FINAL SEASON OF ‘LOST’ PROMISES TO MAKE FANS MORE ANNOYING THAN EVER

That’s the problem with having a show that’s essentially Gilligan’s Island as written by Samuel Beckett: there are no boundaries. Any nonsensical bullshit you throw in can be justified as just another part of the overall enigma. When you give yourself carte blanche to jump and re-jump the shark as many times as you want to, that’s too much dramatic leeway. As I watched, the afore-mentioned overall enigma became not “where is this island?” or “what happened on the island before they got there?” or “that polar bear–what the fuck?” but rather, “why am I still watching this televised non-sequitur when I’ve stopped caring what happens?”

Yet people still keep asking me, “Ohmigod, did you see Lost last night?” Pfft. Whatever.

OK, OK, I’m not going to dis it too hard. Any scripted show that stays on network TV for several seasons is OK with me, even if I am not personally interested in watching. It beats the shit out of another programming hour being sacrificed to Jay Leno, Primetime Live, I Survived a Japanese Game Show or some other flavorless, antiseptic time-filler. Lost has provided work for hundreds of creative professionals in my industry–writers, technicians, designers, not to mention my fellow actors.

The show is automatically worthwhile for having raised the profile of Michael Emerson, who plays Ben Linus; I’ve known that guy deserves to be a star since I first saw him onstage in New York in the mid-’90s. My limited Lost viewing was also enough to make me a fan of Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (who displayed gravitas out the wazoo as Mr. Eko) and Elizabeth Mitchell, although I’ll admit that I don’t remember anything about her character (JanetJuliet); I recall her because 1) she is smokin’ hot, and 2) in a flashback episode her mother was played by my friend, the thoroughly awesome Amy Stewart).

I did get a kick out of how Lost fans’ mini-hysteria over the possibility of their show being pre-empted made national news:

Enjoy the last season of your mind-fucking tele-fetish, Lost-ophiles, but remember: you have no right to ever give me a hard time about being a Twin Peaks fan. Unless, I suppose, you are equally willing to admit that you maintained allegiance to your show even after it had begun to suck.

the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles

The photographer’s name rang a bell. Carel Struycken…
a name that Dutch isn’t something I see every day, but I couldn’t place it. I clicked through to his profile on 360 Cities, and was immediately ashamed that I hadn’t. He was the Giant on Twin Peaks!

For the non-Peakers out there, he also played Lurch (the butler) in the Addams Family movies. Oh, and apparently he was on several episodes of something called Star Trek: The Next Generation, whatever the hell that was.

Who knew? Turns out that Mr. Struycken is quite into panoramic photography.  He has made a whole bunch of cool panoramas of different spots in the L.A. region and elsewhere, which you can check out at his site: www.sphericalpanoramas.com.   Short people, if you’ve ever wanted to see how the world looks to someone who’s seven feet tall, now you can.

Are absolute Answers a human construct, while the underlying Truth in nature is not knowable in such terms? I was immediately reminded of the works of filmmaker David Lynch, in particular his briefly brilliant TV series Twin Peaks, which aired in the early 1990′s.

A typically atypical Twin Peaks scene.

As many will recall, the plot of the show concerned the question of who killed Laura Palmer, the high school homecoming queen in an obscure northwestern logging town. The ABC network promoted Peaks by following the “Who Shot J.R.?” paradigm, and did so quite effectively – at the outset. Lynch was in no great hurry to resolve the Laura Palmer case, sticking instead to his own distinctive style: the seemingly straightforward narrative meandered through a landscape of imagery as strange and disturbing as it was visually striking. Perhaps inevitably, the series soon proved to be as daunting a challenge for network publicists as it was for viewers (apart from a small number of die-hard fans, of which I was one).

One could look at Twin Peaks as a continuous series of “whys,” and indeed, many have. Why the dancing midget, and why was his dialogue recorded backward and played back forward? Why didn’t Agent Cooper’s susceptibility to bizarre visions of midgets and giants disqualify him from becoming an FBI agent? Why does the log lady carry a log around, and is it always the same log or does she have, like, a collection of them? As much fun as these “whys” are, they are incidental to the overall purpose: the series as a whole represents one big Why.

The following paragraph contains a SPOILER. If you are planning to watch the Twin Peaks DVD set and don’t want to know who killed Laura Palmer, consider yourself alerted.

When the murder’s resolution confirms the presence of supernatural elements, the Sheriff comments, “I’ve lived in these old woods most of my life. I’ve seen some strange things, but this is way off the map. I’m having a hard time believing,” the mystical Agent Cooper responds, “Is it easier to believe a man could rape and murder his own daughter?” Satisfying though these lines were, they were also uncommonly pedantic for David Lynch. They were not at all uncommonly pedantic for prime time network television; in fact, I’d lay odds that pressure from ABC forced Lynch to plainly spell out something that his best work would only imply. Finding out WHO killed Laura Palmer is incidental to the essential mystery of why she was killed.

When puzzles like the ones in the MIT Mystery Hunt are solved, that’s it. Done. It’s solved. Completion feels good, which is why there are puzzle junkies, why the spongy psychological term closure has become popular, and why TV networks don’t like unresolved murders. I’m no different in this sense: I like having all the loose ends tied up as much as the next guy. Ultimately, puzzles and TV shows provide frameworks for delivering little completion fixes. We seek them out because out in the day-to-day world they just don’t happen too often. You will almost surely never know why you didn’t get into grad school ten years ago, or why the thieves picked your car. But when you solve the Sunday crossword, it helps. It reminds you that answers exist, and you do sometimes get them. However, when a TV show cops out and spoon-feeds you an answer it helps less, because the answers most often seem unsatisfying. Good dramatists of any medium know that questions are more compelling than answers, and that the only worthy answers are ones that lead straight to more questions.