The Haute Critique

Ok, lets play a game.  First, get high.  With me still?  Good.  Now, spin up an episode of Lost.  Its best to have 2-3 episodes to run through, but one will do.  Take your time – we’ll wait.  Great.   Now, press Play and as you are watching, ask yourself: “Which 70′s TV show is this from?”

Lets face it, every TV show is better high.  And Lost is better than most.  Time and Memory are favorite subjects of the higher perspective and Lost has proven better than nearly every Television show at playing with them.  But one of the things that just jumps out at you when you are critiquing Lost from a different angle is its position and vector in the history and evolution of Television itself.

Every camera angle, every character archetype, every line of dialogue.  The lighting, the plot points, the design and style, the references.  All resonating like a tuning fork with the history of TV (particularly of the 70′s).  Didn’t I see that shot in Hawaii Five-0?  Or was it Magnum PI?  There is more than a bit of MacGyver in there (don’t clip the red wire!) and plenty of Six Million Dollar Man.

So, OK, Lost partakes of the vision, view and pacing of the Great American Action Show.  But look closer – you can also see Dallas.  Yep, there it is, in that scene with Charles Widmore.  Did he just threaten to cut Desmond out of his will if he didn’t leave Pamela Barnes alone?  Dramatic Archetypes dancing across the stage.  Its a Soap Opera out there.  Jack and Sawyer and Kate and Juliet and Michael and Jin and Sun swirl around plotlines that are pulled straight from the Young and the Restless or maybe Ally McBeal.

So what is going on here?  Is it just the logical consequence of people doing what they know?  Projecting the forms, content and tropes of the media they absorbed as kids on their living-room floor onto their own creative visions?  Yes.   But that is part of a much bigger story.  Lost is a form of media fusion.  It combines elements from mystery (what is going on) with elements from a variety of dramatic forms (soap opera, action adventure) and links them together with a nice dose of whatever the heck “The Twilight Zone” was (realist surrealism?) in a sexual union of different forms that each evolved in different environments – the long linkage between the radio soap and the female audience and the pulp novel, action-adventure and the male audience.  The resulting spawn is something new.  Something more attractive and compelling than that which came before it, and possibly capable of doing more.

And this is where the higher critique gets truly interested.  By pressing this genetic mutation successfully, Lost presents a decisive move forward in the evolution of (media) culture.  It is a form of “remix culture” that is closer to Gilles Deleuze than to Larry Lessig.  And once you learn to recognize it, you begin to see it everywhere.  House, the Office (American version), and Battlestar are just three great examples.  Clearly constructed by people who consumed thousands of hours of Television in their formative years, they are, for those who are equipped to receive the messages, masterworks of pop media.

Which give me my highest, secret hope – that JJ Abrams and crew can make a serious move and take the sixth and final season of Lost into the waters churned by one of The Masters of the form, Alan Moore, and pull a Black Dossier, rather than, say a Dallas or even a Twin Peaks (all love to Mr. Lynch).  Lets take that island into the stratosphere JJ, Jeffrey, Damon and co.

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