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.

[ . . .  continued from part 1]

In addition to the shallow switcharoo (IMHO) ending, to me the reunion at the interfaith church was just so eerily and obnoxiously warm and fuzzy, that it made me think that the LOST gang was some sort of creepy suicide cult. I liked it better when the show worked in subtle references to various religious symbolism, but this last scene feels like a strange religious cocktail blend that kinda makes me want to vomit. Did you notice the stained glass window? The Taoist yin and yang, Christian cross, Jewish star of David, Muslim crescent moon and star, Hindu aum, and Buddhist dharmacakra wheel (a connection to the frozen wheel I hadn’t considered). Really, did you have to be that blatant about your religious combo meal? What happened to the mystery? It’s as if LOST is taking us aside to tell us, “Hi viewer, in this series we have borrowed from all of these very profound and inspirational religions. Won’t you, like us, respect and value these important religious traditions in your own path to spiritual enlightenment?”

Please permit me a moment of commentary here. Far from respecting all religions, this sort of religious soup is a slap in the face to all communities of faith. This is where Stephen Prothero’s latest book, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World–and Why Their Differences Matter, has tremendous relevance (check out his video interview on PBS’ Religion and Ethics). When we blend all religions together, we create something entirely different from any one religion. We need to consider each religion within its own context if we’re going to respect and study each religion, not “the simple celebration of diversity for diversity’s sake—that is too easy,” as Prof. Boustan likes to say. In his letter from the director on UCLA’s Center for the Study of Religion site, Boustan notes, “We must avoid the temptation to divide the world into the familiar and the exotic.” The LOST finale has not avoided such temptation and rather makes religion into a cheesy, meaningless prop.

Gary Susman at TV Squad interprets the stained glass window thusly: “There’s an afterlife waiting for everyone, as long as they have faith and are willing to let go.” Why on God’s green earth would LOST end its magnificent run with such a hokey message? Commenting on that stained-glass window and the entire interfaith church idea, one blogger complains, “Why not just have Jack ascend to heaven in a Prius with a ‘coexist’ bumper sticker?” Not that I have anything against Priuses (Prii?) or those stickers (if properly conceived), but the point is: Why do the final moments of the LOST finale feel like an after school special on the importance of respecting religious diversity? There we were, wondering about the mythology of LOST, which questions would be answered and how, following the epic story, and then, we were being homilized. And it’s not even a good homily at that.

On the other hand, I did appreciate Kate’s poignant question at the beginning of the episode: “‘Christian Shepherd’? Seriously?”

[continued (with some less negative thoughts) in part 3 . . . ]

While I generally enjoyed watching the finale with a good friend, with plenty of commercial time analysis, I was completely disappointed with the final ending and twist. At the moment, my reason for disliking the final “answer” provided to us is twofold. First, it was a cheap and hokey trick. Second, it was too forced with its odd blend of religious soup. I’ll take up that last point in part two of this post. Also, remember that I wasn’t really looking for answers, so I may have had a different expectation than you.

So, apparently, they decided to go all Shyamalanian on the series (making this April Fools joke pretty ironic). A Shyamalan film is what it is and ever since the “Sixth Sense,” we’ve known what that is. It’s like the whole movie is building up to this “Oh, I guess I am dead people” moment. With LOST, the Shyamalanian sort of twist on it, revealed in the last fifteen minutes or so, cheapens the entire series for me. I agree with one blogger who compared LOST to Shyamalan’s Signs: “Signs was a 2 hour movie.  Lost was a 6 year series.  With a lot more twists and turns and unanswered questions.  I think in the end, I felt like the first 5 seasons were one show and this one was something that belonged on PAX.” I’m not sure I’d wrap together the whole season that way, because they could have gone another way with the sideways world. But, yeah, the twist explanation ruins it for me.

A lot of people thought the ending was beautiful. I have a hard time seeing the beauty when I feel like the whole “answer” to the big question this season (“What’s the deal with the two parallel worlds?”) was a cop out: the easy, cheesy way to go with it. It reminds me of when I was starting out in my brief high school acting career (you know, a couple musicals, a couple plays) and totally blew an audition to a sought-after play at the school. The audition included an improv game portion, similar to “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” You’d freeze the two people who were performing some scene, and then jump in and replace one of the improvising actors. I had never done anything like this, so I waited until someone was making some really strange pose. I froze them and jumped in to say, “What are you DOING?!” Of course it was lame, everyone groaned, and I didn’t get a part. Instead of trying to come up with some original and creative new narrative, I just put all the responsibility on the other guy, showing I had no improv skills. To me, the last fifteen minutes or so of the finale took a similar “easy way out.” How do we explain this strange alternate world? Afterlife! That solves everything! Yeah, and then we can really ham it up and make people cry about it too.

But maybe you like the Shyamalan thing.

James McGrath mentioned that many people are saying the finale was more emotionally satisfying than intellectually satisfying. After it was over, I suppose my cold and heartless side came out. People were trotted out for the local late night news after the show and asked, “What did you think of the finale?” They were all choked up at how beautiful it was, I just thought, “Are you kidding me?? Those people are going to get mocked at work tomorrow.” I’m not real impressed with the “emotional satisfaction” of an otherwise intellectually satisfying series.

[continued in part two . . .]

I often wonder why it is that I am so drawn to apocalyptic thought in my research, not to mention why people seem to be paying more and more attention to the topic generally speaking (e.g., see this upcoming conference). What I consider my “bad romance” with apocalyptic  thought began in the summer of 2006 in a course on early Judaism taught by James VanderKam. I simply read 1 Enoch and it was like the intellectual engines turned on. But today, I read an article in the Washington Post (HT: James McGrath), that gave me some broader context for why my brain might be so drawn to this mysterious line of research.

In that article, Hank Stuever interprets the run of ABC’s epic and mysterious “Lost” as an indicator of our collective identity for the past decade. Steuver notes, “It was the perfect show for our frustrated ’00s era, in which no one had to answer for anything much — not for the real estate and Wall Street busts, the levee floods, the bad war intelligence.” Widening the net further, he assesses: “At its most essential, the show was about an airplane crash, told from every possible angle. That’s also our story — wounded by the events of 9/11 and the controlled chaos that came with new battlefields and the worst economy in 70 years.” And still further defining our decade with “Lost”: “We’ll go on living in the future; the people of ‘Lost’ will forever belong to the 2000s, which some are already calling ‘the lost decade.’”

I don’t know who these people are that call the 2000s “the lost decade” — when I googled it, I got some things about Japan and investments — but the idea strikes a chord with me nevertheless, even if for not all the same reasons it does with Steuver. Going back even earlier than 9/11, our culture’s understanding of the decade began with bewildering anticipation about whether the first moment of 2000 would bring about the end of the world. The fanaticism that surrounded Y2K served as one of the cultural backdrops of my first year and a half in college.

Still, I didn’t realize my intellectual calling (as an academic) until my senior year of college, which was indeed the year of 9/11 and the subsequent upheaval of global politics. Academically, I struggled to find a truly satisfying research area. Meanwhile, as our 2000s culture began to explore–for whatever reason–television shows and movies of apocalyptic import, my brain got sucked into it all. Replacing my teenage obsession with Friends (perhaps my deepest connection with ’90s culture), my imagination was drawn towards shows like Lost, Heroes, Jericho, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and now V and FlashForward. “Lost” began the year before I entered seminary.

Without a doubt, I appreciate working with concrete social issues, such as gender roles or economic stratification, in my research. But in the deepest core of my intellectual passions, my ultimate academic search is for complex, hidden mysteries. There is something I love about living with more questions than answers. Is that “Lost’s” effect on me or my attraction to “Lost” or both?

In any case, when people are all concerned about whether we will be “satisfied” with finale, I have a difficult time relating. For me, “Lost” was an apocalypse — an invitation to a world of hidden mysteries. But to be honest, just as I found my attraction to apocalyptic literature by entering the world 1 Enoch, I am more satisfied simply entering the mystery than I am with any attempt at explaining the mystery. For me, the “Lost” finale need not connect all the dots. Rather, I will simply mourn the loss of my biggest cultural partner in my research. Thankfully, I don’t think our culture is done with hidden mysteries.