antiorario

It’s been one full month since the Lost finale. Now the whole world has already written about it, one way or another. Fans have tweeted their satisfaction or disappointment, while non-fans have reiterated their lack of interest (and also directed their ha-has at the disappointed fans). Academics have dissected, analyzed, interpreted the episode, the season, the series and, possibly, the fans’ reactions to all of them.

Now, I’m torn. I could be a fan and voice out—with all my lateness—my feelings about the outcome of the series, or I could wear my structuralist’s hat (which I admit I generally have a hard time taking off, not for academic snottiness but because I think I’m just wired that way). I’m not sure which of the two is going to happen, so I’ll just go with the flow of my thoughts, hoping the readers will follow.

The truth about season six

I know the title of this section is misleading, as I’m not going to reveal any previously unknown secrets. The truth in question concerns my attitude toward season six, which, up until the last few episodes, I claimed was illuminating and as engaging as the previous two. In reality, I was underwhelmed and slightly disappointed with what I perceived to be a lack of narrative involvement: information was being given, but I didn’t feel that enough stuff was actually happening.

It seemed to me that Lost was violating one of narrativity’s cardinal rules, that of “show, don’t tell,” which makes particular sense in an audiovisual medium. I felt that all the information was being provided to me as if the whole season had been designed as a system of footnotes to the previous five—and the last three episodes confirmed this feeling. Alright, I knew that every season had its own special quality, thus I had to accept season six as having this peculiar one. It still didn’t mean I had to like it.

The fan and the semiotician

Accepting this new quality of the show meant that, as a semiotician, I was acknowledging a shift in its textual construction, exactly like I had previously acknowledged the time travel, the paranormal activity, and every other seemingly odd element of Lost’s discursive and narrative fabric—up to the very idea that a bunch of people had survived a plane crash of that magnitude.

But this is what fiction is about, isn’t it? It’s exactly what suspension of disbelief means. As long as the different shifts in textual construction hold together, there would and should be no grounds for complaint. If everything holds, the text can be assumed to be semiotically sound (until proven otherwise).¹

If, so far, the semiotician doesn’t judge (and he never should, really), the fan is allowed some margin of discomfort. But since the fan and the semiotician are bound together, both perspectives have to be taken into account in my understanding of the Lost finale and, consequently, of the whole series.

The myth of the lack of revelations

One of the most common complaints I’ve read is that the series finale didn’t provide enough explanations of things that had happened before. I want to be daring and unpopular here, and say that I think the finale (and the whole of season six) provided way more information than it should have. Everyone who has watched Lost for at least a few episodes knows that it is by no means the usual kind of American drama, where everything gets a nice explanation at the end. It’s no forensic drama, and it’s definitely no Gilmore Girls. (Pardon the reference here, I was trying to go for the least Lost-like show I could think of.)

It’s not only because the complexity of the storyline is so high that it would have been impossible to explain everything—who wants six more seasons raise a hand—but because the semiotic process at the foundation of Lost requires viewers to fill in the gaps. It’s what we do in real life in every single moment, which is why I don’t think it should be considered so outrageous for a work of art to require us to do the same. (Yes, a work of art: if we put it this way it’s not so outrageous anymore, is it? Did Dante write his own footnotes to the Comedy? I don’t think so. Did I just compare Lost to Dante? You betcha.) Ultimately, it would have been an insult to the viewers if every single detail of the story had been accurately explained. However, television has gotten us accustomed to receiving explanations, which I think is why many viewers expected them.

Why would I need to know who Mother is or how the light at the center of the island works?² Frankly, I’m not even sure I needed to know there was a Mother or a light. This, in my opinion, is why Lost works much better when some things are left unsaid or ambiguous.

One particular example is the moral polarization between Jacob and his brother. On the one hand everything points to a semisymbolic³ relationship between the two: one wears a white shirt and seems to be the good guy, the other one wears a black shirt and seems to be the bad one. (The white:black::good:bad semisymbolism is so conventional and culturally ingrained to be nothing short of a cliché.) This opposition also seems to be confirmed when Mother tells Jacob’s brother that he’s special because he can lie (as opposed to Jacob, who apparently can’t), and also when she tells Jacob that he was always meant to be the next guardian of the island (because he’s the good guy, one would assume). Since lying is supposed to be wrong, the “moral math” should follow very simply. Nonetheless, Jacob is seen doing (or having people do on his behalf) very bad things, while his brother—even after becoming the smoke monster—shows to be capable of mercy and perhaps even of honoring his word. Yet no precise revelation about the true nature of this opposition is ever provided.

Partly as a consequence, the one big detail Lost leaves unsaid is the question of what would have happened had “Locke” been able to leave the island. All we know is Jacob’s metaphor of the wine bottle (the island), according to which if the red wine (his brother) spills out it will be bad news for the whole world—which is why someone must guard the island (acting as a cork). Since Jacob cannot lie, we can only assume he is telling the truth to the best of his knowledge, but we cannot know whether that truth is, well, true. And it doesn’t matter. The final fight between Jack and “Locke” is by no means less powerful or less meaningful because of this uncertainty or lack of relevance of the ultimate truth. Better yet, it’s a perfect deployment of the theme of faith, which used to be Locke’s prerogative and now, in the final season, gets transferred to Jack.

Moving sideways

At the beginning of season six I said that the time-travel dilemma had been brilliantly solved with the introduction of a parallel universe. I don’t think I was the only one who had to wait until the last episode to understand that it was not at all like that. Even more strikingly, it wasn’t until maybe a couple of episodes to the end that I realized the writers (and consequently the hard-core fans) used the term sideways to denominate this special universe.

I don’t think this term is too descriptive, and it wouldn’t have given anything away if I had known about it, except for the fact that I would have noticed the producers’ implicit refusal to talk about a parallel universe. After all, meaning emerges in difference, doesn’t it? And isn’t absence a very notable kind of difference?

Here’s where the semiotician—so far intent on explaining and motivating what the fan couldn’t accept—becomes himself uncomfortable with the turn of events. The feeling is that the producers have decided, sometime in season five, to make Lost break out of the text and to become the masters of a game where some of the players had more knowledge than others. Specifically, the hard-core fans (that is those who discuss the show at length in web forums and blogs, and actually have some level of interaction with the producers) had access to information that was not directly derivable from the text of the TV show.

It’s way more than what happened with the invention of the Valenzetti equation back in season one. Not knowing what that was didn’t change the (lack of) understanding the viewers had of the numbers. On the other hand, this unforeseen interference⁴ between television and its web-based metatextual world had, in my opinion, far deeper effects on the sixth season.

Lost: an exposé

Not that it hadn’t happened before. The fourteenth episode of season three, “Exposé,” was exactly the product of such an interference. Nikki and Paulo were killed off the way they were (buried alive by mistake, in an episode that was completely out of context) simply because the fans didn’t like them. Despite Damon Lindelof’s claim that the characters were “universally despised,” I must assume the decision was based on a relatively small number of fans—the ones who gave constant feedback. The others probably had no idea who these two characters were. As Sawyer would say, “Who the hell is Nikki?”

This unequal distribution of knowledge and awareness among the fans had a big impact on the reactions to the episode: those who knew and did dislike Nikki and Paulo could, of course, understand exactly what the episode was about (and cheered); those who didn’t dislike them (having barely noticed them) simply remained clueless about the ultimate meaning and function of the episode, and just thought of it as a dud, a low point in the whole series—even lower than Mr. Eko and Ana Lucia (there, I said it).

Then there are people like me, who may have picked up on the episode’s odd nature and realized it didn’t happen by accident. Like I said (and it’s not something I came up with, unfortunately), meaning lies in differences: the discursive structures of the episode—as well as its structure of enunciation—are significantly different from anything that comes before. Also, while “Exposé” may have influenced future choices, no other episode that follows behaves the same way. Due to its placement midway through the series it can afford to be odd, since the show’s semiotic mechanisms have already been established.

I won’t go into the details of how the episode plays with these mechanisms.⁵ Suffice it to say that it’s the show’s first attempt at overflowing its established textual boundaries—if it were an actor, it would be breaking the proverbial fourth wall.

Back to the end

The single most interesting feature of the series finale is the revelation of the fake parallel universe. This illusion, carried on for a whole season, fits perfectly into Lost’s general strategy of deception and withholding of information, even more so considering that the revelation comes in an absolutely unexpected way.⁶ My first reaction to it was to think that it made the whole season lose sense—which is in fact the exact opposite of what it’s meant to do. Then I regained my semiotic awareness (not before watching the episode again, after a whole day during which I felt as if I had been drugged) and realized that not only was meaning not taken away, but that there was a whole new level of meaning to be considered.

Here’s where the “sideways” denomination came into play, as the marker of the meaning to come—a marker that is completely extratextual, since up to a certain point no one within the text is aware of the parallel universe. A whole class of viewers must have been tipped off by this word. Those who were more actively involved with the off-the-air discussion about Lost had to be closer to an understanding of the season before I ever was.

What bothers me about this interference of an extratextual world with the final outcome of the text is that it challenges all the partial conclusions I had drawn about the meaning of the show. Whether or not I like the outcome as a fan, as a semiotician I cannot but take into account the finale’s pragmatic implications. After watching the episode, I had the bitter feeling that I would eventually be able to reconcile my discomfort, and justify the structural shift in the name of a sort of postulated textual consistency.

The feeling I had about it was bitter because I realized that’s exactly the sort of thing non-semioticians think semiotics does: find arbitrary justifications in the name of some abstract principle. I was also feeling bitter because the finale forced me to change my pragmatic approach to the whole text—better yet, to have one, after years of basically ignoring the pragmatic aspect and treating Lost as a self-contained and -sufficient text. If my initial approach was probably too conservative (but I will deny ever admitting to this), the pragmatic shift in season six was what broke the series’ textual consistency.

The enunciative structure of the text, which for five seasons had been functional to its narrative tension—that is, to creating those mechanisms of suspense and anticipation that drove the whole story—in season six was bent, once again, but with the new goal of creating a device that would deceive the audience, and ultimately split it into two unequal parts: a participating audience with considerably more (albeit not necessarily accurate) knowledge and insight, and one, possibly much wider, that had no access to a certain amount of extratextual information on the show—information that, let’s not forget, often came directly from the very people who ran the show.

Quenching the fans’ thirst

Season six was designed to answer the fans’ questions—as anticipated by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof in the season-five DVD extras—and that’s exactly what it does: it takes single issues and gives explanations. Sometimes it does so by devoting entire episodes to relatively minor details with the sole purpose of gratifying the thirsty fan (by which I mean the kind of fan who’s interested in the smallest detail without much consideration for its weight in the general structure of the story). This is the case with the ninth episode, “Ab Aeterno,” where we finally get to know Richard Alpert’s back story. We do learn more about the dynamics between Jacob and the man in black (although we still don’t know they’re brothers), but the episode-long flashback serves almost exclusively as a set-up for the scene where Hurley acts as an intermediary between Richard and his long-dead wife (a scene that seems taken from an episode of Ghost Whisperer, with Jorge Garcia as an unlikely Jennifer Love Hewitt), in order to restore the immortal man’s faith in the mission Jacob bestowed upon him one and a half centuries before.

The episode’s real mission is revealed: shaking up the viewer’s faith by displaying Richard’s own crisis, only to restore it—along with Richard’s—at the end of the episode. But was the viewer’s faith all that solid to begin with? And does the episode ultimately restore it? Does it even want to? All plausible questions with a bunch of different plausible answers, but more than else these questions are a confirmation that the text has engaged in a duel with the viewers: via a not-too-subtle simulacrum (Richard) it challenges its own veridictive premises by tickling the audience with the seasons-old questions about the nature of the island and the existential status of its inhabitants. This is all the episode seems to care about, as it otherwise shows very few signs of narrative advancement.

“Say goodnight, Gracie”

Lost’s final season, and particularly the last episode, is way more self-reflexive than the show ever was, or than it ever wanted to appear. By breaking out of its established pragmatic model—where the enunciative device played cat and mouse with the audience without ever letting itself get caught—“The End” engages the audience directly, and voices out a number of issues that had bothered the viewers for six seasons. It even goes as far as to make fun of its own creation, via some of the characters’ smirky remarks (such as Kate mocking Christian Shephard’s name). Once again, even if only briefly, by moving up a level and engaging with the audience, the text finds it easier to assume some distinctly comic traits.

What I see is that the sixth season was designed as a long setup to the finale, which couldn’t not be a long goodbye. And despite the fact that I may not approve—as a fan, mostly—of the way it was deployed, I think everything about it was built almost to perfection. Once again, and for the last time, Lost was able to create expectations and give us something unexpected in the end: it was able to surprise us. As Jason Mittell also remarks, “The End” reminded me somewhat of the finale of Six Feet Under, from an emotional point of view. Contrary to Mittell, though, that’s exactly what I didn’t like about it—and I don’t mean I didn’t like it being emotional: I thought the Six Feet Under finale was unnecessarily and nauseatingly rhetorical, a way not to end a story but to part from the viewers.

This need for a rhetorical goodbye can be understood in the case of a series that, like Lost, had such an interactive history, and considering that the final season—and even more so the last episode—was a veritable worldwide event. I think this is what made the final episode generate strong emotional reactions even in people who didn’t particularly care for the way things ended—or who stubbornly refuse to accept it (I know some of those).

Ultimately, though, what makes me uncomfortable about this kind of finale is not the rhetorical approach per se, but the fact that, in my opinion, it works only upon first viewing and possibly just for a limited subset of viewers. It works quite well for a text that is perceived as ephemeral and perishable not only by its audience but also—if not primarily—by its producers.

But, contrary to general opinion, Lost isn’t over: it’s only just begun.