beyond lost pol cruells 1 pol cruells abel ies bosc de la coma
Transcription
beyond lost pol cruells 1 pol cruells abel ies bosc de la coma
BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS POL CRUELLS ABEL IES BOSC DE LA COMA 1 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS “Nothing freer than human imagination” David Hume 2 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS INDEX 1. Introduction 2. Lost as a TV revolution 2.1 Lost success on the TV 2.2 J.J.Abrams, the current master of mystery 2.2.1 The Mystery Box 2.3 The showrunners 3. Lost as a serial 3.1 The characters 3.1.1 Philosophy inside the characters 3.1.1.1 John Locke 3.1.1.1.1 Jeremy Bentham 3.1.1.2 Rousseau 3.1.1.3 David Hume 3.1.1.4 Mikhail Bakunin 3.1.1.5 Hugo De Groot 3.1.2 The Island 3.1.3 Other important characters 3.2 Dharma Initiative 3.2.1 Research Stations 3.2.2 Orientation 3.2.3 Electromagnetism 3 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.3 The Seven Wonders of the World 3.4 Biblical references on Lost 3.5 The Numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42) 3.6 Recurrent thematic and cultural references 3.6.1 Symbolism 3.6.2 Cliffhanger and plot twists 3.6.3 A new way to tell a story: Flashbacks Flash forwards and Flash-sideways. 3.7 Literary influences and appearances on Lost 4. Conclusions 5.Personal Opinion 6.Sources: 1. Introduction 4 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS As a 1st Batxillerat student I must do a TDR and I decided to do it about Lost because once I watched it on my laptop in English, subtitled in Spanish, then I investigate a little and I found that Lost had lots of both cultural and literary references and influences and I felt interesting to go deeply at this point. So this point covers forty pages from this research, and the other fifty pages come after as a continuation from the first forty pages. However, the main reason to do this research is that in a future, I would like to work on something related to the world of the audio communications, especially if I can work with TV series or cinema. So I think with this work I can learn more about what made Lost a phenomenon on America and how it revolutionized the broadcast in the United States in the beginning of the century. Lost was absolutely a TV revolution, from 2004 to 2010, especially on the United States. Its pilot, which is the most expensive pilot in the history of TV, created such an expectation on the series that the first episode of the sixth season did cancel president Obama’s speech about the State of the Union. It is just a sign, but it reflects the importance of how such an event affected people. Besides, Lost has become a referent on American culture because it breaks molds already from its beginning, enthusiastic both public and critics, thanks to its plot twists and brilliant scripts. In order to do this research, I will analyse the topic from two different points of view. The first one will be Lost as a TV revolution and the second one, Lost as a TV series. With Lost as a TV revolution I will try to explain about the success of Lost on TV, about his author, J.J. Abrams and his “Mystery Box”, the beginning of Lost in the TV and finally its controversial end. Moreover I will talk about the show runners, the brains behind the series. 5 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS In the second part I will try to do an introspective reflexion about the series. I will start talking about the main characters and their characteristics, The Dharma Initiative, the numbers, one of the great mysteries on the series, and finally about the recurrent thematic and the cultural references that Lost is based on, besides the literary influence on the series. On the other hand, Lost is fed on lots of references, for instance, some of the philosophical names of the main characters. Moreover, it could be interpreted as the human life: a group of people trapped on an island, and rediscovering themselves as they evolve to become human beings. At last but far from the least, due to I saw the complete series in English and subtitled in Spanish I am more confident and I find more meaning doing this searching work in English Finally, my personal expectations about doing this TDR are to be able to improve my English language in general and also to learn more about how Lost became a phenomenon on television and in American culture. 2.Lost as a TV revolution 6 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS On September 22nd 2004, the most expensive pilot for a series was broadcasted on ABC channel in the USA. The pilot itself lasted 2 hours, but it was cut off in two parts because of its large duration. It was (and it is) one of the most critically claimed television pilots of all times, furthermore both parts of the pilot gained high ratings, and the episode would later win several awards like two Emmy Awards, two Golden Reed Awards and it was nominated for an Hugo Award, which is the most important award in science fiction. This pilot was the beginning of Lost. During 6 years, Lost gained a lot of supporters and won an excellent reputation, becoming a basic reference in the new American TV culture. Yet, its stunned, odd and astonishing end, after six years of mystery, time-jumps, flashbacks and flash forwards, an alternative timeline and a lot of non solved questions made of it one of the most controversial and criticized of a TV series. From my personal point of view, one of the hooks of this TV series was the good use of different literary techniques, flashbacks, flash forwards and an alternative timeline, and not conscious but unconscious people understand that it was not a typical series of a group of people wrecked on an island, but a series about the sense of the human existence, moved on an island. Furthermore, the show runners included lots of references about literature and pop culture. We are living in a so materialistic world that it is reassuring this series has raised some very important spiritual dilemmas which have made us think that we have developed uncertainties about human nature, death and fate. That is to say, we have seen them argue, fight, kill, die, love, hate, fear... all feelings have surfaced and we have to side one or the other, change their minds about their behavior, get on your skin, convert some of our heroes. Who was 7 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS good? Who was the bad guy? Were they good and bad or just human beings with their faults and virtues? At the beginning, Lost was conceived under the name of Nowhere, which was a realistic drama, and the writer, Jeffrey Liebel, credited The Lord of The Flies and “El Náufrago”, a book and a film, as his influences, but the ABC desestimated the project. Then ABC delivered to J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof the project and they transformed the script into Lost. Abrams and Lindelof changed its nature from realistic drama to science-fiction and mystery and then the ABC agreed to shoot the pilot. In my opinion, a classic situation like a wreck mixed with the mysteries on the island (as if the island were alive) with this philosophical reflexion of life, it gave to the series the reputation and the success it has nowadays. Too much has been said about the controversial end of Lost, a dizzy and strange end that disappointed a lot of fans. It was obvious, due to the two hours that spent the last chapter, called “The End” (part 1 and 2) lasted and most of the questions remain in the air, still unanswered. 2.2 J.J.Abrams, the current master of mystery 8 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS J.J. Abrams was born in New York City on 27th July 1966. He attended Sarah Lawrence College, and furthermore his parents were both TV producers. At the age of 16 he raid on movie business to write the Nightbeast, music a for science fiction film. During his years at the college, he collaborated, with a partner, on writing a feature film treatment. The treatment was the basis for Taking Care of Business, a film comedy made in 1990. Abrams also collaborated with the producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean, Pearl Harbour, National Tresure) and director Michael Bay (Transformers, The Island) on the 1998 film, Armageddon, a science fiction and catastrophic film. In 2001 created Bad Robot, his own company, which is the responsible behind Alias, Lost, Fringe, Person of Interest, Alcatraz, Super 8… His first series was Felicity, with four seasons on NBC. After that, he created and produced Alias. The threshold before his great series. However, he became famous in television business thanks to two series: Lost and Fringe. Fringe is nowadays on Fox with its five seasons and his latest proposal, Alcatraz, an unexpected series about the legendary prison of California, which began last January but was cancelled with the first season. Alcatraz is set on the prison with the same name, where inexplicably appear several prisoners, who mysteriously disappeared fifty years 9 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS ago, suddenly reappear with the very same appearance as the one they had when they disappeared. On the other hand, Fringe can be considered by someone as the successor of Lost. Fringe is about a FBI department, "Fringe Division" who investigate a series of unexplained and fringe events, which are known as “The Pattern”, but still nowadays it has not a clear definition. Nevertheless, from the third season on, it follow a lineal plot based on a parallel world, and the two last seasons are about these parallels worlds and about the fact that one cannot exist if the other exists. At the time this research is written, has began the fifth and last season of Lost, which seems to be tremendous. In 2007 J.J. Abrams made a speech in TED, one of his most famous speeches about his Mystery Box. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an organization dedicated to the Ideas worth spreading and it is famous for its conferences and its talks. In these talks speakers talk about very different subjects such as technology, science, art, politic, culture… 2.2.1 The Mystery Box 10 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS One of the references to the figure of J.J. Abrams is his Mystery Box. In his speeches, he always talks about his mystery box, a present from one of his relatives in his childhood, hand all the things that hypothetically could be inside. He says that his mystery box has never been opened; remaining the mystery of what it keeps inside. That is where it remains the success of Lost, Fringe or whatever you know about J.J. Abrams. Some years ago, when he exposed his own concept of The Mystery Box, he said: “What are stories, but mystery boxes? . . . What’s a bigger mystery box than a movie theatre? You go to the theatre, you’re just so excited to see anything — the moment the lights go down is often the best part.” it represents infinite possibility,” he told his audience. “It represents hope. It represents potential.” And who would want to give up those things? 1 What Abrams was talking about specifically was something he got at Tannen’s Magic, a magic store in Midtown Manhattan, thirty years ago. A real box with a question mark on the outside and unidentified objects shuffling around inside, that Abrams had never opened. 1 http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/02/whats-in-j-j-abramss-mysterybox/ (8/02/12) 11 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS There it lays his success on television business, series like this mystery box, which hides a lot of enigmas, showing us only what they want us to know. Above that, a lot of times you do not understand what it is trying to tell to you. It happened blatantly in Lost, and now it is happening again in Fringe. What`s more. J.J. Abrams and his series are secrets keepers, sometimes lots of secrets and mysteries which are not going to be revealed, at least, some of them. 12 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 2.3 The show runners Although J.J. Abrams is the creator of Lost, earlier he abandoned the crew who made him and only had the title of producer. So this part is dedicated to the people cameras, behind the the 10 screenwriters who spent 6 years of their life to continue Lost, the brains which the audience didn’t see but brought this category of master. The most recognizable of them are two creators: Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse 2, although the whole team was consisted of ten screenwriters. But from this team of ten the visible face of the screen writers on conferences were these two mentioned Moreover, above. during the running of the series they brought the Official Podcast of Lost, which contains exclusive interviews with members of the series and actors, and other information occurred behind the cameras. To show the actual success of these screenwriters, I learnt that Damon Lindelof had already written the plot for Prometheus, the new film of Riddley Scott. 2 Above, Damon Lindelof; Below, Carlton Cuse. 13 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3. Lost as a serial This part will be focused on the different aspects of the series like philosophical references, the main characters, the symbology and literary influences which made Lost be a much higher series than other series and why it reached this so famous level. First of all I will tell a bit about its different components and later I will explain the different meanings. From my point of view, it seems Lost is a mix of lots of things that always the humanity are fascinated about- like philosophical themes, mystery…-. Maybe because you think a thing like this is very improbable to occur to you. I think seven different points were great to explain the inspiration of putting cultural references. As I named it “Lost as a serial” its name could be equally “Lost as a cultural revision”. The first part is centered on the characters, specially those main characters that have philosophical references or inspiration; the best known are John Locke, David Hume or Mikail Bakunin. And there is an special part for the Island, which firstly seems to be only the place, but along the series seems to be more important. And in a minor degree, a little explanation about the rest of the characters who don’t have any philosophic reference but their origin is interesting as well. The second point explains what exactly Dharma Initiative is and all the mysterious buildings which are buried on the Island underground. As I said above, on internet I came across a website where people commented up to what extend Lost had included different references, they mentioned something about the seven wonders of the world, so I investigated about it and, although there isn’t seven wonders on the Island, if we lump together the different buildings that conform the 14 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS seven wonders of the ancient world, (a statue, temples, a lighthouse and a pyramid) we realize that there are three of the four buildings on the Island. Furthermore, I included a section about the numbers because of its appearance on the first episode; they appear constantly, and finally, on the sixth season we know the numbers have a great role. Besides, there is a point talking about different techniques the screen writers used in the whole series to explain better the complex plot of Lost. These techniques are the Flashbacks and Flash-forwards, which are taken from literature and a new brand from Lost: the Flashsideways. Finally to end up my research work I have included a section which talks about the influence literature has upon Lost. This part, obviously, is nearly completely invented, because these are my very personal impressions of parallelisms I found between books and Lost. This part is the aim of this research; the twelve previous pages are only a kind of introduction. 15 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1 The Characters In this part I will talk about the main characters that conforms the series. Firstly I will talk about one of the most known facts of the series: eight of the characters and their relationships with philosophers and their ideas, even though, maybe, there are few who are less know, such as De Groot or Jeremy Bentham, there are a group necessarily known like John Locke, David Hume, Rousseau… Secondly I am going to talk about the Island where the action takes place, but it is not only the “place”, actually, but we can consider it like another important character in the series. And finally, other characters who have no connection with philosophers but they are inspired by writers or other important people in different fields, like Kate Austen, who is clearly inspired by novelist Jane Austen or Jack Shepard, whose surname I will analyze on the Biblical references section, is related with Sam Shepard, an American playwright. As in any kind of creation (whether literary or cinematographic) the most important fact are the characters. So this part is focused on them, on their personality and on what certain acts they perform. As this part is a comparison between philosophers and Lost characters, there are two sub points – the points refer to Rousseau and DeGroot- which do not have neither the main philosopher’s name nor character’s name. This is because the other six has the same name between characters and philosophers, and this is not the case of Rousseau and DeGroot, I must use only the surname. 16 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1 Philosophy inside the characters As I said, there is a clear nexus between the huge world of Lost and the wide world of the philosophy. Locke, Rousseau or Hume are just only the clearest references. There are lots of philosophical bases and reflections on the series, but the most identifiable are the main characters and their behavior on the Island based on the different philosophic theories. Their behavior is related to their own personal thinking as far as their theories about the conception of life and the world are concerned. In this section we can find two types of relations with the philosophers and the characters: similarities and divergences. What’s more; I think Lost is for curious people who do not only want to hang out watching the TV but people who want to know about the inner society. For example: Lost leads me to know more about philosophy and society behavior rather than what I learned in class and also guides me to meditate from philosophical themes that other series don’t do. To highlight the great success of the series, it is curious that when you type the name of one philosopher, for example on Internet, appears both, the real philosopher and the character in the series. But, from my point of view, if the show runners want to show that philosophy is important on the daily life, they forget lots of great philosophers such as the “Nihilism” of Nietzsche or the “Existentialist” of Kierkegaard. Nevertheless we have one only true fact to cling; in Lost nothing is casual. 17 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1.1 John Locke John Locke was a British philosopher, father of Liberalism and Empirism. The last is what the philosopher and the character share. “Everything happens for a reason”. This is the sentence used by John Locke to justify everything that happens to him on the island. The Empirism has also a very strong repercussion in the character of John Locke too. Firstly, he was paraplegic before he wrecked on the island, but after the accident, when he was lying on the beach, he was able to stand up and walk again, what led him to believe he had a special connection with the Island and he was taken there for one specific objective that the Island led him to walk again. Another fact in common is that John Locke, philosopher, criticized the absolute authority to only one person and traced the division of power, which seems that John Locke, the character, believes too. I put the character of John Locke first because probably Locke is the most recognizable of the philosophers and, the character, from my point of view, is one of the deepest characters, but the most. 18 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1.1.1 Jeremy Bentham In the series, Jeremy Bentham is the name used by John Locke when he returned to the real world in the flash-sideway to persuade de Ocean Six, the six losties that left the Island, to return to the island, because they should have never left the island. Jeremy Bentham, like more characters in the series was the name of a british philosopher, father of the Utilitarism, which its basic basis is: “the maximum welfare for the greatest number of people”. Associated with the series, the short period John Locke take this fake identity and turns into Jeremy Bentham he tries to find the Ocean Six and returned them to the island for the welfare of the rest of the people who is in the Island. This name was given to John by Charles Widmore in Túnez, after his time-travelling from the Island to begin his mission to find and convince the Ocean Six. When John asks Charles why he gave him that name Widmore justifies himself by answering Locke’s parents had sense of humor. 19 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1.2 David Hume David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, father of the Empirism. Desmond David Hume in the series takes the philosopher’s name and his ideas (and, as an anecdote, both are Scottish, too) Desmond is a man who crash into the island before 2004 and a man called Kelvin rescue him and bring him to “The Swann” 3. David Hume believed that all knowledge comes from senses. Parallel with the series, Desmond, once in the Island, he believed also with his senses: first, with pulsing every 108 minutes the countdown on “The Swann”, then, on the third season, he has premonitions about Charlie, which can be interpreted as a sixth sense. In fact, Desmond has three premonitions about Charlie’s death, first killed by a thunder, then drowned and finally killed by an arrow. At last, Charlie die drowned on the station “The Looking Glass” 4 at the end of the third season due to save Desmond, because Mikhail Bakunin 5 where outside the underwater station with a grenade on the hand. Explained below at point 3.2 Explained below at point 3.2 5 Explained below at point 3.1.1.4 3 4 20 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1.3 Rousseau Rousseau was a French philosopher who believed that the society itself hurts people who are part of society. His most famous phrase is: “The man is born free, but it is shackled from everywhere” The parallelism in the series is the character of Danielle Rousseau, who at the time of the wrecked was living along on the island, because twenty years earlier she and her expedition wrecked on the Island and the “Monster”, a black smoke -which I will explaine it below- killed all her peers. In the fourth season Danielle is killed by a mercenary team, who travel to the Island by order of Charles Widmore. It is very impressive that a woman along survive on a mysterious Island and was able to resist a disease who killed the rest of her crew. 21 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1.4 Mikhail Bakunin Mikhail Bakunin was a Russian anarchist, who founded the first international along with Karl Marx, and was the first great promoter of anarchism as a political and popular movement. In the series Mikhail Bakunin is an old soviet soldier recruited by Jacob through an advertisement on a newspaper. His mission on the island at the time of the series took place is the communicators manager on the station “The Flame”. Furthermore, it seems to be immortal. I think it is related to the fact that it is inspired by the anarchism, which doesn’t follow any superior power. My theory is that as inspired by the anarchist movement, he is “free” from life inside the Island, because he is shot twice and left uninjured, or that the Island gave to him that power. I don’t know the aim he seems to be immortal, but in a forum I found once that because he has the name of an anarchist, he doesn’t follow the rules of nothing, included the death. 22 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.1.5 De Groot Karen and Gerald De Groot are the founders of Dharma Iniciative although they never appeared in the series. They only have a short appearance in the orientation videos of “the Pearl” 6 and “the Swann” that maybe could pass unnoticed. The surname DeGroot means “the big” or “the great” in Dutch. Gerald DeGroot was inspired by the Dutch philosopher and jurist Hugo De Groot, whose book “De iure belli ac pacis” was the first agreement of the International Rights, which regulates the external relationships between countries and Sates. The two De Groot, the real and the one in the series were prodigious children. Both went to the University at a very young age and were very smart. One became jurist at the age of 19, the other leaded the Dharma Initiative just after being graduated from Michigan University. There was also a Dutch chess player and psychologist named Adrian DeGroot. He leads many psychological chess experiments, some of them the most known of the world. In these experiments, he investigates the cognitive requirements and processes of the mind involved in moving a chess piece. 6 Explained below at point 3.2 23 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.2 The Island The Island could be classified as a character on the series; besides it has its own wishes and plans. It is very difficult to discover the Island, and it seems that the Island is able to move by itself through space and time. It is said that the Island is located in the South Pacific because the plane crashed during a flight between Los Ángeles and Sydney. But in the 5th season we learnt that it is possible to move the island in the space by a frozen wheel, under “the Orchid” 7. There are a lot of references in the Island about its own history. The oldest: odd symbols on the cork of the Heart of the Island. After that, there was a gigantic statue of an unknown god, however by this time only a foot with four fingers reminds. The complete statue is only shown when the losties (the nickname we know the main characters) travel through time, and the statue reminds us of Egyptian one. Moreover, in the finale of the series we could appreciate that about two thousand of years ago there was a guardian of the island, too 8. Later, in the ninetieth century a ship wrecked on the island due to a very strong storm and pulled the statue down breaking it up. In the fifties, the U.S army landed in the South Pacific due to some nuclear proofs. The Others, the people who live on the island, killed the army, but they were able to bring a bomb called “Jughead” which later would be buried under the Others’ Village to prevent it to be detonated. 7 8 Explained below, at point 3.2 Explained below, at point 3.7: Ayn Rand 24 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS In the beginning of the 70’s, there was a great activity promoted by Dharma Initiative, few constructions were built on the island (scientific stations, barracks and a large communications network). Finally, in 2004, there was a fault of the magnetism of “the Swann” on the Island, the plane 815 of Oceanic crashed onto the beach of the Island. Even though it is very difficult to find the Island, we discover that there was a lot of activity on it through the time, but it could be the fate that the Island had for its people. 25 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.1.3 Other important characters Apart from the characters described above, there are also more important characters throughout the series that instead of being inspired of philosophers, they have references to real people. I will make only a slight mention to this part, since the characters that have a literary parallelism – and who have a sort of importance to me- will be analysed in point 3.7. Jack Shepard: The surname itself means the man who leads the rest, like the shepherd leading its cattle, in reference that in a beginning he is the leader of the group. Moreover we could found an American drama writer called Sam Shepard who is considered one of the most important contemporary playwrights. In 1979 he won the Pulitzer for Buried Child, a play which seems to be inspired Jack’s life. We could found parallelisms in the play and Jack’s life: The play depicts the destruction of a traditional and nucleolus family, more or less what happens with the actions Jack do before wrecking on the Island. 9 Kate Austen: She represents the beautiful girl, although we soon learn, already in the first season, that she was flying to Los Angeles in the role of a fugitive. After having murdered his father, she was pursued by agent Mars, who die after the crash onto the island, for three whole years. 9 Explanation below, at point 3.1: Sam Shepard 26 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS Her surname is inspired by the novelist Jane Austen, whose magna opus was Pride and Prejudice. As you can see, this choice is not casual. In the mentioned book the main character is a woman which was not very usual at that time and she is also a woman with a very strong personality. 10 In the series, Kate has a strong character too and she is one of the corners in the love triangle between her, Jack and Sawyer. James “Sawyer” Ford: Although his real name is James Ford, his nickname, Sawyer, is taken by “The adventures of Tom Sawyer”, by novelist Mark Twain. Both are scammers. The parallelisms between the childhood of Tom Sawyer and James Ford are practically identical; both lost their parents early, having to survive alone on the world. The only great difference is the century, Tom, in the nineteen century and James on the twenty-one. 11 Hugo Reyes: He is the typical “fat” but sympathetic guy who gives the humour on the series. He believes he is damn after wining millions of dollars on the lottery thanks to the sequence 4-8-15-16-23-42 12. On the Island he realise that the numbers are there too, increasing his fear to the numbers. 10 11 12 Explained below, at point 3.7: Jane Austen Explained below, at point 3.7: Mark Twain Explained below, at point 3.5 27 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS At the end he become the protector of the Island relieving Jack, and he ask Ben Linus for help to be his second, starting a new era on the Island. Sayid Jarrah: The character of Sayid is influenced all the series by his past as a torturer, and in the Island he try to redempt himself, reaching the fact that he has to die one time to reborn as a new man. I explain the character deeply below, on point 3.4: 1- Redemption and 4- Reborn. Daniel Faraday: He first appears in the four seasons as a member of the Kahana. His surname is taken from Michael Faraday, who was an English physicist who researched electromagnetism, one of the characteristics from the Island. With Faraday’s research took a major step in the development of electricity by establishing that magnetism produces electricity through movement. To sum up this point, I reached the conclusion that most of the facts in the series have a close relation to the real world, and I believe this is one of the bases for the success of Lost, because although several people don’t know from this fact, the series has more from real than fantasy. 28 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.2 Dharma Initiative In the first episode of the first season, a polar bear appears mysteriously on the Island in the South Pacific. But in the first episode of the third season, called Tale of two cities, which is the name of a Charles Dickens’s book, this mystery is solved. Later, in the second episode, the actions of a secret organization D.H.A.R.M.A, scientific are revealed, which experiments stations for a better in world through the Valenzetti equation (an equation whose digits are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42). Since Ezio Valenzetti made the equation, it is used to predict humanity doomsday. Dharma Initiative, which is an acronym meaning Department of Heuristics and Research on Material Applications built few scientist stations on the island. The missions of the stations were meant to change the numbers of the Valenzetti equation. The Valezetti equation is a sequence of numbers capable of measuring the human history in numerical terms. As a curiosity Dharma is a word from Asian religions which means Duty, and its opposite is Karma. Moreover inside the Dharma Initiative people greet themselves with the word “Namaste”, which means: “the spirit that dwells in me greets the spirit that dwells in you”. Furthermore, in the 5th season and as a consequence of the actions of John Locke in the frozen wheel under “the Orchid”, which I will explain below, a part of the losties were transported in the seventies, 29 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS when the Dharma Initiative had its apogee, and they became part of the Initiative joining it as workers. It is also curious that almost all of the names for the stations are inspired by an attribute from Greek God Apollo. For example, one of the animals devoted to Apollo was the Swann, he was the protector of archeries (The Arrow), and he was the God of the sun (The Flame). Their stations logos have a background in black and the draws in white, while the few stations that have no relation to the God have the colours inverted. 30 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.2.1 Research Stations This part is centred on some buildings we can find on the Island. The aims of these stations are to investigate about physical phenomenon of the nature which can influence the Valenzetti equation. 13 The stations were built by Dharma and all of them were built underground (or underwater) except for The Flame. In this part I will try to find similarities between this research stations and facts or themes from the real world that inspired the creators to put it on the series. Every station has cultural references of our modern world, such as references to religion, popular culture and literature influences. As a curiosity almost all of the station names have also literary references. 13 Explained below, exactly at point 3.6 31 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS - The Swann: The Swann is the first station to be discovered, just after the second season started due to content the audience who were deceived with the abrupt end of the first season. Inside “The Swann” lives Desmond Hume, a man who clashes in the island with his ship. Inside the station there is a computer on a dome, and has a flip-card timer. The computer resets the timer through manual entry of a numeric code "4 8 15 16 23 42" every 108 minutes. The code could not be entered until four minutes before the countdown reached zero, at which time the alarm begins to ring. Initially, the station was built to study the magnetism on the island, but after and accident occurred at the seventies drilling a bag of magnetism, it was used to control this magnetism. According to the producers, the inside of the station was inspired by the thematic land of “Tomorrowland”, in Disneyland, probably because they wanted to make the stations a “developed” place within the island, and the inside of the Swann, which is the first station we can see, reflects that. Although it is one of the most important stations- for Dharma Initiative and for the series- I have to admit I didn’t succeeded in finding any relationship between the swans and the station, although the swan was an animal who follows god Apollo. 32 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Pearl: The Pearl is a psychology station, a base for monitoring the behaviour of the other personal in the rest of stations through cameras from “The Swann” as well as possibly from the other stations. But the real purpose of this station was to control the behaviour and actions from people of “The Pearl”. It is said by Desmond that perhaps the people of the Pearl were the subjects of the experiment. Besides, its name reminds us about the Nobel Prize winner in 1962, John Steinbeck’s novel, The Pearl. The novel “The Pearl” is about a couple with a son who are fishermen, and they are very poor. One day the husband found a pearl while he was fishing, and they think if they sold the pearl they would became rich, but the pearl didn’t bring to the family any positive thing, but negative things. One of my conjectures is that people who went to “The Pearl” though they will control and follow people on other stations. This will be the positive thing as the family in the novel “The Pearl” though at the beginning with the pearl. But in fact workers on “The Pearl” were controlled as we see there were cameras to follow their behaviour, and all the work of the people of “The Pearl” went to the rubbish, meaning that the negative thing (but this is only a conjecture that I though, but I think this is not the purpose similarities between both “The Pearl”, book and station). 33 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Hydra: The Hydra is a zoological research station situated on a small island apart from the main island. It has two parts: one above ground and another underwater. This station take importance in season three, because the Others kidnapped Jack, Kate and Sawyer and brought them to The Hydra; Jack was enclosed on an aquarium for sharks and dolphins, and Kate and Sawyer were enclosed on a cage for bears. There is also a little chamber called “Room 23” where the Others made brainwashing through drugs, loud music and a psychedelic video. It remembers us to one of the most known films by Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange, were Alex, the protagonist, is submitted to the Ludovico Treatment to change his behaviour. This film, but, is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel of the homonymous title. The name is possible referred to the mythological animal or also an invertebrate animal of fresh water. Both have the ability of regenerate themselves. And also related with the fact that station “The Hydra” has different parts on the small island, as it is cut in different parts. 34 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Arrow: The Arrow is a small station camouflaged by a cottage. It was used for Dharma Initiative for making strategies against the natives on the Island. After the Crash of Oceanic’s flight 815 it was the refuge from the survivors of the plane’s tail. They are the tailies, the passengers that were on the back part of the plane at the time of the crash. The plane broke into three parts, and the bottom fell here. They were living on the beach too, but one day they discovered this station and made it his “home”. Furthermore, inside the stations Mr. Eko found a Bible, which had a hole inside it to keep objects, which has a part of an orientation video inside it. The name could refer to the typical weapon to kill natives from undeveloped lands, often used by the conquerors. Here the parallelism -I though- is that the natives of the Island are the natives of America, and Dharma Initiative are the colonists from Europe in the XV century. This is shown especially on old western films, where the white people kill Indians up on their horse and shooting arrows. 35 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Orchid: It is the last station to be discovered. It is situated under a botanic garden to research for “Casmir effect”. It is the last station showed and probably one of the most important stations in Dharma, although it only appears on few episodes. Ben Linus and John Locke travel to this station and while Locke is watching the video orientation, Linus is putting metallic objects into a camera to destroy it. After this, Ben goes down to a secret cave where is buried part of a frozen wheel which moves the Island. Behind the wheel there was a yellow light, which later we discover it is the light from the “Heart of the Island”. Ben broke the ice on the wheel and, difficultly, he moved the wheel using lots of effort, the light increased extending itself and covering the whole cave. Outside, the Island made an odd sound and the sky became purple again, like when “The Swann” went off on the second season. Suddenly, a light enveloped the entire island, making it vanish. 36 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Flame: The survivors discovered The Flame because of a monitor in The Pearl shows a man looking to the camera, Mikhail Bakunin, who was an Other living in “The Flame”. From there the Others were reported with the external world. Ironically, the end of the station was when someone active the C-4 (a kind of bomb) fixed on the pillars and The Flame explode creating a great flame. The station has the name of “Flame” maybe because the fire expands itself very quickly, like communication nowadays, more or less. Besides, in the fourth season the station explode due to the C-4, a type of explosive, stuck under the stations, and the explosion ended at least with a huge flame. Moreover, possibly “The Flame” has its own kind of protection. When the losties went there, John Locke tried to unlock a computer by playing chess with the computer, and when he won, some options were displayed. The options were: asking for a food supply, contact with the outside world, have access to a submarine sonar system and report of an incursion of the Hostiles. When they left the station Locke typed 77, which meant an incursion, and making the explosion of “The Flame”. 37 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Staff: The staff is a medical station. Nowadays it is used by The Others. In the first season, Claire, the pregnant girl is kidnapped by Ethan, one of the Others, and he bring her to the Staff to save both, Claire and the baby’s life. Later, in the third season, Juliet, once is infiltrated with the losties, bring Sun, who was pregnant, to this station, because the Others who got pregnant died in the Island, and Juliet can`t do nothing for them, so her hope is to help Sun to have the baby in the Island. When they arrived at the station, Sun noticed that the station was empty and without any medical equipment, but then Juliet opened a hidden room behind the some metallic wardrobes at the time Sun asked Juliet what the purpose of this room is. Then Juliet replied: “This is the place where we bring the pregnant women to die”. The symbol of the station is referred to Greek God Aesculapius. He was the god of medicine and healing. He was also the son of God Apollo, whom most of the stations are referred to. The (red) stuff with snakes rolled on it represents the attribute given to the god. This is the only station that has its attribute in red, instead of the typical black or white from the other stations have. 38 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Looking Glass: The Looking Glass is the only underwater station of Dharma. It is presumed to transmissions block and anchorage submarines. It is believed to be flooded, and Juliet think so, but later it is shown two women were on the station. In this station is clear that Mikhail Bakunin is immortal, because he was shot by Desmond with crossbow from the Looking Glass, hitting him on the chest. The name for this station is taken from the second part, less known, of the books of Alice. The first book, called Alice in Wonderland, is the universal known, where Alice fell inside a burrow and discovered a magical world with weird and odd characters. But Lewis wrote a second part, Alice through the looking glass, where Alice crosses a mirror and she is involved on a chess game. So, this station takes the name of this second part of the series of Alice. What is curious is that, actually, many of the cinematography adaptations combine the two books, calling them Alice in Wonderland. But in fact there are two books. 39 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Tempest: “The Tempest” is a station that has chemical weapons. Charlotte were Daniel there and to neutralize the toxic gas all over the island, but when Jack realizes they were missing, they search for them. When Jack, Kate and Juliet arrive at the station, firstly they thought that the couple tried to release the gas, but after the misunderstanding, finally they disconnect the system to prevent the release of gas by Ben. The name of the stations was inspired by Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest”, which paradoxically is set on an island. The plot is that a wizard, Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, are left on a mysterious island. Prospero caused a tempest and a ship with his enemies wrecked on this island, and after that Prospero, who is a wizard, manipulates the survivors for his own purpose, which is restore his daughter to the throne of Milan, where Prospero is the Duke. It is evident that the essence of this play and the essence of Lost are nearly the same (with the exception that Lost is more complete in all the ways). As literary critic Harold Bloom said: “all the literature and arts comes from the genius Shakespeare” 14 So in Lost must be a reference to him. 14 “How to read and why”, Harold Bloom, 2000 40 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -The Lamp Post: The station named The Lamp Post is localized under a church in Los Angeles, used to find the island in the space-time line, because the Island is an odd entity which (or who) has abilities to move itself through the line of time and space. In the centre of the station there is a mapamundi and a Foucault pendulum. Currently the person who is in charge of this station is Eloise Hawking, the mother of Daniel Faraday, the physicist who landed on the Island on the fourth season. The surname of Eloise is taken by another great physicist who has a theory about the black holes, Stephen Hawking. The name of the stations is taken of the best known work of C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia”. The Lamp Post is situated just when Lucy, one of the main characters, crosses the wardrobe and arrives at the magic world of Narnia. The Post symbolizes the nexus between Narnia and the real world, whereas the station of Lamp Post symbolizes the nexus between the world and this mysterious Island. The aim that “Chronicles of Narnia” doesn’t appear on the point 3.7 is because it has no more meaning beyond what I explained here. 41 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.2.1 Orientation In every station there was a video called “Orientation”, which showed the aim of every station and sometimes a portion of the history of the Inititiative. What’s more, apart of the aim, it showed how the stations worked. During the episodes we are able to watch few videos, which included the Orientation for the Swann, the Pearl, the Flame and the Orchid. Moreover, in every video there is a presenter, called Pierre Chang, who is one of the “Heavyweights” inside Dharma Initiative, along with Horace Goodspeed, a mathematic and leader on the seventies of the Initiative in the Island and Stuart Radzinsky, the Head of Research in Dharma and the architect of The Swann. Later, he was closed inside the Swann to switch the countdown with another partner called Kelvin Inman, and he committed suicide after finished a map hidden on “The Swann” where Radzinsky drew the place of the other station. This map helped Locke to find The Pearl. After this short explanation, going back to the beginning, Dr. Chang appeared in all the videos but always with another pseudonym. In the Swann orientation video his name is Marvin Candle, in the Orchid orientation video his name is Edgar Halliwax and in the Pearl orientation video his name is Mark Wickmund. This could confuse the audience, and in fact it did, but during the different seasons it is not explained why he is using pseudonyms in every video. Perhaps it is thought to confuse the workers in the different stations. 42 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.2.2 Electromagnetism Despite being a fiction series Lost deals with science field too and the most studied scientific element inside Lost is Electromagnetism. It first appears on the second season, with the appearance of the Swann station. Moreover on the island, it seems that there are few events related to electromagnetic phenomenon. Although there are no explanations about the Island’s magnetism, we have the certain that the Swann was built to keep the electromagnetism saved after an accident occurred when the station was being built. The workers go further drilling than the bag of magnetism was able to resist, and they made a hole on the magnetism’s bag. So they have to change the aim of “The Swann”, and its function of studying the electromagnetism changed to supervise it through a countdown installed on the Swann, that every 108 minutes the responsible had to switch a button to liberate a part of the electromagnetism and not let the bag of electromagnetisms overcharge. And from now onwards, every 108 minutes the responsible for the Swann has to switch a button to liberate a little part of this electromagnetism power. 43 BEYOND LOST 3.3 POL CRUELLS The seven wonders of the world In my research, I came across a forum in internet where a member found some parallelism between some of the buildings on the Island and the seven wonders of the ancient world. We know the creators of Lost used as many references and inspirations from the real world as they could, so they made references from the seven wonders of the ancient world, too. If we get together the different kind of buildings considered wonders, we discover that there are also buildings on the island making references of these wonders: -Lighthouse of Alexandria: There is also a Lighthouse on the Island, but this is a little bit special. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was the highest one, but an earthquake destroyed it. 44 BEYOND LOST -Temple of POL CRUELLS Arthemisa in Ephestus and Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus: This two temples were the greatest of the ancient world whereas the Temple on the Island is the biggest building on the island. 45 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -Zeus Statue in Olympia and Collosus of Rhodes: The foot with four fingers is what remains about an old statue of Egiptian goddess “Tueris”. It was represented by a human body and an hippopotamus head. Nowadays, but, we can only see its foot, because the rests of the statue are lost on the island, after the crash of the Black Rock into the statue. 46 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -Hanging Gardens of Babylonia: The last station to be discovered is called The Orchid, a kind of flower, but it is so called because a greenhouse was the cover for the real station. And the adjective “Hanging” was a mistake of translation, so the real meaning is “Overhang”, and the greenhouse “Overhang” from the forest too. 47 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -Great Pyramid of Giza: Ironically, the only wonder which still remains and it hasn’t been destroyed is the only one which has no references in Lost. But although we can’t see any references to the Egyptian pyramids we know that on a concrete moment on the island’s history the Egyptian lived there. Evidence of that is the statue, which is an Egyptian God named Tueris, the goddess of fertility. Represented with a human body and an animal head, this time an hippopotamus, characteristic of the Egyptian religion. 48 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.4 Biblical references on Lost In this part I will talk about some Biblical references the creators of Lost have included in the series. The Bible – and also in its many different names (Quran, Old Testament…) - is nearly true that is the most universal and known book, and in extension, the most influenced- although it is full of contradictions because people read it not as a fictional masterpiece but as a real book. According to a survey made by the Society of the Congress Library in the eighties, in the American culture, the Bible is the most influencing book. Apart from being one of the most influential book, the Bible is also one of the best known books of history- together with others religion books such as the Old Testament or the Quran- so, it is not weird that the show runners have included a lot of biblical references on the series. I will only write about five points of parallelisms between the series and the Bible, the ones I personally think are the most important, although I think there are few more parallelisms. Firstly, there are at least eight physical apparitions of the Bible: there was one on “The Swann”, another one in “The Arrow”, another one in Jack’s shelving in his apartment… Then, from my point of view, here there is an enumeration of some of the parallelism between The Bible and Lost: 49 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 1-REDEMPTION I begin the Biblical references with Redemption because this concept of the Bible is possibly the most important fact in Lost. At the beginning, all the characters wrecked on the island with different troubles -but not simply troubles- like Kate’s out of the law or Jack’s family situation. «Everybody gets a new life on this island» said John Locke early in the first season. And he is right; in different ways, the accident of the plane benefits almost everybody. Jack does not have to bury his father and stops blaming himself; although Kate’s past is revealed, in the third chapter her police guard died, let her stop running from the police; John Locke recovers his mobility on his legs, apart of believing their plane accident maybe was not an “accident”; Claire could have her baby on the Island and take care of the baby herself, instead of giving the baby to an adoption family as she first had thought. Besides, Sayid has to carry about the fault that he has tortured lots of people on the Army, and it’s a fact that he is not prided. For example, he was obligated to torture his own lover, a fact that seems to chase him in the Island. 50 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 2-ESAÚ AND JACOB: Early on the series a symbolical appearance appears on Lost. In the fifth episode of the first season, the group found two ancient skeletons in a cave where they poured some water. There, Locke baptized them as “Adam and Eve”, when he said: «Our own Adam and Eve». It makes references to the fact that these two bodies were the first people to live on the Island. Beside the bodies, Jack also found a bag with two stones inside it: one white and other black. At the end of the series we could realized that the male body belonged to the “Black Smoke”. It was the body before being transformed into the “Black Smoke” or the “Monster” and the second body belonged to “Mother”, the guardian of the island before Jacob. In the series there is also a parallelism between Jacob, his brother Esau and the Bible. This book, the Genesis, said that there were two brothers, called Jacob and Esau, who even before they had born, they fought in her mother’s womb. Everything that happens on the island is because of Jacob, due to his fight against his brother, and he does all what he does in order to remedy the disaster he caused two thousands years ago, when he killed his brother physically, creating the “Black Smoke”. Apart from being inspired by the Bible, Jacob and his brother could take references from “As I Lay Dying” one of the best work of William Faulkner, Nobel prize in 1949. The book is about the journey of two brothers to his mother’s funeral, but they are arguing during the whole journey, bringing them catastrophic consequences. 51 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3-SHEPHARD: In the Christian religion the shepherd is the person who leads the believers into the Christianism. Hence, it is not a coincidence that Jack and his father, Christian, have the surname of Shepherd. In different ways, Jack is the shepherd of the losties, and Christian, in his few appearances is a kind of shepherd on the island for his son, Jack. For example, in the fifth episode of the first season, called “White Rabbit”, the losties had finished their stockpile of water, so they need urgently a river or a fountain. Christian appears then on Jack’s dreams and guide him to a cave where passes a river, which is the cave where they found the two skeletons “Adam and Eve”. The title, “White Rabbit”, is an allusion of Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. In the book Alice follows a white rabbit as Jack follows his father through the Island. So here the ghost of Christian Shepard is a kind of shepherd for Jack helping him to found the fountain. Moreover there is an American playwright called Sam Sephard who won the Pulitzer later on the seventies thanks to the play Buried Child. If we read this play or we go to the theatre to see it, we will realize that Jack could perfectly be the main character in the play, because both stories are nearly the same. To sum up this point I will make a clarification: I know I’ve been talking about Jack’s surname as a role from the Catholic Church, but in fact between the two names there is a clear difference: Shepard for the surname and Shepherd for the role. 52 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 4-REBORN When Ethan Rom -an Other who was sent by Ben to the place where the plane wrecked on the Island, to control the losties- he kidnapped pregnant Claire, Charlie went behind Ethan and Claire to save the last one. In the middle of the wood Ethan and Charlie fought, and Ethan hanged Charlie after beating him. Later, Jack and Kate, who ran after them, found Charlie hanged on a bamboo tree. Firstly, they thought there was no hope for Charlie and they believed Charlie was dead, but Jack, after hitting Charlie’s chest furiously, revived him. Another case of Reborn is Sayid Farrah. After the explosion at the end of the fifth season by the Jug Head, Sayid was bleeding very badly. Then Sayid told Hurley that if he died now he wouldn’t go to a comfortable place due to his past life as a torturer and murderer, and he fell unconscious. He was close to die, but thanks to Jacob, who previously had told Hurley what he had to do, Hurley told the guys that they had to bring Sayid to the Temple, a building in the middle of the jungle, where lots of the Others lived. Through a hole on a wall, they entered a secret corridor underground. The Others caught them and were at the point to kill them, but then Hurley came to his defense saying he was sent by Jacob. The Others took Sayid and put him on a fountain in the Temple and drown an unconscious Sayid into it, at the time they turned a hourglass. It seems Sayid was drowned, but the Others didn’t remove him. Then Jack started a fight with the Others, and after a while, a reborn Sayid said: “What happened?” 53 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 5-EXODUS The “Exodus” is the second book of the “Bible”. The exodus is maybe the most known book of the Bible, after the Genesis and The Apocalypse, so it’s not strange to have a little reference in Lost. It tells the story of slavery in Egypt of the Israelian people, their escape and how they had to cross the Red Sea to reach the Promised Land. In Lost, Exodus is the name of the final season of the first season, when the losties, warned by Danielle Rousseau, know that “The Others” were on their way to arrive at the camp, and Jack believed the only way to keep save all the passengers of the flight 815 save is open the trap, so Danielle brought a little group of them to the Black Rock, an old ship in the middle of the jungle, where there is dynamite. Meanwhile Sawyer and three other men sailed to the sea with a raft they made on their own, to arrive in a land from the “real world”, and then return to the Island to rescue their partners. In the end of Exodus we saw how the others destroyed the raft in the sea and left its crew in the middle of the sea. On the Island Jack and the others managed well bringing the dynamite to the Trap, and finally they made it go off. Then Jack and John looked inside in the darkness, and this how the first season ends. This ending was so controversial because the fans, after all, had to wait three more long months to the next season, letting the screen writers decide on the first thing to show on the first episode of the second season was the inside of the Trap. 54 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.5 The numbers (4 8 15 16 23 42) During the series one of the biggest axes of Lost was the numbers which were 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. They made appearance on the eighteen episodes -centered on Hurley and how he became rich on the lottery thanks to these numbers- but they really took importance in the second season, with the discovery of “The Swann” and the countdown. The beginning of the numbers came from an Equation made by a (fictional) mathematic called Enzo Valenzetti, who made the Valenzetti Equation to predict the world’s end. Even though this was an important fact of Lost, it wasn’t shown in the TV series. It was shown on the Sri Lanka video in the game The Lost Experience, which was an alternate reality game. The aim of the stations built on the Island, and the aim of Dharma Initiative was to change these numbers and give the humanity a chance to survive. On “The Substitute”, the sixth chapter of the sixth Seaton, the Black Smoke on its human appearance tells Sawyer that the Numbers are related to Jacob. The Black Smoke led Sawyer to a cave in some unknown cliffs, and there the Black Smoke showed Sawyer a kind of list written with chalk on the roof and walls of the cave. There, there were lost of names from characters in Lost, mostly crossed out. He tells that names were chosen by Jacob as possible candidates to occupy the charge of the protector of the Island. And then, Sawyer asks from what the Island had to be protected from, the Black Smoke answered: “from nothing”. Every single candidate had a number before their name, but as most of them were crossed, we only can see a few of them, respectly the ones who has the numbers that conform the Valenzetti Equation. If we don’t know The Lost 55 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS Experience and we don’t know the Equation, the numbers for the candidates could be an answer to us for the Numbers. 4- Locke 8- Reyes 15- Ford 16- Jarrah 23- Shepard 42- Kwon The black smoke also tells Sawyer that every candidate has three options on the Island: 1. Do nothing, but his name could be crossed 2. Accept being the protector of the Island 3. Leave the Island While the Black Smoke is talking that to Sawyer, he crossed the name of Locke, because he had died two seasons ago, and showing us what happens if someone chooses the option Locke had chosen. 56 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.6 Recurrent thematic and cultural references Lost is thrives from lots of thematic, cultural references or literary techniques taken from literature. Firstly I will explain different literary techniques used in Lost, such as the cliffhangers and plot twists, as well as the Symbolism used in Lost to express the frame of mind or the feelings of the characters. Then I will talk about cliffhangers and plot twists, two techniques carried to the extreme to keep the audience pending on future episodes. This is shown in almost every episode. At the end of each episode there is a cliffhanger, and there are plot twists every two or three episodes. Finally, in the last point I will exhibit the three literary techniques used in Lost to lead the series: the Flashbacks, Flash Forwards and a brand new invented by the show runners, the Flash-sideways. Moreover, in the largest part of the research, I investigated about literary influences on Lost and how they are hidden in the series. 57 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.6.1 Symbolism Symbolism is possibly one of the most used techniques in universal literature. According to Cambridge dictionary, symbolism is the use of symbols in art, literature, films, etc. to represent ideas. A thing (an object or a verbal phrase) is used to make reference to another thing which has a relation to the first thing. Yet, we have to remember that symbolism is always subjective, so everybody could have a different result. For me, the best example of symbolism is the second episode of the third season, called “the Glass Ballerina”, which with a glass ballerina reflects the anemic state of Sun. Sun Kwon is also a main character. Along with her husband, Jin Kwon, firstly they were the exotic couple who hadn’t speak English, because they are Korean, but after is revealed that Sun studied English when she was young. Another great and well-founded symbolism is the music box of Danielle Rousseau. During all the years Danielle was alone on the island, the music box didn`t work, but when Sayid found Danielle’s cave and discovered the box, he touched it and immediately the box started to play well. Moreover, when Sayid wanted to leave the cave, the box stopped playing. So, the music box reflects the loneliness of Danielle. All in all, there are two facts which appear constantly: the Rain, which appears in scenes of a high emotional level or Black and White, the contrast between good and evil, or simply to show the contrast. 58 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.6.2 Cliffhangers and plot twists First of all, we have to differentiate between what a cliffhanger an a plot twist is, the two most used literary techniques i Lost. A cliffhanger is a sudden end, leaving the characters in a difficult situation. This is used to keep the audience impatient to see the next episode and see what happens after the cliffhanger, mostly. The first great cliffhanger of Lost could be the discovering of “the Trap”, which is the big mystery through all the first season, until we discovered “The Swann”. During Lost, there are a lot of cliffhangers, almost in all the episodes, and normally there is a bigger cliffhanger at the end of the season, forcing the audience to wait for three long months. In the first season, the losties open “the Trap”, but we don’t know about the inside until the beginning of the second season. In the second season, the countdown of The Swann counts to zero, but the show runners don’t show us what happened; only we knew that at least, the countdown was important. And finally, in the fifth season the Juge head went off being unaware of what will happen later. On the other hand, a plot twits is an inesperate change to the development of a series, but the plot twist could be interpretive by little clues. Moreover a plot twist, as its name says, makes a repercussion in the series. For example; a plot twist in the Pilot is the appearance of a monster on the Island, when they found polar bears wandering through the jungle, or three episodes later when John Locke, before wrecking on the island he, on a wheelchair. In the beginning of the third season, after the appearance of the Others, who our first impression are that they are uncivilized people living in the wild rainforest, they lived on barracks with electricity and still water, on a town inspired by a little borough of the seventies in 59 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS America, or that in the middle of the third season we know that there’s another little island, which has the station “the Hydra”, apart from the principal. These are only a few examples of cliffhangers and plot twists which took place in “Lost”, but in fact, as I said, in almost every chapter there is a plot twist or a cliffhanger. So, the main difference is that a cliffhanger is used at the end of the chapter, just to keep the audience’s attention to the next episode, but without affecting the plot of the series, while a plot twist I strongly believe that with Lost cliffhangers and plot twists reaches their apotheosis in TV series, because cliffhangers and plot twists are taken from literature. But as cliffhangers and plot twists reach the series to the Olympus of American (and world) series, ultimately it produces the fall of Lost, by keeping lots of mysteries during the series and no given solutions at the end, causing the audience to feel ill ease. Earlier in the first season cliffhangers and plot twists are a constancy, and in almost every episode there is a cliffhanger at the end of the episode or lots of plot twists in the season, just to keep the audience’s attention on the next chapter. 60 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.6.3 A new way to tell a story: Flashbacks, Flashforwards and Flashsides. This section is spilt into three parts: the Flashbacks, the Flash forwards and the Flash-sideway and I will proceed according to these parts. Firstly, the flashbacks to know more about the characters, then the flash forwards to show the Ocean Six life after leaving the Island, who are living a “normal” life on Earth again, and finally the flashsideways, a kind of alternate reality. FLASHBACKS: We could say that Lost is a series of action. At present time, on the Island, the characters don’t speak too much to each other and they don’t share their anxieties, either. We learn more about the characters thanks to this kind of “past events” called Flashbacks. With the Flashbacks we learn about the character’s life before wrecking onto the Island, we also learn about their relationships and their personality. After twenty minutes of the first episode we saw the first flashbacks, which showed us some previous minutes before the wreck. In these flashbacks we saw how the passengers got to know each other, but they thought they wouldn’t see all those people once the plane had landed in Los Angeles. Every main character has at least more than five flashbacks during the series, which shows us what happened to the characters before the wreck. 61 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS One curious thing that reflects the passion with which the show runners work is that the flashbacks have thematic or narrative parallelisms with the events occurred on the Island, so any flashback is not a chance on Lost. With the last episode from the end of the second season and beyond, the flashbacks begin not only to show the past of the losties, but also flashbacks from Desmond and then from The Others. Flashbacks didn’t appear with Lost, but this series brings flashbacks to unexpected limits, making flashbacks a very important fact to every episode and to the series in general. After the fourth season, whose flashbacks and flash forwards both have the same episodes, then flashbacks disappear. FLASH FORWARDS: At the end of the third season a new kind of narration comes up: The Flash Forwards. In the end of the third season, they show us the future of the losties when they were able to leave the Island. The Flash forwards, then, mostly shows the future life of the Ocean Six (Jack, Kate, Hugo, Sayid, Sun and Aaron, Claire’s son) and their life out of the Island. At Comic-Con in San Diego in 2007 Damon Lindelof said: "Both myself and Carlton (Cuse) knew that flashbacks would not last in the series history. By the time we left to show the audience the most relevant moments character’s lives and the time when it seemed that we were making all along the way, such as Jin suddenly had a second wife and was like "Oh, really?, never mentioned it," we knew we had wave change, and we did as flash forwards ". 62 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS FLASH-SIDEWAYS: As the episodes went by, some of us thought that the show runners couldn’t include any other literary technique, but they did. They invented a brand new. We could describe it as the Flash-sideways as an alternative reality. At the end of the series we discover that these flash-sideways show us what kind of life would have been carried out provided that the Oceanic 815 wouldn’t have wrecked on the Island. The Flash-sideways were a way to explain an hypothetical life of the losties if they hadn’t wrecked on the Island, but at the end of “The End”, we discover thanks to the words of Christian Shepard to his son that these flash-sideways were made by the losties, to made a final place (the church) to reconnect themselves after death. The End: But it is not until the very last episode that we learn about these flash-sideways chances. It is told by Jack’s father Christian Shepard, in a “universal” church, formed by all the main religion idols on the planet. VOICE: Hey, kiddo. [Jack turns around to see his father standing behind him.] JACK: Dad? CHRISTIAN: Hello, Jack. JACK: I don't understand...you died. CHRISTIAN: Yeah. Yes I did... 63 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS JACK: Then how are you here right now? [Christian sighs.] CHRISTIAN: How are you here? JACK: I died too... [Jack begins to cry as he remembers.] CHRISTIAN: It's okay...it's okay. It's okay son. [Christian approaches Jack and they hug each other.] JACK: I love you, dad. CHRISTIAN: I love you too, son. JACK: You...are you real? CHRISTIAN: I should hope so. Yeah, I'm real. You're real, everything that's ever happened to you is real. All those people in the church...they're real too. JACK: They're all...they're all dead? CHRISTIAN: Everyone dies sometime, kiddo. Some of them before you, some...long after you. JACK: But why are they all here now? CHRISTIAN: Well there is no "now" here. JACK: Where are we, dad? CHRISTIAN: This is the place that you...that you all made together, so that you could find one another. The most...important part of your life, was the time that you spent with these people. That's why all of you are here. Nobody does it alone Jack. You needed all of them, and they needed you. JACK: For what? CHRISTIAN: To remember...and to...let go. JACK: Kate...she said we were leaving. CHRISTIAN: Not leaving, no. Moving on. 64 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS JACK: Where we going? CHRISTIAN: [smiling] Let's go find out. 15 Jack reconnects with all the losties, and after they embrace each other, they sit on the banks. Finally Christian opens a big door and a powerful white light invader the church. 15 Last dialogue of Lost. It is between Jack and his father, Christian, and he tells his son where they are. 65 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3.7 Literary influences and appearances on Lost This last part of my work is centred mostly on literary influences that the creators had acquired- or not, maybe it’s just an impressionfrom the great novels and novelists of the history of literature. Actually, this is the most subjective part of this research as some of the scenes in the series remind me of novels I know or I have read. I found some equal facts or parallelisms in the series I considered interesting to comment, but perfectly could be rebutted. In this section I chose 15 great novelists, poets and essayist whom I have read about- and I felt like to write about- and I have written my most personal impressions, helped by extracts from their novels or from impressions of other people, like essayist Harold Bloom or Virginia Woolf about other writers. The fifteen writers I have chosen are: William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Jane Austen, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll, John Steinbeck, Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Cormac McCarthy, Ayn Rand, Sam Shepard, Jules Verne, the Bible and the Quran and Jorge Luis Borges. *All fifteen I have chosen and the way they are structured doesn’t follow any kind of order or aim. 66 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 1-William Shakespeare: Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930), the greatest contemporaneous literary critic holds in his works that William Shakespeare created the human personality on his thesis “William Shakespeare: The invention of the Human”. Bloom, in almost for thousand of pages, holds with great works such as “Hamlet”, “King Lear”, and “Henry IV” that Shakespeare created the human behaviour. “Before Shakespeare, the literary character changes only a little; men and women are represented aging and dying, but not changing because his relation with themselves, rather than with gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare, the characters develop themselves rather than unfold themselves, and they develop because they conceive themselves again. Sometimes this occurs because they listen themselves talking, themselves or each other. Spying himself talking on his real way to the individuation, and no other writer, before or after Shakespeare, has achieved so well the nearly wonder of creating voices extremely different although coherent with themselves for his one hundred-odd main characters and several hundred distinguishable minor personal” 16 So, in a Shakespearean way, we could affirm that without the influence of Shakespeare, the complexity of the characters of Lost – and extension the literature in generally- would lose part of their charm, and moreover part of Lost essence in itself. 16 Harold Bloom, “William Shakespeare: The invention of the Human” 67 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 2-Dante Alighieri: “The Divine Comedy” is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri – often named the Supreme Poet- in the fourteenth century. It tells the journey of Dante, the Christian poet, visiting the world beyond death. Firstly visiting Hell, where all the sinners who at the time of his death are not regretful about his past acts and they are punished there. Secondly the Purgatory, where people who have committed sins before their death but they are sorry about them are trying to redeem themselves. And finally he reaches Heaven, where people freeing from all sins are waiting for the Final Judgement. One of the most known theory about what was the Island was that the Island was a sort of Purgatory, and the losties were there to redeem their sins. This reminds us to the “Purgatorio”, the second book that forms the Divine Comedy – the others are “Inferno” and “Paradiso”. In this passage of the IX chant, Dante explains how an angel marks on his forehead seven P, symbolizing the seven sins people in the purgatory have to redeem of: “Devoutly at the holy feet I cast me, For mercy's sake besought that he would open, But first upon my breast three times I smote. Seven P's upon my forehead he described With the sword's point, and, "Take heed that thou wash These wounds, when thou shalt be within," he said.” 17 “Within” could be the Island, and the losties could redeem all his past sins on the Earth, to delete the seven P on their forehead to finally reach Heaven. 17 Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, chant IX 68 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 3-Jane Austen: Kate Austen was inspired by Jane Austen, the great British female novelist- along with Virginia Woolf- in the twentieth century. In her novels, Austen shows the life of women in the nineteenth century society, where the women were merely considered as a house-wives. We found the parallelism between Kate Austen and Jane Austen in “Pride and Prejudice” and “Emma”. Austen considered that women were more imaginative than men, and so the show runners of Lost. Jane Austen brings us characters of strong personality, such as Emma Woodhouse in “Emma” and Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”. Both took all the attention of the reader and although it doesn’t happen in Lost because it will be impossible as women in the series have a strong personality, too. Most of us hated Ana Lucía, a tailie, when she made her first appearance- although when we start to sympathize with her, she dies- , or we connect with Kate very soon as she is the only woman with strong personality. Then Juliet appears, the mysterious Juliet who is one of the Others and we don’t know which side she plays in, and who finally died on the “Jug Head” explosion in “the Swann”. “IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” 18 With this beginning, Austen makes clear that women are not just housewives for men, disagreeing with thought of her century, but possibly establishing the foundations for a future movement called “feminism”. 18 Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”, 1813 69 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 4-William Faulkner: The masterpiece of William Faulkner, “As I die lying”, it tells the story of two brothers -Darl and Jewel Bundren- on their way to a Mississippi, the place where their mother- Abbie Bundren- wants to be buried. After reading the “AsI die lying” plot it comes to my mind the history of Jacob and his brother. After killing their mother, Jacob’s brother fights against Jacob, up to the extent that Jacob throws his brother to the Island’s heart, killing him and creating the “Monster”. Faulkner is a genius at the point to create convincing men and women, as we see on his work, but cruel ones, at the point we see they hatred goes through killing each other. The vision of Faulkner on his works is the horrors of the family and the community, like the strange family conformed by Jacob, his brother and Mother, which through familiar hatred, Mother and the Men in Black eventually die. The aim of “As I die lying” is a white family trying to satisfy its mother’s last wish, like Jacob and his brother, who are trying to satisfy their mother last wish, which is to protect the Island. And because sleep is non-being, and the rain and the wind are were, isn’t, it doesn’t exist. And, however, the cart is, because, when the cart will be was, Addie Bundren won’t be. And Jewel is, because, when the cart will be was, Addie Bundren has to be. And therefore I have to be; otherwise, I couldn’t empty to sleep on an strange chamber. And therefore, if I’m still not clearer, I am is. 19 This fragment shows the bipolar personality at the end of the novel, just as Jacob ends mad by trying to find a substitute for the protector of the Island, foreseeing that his end is near. 19 William Faulkner, “As I lie dying”, 1930 70 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 5-Virginia Woolf: For me, Virginia Woolf has a very special significance, for her way of writing and all her spectacular work. Searching and looking into, I discovered so many parallelisms between Virginia Woolf’s work and Lost, so this is the reason why this fifth section on Virginia Woolf will take two pages instead of one. After being elected the protector of the Island, Jacob started his search for another substitute, by bringing new people to the Island and wrecking ships on the Island too. Since none of them were candidates suitable enough, he finally caused the plane crash on the Island in 2004. From all the candidates, he makes a list. The list is written in a cave with in talk, and the names are accompanied by a number. We see this thanks to the Black Smoke which leads Sawyer to this cave explaining that they are on the Island because of this list. Back to the lighthouse, following Jacob’s instructions, Hurley leads Jack to the lighthouse, a high tower on the edge of some cliffs, but mysteriously the losties hadn’t seen it the past six years. On the top of the lighthouse, there is a mirror and a dial. The Lighthouse uses a fire pit and mirrors to generate light, and it is controlled by a system of pulleys and gears. When Hurley starts the lighthouse, the dial starts to move, and Jack sees different mirages on the mirror. Then he realizes there were names written on the dial, he asks Hurley to write his name, and then Jack sees his childhood’s house. Jack, angry, destroys the mirror. With “Mrs Dalloway”, “Orlando”, “The Waves”, “Between the acts” and “To the Lighthouse” Virginia Woolf reaches her definitely work, which we could put on Modernism. But in this part I will focus on “To the Lighthouse”, which has a relation with the Lighthouse on the Island. 71 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS “To the Lighthouse” is representative due to moving the plot, the dialogue and the action to a second term, and giving more importance to the philosophical introspection and thoughts. Something like this happens to Jack. During the series he is the character whose thoughts and introspections we most learn about. Her first novel was “Jacob’s Room”, Woolf tells the story of the main character, Jacob Flanders, but from the perspective and impressions other people have about Jacob. In Lost something similar happens to Jacob. From the very first time we heard of him, we already know Jacob starting of impressions about other characters like Ben and Richard, and we do not know anything else from the character until the antepenultimate episode “Across the sea”, which is a kind of bioghraphy about him. Virginia Woolf left a great literary legacy, with fictional books such as “Mrs Dolloway”, “To the Lighthouse” and “Orlando”, essays such as “A Room of One’s Own” and “The Common Reader”. Moreover, she was possibly the first feminist and one of the most important characters on Modernism literary movement. Her most famous quote was: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” 20 Getting into her work in depth, we could find lots of parallelisms with Lost, although maybe the show runners aren’t aware of. 20 Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”, 1929 72 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 6-Lewis Carroll: Lewis Carroll is the pseudonym of Charles Lutwige Dodgson, a reverend who had not grown sexually and was comfortable with the companion of little girls. And this was the beginning of Alice. In Lost there are lots of references to Alice. There is a station named “the Looking-Glass”, a chapter named -and inspired by- the White Rabbit, and rabbits are abundant all along the series. For example, in “The Orchid” orientation video or in the logo of “The Looking glass”. Virginia Woolf, on her essay “Lewis Carroll”, said about Carroll: "Since childhood remained in him entire, he could do what no one else has ever been able to do—he could return to that world; he could re-create it, so that we too become children again." 21 Probably this was the main feature of Carroll. In his adulthood he was able to return to the childhood by writing a girl’s “dream”. And the show runners took this concept of going back to the childhood very well to include it in Lost. With the series, they achieved one thing that maybe without Lost the audience would find impossible: to have all the whole age range of audience (young people and adults) on the PC screen sharing their thoughts episode after episode and flooding webs dedicated to Lost with conjectures and theories about the next episode or what will happen with a concrete character or a strange thing that had happened. I think this is the most admirable “power” of Lost: moving the fans after every episode to the Internet sharing their thoughts about the series and the future events. 21 Virginia Woolf, “The Moment and Other Essays”, 1947 73 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 7-John Steinbeck: John Steinbeck reflected passionately on his works the life of American people in the fifties. His magna opus -although it was not included in Lost, but I will not be surprised if there are some grapes hidden in some chapters- is “The Grapes of Wrath”, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1962. In Lost, however, they use other two novels by Steinbeck, “The Pearl” and “Of Mice and Men”. Although I haven’t found any semblances between “The Pearl” book and The Pearl station apart of they share the name, I notice that the plot of “The Pearl” is the same as Hurley when he won the lottery. “The Pearl” tells the story about a poor family who found a giant pearl in the ocean, and they think it will bring fortune to the family, even though at last the pearl brings the family more troubles than luck. Something similar happens to Hurley. When he won the lottery he thinks he would never work again because now he is rich, but the curse of the numbers only brings troubles to his family. “Of Mice and Men” is very used in the series. There are at least three episodes where a fragment of the book is told, the most significative one is when Ben told Sawyer they are on a smallest island that the main Island. Ben says: "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody. It don't make any difference who the guy is, so long as he's with you. I tell ya...I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely, and he gets sick." 22 22 John Steinbeck, “Of Mice and Men”, 1937 74 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 8-Marcel Proust: Marcel Proust, the last great novelist of the literature spent his twenty last years writing what would be his magna opus: “In Search of Lost Time”. It is a review of his childhood and adolescence, and it begins with Proust taking his breakfast, and at the time he smells a muffin, all his thoughts came to his mind, and symbolism is not a minor aspect on Lost. I wanted to include Proust in this part because is admirable how through a cupcake he succeeds in recreating his past. And with some episodes the show runners use this technique either like Proust’s muffin or by showing one of the character’s feelings. “No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.” 23 23 Marcel Proust, “In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way”, 1913 75 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 9-Mark Twain: If we read closely the biography of the lostie James “Sawyer” Ford and then we read “The adventures of Tom Sawyer” probably we will think we have read the same twice. Tom’s first and best known scam included painting a fence white, and convinced the local boys to pay for the privilege of painting a fence bigger and harder. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it-namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covets a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. 24 With this famous quote, Tom Sawyer discovered how to survive in the hard world of the fifties in the banks of the Mississippi. Although James “Sawyer” Ford didn’t know how to survive by painting a fence, he discovered it by copying scram techniques used by a man named Sawyer who swindled his parents, and having James’ parents committed suicide in front of him. Then, James Ford life turned out to be the vengeance of his parents and the final sense of all his swindled was to get to the man named Sawyer to kill him. But ultimately, when he found the man who he wanted to kill on the Island, thanks to the Man in Black, and after murdering him, he realises he had become like his parents’ murderer. 24 Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, 1876 76 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 10- Cormac McCarthy: Although Cormac McCarthy won the National Book Award (of America) with the novel “All the pretty horses”, and won the Pulitzer with “The Road”, he hadn’t won any important prize for one of his most important books, “Blood Meridian” one of the great apocalypse novels of American literature. We know that fact before opening the book, just only reading the plot: “An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the "wild west." Based on historical events that took place on the TexasMexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.” 25 But the Kid isn’t the main character of “Blood Meridian”; he shares this with Judge Holden. Apart from being inspired by a real person who lived on the XIX century, McCarthy probably bring on of the most sadistic characters in universal literature. At the last chapter, the Judge kills the Kid brutally in an outhouse. But Judge Holden is not only sadistic but he is also ambitious. At the end of the novel McCarthy shows us the ambition of the Judge: “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” 26 25 26 Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian” (Plot) Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian”, 1985 77 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS And possibly he never will, because although in the book we saw the judge on 1850 and after in 1974, his physical appearance never changes. The Judge Holden and Jacob and his brother are all equally sadistic (in their way) and ambitious in the same way: The Judge believes he will never die; Jacob and his brother in fact knows this, but they have the very same a great ambition: Jacob is searching a new protector and his brother is trying to leave the Island. They fought two thousands of years to achieve this, by bringing people to the Island. And they don’t care about all the collateral damage. Judge Holden is always fomenting violence, because he thought violence is the foundation of human nature while Jacob and his brother are the responsible for first, the wreck and all the people lost on The Island, and also are the responsible for the deaths occurred on the Island. 78 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 11- Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand is not known in European culture, except little circles of intellectuals. Her thoughts root on American culture and society. But this was not a defeat for Ayn Rand but a victory. Her particularly though was design concretely for the United States and there took importance, by selling huge amounts of her two novels – “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead”-. This two novels- the one surpassing the one thousand and two hundred pages and the second of nearly one more thousand pages explain the foundations of Objectivism. Ayn rand’s philosophy is brought to the series by the character of Mother, who lived two thousands of years ago and was the caregiver of Jacob and his brother. Mother’s egoism lies on the fact she doesn’t want to be the protector anymore, although she was designated to be the protector and not to leave her load. This egoism brings Mother to kill Claudia, the biological mother of Jacob and the Black Men, and then lying to her sons. And thirty years later bring her to nearly kill her adopted son, Jacob’s son, just because she discovered the properties of the Island’s Heart and how to reach it; causing her death and the physical death of Jacob’s brother. By Rand’s own words, the main theme of Atlas Shrugged is: “Not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder - and rebirth - of the human spirit” 27 This sentence is directly related to the Black Smoke, after being killed by Jacob, and becoming the “Black Smoke” or “the Monster”. 27 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (plot) 79 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 12-Sam Shephard: Out of the fifty plays Sam Shepard wrote from the sixties until now, he wrote in 1978, “Buried Child” -and the one which had brought the Pulitzer Prize to the writer- have a relation with Lost. Apart from sharing the surname “Shepard”, Sam Shepard and Jack Shepard shares too the plot of “Buried Child”: “Depicts the fragmentation of the American nuclear family in a context of disappointment and disillusionment with American mythology and the American dream, the 1970s rural economic slowdown and the breakdown of traditional family structures and values”. 28 Sam Shepard’s youth was marked by his father’s alcoholism, and the destroying of his family, like Jack. His father alcoholism marked his youth, and after his adulthood. But what reflexes Jack’s life on Sam Shepard’s work the most is the great parallelism between “Buried Child” plot and Jack’s life. The main ghost that follows Jack all along the series is the destruction of his whole family. His father becomes alcoholic at the point that Jack causes his own father’s dispatch, and in second terms his death in Sydney. Sarah, Jack’s wife before the wreck, had a lung perforated after a car crash, and miraculously Jack saved her life, and then they married. But Jack was too busy with his work, at the point they split up, but Jack was indifferent due to his work again. But then Jack harasses Sarah because he thinks his ex-wife had a relation with his own father. So at the end he destroys his whole family and part of his life. 28 Sam Shepard, “Buried Child” (plot), 1979 80 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 13-Jules Verne: Jules Verne was the father of modern science-fiction. He has a novel named “The Mysterious Island”, consider his masterpiece, and the show runners had featured as the main inspiration for the show, among with “The Lord of the Flies”, by William Golding. “The Mysterious Island” is about five hostages who escape stealing an aerostatic balloon and they fall to an unknown island which is not in the maps. There, they have to try to survive. But during his stay on the island are monitored by a superhuman strength that lives on the depth of the island. At the end of the novel we realize that that superhuman strength was no less than Captain Nemo, who was living on a cave on the Island. “The Mysterious Island” is possibly the novel which has the most parallelisms with Lost: -The main characters wrecked on a mysterious island which is not in the maps, like the losties. -The act with the balloon is similar with the scene with Henry Gale, the pseudonym used by Ben Linus to meet the losties. -During all along the novel a mysterious strength seems to live on the island, like the Black Smoke on the Island. -At the end of the novel appears on the island a plume announcing something bad, just as the plume appeared on the end of the first season. 81 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 14- Bible & Alcorà: The show runners managed very well the fact to include facts from the two books of the catholic religion and Islam because it shows the great semblances and parallelisms between religions. Apart from appearing many times the book physically, I think, in Lost, the character who represents the Bible is Mr.Eko. Mr.Eko was an old lord of the war from the south of Africa, and had a brother priest, and was on the tail of the Oceanic 815. During the series he has a stick with Bible quotes wrote on it, and when Claire asked Eko why he had written this, he answered that were thing he needs to remember. When Locke was burying Eko, he put his stick on Eko’s tomb, but he realized a special quote: Lift up your eyes and look north. John 3:05. Thanks to that losties were able to find “The Flame”. Also he is often viewed reciting the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd”. As a curiosity, it is said that “the Monster” killed Mr.Eko by making the sign of the Christian cross. 82 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 15-Jorge Luis Borges: To end up this point and including one of my favourite writers and poets, I will talk about Jorge Luis Borges: poet, essayist and story writer even thought is not related to the plot of the series but on the promotion of the sixth season. Cuatro, a Spanish TV channel, which has the rights to broadcast Lost in Spain, made a short film to promotion the end of the series. It was so succeeded that Carlton Cuse, one of the show runners retwitted it. And then they make another one with the voice of Terry O’Quinn, John Locke in the series. The short was about a parallelism between chess and the series and inspired by Borges’ poem, but because of copyright reasons, finally Cuatro had to add a paragraph about Omar Kayyam, who Borges mentioned on his Chess poem. Here is the poem by Borges29: “AJEDREZ” I En su grave rincón, los jugadores rigen las lentas piezas. El tablero los demora hasta el alba en su severo ámbito en que se odian dos colores. Adentro irradian mágicos rigores las formas: torre homérica, ligero caballo, armada reina, rey postrero, oblicuo alfil y peones agresores. 29 it. Instead of translating the poem into English, I prefer to leave it as Borges wrote 83 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS Cuando los jugadores se hayan ido, cuando el tiempo los haya consumido, ciertamente no habrá cesado el rito. En el Oriente se encendió esta guerra cuyo anfiteatro es hoy toda la Tierra. Como el otro, este juego es infinito. II Tenue rey, sesgo alfil, encarnizada reina, torre directa y peón ladino sobre lo negro y blanco del camino buscan y libran su batalla armada. No saben que la mano señalada del jugador gobierna su destino, no saben que un rigor adamantino sujeta su albedrío y su jornada. También el jugador es prisionero (la sentencia es de Omar) de otro tablero de negras noches y de blancos días. Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza. ¿Qué Dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonía? 30 30 Jorge Luis Borges, El Hacedor: “Ajedrez”, 1960 84 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 4.Conclusions Lost is not a common TV series. It tells us about life, death, destiny, fate, good and evil, strange mysteries. Actually, it tells us about human nature. From my point of view, I think its only mistake was to leave lots of unsolved mysteries on the Island, for example, what exactly is the Island. Borges warned us long time ago about it. In his short story “Abenjacán el Bojarí, died in his labyrinth”, said: “Dunraven, versed on his police books, thought the solution of the mystery always is inferior to the mystery itself. The mystery participates of the supernatural and even of the divine; the solution, of the hand-games.” 31 I strongly believe that the show runners had already realized (but late) that all the mysteries they built in and around the Island were too much and complicated to solve, so they were forced to left a lot unsolved. But in Lost there were two types of mysteries. The first ones were those that needed an explanation from the show runners, such as what was the origin of the Island was or what exactly Dharma Initiative was. The second ones were those, the show runners left to be solved by the audience, such as why there were so many philosophical names or the strange end of the series. Although leaving lots of unsolved mysteries, this so lostian end brings us the most important fact: an end for the characters. 31 Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, “Abenjacán el Bojarí, dead on his labyrinth”, 1949 85 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 5.PERSONAL OPINION: With this research work I learnt a lot about culture, philosophy and literature, and I have to admit that I have enjoyed myself a lot searching information for the work and then comparing Lost with other topics, like the huge influence philosophy had on the series. Besides, I have to add that my favourite part of my TDR and the one that I was more exited about and I spent more time is the last point, the literary influences in Lost. In fact my last election of choosing the theme for my TDR was a coincidence at last. I watched the whole series of Lost on the summer of 2011, and at the fall of 2011 I went to the cinema to watch Super 8, the last film of J.J. Abrams. There I found my English teacher (and my teacher advisor for this TDR) Carmina Martí, who told me that she also liked Lost. Some ideas were rounding about my head of which theme I have to choose for my TDR, and initially I had planned to do it about a theme related to literature, which is one of my passions, and its obvious because I stick it at the end of this TDR. To sum up this huge TDR that brought me so much work and time, I can only say that I would repeat it again pleasantly, although it took me long time working on my laptop and searching information both on Internet and books, because it has not been a waste of time at all. 86 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS 6. SOURCES: -WEBGRAPHY: - http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/ (Recovered on 8/02/2012) - http://es.lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Lost (Recovered on 8/02/2012) - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost (Recovered on 10/02/2012) - http://gentedigital.es/comunidad/series/2010/05/20/12-razonespara-entender-el-exito-de-lost/ (Recovered on 3/03/2012) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_%28TV_series%29 (Recovered on 28/03/2012) - http://www.4815162342.com/forum/ (Recovered on 2/04/2012) - http://www.encerradosafuera.com.ar/tele/lost.php (Recovered on 16/04/2012) - http://www.losttvfans.com/page/Biblical+References (Recovered on 23/06/2012) - http://voices.yahoo.com/jacob-esau-bible-story-puzzled-overpuzzled-3320550.html (Recovered on 25/06/2012) - http://www.antronio.com/index.php?/topic/793826-lost-y-la-bibliasupuesta-teoria-de-lost-basado-en-la-biblia/ (Recovered on 1/07/2012) - http://www.flicksnshows.com/archive/index.php/t-1439.html (Recovered on 8/07/2012) 87 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS -BIBLIOGRAPHY: -Harold Bloom, How to read and Why, 2000 -Harold Bloom, Genius, A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Crative Minds, 2002 -Harold Bloom, “William Shakespeare: The invention of the Human”, 1998 -Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, 1304-1321 -Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”, 1813 -William Faulkner, “As I lie dying”, 1930 -Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”, 1929 -Virginia Woolf, “The Moment and Other Essays”, 1947 -John Steinbeck, “Of Mice and Men”, 1937 -Marcel Proust, “In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way”, 1913 -Mark Twain, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, 1876 -Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian”, 1985 -Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged,1953 -Sam Shepard, “Buried Child”, 1979 -Jorge Luis Borges, El Hacedor: “Ajedrez”, 1960 -Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph, “Abenjacán el Bojarí, dead on his labyrinth”, 1949 -The Bible (Genesis, Numbers & Exodus) -Perdidos: la guía definitiva, 2010 88 BEYOND LOST POL CRUELLS The plane clears frame, finally free of the Island. Jack Shepard has done what he came to this place to do. He has found his purpose. He has found love, and been loved. He has finally found a way to love himself. The bamboo sways across the blue sky and Jack Shepard's eye closes one final time. He is gone. 32 The End 32 Last nine lines from the script of the last chapter of Lost, titled “The End”. 89