with diverse backgrounds, which is more than many of their peers can say. They didn't always pull it off, but they attempted a lot of things that they didn't necessarily pull off.
I think that you, the author, and many others with similar critiques, are reacting to sloppy writing and shallow characterization in general, and that calling it racism/sexism is, in the context of mainstream popular entertainment, unreasonable and overly inflammatory.
I'm going to throw a trashcan through the window of J.J. Abrams' house.
Also! The writers of "Lost" don't get points for being at the same level of racism/sexism as other television writers. They also don't get points for trying to tell "diverse" stories and "not pulling it off." This isn't middle-school soccer practice–you don't get points for participation. If you try real hard and then fail, said failure is not mitigated by effort. The ubiquity of crappiness and mediocrity in our culture doesn't make these qualities excusable; "average" is not a synonym for "good." Statistics say that 1 in 5 college bros likes to run around date-raping women–therefore, this is a common phenomenon. According to your logic, this makes date rape not a crime.
I'm also confused about your statement that identifying sexist or racist elements in "mainstream popular entertainment" is somehow "unreasonable" and "overly inflammatory." Here's why it's important to identify sexist and racist elements in mainstream popular entertainment: it's mainstream, and it's popular. Do you think that cultural critique should be reserved for the likes of Eudora Welty? Television is an incredibly powerful and influential medium; whether we like it or not, it subtly (and not so subtly) informs our world views and value systems. The more mainstream and popular a television show is, the more important it is to criticize it.
Finally, you can't win an argument by accusing people of being "clouded by emotion"; instead you have to think of some actual refutations. Save that shit for Francis Farmer and James Tiberius Kirk.
I just wrote a super long and thoughtful reply and then the Internet ate it and I can't bring myself to type it all out again.
Basically, I think most popular entertainment is appallingly sexist and racist and I'd rather address the most problematic and egregious examples rather than attacking writers who are at least making an effort and seem to have good intentions. I think it's totally fine to critique the way women and minority characters were handled on Lost, but that to channel all of one's more general frustrations with the writing into this issue is a convenient misinterpretation, providing an easy outlet for one's outrage.
I wasn't trying to "win" anything by accusing people of being "clouded by emotion," only to point out the difficulty of engaging with an argument that is mostly an emotional rant rather than a reasonably thought out series of points.
Questions!
1. I'm sorry that your busy schedule only permits you to address the "most problematic and egregious examples" of sexist and racist popular entertainment. However, I didn't realize that you are also the head of the critical establishment, and have the power to dictate how journalists, English majors and weird Internet people focus their attention. Please, sir, might a weird Internet person such as myself spend five minutes today thinking about the lost opportunities represented by Ana Lucia?
2. Why do you think that it's logical to say that people shouldn't attack writers who are "at least making an effort," and in the next breath state "I think it's totally fine to critique the way women and minority characters were handled on 'Lost' . . ."? Which one is it? What's your point? Are you clouded by emotion?
3. Why do you assume that I'm channeling "all of [my] more general frustrations with ['Lost's] writing into this issue"? My frustration with 'Lost' is infinite; it contains multitudes. I don't think that 'Lost' was bad simply because some of its characterizations had sexist and racist elements; I think 'Lost' was bad because of mistakes made on almost every level, down to foley (they never should have given the Smoke Monster those clanking noises that mysteriously disappeared around S4.) If all you've been trying to argue this whole time is that 'Lost' is bad for lots of reasons, not just because of its sexist and racist elements, then huzzah–I agree with you.
3. I'm sorry that you're having such a difficult time "engaging" with my argument; that must be hard for you. How are you coping? Also, did you know that "sarcasm" is not an emotion?
1. There's difference between a thoughtful critique and a hysterical rant.
2. "If all you've been trying to argue this whole time is that 'Lost' is bad for lots of reasons, not just because of its sexist and racist elements, then huzzah–I agree with you."
I have been trying to argue that Lost was bad for lots of reasons and also good for lots of reasons. I think that the ways that Lost was bad stem primarily from sloppiness, not from racism and sexism. Yes, the fact that the writers of Lost are white and male and therefore tend to relate better to other white males was certainly apparent, but that was not the defining problem.
It can be fine and productive to reasonably discuss the implications of Lost's treatment of women and minorities, but, because Lost was the sort of show that inspires such intense passion, these criticisms more strongly resemble hysterical rants. I tire of reading hysterical rants and would prefer a more reasonable discussion.
But it looks like it will be a while before people have the distance to be reasonable about Lost.
Anyway, this is not the most relaxing activity in between bouts of stomach virus induced vomiting, so I'm going to bow out. You can consider it a forfeit if that would make you happy.
Sorry you're so bummed about Lost. I think it could have been a lot better, and I wish it had been, but I liked watching it and I'm glad it exists.
I consider it a forfeit because you didn't actually refute any of my points; you merely resorted to calling me "hysterical" and "emotional," which is amusing because that is a move straight out of the Sexist Male playbook.
Your points were things like: "O RLY? The characters? You mean these shitty fucking characters? Fuck you." And I was never trying to refute them, only to temper the rage being unleashed on a show that I loved, although it was certainly imperfect.
I'm a girl, BTW. A girl who writes screenplays about girls' relationships with other girls, with no traditional romantic storylines. Even though I know that's like the least commercial thing I could possibly write. Because I think it's important for female voices and female characters and female stories to be a part of popular entertainment. Also, because I'm a lot better at writing moody, sardonic girl protagonists, and try as I might, my male characters tend to be less fully realized.
Which is why I find it easy empathize with white male writers who are making an effort to write interesting female and minority characters, even if they don't always pull it off. I am willing to cut them some slack because their intentions seem good, and there are so many other writers who don't even bother to try, because they don't even think about it or because it's hard and they might not pull it off.
Just because someone disagrees with you, it doesn't necessarily make them a Sexist Male.
Hey you guys! You guys are the best! Thanks for the enjoyable reading. Nobody argues like this on the internet anymore and it saddens me. Everyone resorts to meme regurgitation and gooble-gobble. I'm glad you didn't give up there, metoometoo because you almost LOST via forfeit (a forfeit is a loss) Please continue. I'm almost willing to umpire, Jim Joyce style.
The crazy thing is I agree with a lot of metoometoo's points (I enjoyed LOST while agreeing mostly that it was terrible; both terrible yet vastly entertaining until the final 2 hours which was breathtakingly pathetic storytelling) yet I thin Mar is up a few points simply for having a better debating style. Also though, I have assumed Mar is a white male, so it could be an inevitability he wins. It's close though guys, super close. Please more?
@metoometoo
It's great that you want to give the writers their due, because yes, they went out of their way to make LOST an inclusive television show in ways that most TV shows have not. But inclusivity brownie points aside, people are still entitled to question and critique the way race/class/gender/disability/whatever gets handled on the show. Featuring a diverse cast, or even doing better than most TV shows to avoid sexism/racism/etc– these things don't exempt the writers or the story from critique. There's no Get Out of Criticism Free card, however well-intentioned your efforts are. The OP's points are, I think, largely valid and don't at all seem like a "hysterical rant" or emotion-tinged litany of complaints. They seem like reasonable criticisms.
It's nice that you love the show, but so do the folks who spend so much time critiquing it. There's nothing wrong with pointing out the flaws of something — it doesn't mean you don't appreciate it, or that you think it sucks. You seem awfully defensive and impassioned for someone who ascribes the reasoned complaints of other people to emotion.
Ha, thanks djfreshie. The thing is, I actually hate arguing!
I wish I could go back to college and take a class about Lost and have discussions where the professor would make us articulate our points and opinions clearly and calmly and then we could build a consensus and come up with cool insights together and be happy and excited about our cool insights instead of having tense knots in our stomachs and wanting to throw trashcans through peoples' windows.
@djfreshie: I am also a lady, so don't cast me in the Jack role. Neither of us are eligible to inherit the island.
@metoometoo: In regard to the point that you specifically cited, my argument, as stated above, is that this essay works because it deconstructs the crappiness of Lost's characterizations, thus refuting the main argument of "Lost" apologists (and head writers Lindelof and Cuse) that "Lost" was "all about the characters." If "Lost" was all about the characters, then it was a poor show indeed. The fact is that "Lost" wasn't good because of the characters. Although some of its characters were interesting, the main attractions of "Lost" were its intriguing plots, breath-taking cliff-hangers, awesome sense of atmosphere, and maddening mysteries. I've stated this point over and over above, sometimes in what was intended to be a humorous manner, which apparently was confusing. Despite whatever tonal problems occurred, the logic of my argument has been consistent. My most "hysterical" comment, which regarded the trashcan, was a reference to "Do the Right Thing," and in itself was a joke about how overwrought this discussion has gotten.
When engaged in a debate, it's not considered cricket to indulge in ad hominem attacks. Many of your against my points have consisted of ad hominem attacks, namely accusing me of being "emotional" and "hysterical." This sort of accusation is a classic tactic used by men in order to win arguments against women. I didn't accuse you of being a sexist male because you disagreed with me; I accused you of being a sexist male because you were acting like one. A better argument for "Lost" not being sexist or racist would have been to point out its willingness to air long subtitled sequences, or the fact that, bad writing or not, it provided work and screen time for many actors of color, or to discuss the strength and subtlety of the "Juliette" character. You didn't make any of those points.
Writing is hard. The only thing that's harder than writing is getting paid for writing, and the only thing that's harder than that is getting paid well for writing. The "Lost" team won the lottery–they were being compensated handsomely, and they had a rapt, engaged, passionate, and large audience hanging on their every move. Basically, they were living the dream. I suppose your empathy for them is commendable; I myself have none. They squandered their opportunity–they didn't earn their keep. Meanwhile, TV writers like Paul Feig and Jane Espensen and Joss Whedon and Mitchell Hurwitz and Kater Gordon and David Milch (to name a few) don't have shows on the air. That's a goddamn shame. My empathy is reserved for them (and for myself, because I don't get to watch their shows.)
I did hesitate to use the words "emotional" and "hysterical" because I'm well aware that these accusations are often used in a sexist manner. The thing is, though, sometimes people (of both genders) ARE overly emotional, and sometimes this does override their capacity for reasonable discussion.
I have found most post-Lost-finale conversations exasperatingly hysterical, and it makes me sad, because although there were aspects of the show that disappointed me, I still thought it was pretty awesome. And I think it's possible to critique the show and the writing and the character arcs without painting the writers as stupid, sexist, racist assholes. They may be smug bastards, but I don't think they're stupid, sexist, racist assholes, and I'm glad they made something cool that we could all enjoy and be so emotionally and intellectually invested in for so long.
Not sure getting paid for writing and even getting paid well for writing are actually harder than writing.
They should have wrapped it up 2 years ago.