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In particular, a wonderful point:
Here's one of the things about mysteries: not everything is a clue. If you went to the headquarters of a company and you were trying to solve a murder, you would find a few things related to the murder, but you would also find lots of isolated, noteworthy things that aren't related to the murder. That's because the building exists outside the murder occurring. The building wasn't built just to house the murder.
I'm humbled by the simplicity. And that leads me to point-of-view. Lost was a pretty heavy POV show. Most TeeVee shows are omniscient. Particularly procedurals. There's no room for interpretation there. The point-of-view is going to be your investigators and maybe your criminals, although networks (and audiences, apparently) tend to dislike showing the criminal's point-of-view. When you think about POV, it sorta makes sense. You're tooling along in your obvious, 2D investigative point-of-view when you toss in a scene of the criminal doing bad things. Holy smokes! What are we to think? Well, since we're so automatically invested in the POV of Our Heroes (this is what TeeVee teaches us), that Our Heroes are fucking stupid. Point-of-view in television is very, very simple and any messing with the formula confuses people.
Ensemble shows are pretty much the same thing, only you get many omniscient points of view from all the different characters. But Lost... the entire series opened on a guy's eye. Flashbacks came FROM those characters. There wasn't an omniscient point-of-view taking us into the flashbacks; the characters themselves were doing it. I just think there was a different focus with Lost. I don't know if the writers were aware of how much they were expanding point-of-view, or if they realized it later. It sure could've been a happy accident. It's super-tough to do this on television, mainly because nobody will let you. It's one thing for a plot-point or character's action to be open to interpretation but it's something entirely different when it's the entire show.
And now, I direct you back in time to Twin Peaks, a show that was strictly set in POV. And that's why it was so fucking scary. That spooky shot up the Palmer's staircase? That's not the omniscient camera. It's so specific that that's why it's scary. What people see is what THEY SEE and not just what the camera is choosing to show the audience. People compare what they perceive as Lost's failings to the similar failings in Twin Peaks. Totally true, but I'm not sure they know why. Lost gave us a few seasons of caring ONLY about the weird island shit, forgetting about the characters entirely while they tried not to answer any questions. Then they came back to what made the show work in the first place -- the characters. And the plot began to suggest itself again. Twin Peaks faltered after giving up its mystery, who killed Laura Palmer, and meandered around trying to find some other plot. But when Twin Peaks came back to itself, it did so because the writers got back into the characters and then plot suggested itself.
Both Lost and Twin Peaks had ensembles that were heavily into their own points-of-view. I think the shows that try to ape this success, like FlashForward, do so with the typical omniscient TeeVee point-of-view. And just before some of you wiseacres think I'm saying that ensemble shows are character-driven while single-lead shows aren't, that ain't the case. THINK ABOUT THIS. In most TeeVee shows, you're watching a chosen point-of-view. It's safe; there may be character or plot surprises, but you know that what you're seeing is what's happened. Stuff may get held back, but you watch because you know that the omniscient friend with which you've made a pact will faithfully reveal the truth to you at some pre-designated point in the future (end of episode, two-parter, episode arc, season).
Lost didn't make that pact with people. Now, if you went into the show expecting the answers that you get from other shows, then yeah. You'll be disappointed. And maybe that kind of storytelling just isn't your cup of tea. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
You know what other show does this? Damages. And I dig that show. Except for season two. But one and three? Fantastic.
There's more:
Does this approach allow the people who write the show a little bit of wiggle room, and allow them to get out of things that might originally have been envisioned as meaningful, but now just turn out to be blind alleys? Of course. But it also respects the fact that when you solve a real mystery, there are blind alleys. There are things that don't mean anything. Haven't you ever watched Law & Order?
This is a real frustration when you're breaking a procedural. It's all about the smarts of your detective. There HAVE to be twists (somebody somewhere made that a rule), and not every twist can lead to the final unmasking of the villain or the solving of the case. But not every twist can NOT, either. There's an appropriate level of smartness that the detective needs to have. This isn't a new thing but the perceived complexity of the procedural IS. Now, we've got technology that can help or hurt. And every moment, we're always asking, "Does this make our detective stupid? Wouldn't he know this? How do we get him to walk through that door?"
Lost started this way and then they finally went, "Fuck it. How about we just tell stories about these characters and don't explain every little thing because not everybody in every situation HAS all the answers?" For me, that's refreshing. Because I can wonder about the power source without being flat-out told what it is. Yes, one of the show's themes is faith but for me, it's a philosophical faith. And the power source is endemic of that. The "first cause" argument. Plato vs. Aristotle vs. Thomas Aquinas, for example. They never worked that shit out.
Backed up on comments. I'll get to them next. Swear! Now I've got to go argue with some stupid horse racing people... it's like crack to me...
8 comments:
Re: "there may be character or plot surprises, but you know that what you're seeing is what's happened. Stuff may get held back, but you watch because you know that the omniscient friend with which you've made a pact will faithfully reveal the truth to you at some pre-designated point in the future (end of episode, two-parter, episode arc, season)."
When I read this, I immediately thought about the most recent half-season of Gossip Girl. It’s a show all about omniscience—in the past we’ve not only had the omniscient camera showing us everything that every character is doing as they do it, but the characters themselves are alerted to each others’ actions via the apparently omniscient blog “Gossip Girl.” But most recently, we were totally thrown out of a lead character’s (Chuck’s) point of view:
1. Suddenly, important things were happening to him that we weren’t seeing. For example, he decided to pimp his girlfriend out to his uncle…which we only knew because he semi-confessed afterward (we never saw any of that interaction ourselves).
2. He stopped having his own storylines, so we never saw anything of his “private” life except where/when it interacted with the other characters’ storylines.
3. This is after his bizarre storyline about his dead mother coming back to life, which I for one thought had to be him being delusional (none of the logistics of that storyline made sense, but it made total metaphorical sense w/r/t his relationship with Blair (his girlfriend)…plus he’d seen a “ghost” before. So I figured…)
The unreliability/inaccessibility of Chuck’s POV for the second half of the season (and sort of the first half) was weird enough, but I figured his thinking/actions would be explained at some point…I guess because I bought into the “omniscient camera” of the show’s first two seasons/almost every TV show. But now the season’s ended and we STILL have no explanation/access to his POV. Instead they left him bleeding out in some alley?
Much as I hate to be stodgy and concrete, I’m really unhappy that the writers cut this character off from the audience. I miss him! And am now totally not only confused as to what’s going on with him, but (more importantly?) what’s going on with the “rules” of the show. I don’t understand why they’d want to break their POV "pact"…or if they even realize that they did?
While all this is very interesting from a writer's POV, it's totally irrelevant from an audience's POV. A great majority of the loyal viewership wanted to know what the island was and the show denied the answer. The End. And by the way, they also wanted to know more about some of the characters, like Eloise and Widmore, but I forgot - Fuck it, right? Riiiight.
I felt cheated by "The End," because in the end, the Island was revealed to be the world's biggest and longest running MacGuffin. In the end, the Island was important only because characters were fighting over it, not because it was important de facto to the world. That was finally established when Jack said that he had to protect the Island because it was all that he had left. It was important to Jack, and, by that late date, we are supposed to want what jack wants. But what if it isn't what we want? Then the show has failed somewhere along the way. MIB wasn't evil, he was evil only because he wanted something that his Crazy Mama and his dim-witted brother, and, last of all, Jack wanted to deny him. So we choose sides. Frankly, in the end, I was on MIB's side. It can be argued that the show was attempting to make some deep, philosophical point, that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," but that is pretty trite. The mistake was in placing the mythology at the end of the show's run, rather than at the beginning. If we had known the history of the brothers and their crazy, murdering, kidnapping foster mother, then we could have been prepared for the end. Brought in at the last minute, it just makes the whole thing an exercise in futility. Well, just like life, they seem to be saying. We all end up dead, so it doesn't matter how you fill the time. Pick a side, any side. it's all the same -- in the end.
Very interesting, and maybe you do have a valid point....
So Fucking What?
Doesn't change the basic feeling of being cheated, and no reiteration of "It's the characters, stupid!" is going to change that.
It's exactly the same sort of dufus mistake made in the movie SIGNS - the last 10 minutes of the movie made the rest of it an unforgiveable exercise in stupidity.
TWIN PEAKS - at least - did deal with the central mystery at the heart of the show. Would we still be talking about it had it lasted five years and never really answered Who Killed Laura Palmer?
Only THE PRISONER got away with not answering everything - but part of the allure, was having you make up your own mind - but that was clearly defined from the first episode onward; and it appears that only the British can really get away with doing this - witness SAPPHIRE AND STEEL.
THE PRISONER also gets away with it because it's really an intellectual puzzle -- and LOST doesn't really have any substantial thought in its head. It glided on your emotions, and danced on that reptile forebrain, going on action and momentum and NEVER any sort of reflection, curiousity, or reasoning of what the Hell was going on...
Just an aside, but Signs is a religious allegory presented in a science fiction format. To me it is fairly recognizable as such from the get-go, so I always felt that the ending was appropriate. In that regard, it differs from Lost, which waited too long to set the ground rules. Night gets a bad rap from the science fiction faction of movie goers. (Although Sam Carter's rant on the subject in Stargate SG-1 is funny.)
@HWL - regarding SIGNS... in the advance ads for it, I had sort of twigged that there was going to be some sort of religious/spiritual aspect to it -- which I was fascinated to see how it was going to be approached.
Ham-handed allegory is STILL ham-handed... and (to me) such a misstep, that it just negated the experience up to that point.
Witness the slow and painful fall of NIGHT since that...
It was heavily alluded to in "Across The Sea" that the Island is the source of every living thing's "life-force", so that's why the Island was so important. Yeah, it's mumbo-jumbo they pulled out of their ass for season 6, but that was why it needed protecting. If ol' Smokey destroyed the source, nothing could ever be born again - we were left to assume.
Clearly, some people don't enjoy reading between the lines and would have preferred The Architect from The Matrix (maybe a Darlton cameo?) to just talk them through in ad nauseum in the finale.
I kinda dig that I STILL get to debate and theorize about Lost, which was surely 50% of the fun with the show.
I think this is a fantastic post. What it can seem like to people who don't like the finale is that you're just trying to rationalize the show's faults. Maybe?
But what's really going on is a good dissection and discussion about expectations and disappointment.
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