As you can see from my two earlier posts, I’m not crazy about the way the LOST storytellers handled the “solution” to the sideways reality question. On the other hand, I would not have been opposed to having the show consider the afterlife in some way. I think they could have done what they did (some sort of afterlife) without reverting to Shyamalanian tricks or making me choke on their potent religious soup. I kind of wish they would have explored the afterlife in a more direct manner instead of using the Sixth Sense surprise.

As I reflect upon the LOST depiction of afterlife, I am immediately reminded of at least two cultural references (which is fitting since I taught my students about intertextuality today). My first association after learning that this sideways world in the film is the afterlife was “Defending Your Life.” Remember that one? In the movie, the character played by Albert Brooks discovers that he is on trial for how fearless he was in his life. Now he’s being tested on whether he was brave enough in this first life to “move on” to the next thing, or whether he has to go back and try again. There is something very intriguing in this Purgatory-like/reincarnation idea that one must deal with the meaning of his or her life after death in some way.

Complementing that aspect of accounting for the the life one has lived, the second reference that came to mind is C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce (others elsewhere noticed too). This is an even better parallel and one of my favorite books. In Divorce, Lewis tells the tale of two worlds, that symbolically represent heaven and hell. In a very Plato sort of way, some of the people in the shady, shadowy world of hell take a bus trip up to the very solid and “real” world of heaven. They arrive at the outskirts of heaven and it is so “real” and, thus, more solid, that the blades of grass do not bend under the feet of the shadowy people from the gray world of hell. People in the hell-place are subject to their own personal versions of hell, whatever self-destructive persona that person had before death, but multiplied. The afterlife in LOST obviously is not either hell or heaven, but there is room for both. Reality in the afterlife is not exactly the same as it had been before death, but directly influenced by one’s experience of life.

Like The Great Divorce, there seems to be an element to the afterlife that it is what people imagine it. The best connection I’ve seen between the LOST finale and Divorce comes from Travis Prinzi (who also mixes in some Harry Potter):

The Flash Sideways is a postmodern Graytown (from C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce.) It’s like Lewis’s Graytown, because the people there can stay or leave as they feel ready. . . . But also consider that Christian told Jack that all the castaways “made” the place, because they needed it.

And in that case, it’s like King’s Cross. Harry perceives his meeting place with Dumbledore as King’s Cross, because it’s his own perception. What he believes actually shapes the place. In Lewis’s Graytown, the place is what it is and looks like what it looks like. Graytown’s citizens disagree on the meaning of the place, but not its makeup. At King’s Cross, and in this Sideways world, the place looks like what its inhabitants make it in their own imaginations. But all are able to proceed to love eternal when they are ready.

As the story ended, the people sitting with me immediately began discussing: So is the Sideways real? I just smiled to myself, being too exhausted to formulate an answer. I wanted to say with Dumbledore, “It was in their heads, but why on earth should that make it not real?” What LOST did was make the statement: what is in your head is real. Imagination vindicated. Faith vindicated. Spiritual reality vindicated.

What gets me curious, though, is the fact that in Divorce the shadowy members of Graytown are subject to whatever delusions they have lived and died with. Jack Shepherd, however, seems to have “let go” and found redemption by the time he has died. Why, then, does he revert back to his earlier skeptic ways once he’s in the afterlife scenario? That bit kind of conjures up a Matrix-like scenario, to name a third cultural reference — a need for an awakening. The difference from the Matrix, though, is that this alternate reality does not seem repressive.

It’s also interesting there is apparently a former (kinda) purgatory to the ultimate (kinda) purgatory, while Michael and others with unresolved issues remain on the island whispering to future island visitors. But that will have to wait for further speculation.