As a show of how apologetic for leaving all of my imaginary readers, I offer this. Enjoy.
-----
May 28th
They're making me write this. Rather, Dr. Frederick Mann is making me write this. ‘They’ don’t come into the picture. I’m not paranoid, after all.
I don't really see a point to this exercise. It's not like I'm going to say anything of substance. I might even just write “la la la la la” over and over. That'd really piss them off, wouldn't it? He said fill it up, so I'll fill it up. La la la la la la la...
June 5th
Hi, Dr. Mann.
La la la la la la la la la la la la la la...
June 10th
Cindy was NOT – I repeat NOT – a delusion, hallucination, dream, or masturbatory fantasy. We were married. For all of two days before this happened, yes, but married. We have the parchment contract to prove it. And no, I'm not in possession of it at this time. You really think I keep delicate documents like that on me at all times? How many of you carry around your birth certificates in your wallets?
No, but I showed you the ring. You examined it. It’s an eight-hundred-year-old, six carat diamond set in pure, baroque-filigreed gold. Ever seen one like that before? Keep checking the museums, boys. It isn’t stolen. You’re looking at the genuine article.
I do not need “help.” Mann keeps saying that it's difficult to ask for help, to admit we're not in charge or that we need others, but that we all do. He's completely missing the point. I would only need help if something were wrong.
June 17th
No one listens.
No one listens.
No one listens.
No one listens.
No one listens.
No one listens.
(All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.)...
June 22nd
Fine. You want an entry? Take away my oreo privileges? You bastards.
Want to know what I hate? Apple sauce. It's like eating pre-chewed food. I utterly loathe it (and Dr. Mann makes sure they put it on every tray – not just mine, no, this doesn't spring from some paranoiac's persecution fantasy, Dr. Mann is just obsessed with apples). I'm not an infant, a geriatric, a feeb, or a dental patient. You know what I hate more than apple sauce? When Napoleon paints the walls with it.
He's not the real Napoleon, of course, which is what really gets to me. There's a lot of people in here who think they're things they aren't. Not in a guy-pretends-to-be-smart-and-outgoing-to-get-the-girl sort of way, either. Bugs the hell out of me. If you're in here, everything you say is suspect. Which means that none of you people will ever listen to me. Ever. The inmates would be more reasonable than the people running the asylum.
ONE THING changes and all of a sudden I can't ever have a normal life. I mean, I tried. I’ve lived in this place just fine for what, a year or so now? I’ve picked up the language, the customs, the traditions. They’re stupid and they make no sense, but I live with them. And then one conversation a couple months ago and suddenly everything turns upside-down. Well, one conversation and some open sores/jitters from a meth addiction, but I’m better now (case in point: no more conversations with the ghost of Hamlet’s father). I almost wish things would go back to the way they were, even though living out a two-dimensional narrative fantasy would be such a massive step down from this.
Oh, and one other thing. You know how Pinnochio doesn't end? With Pinnochio getting chopped up for firewood because everyone is terrified of a talking puppet.
La la la...
June 30th
Napoleon spent an hour arguing with one of the supervising shrinks today. The shrink made the mistake of disputing that he, le empereur de la francaise, wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” The ensuing argument resulted in three fractured ribs, two puncture wounds, and one shattered window. The emperor was sedated for the rest of the afternoon, which means that he has not been reciting the speeches of Winston Churchill.
Today was a good day.
July 3rd
“Write an entry about your flaws” says Dr. Mann. What, as though I don't think I have them? Sure, I know, I'm bad with finances. I admit that. And honestly, I'm not that outgoing. I get nervous around crowds and I am completely terrified of intimacy. I even buy that “social anxiety disorder” diagnosis I got from Dr. Mann.
I mean, let’s face it. It was only through the rather overzealous efforts of my father that I even met a girl, and it's only because of my family's wealth that we got engaged. She was a complete gold digger. The engagement lasted a grand total of three days, which is congruent with the time it took to hire a caterer and get fitted for the dress and tuxedos. Okay, and fine, I also have something of a foot fetish. It’s part of why I married Cindy even though she was only into me for the gold.
This whole entry is patently ridiculous. I do not have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Nor do I have delusions. “Prince Charming” is my NAME, don't you get it? Like, goes-on-your-birth-certificate-not-your-personal-choice-it-just-so-happens-to-be-yours NAME. My God, where has reason gone?
July 11th
I've been here for more than a month and a half now, and every day it just gets worse. This whole thing is less coherent than Magic Mountain. Just the other day this kid named Seth Kaiser – chilling gray eyes, really dead, monotone way of speaking, probably a sociopath – was dragged out of the isolation ward kicking and screaming the whole way, raving things like “WE'RE ALL DEAD, DO YOU HEAR ME? WE'RE ALL DEAD!” That kid even creeped out Napoleon. He hasn't been back since. Thank God. This place gives me chills.
July 20th
I'm composing this and all subsequent important entries in lemon juice. I'm going to write “la la la” over the top. Why bother writing this at all? Isn't it really idiotic? Couldn't it give me away? Yes it is, and yes it could. But I'm sick of the smug, condescending attitudes of everyone who has the keys to the front gate. I'm going to leave this for them to find after everything is over. They won't figure it out before then, I'm confident of that. You hear that, Dr. Mann? You're not as smart as you think you are. I'm getting out of here. I'm sick to death of the insanity. I'm getting out.
July 21st
Talked to Napoleon today. He said he would have le garde imperial stage a diversionary assault on the hospital's left flank and attempt to seize the cafeteria. Meanwhile, we could force a breakthrough in the rear and escape. I am so screwed.
July 24th
Scuffle in the commons. I managed to snatch a key ring that came off one of the nurses' belts. They got it back from me (along with a few bite marks), but not before I managed to palm the key to the first floor windows.
July 27th
Dr. Mann keeps trying to show me the “nature” of my “delusional thinking.” Of course, every time he descends to this topic, he harps on my hallucinations of Hamlet’s ghost. Well, what meth head hasn’t had a few experiences now and again? The point is I’m pretty sure he wasn’t really there.
Anyway, Mann had to bring it up again today. How I can’t possibly be Prince Charming, especially considering no royals in Europe will even talk to me (seeing as how I won’t submit to the indignity of a blood test), and how, as I made the mistake of revealing to him, I once discussed Medieval music theory with Hamlet’s deceased father.
I pointed out to the good doctor that there are six other people in this wing who are being treated because they're real people who think they're fictional characters. What, I asked him, is at all dysfunctional about thinking the reverse is true? Putting aside whether it is or is not the case. He told me I was missing the point. He said it didn't matter whether I think I'm real or made up, it only matters whether I think I am who I really am. I didn't even respond with the obvious. Instead, I asked him to explain the nature of identity. We ended by discussing the paradox of Theseus' ship.
Who knows? If he spends just a few more sessions with me, I might not even have to worry about getting out – his blood pressure will take care of everything.
July 29th
There may not be any garde imperial coming to our rescue, but Napoleon and a few of his fellow conspirators (among them Jesus, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and an uncontrollable exhibitionist) have decided to stage a Parisian-style riot in the cafeteria tomorrow.
I had my final talk with the good doctor today. He wanted to know how it was that Cindy didn’t get “fully realized” (he he he, it’s a pun, get it? isn’t he so clever?) along with me. Honestly, I don’t know how to answer that. Am I supposed to reveal to the whole world that, after only two days with me, she had already started sneaking out late at night to “visit” some of the larger, less effusive serfs? Because yeah, that makes me feel really good about myself and all… So, as usual, nothing came of our little chat, but the doc was convinced he’d shown me the error of my ways once again.
Good-bye, Dr. Mann, you condescending, self-righteous, narrow-minded, Keith Olbermann look-alike. I hope I never see you again.
September 12th
I got this back today. Oh joy. After a month of solitary, we're going to “try this again.”
You know what they feed you in solitary? Yeah. Apple sauce.
September 22nd
“I need help.” Those are the three most difficult words in the English language to say in immediate succession. More difficult than “Mom, I'm gay,” and “I vote Republican” combined.
But please, for the love of God, somebody help me. I need help.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Obviously...
It goes without saying that I am lazy beyond measure. I'll invoke the (borderline untrue) defense of "life," however, and summarily dispense with imagined objections to my absence. I have discounted the idea of reviewing Boardwalk Empire however. The show is impressive, well-written, engaging, and it's obvious that a lot of money has been thrown into it. The only - vague - objection I have to it is that it seems like a very, very, very good show. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? I suppose I was expecting a great show. Maybe it simply didn't live up to the hype. It hasn't really done anything wrong so far. Again, that doesn't sound so bad. But of all the truly fantastic pieces of television out there, have any of the ones that endure the test of time, that become iconic, been flawless? For what it is, it's perfect. I'm just not sure that what it is is what I was looking for.
I would replace reviews of that with reviews of The Walking
Dead, but according to my good friend, pure.Wasted, that show is about to stop being as good as it has been, which somewhat frightens me.
And finally, I've been looking for information on sexual and sleep disorders. If anyone has firsthand knowledge, feel free to contact me.
Final thought for the day: Have you ever read Stirner? Probably not. He was a bit odd. He argued in favor of absolute, genuine freedom (one of the few who ever did, one of the very few who didn't obfuscate backtracking on their own ideals with intellectual misdirection like "civil liberties"); he argued effectively for a form of moral solipsism and total anarchy. One had to find one's own genuine cause, not adopt the cause of another, whether that other's cause be political, moral, philosophical, or religious. Without using a direct citation, you can say that his main contention was that you "find yourself."
I don't know if you can tell, but I have an issue with this. How exactly does one find oneself? I don't mean this in an esoteric sense. As usual, I mean it in the sense most people take it. This...soul-searching business which gets such airplay in this culture but which, as with most things, amounts to little more than an excuse to dabble in activities reserved for better beings.
I simply don't think there is such thing as a "self" to "find." This might be stating the obvious, but what are you without your environment? If you're a musician inclined to refinement but you are used to living in the grunge subculture, there's always going to be a clash between the role you have and the role you wish to have. Either you'll accept a compromise solution of being an oddity in either setting or you'll have a breakdown at some point from trying to reconcile two irreconcilable modes of living.
Besides, are we even what makes life worth living? Consider that no one dies for themselves except suicides. Men will die for their leader or their people or their ideal. But they are not those things. You are not democracy, you are not the leader, and in death you are yourself no longer part of your community (even if your memory is venerated). My point is that finding oneself seems to be taken as giving meaning to life in some way, or making one happier. But none of us could be the same selves we are now if we'd been born in China or born a hundred years ago.
I should be quick to note here that I am not against changing your life if your mode of living is undesirable, but changing is still not self-creation, since it invariably results from a change in environment. Plants, you see, don't will themselves to health in a desert. They either get replanted in a more temperate environ or they die. And yes, I just compared you to a fern. Get over it. You're not that special.
I think I'm probably with Hegel on this one. The only way to find any sort of authenticity or truth (existential or simply realistic) is through an engagement with history. Personal history, universal history, culture. There's nothing wrong with that, it's the way things are. The self-seeking stuff just begins to annoy me when it takes on mystical overtones.
Which is not to denigrate the introspective. Dear God no. There's too much thoughtlessness in the world as it is...
I would replace reviews of that with reviews of The Walking
Dead, but according to my good friend, pure.Wasted, that show is about to stop being as good as it has been, which somewhat frightens me.
And finally, I've been looking for information on sexual and sleep disorders. If anyone has firsthand knowledge, feel free to contact me.
Final thought for the day: Have you ever read Stirner? Probably not. He was a bit odd. He argued in favor of absolute, genuine freedom (one of the few who ever did, one of the very few who didn't obfuscate backtracking on their own ideals with intellectual misdirection like "civil liberties"); he argued effectively for a form of moral solipsism and total anarchy. One had to find one's own genuine cause, not adopt the cause of another, whether that other's cause be political, moral, philosophical, or religious. Without using a direct citation, you can say that his main contention was that you "find yourself."
I don't know if you can tell, but I have an issue with this. How exactly does one find oneself? I don't mean this in an esoteric sense. As usual, I mean it in the sense most people take it. This...soul-searching business which gets such airplay in this culture but which, as with most things, amounts to little more than an excuse to dabble in activities reserved for better beings.
I simply don't think there is such thing as a "self" to "find." This might be stating the obvious, but what are you without your environment? If you're a musician inclined to refinement but you are used to living in the grunge subculture, there's always going to be a clash between the role you have and the role you wish to have. Either you'll accept a compromise solution of being an oddity in either setting or you'll have a breakdown at some point from trying to reconcile two irreconcilable modes of living.
Besides, are we even what makes life worth living? Consider that no one dies for themselves except suicides. Men will die for their leader or their people or their ideal. But they are not those things. You are not democracy, you are not the leader, and in death you are yourself no longer part of your community (even if your memory is venerated). My point is that finding oneself seems to be taken as giving meaning to life in some way, or making one happier. But none of us could be the same selves we are now if we'd been born in China or born a hundred years ago.
I should be quick to note here that I am not against changing your life if your mode of living is undesirable, but changing is still not self-creation, since it invariably results from a change in environment. Plants, you see, don't will themselves to health in a desert. They either get replanted in a more temperate environ or they die. And yes, I just compared you to a fern. Get over it. You're not that special.
I think I'm probably with Hegel on this one. The only way to find any sort of authenticity or truth (existential or simply realistic) is through an engagement with history. Personal history, universal history, culture. There's nothing wrong with that, it's the way things are. The self-seeking stuff just begins to annoy me when it takes on mystical overtones.
Which is not to denigrate the introspective. Dear God no. There's too much thoughtlessness in the world as it is...
Monday, July 19, 2010
Attention: KFF
I have been busy. I post my random thoughts on this place so as to have an outlet for them. I have not had time to post much lately because of school work, friends, and my writing. Especially this last. I have a year left in which to complete Scheherazade Fell Silent and would actually like to meet this deadline.
Rest assured, however, I will whine more about the Supreme Court at the earliest opportunity. I might even rag on Obama if you are really good.
Also, this blog is a place saver for the point at which Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, and A Game of Thrones begin airing. I will be posting critiques and opinions of them on an episode-by-episode basis. I considered doing this with the final season of Lost, but in all honesty it was such a disappointment that I am glad I refrained.
In the meantime, you may continue making snide remarks about me on the forums. I am totally not reading them. At all.
Rest assured, however, I will whine more about the Supreme Court at the earliest opportunity. I might even rag on Obama if you are really good.
Also, this blog is a place saver for the point at which Boardwalk Empire, The Borgias, and A Game of Thrones begin airing. I will be posting critiques and opinions of them on an episode-by-episode basis. I considered doing this with the final season of Lost, but in all honesty it was such a disappointment that I am glad I refrained.
In the meantime, you may continue making snide remarks about me on the forums. I am totally not reading them. At all.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Supreme Court on the (Right) Wing
I'll make this quick, because I actually have no personal interest in the issue at hand.
Today, the Supreme Court has, in its latest ruling (McDonald v. City of Chicago), basically declared that the Second Amendment "right" to "keep and bear arms" is an individual right, meaning it cannot be abridged by state or local government. (Not that anyone, even the authors of the amendment themselves, actually knows/knew how the [redacted] they meant it to apply.) Thus handgun bans of any sort, like the one in D.C. which the SCOTUS directly overturned, may well be on the way out. Supposedly, the ruling "does not imperil every law regulating firearms," but there isn't any sense of clarity (from the news reports I've read) indicating just what it does say. I couldn't be bothered to read the court opinion or dissent, and in this one case I'm not particularly sorry for that.
You see, I don't have anything against firearms in particular. I know that most of the left-wing arguments against guns are fairly stupid, since (in America and Australia, if not certain West European nations) crime tends to go down in - generally rural - areas with high rates of personal gun ownership, whereas in - generally urban - areas with bans on personal firearm possession, it tends to go up. That's just the simple trend, though undoubtedly multiple factors have to be taken into account (which I won't do here) to explain why this happens. The point, however, is that it does.
On the other hand, I also know that the right-wing anti-government lunacy is equally invalid. The right to own a few handguns or hunting rifles is not going to do anything at all to provide a civilian populace with the tools it would actually need to resist a totalitarian-directed modern military force. Even if we discount robot drones and the entire air force, you still have to contend with explosives, artillery, and the armored corps.
My complaint, then, is not with the decision as such. My complaint is with how stereotypically it fits in with the string of major right-wing decisions that are coming down from the court. Can't the SCOTUS at least pretend not to be comprised of party hacks? I think it would be very decent of the Court if it would do that. We could even have a special day where the right-wing Court hands down a couple of token rational decisions and call it "Fantasy Day."
For more information, check out the ever-popular SCOTUS Wiki.
God bless and arm the Increasingly Conservative States of America.
Today, the Supreme Court has, in its latest ruling (McDonald v. City of Chicago), basically declared that the Second Amendment "right" to "keep and bear arms" is an individual right, meaning it cannot be abridged by state or local government. (Not that anyone, even the authors of the amendment themselves, actually knows/knew how the [redacted] they meant it to apply.) Thus handgun bans of any sort, like the one in D.C. which the SCOTUS directly overturned, may well be on the way out. Supposedly, the ruling "does not imperil every law regulating firearms," but there isn't any sense of clarity (from the news reports I've read) indicating just what it does say. I couldn't be bothered to read the court opinion or dissent, and in this one case I'm not particularly sorry for that.
You see, I don't have anything against firearms in particular. I know that most of the left-wing arguments against guns are fairly stupid, since (in America and Australia, if not certain West European nations) crime tends to go down in - generally rural - areas with high rates of personal gun ownership, whereas in - generally urban - areas with bans on personal firearm possession, it tends to go up. That's just the simple trend, though undoubtedly multiple factors have to be taken into account (which I won't do here) to explain why this happens. The point, however, is that it does.
On the other hand, I also know that the right-wing anti-government lunacy is equally invalid. The right to own a few handguns or hunting rifles is not going to do anything at all to provide a civilian populace with the tools it would actually need to resist a totalitarian-directed modern military force. Even if we discount robot drones and the entire air force, you still have to contend with explosives, artillery, and the armored corps.
My complaint, then, is not with the decision as such. My complaint is with how stereotypically it fits in with the string of major right-wing decisions that are coming down from the court. Can't the SCOTUS at least pretend not to be comprised of party hacks? I think it would be very decent of the Court if it would do that. We could even have a special day where the right-wing Court hands down a couple of token rational decisions and call it "Fantasy Day."
For more information, check out the ever-popular SCOTUS Wiki.
God bless and arm the Increasingly Conservative States of America.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
The World is Square
Though this is a somewhat older piece, I always had an affinity for it. Structurally it's rather bizarre, and thematically it's all over the place, but I think I managed to do what I wanted with it.
- - -
The world was square. How or why or just when it had stopped being a circle and become a square, nobody knew for certain. Some of them pointed out that the world was not a "square," was, in fact, a "cube," but all of the people who said things like that were squares anyway. Now, changes in the world were normal parts of life (after all, you couldn't seriously expect it would always rain or always be sunny, nor that the world would be perpetually flooded or in drought), but, even so, this was a rather major change by anybody's calculations.
Despite the revolutionary nature of this particular change, most people took it in stride. So the world was square, so what? Bills continued to be paid and the utilities continued to run. If the world had decided it wanted to be a square, that was an issue for the philosophers to debate or the scientists to study. For most people, it was just another hassle. For instance, the maps had to be slightly redrawn to accommodate what before this would have been geographical absurdities, and all of the spinning globes had to be recalled and spinning cubes issued in their place. Some people even had to cross from one of the six faces of the earth to another one on their way to work. This had to be done very slowly, however, to ensure that you didn't jettison yourself into the exosphere and fall off the face of the earth. Gravity was still in effect, naturally, no matter what shape the earth became. Cube, sphere, pyramid, it really didn't matter. The only problem was that gravity was very weak along the edges, and seemed to only really work on the six faces.
So Jim, having just read about this in the morning papers, sat in the middle of his living room with a blank look and an empty head as though he was either a lobotomy patient or in shock. It wasn't that Jim was a moron or that his face was inexpressive, because both of those things were completely untrue. Jim was actually very intelligent and rather proud of what intellectual powers he possessed, although there was certainly a great deal of people with prettier and more elastic faces than his. Jim had woken up to find that the earth was square, and this was naturally somewhat disconcerting to him (but not earth-shattering as the saying went).
He had gotten up with his hair standing stiff and straight up on the right side of his head from accumulated stress, dirt, and the molding effects of sleep, pulled on a bathrobe that had been a Christmas present from his much richer friend, and staggered outside to grab his paper and the mail, which he had neglected to bring in the previous night. This done, he sat down on the floor with the white envelopes smelling of glue and opened them. It was because of this unforeseeable mistake that he sat on the floor with the empty head and blank look.
The first letter was from Harvard Law School to which he had applied several months earlier, only a little while before completing his undergraduate studies at Stanford and graduating near the top of his class.
This was a tad bit disappointing. He had higher hopes from the next one on which he set his sights. Perhaps a check.
They did not include a check. The next one was bound to hold some good news, however, and so he opened it with the hopes of three letters riding on one.
Jim set this on top of the others and turned to the fourth one, now absolutely certain that there would be nothing but bad news. What else could go wrong, after all? And yet, the next envelope was from The Late Show inviting him to come work for David Letterman. In his excitement, it took him a moment or so to realize that the letter was not actually addressed to him. So he turned to the last bit of mail, noticing that it was a single piece of paper rather than another envelope of dread news. Probably an advertising flyer, he thought.
Jim let it fall into the pile of all the other opened mail. That was it. Then he read the papers and learned that the US had political infighting, the Middle East had terrorism, China had lead, and, of course, the earth was square. For a long time afterward he couldn't really bring himself to think about any of it, but after a while he could concentrate on the fact that the earth was square. Whether he could only think of the squareness of the earth because it was most distant from him or because he now no longer had the petty problems of everyday life clouding his judgment Jim wasn't sure. What he was certain of was that the earth's nearly-overnight geological upheaval would have to be dealt with. So Jim made up his mind to contact some of his former professors and see what the earth's new shape implied.
Jim took a shower, got dressed, climbed into his car, and drove off. The car broke down three blocks from his house. A quarter of a mile and forty-two minutes later, Jim was on a city transit bus slowly heading to his destination.
It took a while, but at last he was in the office of his old professor of economics. Jim asked the man what the sudden change in the earth's shape portended. His professor replied:
"It's hard to say, you know. Moving across faces of the earth has to be done carefully anymore so you don't fall off the edge of the world. I suppose trade and commerce are going to be more or less confined to each particular side. The world'll probably divide up into six squares of influence, and a major economic power will come to dominate each one. Military expeditions will probably become very difficult affairs between faces, so ultimately we just have to hope each face regulates itself.
"Unfortunately, the southern states are on one square and the northern stares are in another, so it'll be anyone's guess whether or not the United States makes it through this whole thing intact or if we'll be seeing a resurgent Confederacy. At least California's in the same square as D.C. Without them this place would collapse in Roman-style bisexual orgies and our power plants would fail. Of course, both of those are half-true already.
"But if you'll excuse me, this isn't too terribly important at the moment. I have to go birthday shopping for an aunt and then I have to get my daughter a new pacifier. She managed to eat most of the last one. My son suggested we stick balsa wood in her face, but he's the one that let his boa constrictor loose in the house last week. It tried to eat the cat, you know. I think I told you about that. Now his snake is dead, the cat's at the vet getting broken bits of fang removed from its hind leg, and my son wants to have it put to sleep for murdering that grotesque, slithering reptile. So many things to worry about and there just aren't enough hours in the day. Good-bye."
Jim thanked his former instructor, and with that the professor was summarily gone.
His curiosity was not satisfied, however, and so he went to his psychology professor. It took him a while to find the man, however, because the professor had slept late that morning and only recently arrived. Jim asked his professor what the widespread effects of the earth becoming square were likely to be. His professor replied:
"Well, it's hard to say, isn't it? Everybody's different after all. I think it's safe to say the more developed nations will react more calmly and rationally than the rest of the world. Except perhaps for the Germans, but that place is like one giant psych ward anyway, so as long as they don't take out their deep-seated sense of inadequacy on the Jews or some other poor ethnic minority, we'll all be fine.
"Hmmm... As I see it, there will probably be a number of religious interpretations as to the significance of this event, though you know I sincerely doubt that God has anything whatsoever to do with all this mess. There will probably be a lot of grief caused by this geological metamorphosis, so to speak. My, another German reference. Or Czech, rather. It's just that I have a very bright German student in class this semester. Very bright indeed. She's a stunner...
"Anyway, people will be divided from those they know and loved, some on one face of the world, some on another. It's a rather tragic situation. But if you'll excuse me, I have a class to teach and a date to get ready for afterwards. Good luck with Harvard Law, I hope you get in."
With that he was gone. Jim still wasn't satisfied (was, in fact, more dissatisfied than ever), and so he sought out the professor at the school of engineering and put the same questions to him that he had to the other two. The professor replied:
"Obviously we'll be building tunnels now, probably all along the edges of the world, to connect our face with the other faces. That's going to take a while though, and it'll be disorienting for people who end up using it. What are you gonna do, right? But tunnels are exciting."
After this, the engineering professor apologized, but he was about to be late for a meeting. With a hasty good-bye, he made his rapid exit.
Distraught by how everyone was not only unaware of his own problems but blithely ignored what had happened to the world, Jim wandered around campus for a long time trying to think of what to do. It occurred to him that he could write his local congressman, but he was unsure of whether or not the federal government could actually deal with the problems of an entire planet. He was not a history major.
He shook his head and, feeling at once resigned and rebellious in equal measure, went off to Ace Hardware to purchase a shovel.
- - -
The world was square. How or why or just when it had stopped being a circle and become a square, nobody knew for certain. Some of them pointed out that the world was not a "square," was, in fact, a "cube," but all of the people who said things like that were squares anyway. Now, changes in the world were normal parts of life (after all, you couldn't seriously expect it would always rain or always be sunny, nor that the world would be perpetually flooded or in drought), but, even so, this was a rather major change by anybody's calculations.
Despite the revolutionary nature of this particular change, most people took it in stride. So the world was square, so what? Bills continued to be paid and the utilities continued to run. If the world had decided it wanted to be a square, that was an issue for the philosophers to debate or the scientists to study. For most people, it was just another hassle. For instance, the maps had to be slightly redrawn to accommodate what before this would have been geographical absurdities, and all of the spinning globes had to be recalled and spinning cubes issued in their place. Some people even had to cross from one of the six faces of the earth to another one on their way to work. This had to be done very slowly, however, to ensure that you didn't jettison yourself into the exosphere and fall off the face of the earth. Gravity was still in effect, naturally, no matter what shape the earth became. Cube, sphere, pyramid, it really didn't matter. The only problem was that gravity was very weak along the edges, and seemed to only really work on the six faces.
So Jim, having just read about this in the morning papers, sat in the middle of his living room with a blank look and an empty head as though he was either a lobotomy patient or in shock. It wasn't that Jim was a moron or that his face was inexpressive, because both of those things were completely untrue. Jim was actually very intelligent and rather proud of what intellectual powers he possessed, although there was certainly a great deal of people with prettier and more elastic faces than his. Jim had woken up to find that the earth was square, and this was naturally somewhat disconcerting to him (but not earth-shattering as the saying went).
He had gotten up with his hair standing stiff and straight up on the right side of his head from accumulated stress, dirt, and the molding effects of sleep, pulled on a bathrobe that had been a Christmas present from his much richer friend, and staggered outside to grab his paper and the mail, which he had neglected to bring in the previous night. This done, he sat down on the floor with the white envelopes smelling of glue and opened them. It was because of this unforeseeable mistake that he sat on the floor with the empty head and blank look.
The first letter was from Harvard Law School to which he had applied several months earlier, only a little while before completing his undergraduate studies at Stanford and graduating near the top of his class.
To Mr. Jim Finnick,
We regret to inform you that your application to Harvard Law School has been denied.
etc.
Sincerely,
[Illegible photocopied scrawl]
Dean of Admissions
This was a tad bit disappointing. He had higher hopes from the next one on which he set his sights. Perhaps a check.
Dear Mr. Jim Finnick,
You're fired.
Sincerely,
Jackson & Dale
P.S. Please return the fifty dollars you stole from the cash register last week. Don't make us involve the authorities.
They did not include a check. The next one was bound to hold some good news, however, and so he opened it with the hopes of three letters riding on one.
Dear Jimmy,
I've made up my mind. I am not going to marry you. Last night I agreed to marry Sierra, who gives me things you can't even begin to dream of. If you wonder why I left you, it's because you're pudgy and a boring conversationalist. Find a gym and a hobby in that order.
Love,
Mary
P.S. I'm keeping the ring.
Jim set this on top of the others and turned to the fourth one, now absolutely certain that there would be nothing but bad news. What else could go wrong, after all? And yet, the next envelope was from The Late Show inviting him to come work for David Letterman. In his excitement, it took him a moment or so to realize that the letter was not actually addressed to him. So he turned to the last bit of mail, noticing that it was a single piece of paper rather than another envelope of dread news. Probably an advertising flyer, he thought.
Eviction Notice.
Jim let it fall into the pile of all the other opened mail. That was it. Then he read the papers and learned that the US had political infighting, the Middle East had terrorism, China had lead, and, of course, the earth was square. For a long time afterward he couldn't really bring himself to think about any of it, but after a while he could concentrate on the fact that the earth was square. Whether he could only think of the squareness of the earth because it was most distant from him or because he now no longer had the petty problems of everyday life clouding his judgment Jim wasn't sure. What he was certain of was that the earth's nearly-overnight geological upheaval would have to be dealt with. So Jim made up his mind to contact some of his former professors and see what the earth's new shape implied.
Jim took a shower, got dressed, climbed into his car, and drove off. The car broke down three blocks from his house. A quarter of a mile and forty-two minutes later, Jim was on a city transit bus slowly heading to his destination.
It took a while, but at last he was in the office of his old professor of economics. Jim asked the man what the sudden change in the earth's shape portended. His professor replied:
"It's hard to say, you know. Moving across faces of the earth has to be done carefully anymore so you don't fall off the edge of the world. I suppose trade and commerce are going to be more or less confined to each particular side. The world'll probably divide up into six squares of influence, and a major economic power will come to dominate each one. Military expeditions will probably become very difficult affairs between faces, so ultimately we just have to hope each face regulates itself.
"Unfortunately, the southern states are on one square and the northern stares are in another, so it'll be anyone's guess whether or not the United States makes it through this whole thing intact or if we'll be seeing a resurgent Confederacy. At least California's in the same square as D.C. Without them this place would collapse in Roman-style bisexual orgies and our power plants would fail. Of course, both of those are half-true already.
"But if you'll excuse me, this isn't too terribly important at the moment. I have to go birthday shopping for an aunt and then I have to get my daughter a new pacifier. She managed to eat most of the last one. My son suggested we stick balsa wood in her face, but he's the one that let his boa constrictor loose in the house last week. It tried to eat the cat, you know. I think I told you about that. Now his snake is dead, the cat's at the vet getting broken bits of fang removed from its hind leg, and my son wants to have it put to sleep for murdering that grotesque, slithering reptile. So many things to worry about and there just aren't enough hours in the day. Good-bye."
Jim thanked his former instructor, and with that the professor was summarily gone.
His curiosity was not satisfied, however, and so he went to his psychology professor. It took him a while to find the man, however, because the professor had slept late that morning and only recently arrived. Jim asked his professor what the widespread effects of the earth becoming square were likely to be. His professor replied:
"Well, it's hard to say, isn't it? Everybody's different after all. I think it's safe to say the more developed nations will react more calmly and rationally than the rest of the world. Except perhaps for the Germans, but that place is like one giant psych ward anyway, so as long as they don't take out their deep-seated sense of inadequacy on the Jews or some other poor ethnic minority, we'll all be fine.
"Hmmm... As I see it, there will probably be a number of religious interpretations as to the significance of this event, though you know I sincerely doubt that God has anything whatsoever to do with all this mess. There will probably be a lot of grief caused by this geological metamorphosis, so to speak. My, another German reference. Or Czech, rather. It's just that I have a very bright German student in class this semester. Very bright indeed. She's a stunner...
"Anyway, people will be divided from those they know and loved, some on one face of the world, some on another. It's a rather tragic situation. But if you'll excuse me, I have a class to teach and a date to get ready for afterwards. Good luck with Harvard Law, I hope you get in."
With that he was gone. Jim still wasn't satisfied (was, in fact, more dissatisfied than ever), and so he sought out the professor at the school of engineering and put the same questions to him that he had to the other two. The professor replied:
"Obviously we'll be building tunnels now, probably all along the edges of the world, to connect our face with the other faces. That's going to take a while though, and it'll be disorienting for people who end up using it. What are you gonna do, right? But tunnels are exciting."
After this, the engineering professor apologized, but he was about to be late for a meeting. With a hasty good-bye, he made his rapid exit.
Distraught by how everyone was not only unaware of his own problems but blithely ignored what had happened to the world, Jim wandered around campus for a long time trying to think of what to do. It occurred to him that he could write his local congressman, but he was unsure of whether or not the federal government could actually deal with the problems of an entire planet. He was not a history major.
He shook his head and, feeling at once resigned and rebellious in equal measure, went off to Ace Hardware to purchase a shovel.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Bibliophile: Atvar Does Books
A Review of Janet Fitch's Paint it Black.
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I had promised a few people that I would collect my book reviews onto this site, and I've finally decided to begin to make good on that promise. Because symbolism is important, I've put off reviewing just anything until I had something both (relatively) contemporary and worthy to review. I considered reviewing The Kindly Ones, a novel about the Second World War, but as literature it was so fundamentally schizophrenic that I decided I couldn't do it justice in a few pages, nor would it really be suitable for this first posting. Then, about a week or so ago, I finished reading Janet Fitch's Paint it Black. That solved that.
Also, spoiler alerts. Many of them.
First, anyone who has read White Oleander can agree that it really does have a beauty and a power unmatched by much in contemporary American literature. The language is stunningly poetic, the characters are believable, the pacing is superb, the drama infinitely compelling. The only qualm one might have is with the repetitive episodic structure. The progression is from block of time and place to block of time and place with only so much connective structure in between. This in itself isn't really good or bad, it's simply that it is not absolutely perfect. It feels like a holdover from either folklore or from attempts to imitate the structure of music. But then, the book is a pseudo-bildungsroman, and in the contemporary era people aren't so concerned with strict structure anyway. On all the counts that grab and keep people, in any case, White Oleander was a masterwork of craft. I would say it transcends mere craft, but history doesn't often agree with me, so we'll see how well it outweathers the erosion of time.
But the ultimate survival of a work of fiction is arbitrary and prejudicial at best (and I mean the bad kind of arbitrary, not the good, Atvarian form of arbitrary), and it is not predicated solely on the virtues of its creator, or even on the work itself. So the question remains for us, is Janet Fitch a genius or was White Oleander a fluke?
I'm steeply inclined in favor of the former, but I'll get to that as I go on. I can only say that after 16 pages, Paint it Black broke my heart. After 20, I realized it was trying to kill me.
However, I'm forced to admit my bias. After WO, I would be willing to forgive a very great deal from Ms. Fitch before finally relenting and admitting that yes, her first novel was a complete and total accident. (Does it strike anyone as odd that I am more forgiving of inanimate objects and of people I've never met than those I've spent years pestering?...)
The primary difference which exists between White Oleander, Janet Fitch's first major novel (second overall), and her second (third overall), Paint it Black, is reducible to this: White Oleander exhibits more polish and control; Paint it Black is rawer and more brutally emotional. Both are dark novels, and both end on notes that are at least somewhat higher-pitched than what came before, but neither offers what one could call “good cheer” nor do they represent unadulterated nihilism – though whether that's good or not is subject to debate.
I don't know what kind of life Ms. Fitch leads or has led. I don't know if she grew up in the slums or the high rises, but her stories don't seem to be any sort of attempt at deception. This is what life is, they say, accept it. Unlike some great existentialists, the mantra is not “You must change your life” (I thank Walter Kaufmann for that interpretation) and unlike the realists, the mantra is not “change society” either. If it weren't for the urban squalor and the all-too-common suffering, you might almost call Fitch's work romanticist.
Ultimately, I'm not sure which I like more. My own poetics sometimes tend towards preachiness (existentialism) and idealization (romanticism), and, though I've nothing against portraying the possible or conceivable, I profoundly dislike realism for realism's sake. Shouldn't a craftsman or an artist be responsible for more than mere journalism? Mere copying what came before? If they're lying anyway – and to some extent that is unavoidable; literature only comes in degrees of truth-value – then why not lie only to others? Why deceive oneself?
But to the matter at hand. Paint it Black is, in a sense, Romeo & Juliet if Juliet and Romeo had both been more than slightly neurotic and Juliet had also survived Act 5. It's a tragic romance tale, but not a generic one.
The main character, Josie Tyrell, is a young sometime-actress and regular nude model. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She is in love with a man, Michael Faraday, who is in many respects unknowable to us, but what we do know of him leads us to conclude that he is almost entirely pathetic. This man, we learn in the opening, say, 14 pages, has blown his brains out. It takes us to the end of the book to figure out precisely why, but we get a pretty clear idea that this was kindasorta inevitable by about 75-100 pages in even if we didn't learn about the trigger – so to speak – for it all later on.
It's easy for us to get right into the story because the main character makes no demands on us. She's a drunk, a drug-freak, an uneducated, lower-class cockroach who frequents night clubs and other such dens of iniquity. Yet her lover claims that she is “smart” and “original.” I am not entirely sure I can agree with that overestimation. Her one somewhat positive quality is that she has the capacity to appreciate better. When her boyfriend dies, she loses the one bright spot in an otherwise drab, dreary, monotonously oppressive life (totalitarianism is boring, they say, and life is nothing but a totalitarian state writ cosmic). She is alone. She realizes that her friends don't have an ounce of the soul of the man she lost, and her one connection (irony alert here, dear readers, since the connection is to a man she ultimately did not and now cannot know) to someone who could see the “true world” with her, is irrevocably severed. She is adrift.
And the man who destroyed himself and did this to her? A self-loathing, self-deceiving modern-aristocrat genius painter run through with weakness, insecurities, doubts, and a sense of distance between himself and others and between himself and what he wishes he could be. He comes from fabulous wealth and fame. His father is a writer, his mother a concert pianist. He's a Harvard dropout who has a troubled relation with the truth. He wants to be authentic (by rejecting his upper class life in favor of the slums) but he cannot see himself for what he is, nor can he see the truth of what really separates and binds the middle and upper class. And this is the man who introduces Ms. Tyrell to culture and beauty, who is showing her the “true world”...
Tangent: I've noticed an odd kinship between Fitch and Fitzgerald. It is this:
Fitch's prose = sublime
Fitzgerald's prose = sublime
Fitch's characters = contemptible
Fitzgerald's characters = contemptible
Just a minor observation. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
What is the “true world”? You've probably all heard the phrase in some context or another. It is, essentially, a world beyond, above, anterior to, what-have-you, the common or “real” world. According to Fitch's Tyrell:
The thing itself, eh? As opposed to the thing-in-itself? The Kantian thing-in-itself? Nietzsche loathed this idea and hammered it into the dust in Twilight of the Idols (“Reason in Philosophy” section 6). Not that this is particularly relevant, though. It's just odd that there should be such echoes of philosophy here. Oddly enough, the next sentence, a response from a contemptible character named Lola Lola, brings me right back to Nietzsche.
Indeed. Or a beautiful soul in any case (the term which N loaded with contempt and used to denote the meek, the frail, the pathologically kindly). Someone so profoundly sick as to be almost infectious. And when he destroys himself, he takes the weakened, cracked-up foundation he had provided from Josie's life, he robs her of her one support. You could blame her for attaching herself to such a weak creature, but that's too cruel a judgment. She had nothing, but she had always wanted better. She grew up in a hick environment but managed to escape. She moved on to California, hoping to have a normal life at the least, and then this man from a world of light and beauty stepped into her life, and she was too blinded by that to really see the darkness inside him. By the time she does, she's already in love. And that is why it's impossible not to sympathize with her. We see a lonely woman put through too much indignity (rape by your own brother, anyone?) who loses the one flawed but beautiful thing she ever really possessed. It's robbed from her, and it can never be regained.
And the sincerity, the passion, with which Fitch presents Josie's obsession with her lover, is naked in its honesty. Even an inveterate cynic like myself can't help but feel something at this:
The trouble is that I'm not sure where that feeling comes from. The emotional power woven into the fabric of the book could be melodrama, or it could be because the wound is unusually deep. When Michael destroys himself (or is destroyed, but I'll leave that to you, the reader, to discover) and inflicts such suffering on Josie, is it the purity and the sheer volume of the despair, or is it the profundity of the pain which is really moving us? Throughout the book, we get a conflicted, sometimes irresolvable portrait of who Michael Faraday was, and even what Josie Tyrell felt for him. Uncertainty pervades everything about the lives of these two wrecks of human beings – What was Michael's relationship with his mother? Did Josie really know this man at all? Who was truly responsible for this, that, or the other? Who was at fault? Could anything have been done to stop it? – except for one thing: the conviction of love.
I do overstate here, but I do it out of a concern for greater thematic relevance. Josie does wonder here and there whether Michael loved her and on what their loved was based, if anything, but the pain she experiences over his death does not diminish, and the fact remains that she did and does feel something for him, despite, of course, being misled about him (often deliberately) on so many counts. In a sense, she never knew him. But isn't that true of us all? And she loved him anyway.
It isn't that simple, though. This isn't a case of taking a platitude about life and dramatizing it. Michael is not the average man with secrets. He is a deceiver, both of others and of himself. The narrator (a pseudo-Josie-consciousness which I'll get to later) points out: “And in the end, she would never know the truth...He could believe something passionately, then later, deny what he had said. Even hand his position to you, while he argued the exact opposite point of view.”
Later, in one of the conversations between Josie and Michael's mother, Meredith, with whom the Oedipal relationship is just a little bit screwed up – pun pun pun – (O, allusions to Greek myth, how I love thee: minotaur, mother, Oedipus, furies) Josie goes off on a rather nasty attack:
What's that Tolstoy line about happy families, again?
Michael has identity issues. He creates personas for himself. In his suicide letter, he says of Josie “We loved each other once... Didn't we?” That's a heartbreaking final word. In his diaries, however, revealed towards the end, we get a more honest picture of what was going on inside him because the diaries are something he never showed the world nor intended to show. They were a mere extension of his own mind. The letter, however, was just another display.
And the German girl at the motel he checked into, with whom he spoke before the end, got yet another version of who and what Michael was. The only constant in Michael (unlike the constant in Josie, which is loving him) is this: “Worth. He made you feel worthwhile. That was his gift.” For all his weaknesses, and perhaps because of them, he does care about people. He spends time with them, listens to them, interacts with them, and even seems to love them.
But that's really not enough, is it? He's angry, self-loathing, testy, emotionally isolated even from the one he loves, doesn't work, isn't assertive, etc. etc. etc. All the qualities necessary for the “real world” are entirely absent in him. And he shows Josie the “true world.”
In spite of all his failings, she loves him. No healthy person would have. That's part of the dark beauty of the novel: these two people are profoundly fucked up.
I would venture to guess that both melodrama and genuine depth go into making up the power of this. Dostoevsky was into melodrama, after all, and it served only to enhance the power of his works. It seems to me that the same happens here. After all, the pure pathos of the pain is what involves you, but it's the finer details of precisely how mutilated the souls of these deformed, unfinished beings, sent before their time scarce half made up truly are. After all, Josie wants better, but she doesn't want “it all.” And Michael's warped attempt to recover some semblance of normalcy stems from...what? Nature? Nurture? Is it wisdom on his part to withhold the entire truth from the one he loves, or is it folly? Was such a love only possible in these sick and unhealthy conditions? Could the predator that is man when healthy have truly committed to this with such sincerity? And was it even sincerity when the man Josie loved could throw it all away in a day, or the woman Michael loved could strike such a cruel blow that would drive him to that point? Should they have loved each other at all, or was that actually the worst thing that could have happened?
Not all original questions, but composed in such a striking manner that it hardly matters if they're not.
Nor is the “love & death” theme a new one, but it doesn't pretend to be. Similarly, the “love that breaks all barriers” idea is ancient. The particular quirks of the characters, the failure of the love to conquer all, the play between the certainty of feeling and the uncertainty of identity and life, and the unresolvable dilemma between what in life has worth and how much (answered somewhat bluntly and inadequately at the end), combine to make this a very unique take on old story ideas. You will hear some echoes of White Oleander in the female characters and the setting, but the situation is entirely different.
For 387 pages, we are treated to a mix of Josie's recollections of her time with Michael, her life as it is in the wake of his self-destruction, and some accounts she gets of him from others who knew him. Her pain and her obsession run like a skipping disk throughout the whole book, but somehow this works. Maybe because the inability to move forward in such a situation is so true, maybe because the bleakness sucks you in, assimilates you to itself, and then refuses to let you go again. True, the material could be condensed if it were entirely necessary – I will admit it runs a little long. That said, were I the editor, I would not have cut a line of it.
The book is a direct refutation (one of many) of the Nietzschean idea that only what is healthy is beautiful.
Very well, the characters are well-drawn and intricate (compelling even when loathesome), the thematic content is overflowing, the emotions are involving, the uncertainty and mystery of life are made palpable, the style remains magnificent, and the notion of beauty and truth pervade the scene. But what about the flaws? Unlike WO, this book has its share of them.
1. The narrative perspective is an imperfect vehicle.
Take this paragraph, for instance, which was a source of profound annoyance to me the first time I read it and remains so now:
Why, exactly, are some of these sentences italicized as opposed to the others? The italics are her thoughts, of course, but...so, in essence, is the whole narrative, related through the magical medium of narration. “They were going to Paris...But no, they weren't” – doesn't that belong rightly in italics? And what about “What did he think he was doing? What was on his fucking mind?”? Seems more like thoughts than narration to me, but not as clear-cut. Additionally, “The smell of Paris” strikes me as not in line with her current actual thoughts and more in line with her narrator-thoughts.
In fact, it doesn't become clear what the use of this narrative device is until later. Fitch's first person narration in White Oleander was just fine, and it seemed like this story deserves something similar. At the end, however, Josie's inability to go back over her history and experiences like a record adds to her uncertainty. She cannot know the truth of anything, and being able to review her “notes” would conflict with that. So there's a purpose to it, though the narrative perspective isn't uniformly good throughout. The Crime and Punishment narrator this is not.
2. The structure is loose.
This charge I leveled against WO as well. In that one, however, the episodic experiences led from Point A (the mother's imprisonment, the Sudden Dramatic Upset) to Point B (Astrid's release from the system, her freedom as an adult, the Grand Finale and Resolution). In this case, the Sudden Dramatic Upset (Michael's death) throws everything into chaos – directionless chaos and suffering. There is no obvious way out, no clear path to follow. And, again, this is acceptable to an extent. You can read the book if you are involved in the moment, but if you're looking for tight, dramatized structure where everything follows a fictionalized purpose, then this is not the book for you.
Now, a further note: this would be fine by me if – if and only if – the book ended appropriately to the way it unfolded. The resolution should not have been a true resolution in any sense other than one which fit with the premise (which in this case means suicide).
3. The drug use is obsessive, thematically irrelevant, and pointlessly repetitive.
Anesthesia to the pain was only brought up incidentally as a thematic element. Most of the time she wanted to stop suffering or wanted Michael back, but this was detached entirely from the drugs themselves. The only point seemed to be to show that the main character was fucked up. We got that part after the first couple dozen pills and thirty pints of vodka. My only question is how her liver was still functioning past about chapter ten.
4. The ending is contrived.
This is the worst thing for me. Summarily, Josie goes out to the hotel where Michael killed himself with an intention of following him. She has succumbed to his suicidal form of nihilism. How do you escape nihilism? How do you avoid the big “Zero” (as it is noted to be in the book)? Her answer is...by existing. Not incredibly dramatic. The change is occasioned by essentially nothing, and it seems to cheat us of the inexorable logic of circumstance.
Sure, “this is all there is.” Fine. But that's made bearable only by the sight and warmth of another human being, another person who recognizes the Zero. The trouble here is that she has lost that. She's got nothing left. Her friends have given nothing of substance to her, Meredith is unhinged or otherwise incapable of being hinged in the first place, Michael is dead, she can't escape. Yet without reason, she chooses to go on. Tyrell tenacity is a sort of motif in the book, but it doesn't fit with overcoming the profound despair she's been thrown into by her boyfriend's death. She has, after all, come out here resolved more or less to destroy herself, to follow her lover into oblivion.
The book is almost four hundred pages of crushing despair. Four hundred pages of a dream fading and the tapestry of a shared life coming undone. There is no outside help, no source or support. This woman had a resolve once, true, but that was corroded by her addiction to this weak man. When he blew his brains out, he cut her legs out from under her (what do you think of that image?). And her progression was one of steady worsening, not improvement. Spontaneously embracing life and strength simply doesn't seem to work here.
In truth, there were several options. The book could simply have had a non-ending to fit with its loose structure. Josie could simply have walked off into the desert, come what may (as she nearly did, in fact). She could have taken all the pills and drifted off into her sleep. She could have tried to kill Meredith for being the one somehow “responsible” for Michael's destruction (avoiding the blame which falls to herself, of course). She could even have simply sat on the beach and fallen asleep at sunset or an incoming tide. Suicide, however, would probably have been best. The nihilism here demanded embrace, but that was refused on a whim. The comparison to Raskolnikov's transformation at the end of Crime and Punishment is again apt. The ending is hacked on (yes – hacked). Of course, what did get written has uncertainty in its own right (what does the future hold for Josie Tyrell and this German girl she doesn't know), but the purity of the despair is diluted by a sudden fount of strength, found as if by magic. It doesn't fit, it doesn't make sense, it's wrong.
Now, none of these objections in and of themselves are enough to bring the work down. They're annoying, but they aren't critical flaws. So what's my final opinion of the book? It's a great example of the writing craft in many respects. It doesn't have universal applications as embodied in the drama. Even in modernity, few people are as sick as these characters. However, the thematic uncertainties do have genuine relevance to human relationships. Fitch's talent for writing contemptible, trivial, or wrecked characters who nonetheless compel our attention and even our emotional involvement is a rare and welcome gift. And the prose, if nothing else, is nothing less than gorgeous.
Ultimately, I'm left with my subjective assessment. I won't speak to absolutes. I loved the book, in all its beautiful and heart-rending prose and pathos, and there are things in it that I as a writer can learn from. In the end, that's all I need.
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I had promised a few people that I would collect my book reviews onto this site, and I've finally decided to begin to make good on that promise. Because symbolism is important, I've put off reviewing just anything until I had something both (relatively) contemporary and worthy to review. I considered reviewing The Kindly Ones, a novel about the Second World War, but as literature it was so fundamentally schizophrenic that I decided I couldn't do it justice in a few pages, nor would it really be suitable for this first posting. Then, about a week or so ago, I finished reading Janet Fitch's Paint it Black. That solved that.
Also, spoiler alerts. Many of them.
First, anyone who has read White Oleander can agree that it really does have a beauty and a power unmatched by much in contemporary American literature. The language is stunningly poetic, the characters are believable, the pacing is superb, the drama infinitely compelling. The only qualm one might have is with the repetitive episodic structure. The progression is from block of time and place to block of time and place with only so much connective structure in between. This in itself isn't really good or bad, it's simply that it is not absolutely perfect. It feels like a holdover from either folklore or from attempts to imitate the structure of music. But then, the book is a pseudo-bildungsroman, and in the contemporary era people aren't so concerned with strict structure anyway. On all the counts that grab and keep people, in any case, White Oleander was a masterwork of craft. I would say it transcends mere craft, but history doesn't often agree with me, so we'll see how well it outweathers the erosion of time.
But the ultimate survival of a work of fiction is arbitrary and prejudicial at best (and I mean the bad kind of arbitrary, not the good, Atvarian form of arbitrary), and it is not predicated solely on the virtues of its creator, or even on the work itself. So the question remains for us, is Janet Fitch a genius or was White Oleander a fluke?
I'm steeply inclined in favor of the former, but I'll get to that as I go on. I can only say that after 16 pages, Paint it Black broke my heart. After 20, I realized it was trying to kill me.
However, I'm forced to admit my bias. After WO, I would be willing to forgive a very great deal from Ms. Fitch before finally relenting and admitting that yes, her first novel was a complete and total accident. (Does it strike anyone as odd that I am more forgiving of inanimate objects and of people I've never met than those I've spent years pestering?...)
The primary difference which exists between White Oleander, Janet Fitch's first major novel (second overall), and her second (third overall), Paint it Black, is reducible to this: White Oleander exhibits more polish and control; Paint it Black is rawer and more brutally emotional. Both are dark novels, and both end on notes that are at least somewhat higher-pitched than what came before, but neither offers what one could call “good cheer” nor do they represent unadulterated nihilism – though whether that's good or not is subject to debate.
I don't know what kind of life Ms. Fitch leads or has led. I don't know if she grew up in the slums or the high rises, but her stories don't seem to be any sort of attempt at deception. This is what life is, they say, accept it. Unlike some great existentialists, the mantra is not “You must change your life” (I thank Walter Kaufmann for that interpretation) and unlike the realists, the mantra is not “change society” either. If it weren't for the urban squalor and the all-too-common suffering, you might almost call Fitch's work romanticist.
Ultimately, I'm not sure which I like more. My own poetics sometimes tend towards preachiness (existentialism) and idealization (romanticism), and, though I've nothing against portraying the possible or conceivable, I profoundly dislike realism for realism's sake. Shouldn't a craftsman or an artist be responsible for more than mere journalism? Mere copying what came before? If they're lying anyway – and to some extent that is unavoidable; literature only comes in degrees of truth-value – then why not lie only to others? Why deceive oneself?
But to the matter at hand. Paint it Black is, in a sense, Romeo & Juliet if Juliet and Romeo had both been more than slightly neurotic and Juliet had also survived Act 5. It's a tragic romance tale, but not a generic one.
The main character, Josie Tyrell, is a young sometime-actress and regular nude model. She has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She is in love with a man, Michael Faraday, who is in many respects unknowable to us, but what we do know of him leads us to conclude that he is almost entirely pathetic. This man, we learn in the opening, say, 14 pages, has blown his brains out. It takes us to the end of the book to figure out precisely why, but we get a pretty clear idea that this was kindasorta inevitable by about 75-100 pages in even if we didn't learn about the trigger – so to speak – for it all later on.
It's easy for us to get right into the story because the main character makes no demands on us. She's a drunk, a drug-freak, an uneducated, lower-class cockroach who frequents night clubs and other such dens of iniquity. Yet her lover claims that she is “smart” and “original.” I am not entirely sure I can agree with that overestimation. Her one somewhat positive quality is that she has the capacity to appreciate better. When her boyfriend dies, she loses the one bright spot in an otherwise drab, dreary, monotonously oppressive life (totalitarianism is boring, they say, and life is nothing but a totalitarian state writ cosmic). She is alone. She realizes that her friends don't have an ounce of the soul of the man she lost, and her one connection (irony alert here, dear readers, since the connection is to a man she ultimately did not and now cannot know) to someone who could see the “true world” with her, is irrevocably severed. She is adrift.
And the man who destroyed himself and did this to her? A self-loathing, self-deceiving modern-aristocrat genius painter run through with weakness, insecurities, doubts, and a sense of distance between himself and others and between himself and what he wishes he could be. He comes from fabulous wealth and fame. His father is a writer, his mother a concert pianist. He's a Harvard dropout who has a troubled relation with the truth. He wants to be authentic (by rejecting his upper class life in favor of the slums) but he cannot see himself for what he is, nor can he see the truth of what really separates and binds the middle and upper class. And this is the man who introduces Ms. Tyrell to culture and beauty, who is showing her the “true world”...
Tangent: I've noticed an odd kinship between Fitch and Fitzgerald. It is this:
Fitch's prose = sublime
Fitzgerald's prose = sublime
Fitch's characters = contemptible
Fitzgerald's characters = contemptible
Just a minor observation. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
What is the “true world”? You've probably all heard the phrase in some context or another. It is, essentially, a world beyond, above, anterior to, what-have-you, the common or “real” world. According to Fitch's Tyrell:
She thought about the true world, the times they had seen it – it was like light glinting on the surface of the river, that shimmering quality when you saw it. It wasn't the thing itself. It was your own ability to see it. Like the nights they lay in bed listening to the mockingbirds sing. Or the time they knelt by the river, and the blue heron came walking out of the reeds. The feeling when time stopped, and you could stay there forever. "You see the beauty inside everything. It doesn't last long – it's either gone in a minute, you just caught it, or else maybe it's something so big that you normally can't get your head around it. Like the fog in your head clears out. The world stops being a puppet show and you see the real thing. It's probably like that all the time, but you just can't see it, except for those little glimpses."
The thing itself, eh? As opposed to the thing-in-itself? The Kantian thing-in-itself? Nietzsche loathed this idea and hammered it into the dust in Twilight of the Idols (“Reason in Philosophy” section 6). Not that this is particularly relevant, though. It's just odd that there should be such echoes of philosophy here. Oddly enough, the next sentence, a response from a contemptible character named Lola Lola, brings me right back to Nietzsche.
"A beautiful man," Lola said.
Indeed. Or a beautiful soul in any case (the term which N loaded with contempt and used to denote the meek, the frail, the pathologically kindly). Someone so profoundly sick as to be almost infectious. And when he destroys himself, he takes the weakened, cracked-up foundation he had provided from Josie's life, he robs her of her one support. You could blame her for attaching herself to such a weak creature, but that's too cruel a judgment. She had nothing, but she had always wanted better. She grew up in a hick environment but managed to escape. She moved on to California, hoping to have a normal life at the least, and then this man from a world of light and beauty stepped into her life, and she was too blinded by that to really see the darkness inside him. By the time she does, she's already in love. And that is why it's impossible not to sympathize with her. We see a lonely woman put through too much indignity (rape by your own brother, anyone?) who loses the one flawed but beautiful thing she ever really possessed. It's robbed from her, and it can never be regained.
And the sincerity, the passion, with which Fitch presents Josie's obsession with her lover, is naked in its honesty. Even an inveterate cynic like myself can't help but feel something at this:
He set the grinder down then and put his arms around her, tight. Kissed her. “I'll be working. Yo know how I get. Trust me, it's better this way.” She held on to him, her eyes closed, drinking in his smell, pine and moss and some peculiar chemistry of his own, that she craved the way an addict craved freebase. She could lick him like candy. He held her for the longest time, crushing her to him, his scratchy beard.
She missed him like fire.
The trouble is that I'm not sure where that feeling comes from. The emotional power woven into the fabric of the book could be melodrama, or it could be because the wound is unusually deep. When Michael destroys himself (or is destroyed, but I'll leave that to you, the reader, to discover) and inflicts such suffering on Josie, is it the purity and the sheer volume of the despair, or is it the profundity of the pain which is really moving us? Throughout the book, we get a conflicted, sometimes irresolvable portrait of who Michael Faraday was, and even what Josie Tyrell felt for him. Uncertainty pervades everything about the lives of these two wrecks of human beings – What was Michael's relationship with his mother? Did Josie really know this man at all? Who was truly responsible for this, that, or the other? Who was at fault? Could anything have been done to stop it? – except for one thing: the conviction of love.
I do overstate here, but I do it out of a concern for greater thematic relevance. Josie does wonder here and there whether Michael loved her and on what their loved was based, if anything, but the pain she experiences over his death does not diminish, and the fact remains that she did and does feel something for him, despite, of course, being misled about him (often deliberately) on so many counts. In a sense, she never knew him. But isn't that true of us all? And she loved him anyway.
It isn't that simple, though. This isn't a case of taking a platitude about life and dramatizing it. Michael is not the average man with secrets. He is a deceiver, both of others and of himself. The narrator (a pseudo-Josie-consciousness which I'll get to later) points out: “And in the end, she would never know the truth...He could believe something passionately, then later, deny what he had said. Even hand his position to you, while he argued the exact opposite point of view.”
Later, in one of the conversations between Josie and Michael's mother, Meredith, with whom the Oedipal relationship is just a little bit screwed up – pun pun pun – (O, allusions to Greek myth, how I love thee: minotaur, mother, Oedipus, furies) Josie goes off on a rather nasty attack:
“Let me tell you something about your son. You know what he liked?” She took the last drink of Stoli, exhaled the heavy fume. “He liked doing things when he was pretending to be doing something else.” She put the glass down on the table between them, just a tiny table. She leaned over so her face was only inches from Meredith's and lowered her voice to a whisper. “For instance, he liked to fuck me while he was talking on the phone with you.”
What's that Tolstoy line about happy families, again?
Michael has identity issues. He creates personas for himself. In his suicide letter, he says of Josie “We loved each other once... Didn't we?” That's a heartbreaking final word. In his diaries, however, revealed towards the end, we get a more honest picture of what was going on inside him because the diaries are something he never showed the world nor intended to show. They were a mere extension of his own mind. The letter, however, was just another display.
And the German girl at the motel he checked into, with whom he spoke before the end, got yet another version of who and what Michael was. The only constant in Michael (unlike the constant in Josie, which is loving him) is this: “Worth. He made you feel worthwhile. That was his gift.” For all his weaknesses, and perhaps because of them, he does care about people. He spends time with them, listens to them, interacts with them, and even seems to love them.
But that's really not enough, is it? He's angry, self-loathing, testy, emotionally isolated even from the one he loves, doesn't work, isn't assertive, etc. etc. etc. All the qualities necessary for the “real world” are entirely absent in him. And he shows Josie the “true world.”
In spite of all his failings, she loves him. No healthy person would have. That's part of the dark beauty of the novel: these two people are profoundly fucked up.
I would venture to guess that both melodrama and genuine depth go into making up the power of this. Dostoevsky was into melodrama, after all, and it served only to enhance the power of his works. It seems to me that the same happens here. After all, the pure pathos of the pain is what involves you, but it's the finer details of precisely how mutilated the souls of these deformed, unfinished beings, sent before their time scarce half made up truly are. After all, Josie wants better, but she doesn't want “it all.” And Michael's warped attempt to recover some semblance of normalcy stems from...what? Nature? Nurture? Is it wisdom on his part to withhold the entire truth from the one he loves, or is it folly? Was such a love only possible in these sick and unhealthy conditions? Could the predator that is man when healthy have truly committed to this with such sincerity? And was it even sincerity when the man Josie loved could throw it all away in a day, or the woman Michael loved could strike such a cruel blow that would drive him to that point? Should they have loved each other at all, or was that actually the worst thing that could have happened?
Not all original questions, but composed in such a striking manner that it hardly matters if they're not.
Nor is the “love & death” theme a new one, but it doesn't pretend to be. Similarly, the “love that breaks all barriers” idea is ancient. The particular quirks of the characters, the failure of the love to conquer all, the play between the certainty of feeling and the uncertainty of identity and life, and the unresolvable dilemma between what in life has worth and how much (answered somewhat bluntly and inadequately at the end), combine to make this a very unique take on old story ideas. You will hear some echoes of White Oleander in the female characters and the setting, but the situation is entirely different.
For 387 pages, we are treated to a mix of Josie's recollections of her time with Michael, her life as it is in the wake of his self-destruction, and some accounts she gets of him from others who knew him. Her pain and her obsession run like a skipping disk throughout the whole book, but somehow this works. Maybe because the inability to move forward in such a situation is so true, maybe because the bleakness sucks you in, assimilates you to itself, and then refuses to let you go again. True, the material could be condensed if it were entirely necessary – I will admit it runs a little long. That said, were I the editor, I would not have cut a line of it.
The book is a direct refutation (one of many) of the Nietzschean idea that only what is healthy is beautiful.
Very well, the characters are well-drawn and intricate (compelling even when loathesome), the thematic content is overflowing, the emotions are involving, the uncertainty and mystery of life are made palpable, the style remains magnificent, and the notion of beauty and truth pervade the scene. But what about the flaws? Unlike WO, this book has its share of them.
1. The narrative perspective is an imperfect vehicle.
Take this paragraph, for instance, which was a source of profound annoyance to me the first time I read it and remains so now:
She lay on the couch, smoking her Gauloise, the cigarettes he smoked. The smell of Paris. They were going to Paris...But no, they weren't. You goddamn stupid motherfucker. What did he think he was doing? What was on his fucking mind? Here, here's my dark world. You carry it for a change. I'm out.
Why, exactly, are some of these sentences italicized as opposed to the others? The italics are her thoughts, of course, but...so, in essence, is the whole narrative, related through the magical medium of narration. “They were going to Paris...But no, they weren't” – doesn't that belong rightly in italics? And what about “What did he think he was doing? What was on his fucking mind?”? Seems more like thoughts than narration to me, but not as clear-cut. Additionally, “The smell of Paris” strikes me as not in line with her current actual thoughts and more in line with her narrator-thoughts.
In fact, it doesn't become clear what the use of this narrative device is until later. Fitch's first person narration in White Oleander was just fine, and it seemed like this story deserves something similar. At the end, however, Josie's inability to go back over her history and experiences like a record adds to her uncertainty. She cannot know the truth of anything, and being able to review her “notes” would conflict with that. So there's a purpose to it, though the narrative perspective isn't uniformly good throughout. The Crime and Punishment narrator this is not.
2. The structure is loose.
This charge I leveled against WO as well. In that one, however, the episodic experiences led from Point A (the mother's imprisonment, the Sudden Dramatic Upset) to Point B (Astrid's release from the system, her freedom as an adult, the Grand Finale and Resolution). In this case, the Sudden Dramatic Upset (Michael's death) throws everything into chaos – directionless chaos and suffering. There is no obvious way out, no clear path to follow. And, again, this is acceptable to an extent. You can read the book if you are involved in the moment, but if you're looking for tight, dramatized structure where everything follows a fictionalized purpose, then this is not the book for you.
Now, a further note: this would be fine by me if – if and only if – the book ended appropriately to the way it unfolded. The resolution should not have been a true resolution in any sense other than one which fit with the premise (which in this case means suicide).
3. The drug use is obsessive, thematically irrelevant, and pointlessly repetitive.
Anesthesia to the pain was only brought up incidentally as a thematic element. Most of the time she wanted to stop suffering or wanted Michael back, but this was detached entirely from the drugs themselves. The only point seemed to be to show that the main character was fucked up. We got that part after the first couple dozen pills and thirty pints of vodka. My only question is how her liver was still functioning past about chapter ten.
4. The ending is contrived.
This is the worst thing for me. Summarily, Josie goes out to the hotel where Michael killed himself with an intention of following him. She has succumbed to his suicidal form of nihilism. How do you escape nihilism? How do you avoid the big “Zero” (as it is noted to be in the book)? Her answer is...by existing. Not incredibly dramatic. The change is occasioned by essentially nothing, and it seems to cheat us of the inexorable logic of circumstance.
Sure, “this is all there is.” Fine. But that's made bearable only by the sight and warmth of another human being, another person who recognizes the Zero. The trouble here is that she has lost that. She's got nothing left. Her friends have given nothing of substance to her, Meredith is unhinged or otherwise incapable of being hinged in the first place, Michael is dead, she can't escape. Yet without reason, she chooses to go on. Tyrell tenacity is a sort of motif in the book, but it doesn't fit with overcoming the profound despair she's been thrown into by her boyfriend's death. She has, after all, come out here resolved more or less to destroy herself, to follow her lover into oblivion.
The book is almost four hundred pages of crushing despair. Four hundred pages of a dream fading and the tapestry of a shared life coming undone. There is no outside help, no source or support. This woman had a resolve once, true, but that was corroded by her addiction to this weak man. When he blew his brains out, he cut her legs out from under her (what do you think of that image?). And her progression was one of steady worsening, not improvement. Spontaneously embracing life and strength simply doesn't seem to work here.
In truth, there were several options. The book could simply have had a non-ending to fit with its loose structure. Josie could simply have walked off into the desert, come what may (as she nearly did, in fact). She could have taken all the pills and drifted off into her sleep. She could have tried to kill Meredith for being the one somehow “responsible” for Michael's destruction (avoiding the blame which falls to herself, of course). She could even have simply sat on the beach and fallen asleep at sunset or an incoming tide. Suicide, however, would probably have been best. The nihilism here demanded embrace, but that was refused on a whim. The comparison to Raskolnikov's transformation at the end of Crime and Punishment is again apt. The ending is hacked on (yes – hacked). Of course, what did get written has uncertainty in its own right (what does the future hold for Josie Tyrell and this German girl she doesn't know), but the purity of the despair is diluted by a sudden fount of strength, found as if by magic. It doesn't fit, it doesn't make sense, it's wrong.
Now, none of these objections in and of themselves are enough to bring the work down. They're annoying, but they aren't critical flaws. So what's my final opinion of the book? It's a great example of the writing craft in many respects. It doesn't have universal applications as embodied in the drama. Even in modernity, few people are as sick as these characters. However, the thematic uncertainties do have genuine relevance to human relationships. Fitch's talent for writing contemptible, trivial, or wrecked characters who nonetheless compel our attention and even our emotional involvement is a rare and welcome gift. And the prose, if nothing else, is nothing less than gorgeous.
Ultimately, I'm left with my subjective assessment. I won't speak to absolutes. I loved the book, in all its beautiful and heart-rending prose and pathos, and there are things in it that I as a writer can learn from. In the end, that's all I need.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Lost Season 6: This Has Potential
Hello, everyone. Atvar here. Today we have a guest post - an unsettingly on-point guest post - from an insightful critic and good friend of mine, who goes by pure.Wasted, on the subject of the half-finished sixth season of Lost.
Oh, and guys, for the record: MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT.
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Lost Season 6: This Has Potential
That should have been the tagline. Everything about Lost shows -- suggests -- promise in its final season. The end is nigh and the upcoming confrontations are the talk of the town, even in-show. Major players like Jacob, the artist formerly known as John Locke (aka, the Smoke Monster, aka the Man in Black), and Widmore are trying to claim their respective corners of the chessboard. Guns are pointed, dynamite sticks lit on fire, plot devices smashed to pieces, and lives threatened in all sorts of nasty ways -- sometimes all the way through to the dark and gruesome conclusion -- on a regular basis. Epic, defining stories that will forever shape the legacies these characters leave behind are in the process of being told. The set-up is there for something greater than great, something that has never been seen on television to date. So why does it all feel so wrong? Directly compared to previous seasons, episode-for-episode, moment-for-moment, line-for-line, the show simply does not stand up to what came before. Frankly, it isn't even in the same ballpark.
The answer lies not with the ideas and stories that are being tackled, but the way said tackling is being done. Episodes are laden with blatant exposition that the writers make no attempts to cover up, ie. "The Substitute," where the only conflict the writers could come up with for a 42-minute episode was Sawyer ALMOST falling to his death from a random cliffside. Phew! We were so worried he might really bite it! But it's true, some of Lost's finest offerings have been verbal sparring matches, like the chewing out Widmore gives Desmond in Season 3's "Flashes Before Your Eyes," which is painful to watch no matter how many times I've seen it, or, a few episodes later, Locke's "The Man From Tallahassee," where Locke and Ben play an episode-long game of one-upmanship with no more than their wit and the hands the island deals them. Lost has proven time and time again that talky episodes are nothing if not their forte.
In Season 6, these moments are few and far between. In "LA X," Terry O'Quinn's menacing turn as the Man in Black is perfectly juxtaposed with the humility displayed by a broken old John Locke who has to be carried out of his seat on the plane. The dialogue hits home, and it hits hard, in both scenes. But there is no follow-up -- no TMFT to "LA X"'s FBYE. The next attempt is Ben's monologue during his search for redemption (more on this later), and I emphasize 'attempt,' because it is sabotaged by the predictable re-use of the Alex plot from "The Shape of Things to Come" as a crutch, its total lack of subtlety, and finally, a performance by Zuleikha Robinson that didn't deserve to grace the cutting room floor. Her "I'll have you," may be the most underwhelming line in the series' history, seemingly a malicious attempt to undercut Michael Emerson's efforts with dialogue that is desperately above-par -- but only that. Ms. Robinson, or whomever was responsible for the final cut if indeed that was one of many takes she offered, should be ashamed. She didn't need to carry the scene. She didn't even need to do a good job. All the scene needed was for that one line to not fall completely flat on its face... and it did just that. It's difficult to pinpoint who's to blame for such a monumental screw-up; the character has had absolutely zero personality ever since she landed on the island, and yet she was engaging and charismatic in Season 5's "He's Our You," which details her meeting with Sayid off-island. I was watching her because she was an interesting character. Now I watch her because the show insists that she's an interesting plot device.
But slow, generally unsubstantial episodes that are character-driven aren't new either. Season 4, critically acclaimed and praised for its tight writing and a general "return to form" following the inspired Season 3 finale, "Through the Looking Glass," had a little episode called "Something Nice Back Home" that told us nothing we hadn't already seen, or heard, before. But Season 4 had something Season 6 doesn't have, as much as it likes to pretend that it does: a sense of urgency and impending danger. A sense of stakes.
I say 'pretend,' because the characters on the show insist time and time again on reminding me how high the stakes are. "Dr. Linus," a plodding mess very nearly redeemed by Ben's own redemption, closes with a shot of Charles Widmore, who, having finally found the island after more than twenty years of searching, has decided to appear in person. "Recon," a generally enjoyable if predictable ride, closed with Sawyer telling Kate they would let the two 'bad guys' - Locke and Widmore - duke it out. Jack is for the first time since the detonation of Jughead convinced of his significance. Ilana is out for blood. Jin and Sun are about to be reunited. Yet it all feels distant and insignificant. Here, the complexity of Lost's plot works against it. I don't know whether I'm supposed to be terrified of Widmore (he sent Season 4's freighter, with Martin Keamy on board) or cheer for him (Jacob seems to like him; and he, in turn, liked Locke last we saw the two in "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"). In the end, I feel absolutely nothing. The idea of making Widmore's antagonism in Season 4 being a misperception had great... potential... and yet if the writers wanted that, they had to demonstrate his heroics dramatically and in a way that actually explains the misperception -- BEFORE he got to the island. Because they didn't, Charles Widmore's arrival -- once the most dreaded thought imaginable, and what should have felt like a momentous scene in Lost history -- feels no more than a footnote on a larger canvas. The same is true of the Man in Black. It's not clear whether the writers want us to be scared (he humiliated Ben, has no compunctions against lying when he says he's telling the truth, and seems set up to be the Big Bad if ever there was one) or on his side (his reasons for rebelling seem plausible and relatable, all of his murders were easily preventable by the victims; he only kills douchebags). Season 4 benefited from a clear antagonist who loomed over the show and existed solely through his merciless agent, Keamy. From the moment Keamy was introduced, it was clear that the confrontation we wanted would come, and every moment he was on the show built towards that confrontation. Widmore and Locke, however, suffer from a severe case of mistaken agendity.
Conceptually, I believe what Sawyer says is true; there will be a confrontation of sorts. There has to be. Emotionally, there's no reason to buy into any of it. The antagonism rises and falls unevenly; the agents are far too ambiguous to pose a genuine threat to my favorite characters. In "The Lighthouse," Jacob told Hurley, "Someone's coming [to the Temple]. Someone bad. We can't warn them, Hugo. I'm sorry. It's too late." A startling moment of clarity and urgency, clearly setting up the conflict in the subsequent "Sundown." The problem? Once we got to that conflict, the only discernible reason for its taking place seemed to be Dogen's obstinate stance on compromising; the massacre, ably (even if untruthfully) justified by the Man in Black, seemed entirely warranted. But since the Island didn't explode the moment Dogen died, I can't very well tell if the Man in Black's agenda is more devious than he lets on, now, can I? Once again, the writers directly sabotage their efforts by deconstructing any tension they've managed to build up.
The writers forget something else that is very crucial. Season 4 was able to cheat thanks to incredibly ominous flashforwards. Even episodes that seemed to stall managed to feel as though they were getting us closer and closer to the inevitable. From the revelation that the Losties did escape, to the subsequent reveal that Jack is bitter and suicidal (why?!), to the reveal that one of the Losties is dead (who?!) to the reveal that Hurley believed it was a mistake to have gone with Locke (why?!), to the reveal that Jin is dead (how?!), and so on, and so forth. All of these helped paint a clear (distressing, in the best way possible) picture of where the show was going, and every episode felt like a puzzle piece clicking into place. Halfway through Season 6, I have no idea where the show is going, and this isn't a good thing. Episodes that seem to stall... feel like just that. There is nothing emotionally inevitable about the conceptually inevitable confrontation between Locke and Widmore. There was no reason for him to arrive on the Island precisely when he did, as opposed to sometime during Season 5, or five episodes from now. His appearance was random and anti-climactic, and it turns out that the set-up for Lost's potentially most epic conflict is a haphazard mess, tripping over itself every step of the way.
Speaking of poor planning, whose idea was it to give Sawyer's episode to Kate? I'm talking, of course, about "What Kate Does," which is Sawyer's story of coping with the loss of Juliet, for some bizarre, inexplicable reason told through Kate's eyes. Did the writers forget the reason for having centric episodes to begin with? They are meant to show us something interesting and insightful about a given character. So, all enjoyment of "Recon" aside, why in the world would they not take 42 minutes to show us Sawyer's self-destruction with a side-story involving Kate doing what she does worst? One of the character's pivotal moments is glossed over, as opposed to making a true show of it. How much sense would it have made to tell "The Constant," Desmond's time-hopping adventure that lands him that phone-call with Penelope after many years apart, through Sayid's point of view? Or "The Shape of Things to Come," which deals with Ben's choices and the consequences Alex pays for them, from Locke's? The potential was there for the Lost writers to show they were still at the top of their form. They didn't even try.
The same thing happened with Richard. Over the 3 seasons we've known him, he has probably been the most consistent character for acting... well, in-character. He has been cool, calm, and collected in the face of bald-headed time-travelers, guns pointed at his face, nukes being pointed at his island, and all manner of general weirdnesses. ...And now we're supposed to buy into his instant transformation into Jack-on-the-bridge (just add dead Templites!) when we didn't even get to SEE IT? Gee, I don't know, sounds like something with a lot of potential, doesn't it? Something that might have been fun to watch in progress, something that might have been fun for the very able Mr. Carbonell to act out... ...and wouldn't have made his subsequent appearance seem so glaringly out of character. And wouldn't have made his return to form at the end of that very same hour make me throw my hands into the air in exasperation at how ineptly the story had been told. Watch this. "Ab Aeterno" is going to come around tomorrow, and it's not going to tell a single Richard story, in the present, that is nearly as interesting as watching his reaction to the Temple massacre would have been. Just how bad is this? Remember Locke's crisis of faith late in Season 2? Now imagine if we didn't hear Ben telling him the button was meaningless. Imagine we didn't see the tape he and Eko found in the Pearl, which suggested the Swan staff were simply under an experiment. We just jumped from the first scenes of Lockdown straight to the finale, where Locke would appear suddenly, inexplicably out of character and then 80 minutes later have his original beliefs vindicated. And then the next time we saw him, he was acting completely in-character (kind of like "Further Instructions") and had no interesting stories to tell (kind of like "Further Instructions"). There's a reason that story wasn't told that way, and unfortunately for Lost, the circumstances are far more analogous than desirable.
Speaking of characters that have gone missing when they shouldn't have... Sun has become the show's running joke, her screentime reduced to a single appearance every 3-4 episodes, in which she predictably demands to know just Where Is Her Husband?! She has been so marginalized, in fact, that in these 8 episodes (and many that came before) she is demonstrably outshined by Leslie Arzt's scene-stealing performances in "Dr. Linus." Hint: it had something to do with the lines he was given, and the lines she was not. The show insists time and again that she is important by bringing up that "Kwon" is one of the few un-crossed out names in the caves, by making Ilana take her under her wing, and so on... but not for one moment does it make us believe it. Sound familiar? And yet, the development Sun underwent as a result of Jin's "death" -- and the startlingly icy acting elicited out of Ms. Yunjin Kim in her scenes with Widmore in the Season 4 finale -- should have made her a central player and a formidable foe. Too bad they forgot. Desmond, whose ties to Widmore and Ben should have ensured him a key role and a performance to rival "The Constant" in gusto, has been written out simply because the writers couldn't come up with things for him to do. What's with the blatant anti-matrimony? Married people can have fun, too!
So where does that leave us? Talky episodes that contain no remarkable dialogue of note, and conflicts which are too ambiguous to feel involving. A general lack of planning that has resulted in character arcs that deserve attention being condensed, and stories that don't deserve to be told taking up valuable space. (I'm not against Kate having episodes. I'm against Kate having episodes that don't deserve to be told.) [Editor's Note: I am against Kate having episodes.] Sounds pretty bad for being halfway into the final season... but wait, there's that word again: "potential." It keeps coming up, because truth be told, there's plenty of intriguing ideas floating around Lost Season 6, and with more planning and a clearer agenda, they might have been truly great.
-The use of flashsideways to tell an interesting story, when taken advantage of. Jack and Ben both received incredibly focused, tightly-scripted flashes that felt both fresh and true to the characters at the same time. Neither contained an extraneos, unnecessary moment. Kate's and Sayid's, on the other hand, were simply more of the same old, same old, "What Kate Does" actually going so far as to literally replay an island event (Aaron's birth). I can just see the ideas converging... "The usual Kate we have in the regular 2004 timeline is no longer interesting... the usual Claire we had in the regular 2004 timeline wasn't interesting (which is why we stopped being able to write material for her and wrote her out!)... now if only we had some excuse to not be bound by the stories we've told, and to give these characters interesting, unusual moments... Oh, I know! Let's make a whole episode revolve around them both! That will solve EVERYTHING."
-The conflict between such key players as Jacob, the Man in Black, Widmore, and the Losties caught in between. Should have been the greatest thing since sliced bread, even (especially?) during the set-up. Turned out more like a piece of toast that landed buttered-side down.
-Ben's redemption. As mishandled as the episode's island story might have been, the idea of Ben seeking redemption with such humility, after all he's done, is heartbreaking. On the other hand, the idea of Ben starting this search in episode 7 out of 15, and then presumably not appearing in numerous episodes afterward (he was a no-show in "Recon"), is inexcusable. This should have been a Season-long arc, and instead his reduced screentime prompts a Cliff's Notes version condensed to fit in a single episode halfway through the season. It is unworthy of both the character and Michael Emerson, whose efforts to make the 'arc' play out so much more competently than it's written are admirable and almost, almost, almost succeed.
-And of course the increasingly game cast at the writers' disposal:
--Terry O'Quinn's delicious monster -- which instead turned tame and lame. Compare his supremely staggering confidence in "Dead is Dead" or "LA X" when he humiliates Ben, to the excuses and ramblings he makes in "Recon." Is the problem that he now has no characters to humiliate? Well, hell, we've resurrected Mikhail once before... and if John Locke had no problem beating him up at a moment's notice, the Man in Black should have a field day.
--Michael Emerson taking on the humbled and redemptive Ben -- who has received as much screentime this season as Ilana, whose lack of personality makes the Man in Black look verifiably human by comparison, or Frank. I've got nothing against Frank. But when his one-liners are coming at the expense of Ben's character-defining moments, I'm going to second-guess that Season outline.
--Evangeline Lilly's subtle efforts to make Kate seem vaguely human -- and being sabotaged by the writing every step of the way. "The writers have admitted they can't write women," is no excuse. Just watch reruns of Battlestar Galactica. Or pretend they're men. Hey, it worked for Ana Lucia!
--Ken Leung, whose Miles has finally achieved the dream of all young wooden characters -- characterization ("I'm a real boy!") -- through his genuine affection for Sawyer. Sure. It's taken him two and a half seasons to be good for more than his snarky wit and usefulness as a plot device and NOW you stop giving him screentime.
--Josh Holloway, whose portrayals of Sawyer's self-destructive urges were the high-points of the one and a half episodes in which we saw them. Speaking of which, for all the drama that surrounded his 'transformation,' what did it change, really? Yeah, he's with evil Locke, and-- wait a second, he's not really with evil Locke, he's with Richard! But wait, he's not really with Richard, is he? He's genuinely convinced by Locke, who seems to be a reasonable smokey being! No, no, he's actually posing as Locke's trusted lieutenant to give him up to Widmore at the first opportunity. Unless... he's really leading Widmore into a trap. Yes, a trap -- a trap for BOTH, while he leads his friends to ESCAPE! And that's obviously the actions of a completely upredictable, dangerous Sawyer still reeling from Juliet's recent death. Because the Sawyer of seasons past wouldn't, y'know, con everyone in sight to save his friends. Ever. Except if they were all stranded in 1977 or something. But otherwise, no.
All of these things keep insisting that the next episode could be the big one, the one that resolves all of this set-up and makes it all worth-while. And the episodes keep ticking away, turning in a decent if unremarkable product by Lost's high standards. Anyway. All this talk about potential seems now somehow deceptively optimistic. So let's conclude with a final failing demonstrative of Lost's uninspired story-telling come Season 5... and now, unfortunately, 6:
The Alex crutch. Or should I say, the Alex hammer (the better to hit us over the head with). I agree with the writers, Alex's death was a significant moment both for the show and for Ben personally. But when it's used as it was in "Dr. Linus," simply to save time for a monologue that would have otherwise taken genuine effort to write (might have even been forced to turn it into a conversation!)... we have a problem. The writers should have learned their lesson with "Dead Is Dead," which was an outstanding episode save for the title, the death of Caesar (who was infinitely more interesting in his four scenes than Ilana has been over both seasons so far), the anti-climactic flashbacks, and the anti-climactic climax. Well, OK, it might have been just the Ben and 'Locke' scenes that were any good. But the point is, the judgment over Alex's death was built up as this huge thing, and it turned out to be no more than a replay of things we've already seen, with a 10-second cameo by the Smoke Monster in the form of the Man in Black in the form of John Locke in the form of Alex Rousseau. And it didn't even take. What makes this redemption any more definitive? Absurdly enough, I'm almost happy this is the last season. I'm not sure I'd be able to take another episode where I successfully predict that Ben will make yet another earnest (oh, but so much more earnest than last time!) effort to redeem himself, for the umpteenth time in a row, just to demonstrate how difficult it is for some people to change their ways. I'm not sure I could stand to see one of Lost's finest reduced into a Kate.
But "Ab Aeterno" is just around the corner. Little birdies tell that it's going to reveal some of Lost's biggest mysteries -- those secrets that go to the show's very heart. Talk about potential, right? And it's great. It sounds like there's so much they could do with that.
You know... in the future.
-p.W
Oh, and guys, for the record: MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT.
-----
Lost Season 6: This Has Potential
That should have been the tagline. Everything about Lost shows -- suggests -- promise in its final season. The end is nigh and the upcoming confrontations are the talk of the town, even in-show. Major players like Jacob, the artist formerly known as John Locke (aka, the Smoke Monster, aka the Man in Black), and Widmore are trying to claim their respective corners of the chessboard. Guns are pointed, dynamite sticks lit on fire, plot devices smashed to pieces, and lives threatened in all sorts of nasty ways -- sometimes all the way through to the dark and gruesome conclusion -- on a regular basis. Epic, defining stories that will forever shape the legacies these characters leave behind are in the process of being told. The set-up is there for something greater than great, something that has never been seen on television to date. So why does it all feel so wrong? Directly compared to previous seasons, episode-for-episode, moment-for-moment, line-for-line, the show simply does not stand up to what came before. Frankly, it isn't even in the same ballpark.
The answer lies not with the ideas and stories that are being tackled, but the way said tackling is being done. Episodes are laden with blatant exposition that the writers make no attempts to cover up, ie. "The Substitute," where the only conflict the writers could come up with for a 42-minute episode was Sawyer ALMOST falling to his death from a random cliffside. Phew! We were so worried he might really bite it! But it's true, some of Lost's finest offerings have been verbal sparring matches, like the chewing out Widmore gives Desmond in Season 3's "Flashes Before Your Eyes," which is painful to watch no matter how many times I've seen it, or, a few episodes later, Locke's "The Man From Tallahassee," where Locke and Ben play an episode-long game of one-upmanship with no more than their wit and the hands the island deals them. Lost has proven time and time again that talky episodes are nothing if not their forte.
In Season 6, these moments are few and far between. In "LA X," Terry O'Quinn's menacing turn as the Man in Black is perfectly juxtaposed with the humility displayed by a broken old John Locke who has to be carried out of his seat on the plane. The dialogue hits home, and it hits hard, in both scenes. But there is no follow-up -- no TMFT to "LA X"'s FBYE. The next attempt is Ben's monologue during his search for redemption (more on this later), and I emphasize 'attempt,' because it is sabotaged by the predictable re-use of the Alex plot from "The Shape of Things to Come" as a crutch, its total lack of subtlety, and finally, a performance by Zuleikha Robinson that didn't deserve to grace the cutting room floor. Her "I'll have you," may be the most underwhelming line in the series' history, seemingly a malicious attempt to undercut Michael Emerson's efforts with dialogue that is desperately above-par -- but only that. Ms. Robinson, or whomever was responsible for the final cut if indeed that was one of many takes she offered, should be ashamed. She didn't need to carry the scene. She didn't even need to do a good job. All the scene needed was for that one line to not fall completely flat on its face... and it did just that. It's difficult to pinpoint who's to blame for such a monumental screw-up; the character has had absolutely zero personality ever since she landed on the island, and yet she was engaging and charismatic in Season 5's "He's Our You," which details her meeting with Sayid off-island. I was watching her because she was an interesting character. Now I watch her because the show insists that she's an interesting plot device.
"I've been trapped for so long, I don't even remember what it feels like to be free. Maybe you can understand that. But before I was trapped, James, I was a man, just like you. I know what it's like to feel joy, to feel pain, anger, fear, to experience betrayal. I know what it's like to lose someone you love," the Man in Black tells Sawyer as they're traipsing through the jungle. It's an understandably uninspired performance by Terry O'Quinn; what did the writers honestly expect when they gave him instead of a speech, a laundry list of emotions that aren't attached to anything we've (or he's) ever seen?
But slow, generally unsubstantial episodes that are character-driven aren't new either. Season 4, critically acclaimed and praised for its tight writing and a general "return to form" following the inspired Season 3 finale, "Through the Looking Glass," had a little episode called "Something Nice Back Home" that told us nothing we hadn't already seen, or heard, before. But Season 4 had something Season 6 doesn't have, as much as it likes to pretend that it does: a sense of urgency and impending danger. A sense of stakes.
I say 'pretend,' because the characters on the show insist time and time again on reminding me how high the stakes are. "Dr. Linus," a plodding mess very nearly redeemed by Ben's own redemption, closes with a shot of Charles Widmore, who, having finally found the island after more than twenty years of searching, has decided to appear in person. "Recon," a generally enjoyable if predictable ride, closed with Sawyer telling Kate they would let the two 'bad guys' - Locke and Widmore - duke it out. Jack is for the first time since the detonation of Jughead convinced of his significance. Ilana is out for blood. Jin and Sun are about to be reunited. Yet it all feels distant and insignificant. Here, the complexity of Lost's plot works against it. I don't know whether I'm supposed to be terrified of Widmore (he sent Season 4's freighter, with Martin Keamy on board) or cheer for him (Jacob seems to like him; and he, in turn, liked Locke last we saw the two in "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham"). In the end, I feel absolutely nothing. The idea of making Widmore's antagonism in Season 4 being a misperception had great... potential... and yet if the writers wanted that, they had to demonstrate his heroics dramatically and in a way that actually explains the misperception -- BEFORE he got to the island. Because they didn't, Charles Widmore's arrival -- once the most dreaded thought imaginable, and what should have felt like a momentous scene in Lost history -- feels no more than a footnote on a larger canvas. The same is true of the Man in Black. It's not clear whether the writers want us to be scared (he humiliated Ben, has no compunctions against lying when he says he's telling the truth, and seems set up to be the Big Bad if ever there was one) or on his side (his reasons for rebelling seem plausible and relatable, all of his murders were easily preventable by the victims; he only kills douchebags). Season 4 benefited from a clear antagonist who loomed over the show and existed solely through his merciless agent, Keamy. From the moment Keamy was introduced, it was clear that the confrontation we wanted would come, and every moment he was on the show built towards that confrontation. Widmore and Locke, however, suffer from a severe case of mistaken agendity.
"Guy named Widmore set up camp on the beach. Got a whole team with him, guys with guns. They're here for Locke. I'm gonna let them fight it out." Unfortunately for the show, I am no more emotionally engaged in the conflict than Sawyer.
Conceptually, I believe what Sawyer says is true; there will be a confrontation of sorts. There has to be. Emotionally, there's no reason to buy into any of it. The antagonism rises and falls unevenly; the agents are far too ambiguous to pose a genuine threat to my favorite characters. In "The Lighthouse," Jacob told Hurley, "Someone's coming [to the Temple]. Someone bad. We can't warn them, Hugo. I'm sorry. It's too late." A startling moment of clarity and urgency, clearly setting up the conflict in the subsequent "Sundown." The problem? Once we got to that conflict, the only discernible reason for its taking place seemed to be Dogen's obstinate stance on compromising; the massacre, ably (even if untruthfully) justified by the Man in Black, seemed entirely warranted. But since the Island didn't explode the moment Dogen died, I can't very well tell if the Man in Black's agenda is more devious than he lets on, now, can I? Once again, the writers directly sabotage their efforts by deconstructing any tension they've managed to build up.
The writers forget something else that is very crucial. Season 4 was able to cheat thanks to incredibly ominous flashforwards. Even episodes that seemed to stall managed to feel as though they were getting us closer and closer to the inevitable. From the revelation that the Losties did escape, to the subsequent reveal that Jack is bitter and suicidal (why?!), to the reveal that one of the Losties is dead (who?!) to the reveal that Hurley believed it was a mistake to have gone with Locke (why?!), to the reveal that Jin is dead (how?!), and so on, and so forth. All of these helped paint a clear (distressing, in the best way possible) picture of where the show was going, and every episode felt like a puzzle piece clicking into place. Halfway through Season 6, I have no idea where the show is going, and this isn't a good thing. Episodes that seem to stall... feel like just that. There is nothing emotionally inevitable about the conceptually inevitable confrontation between Locke and Widmore. There was no reason for him to arrive on the Island precisely when he did, as opposed to sometime during Season 5, or five episodes from now. His appearance was random and anti-climactic, and it turns out that the set-up for Lost's potentially most epic conflict is a haphazard mess, tripping over itself every step of the way.
Speaking of poor planning, whose idea was it to give Sawyer's episode to Kate? I'm talking, of course, about "What Kate Does," which is Sawyer's story of coping with the loss of Juliet, for some bizarre, inexplicable reason told through Kate's eyes. Did the writers forget the reason for having centric episodes to begin with? They are meant to show us something interesting and insightful about a given character. So, all enjoyment of "Recon" aside, why in the world would they not take 42 minutes to show us Sawyer's self-destruction with a side-story involving Kate doing what she does worst? One of the character's pivotal moments is glossed over, as opposed to making a true show of it. How much sense would it have made to tell "The Constant," Desmond's time-hopping adventure that lands him that phone-call with Penelope after many years apart, through Sayid's point of view? Or "The Shape of Things to Come," which deals with Ben's choices and the consequences Alex pays for them, from Locke's? The potential was there for the Lost writers to show they were still at the top of their form. They didn't even try.
The same thing happened with Richard. Over the 3 seasons we've known him, he has probably been the most consistent character for acting... well, in-character. He has been cool, calm, and collected in the face of bald-headed time-travelers, guns pointed at his face, nukes being pointed at his island, and all manner of general weirdnesses. ...And now we're supposed to buy into his instant transformation into Jack-on-the-bridge (just add dead Templites!) when we didn't even get to SEE IT? Gee, I don't know, sounds like something with a lot of potential, doesn't it? Something that might have been fun to watch in progress, something that might have been fun for the very able Mr. Carbonell to act out... ...and wouldn't have made his subsequent appearance seem so glaringly out of character. And wouldn't have made his return to form at the end of that very same hour make me throw my hands into the air in exasperation at how ineptly the story had been told. Watch this. "Ab Aeterno" is going to come around tomorrow, and it's not going to tell a single Richard story, in the present, that is nearly as interesting as watching his reaction to the Temple massacre would have been. Just how bad is this? Remember Locke's crisis of faith late in Season 2? Now imagine if we didn't hear Ben telling him the button was meaningless. Imagine we didn't see the tape he and Eko found in the Pearl, which suggested the Swan staff were simply under an experiment. We just jumped from the first scenes of Lockdown straight to the finale, where Locke would appear suddenly, inexplicably out of character and then 80 minutes later have his original beliefs vindicated. And then the next time we saw him, he was acting completely in-character (kind of like "Further Instructions") and had no interesting stories to tell (kind of like "Further Instructions"). There's a reason that story wasn't told that way, and unfortunately for Lost, the circumstances are far more analogous than desirable.
Speaking of characters that have gone missing when they shouldn't have... Sun has become the show's running joke, her screentime reduced to a single appearance every 3-4 episodes, in which she predictably demands to know just Where Is Her Husband?! She has been so marginalized, in fact, that in these 8 episodes (and many that came before) she is demonstrably outshined by Leslie Arzt's scene-stealing performances in "Dr. Linus." Hint: it had something to do with the lines he was given, and the lines she was not. The show insists time and again that she is important by bringing up that "Kwon" is one of the few un-crossed out names in the caves, by making Ilana take her under her wing, and so on... but not for one moment does it make us believe it. Sound familiar? And yet, the development Sun underwent as a result of Jin's "death" -- and the startlingly icy acting elicited out of Ms. Yunjin Kim in her scenes with Widmore in the Season 4 finale -- should have made her a central player and a formidable foe. Too bad they forgot. Desmond, whose ties to Widmore and Ben should have ensured him a key role and a performance to rival "The Constant" in gusto, has been written out simply because the writers couldn't come up with things for him to do. What's with the blatant anti-matrimony? Married people can have fun, too!
So where does that leave us? Talky episodes that contain no remarkable dialogue of note, and conflicts which are too ambiguous to feel involving. A general lack of planning that has resulted in character arcs that deserve attention being condensed, and stories that don't deserve to be told taking up valuable space. (I'm not against Kate having episodes. I'm against Kate having episodes that don't deserve to be told.) [Editor's Note: I am against Kate having episodes.] Sounds pretty bad for being halfway into the final season... but wait, there's that word again: "potential." It keeps coming up, because truth be told, there's plenty of intriguing ideas floating around Lost Season 6, and with more planning and a clearer agenda, they might have been truly great.
-The use of flashsideways to tell an interesting story, when taken advantage of. Jack and Ben both received incredibly focused, tightly-scripted flashes that felt both fresh and true to the characters at the same time. Neither contained an extraneos, unnecessary moment. Kate's and Sayid's, on the other hand, were simply more of the same old, same old, "What Kate Does" actually going so far as to literally replay an island event (Aaron's birth). I can just see the ideas converging... "The usual Kate we have in the regular 2004 timeline is no longer interesting... the usual Claire we had in the regular 2004 timeline wasn't interesting (which is why we stopped being able to write material for her and wrote her out!)... now if only we had some excuse to not be bound by the stories we've told, and to give these characters interesting, unusual moments... Oh, I know! Let's make a whole episode revolve around them both! That will solve EVERYTHING."
-The conflict between such key players as Jacob, the Man in Black, Widmore, and the Losties caught in between. Should have been the greatest thing since sliced bread, even (especially?) during the set-up. Turned out more like a piece of toast that landed buttered-side down.
-Ben's redemption. As mishandled as the episode's island story might have been, the idea of Ben seeking redemption with such humility, after all he's done, is heartbreaking. On the other hand, the idea of Ben starting this search in episode 7 out of 15, and then presumably not appearing in numerous episodes afterward (he was a no-show in "Recon"), is inexcusable. This should have been a Season-long arc, and instead his reduced screentime prompts a Cliff's Notes version condensed to fit in a single episode halfway through the season. It is unworthy of both the character and Michael Emerson, whose efforts to make the 'arc' play out so much more competently than it's written are admirable and almost, almost, almost succeed.
-And of course the increasingly game cast at the writers' disposal:
--Terry O'Quinn's delicious monster -- which instead turned tame and lame. Compare his supremely staggering confidence in "Dead is Dead" or "LA X" when he humiliates Ben, to the excuses and ramblings he makes in "Recon." Is the problem that he now has no characters to humiliate? Well, hell, we've resurrected Mikhail once before... and if John Locke had no problem beating him up at a moment's notice, the Man in Black should have a field day.
--Michael Emerson taking on the humbled and redemptive Ben -- who has received as much screentime this season as Ilana, whose lack of personality makes the Man in Black look verifiably human by comparison, or Frank. I've got nothing against Frank. But when his one-liners are coming at the expense of Ben's character-defining moments, I'm going to second-guess that Season outline.
--Evangeline Lilly's subtle efforts to make Kate seem vaguely human -- and being sabotaged by the writing every step of the way. "The writers have admitted they can't write women," is no excuse. Just watch reruns of Battlestar Galactica. Or pretend they're men. Hey, it worked for Ana Lucia!
--Ken Leung, whose Miles has finally achieved the dream of all young wooden characters -- characterization ("I'm a real boy!") -- through his genuine affection for Sawyer. Sure. It's taken him two and a half seasons to be good for more than his snarky wit and usefulness as a plot device and NOW you stop giving him screentime.
Sawyer: "Hey Miles, you mind hanging back?" "You got it, boss." I cared more about Miles in this one scene (that is completely not about him) than all of his other appearances -- including his own episode, "Some Like it Hoth" -- before, or since. Well, "since" is easy enough, since he's had like 3 of them.
--Josh Holloway, whose portrayals of Sawyer's self-destructive urges were the high-points of the one and a half episodes in which we saw them. Speaking of which, for all the drama that surrounded his 'transformation,' what did it change, really? Yeah, he's with evil Locke, and-- wait a second, he's not really with evil Locke, he's with Richard! But wait, he's not really with Richard, is he? He's genuinely convinced by Locke, who seems to be a reasonable smokey being! No, no, he's actually posing as Locke's trusted lieutenant to give him up to Widmore at the first opportunity. Unless... he's really leading Widmore into a trap. Yes, a trap -- a trap for BOTH, while he leads his friends to ESCAPE! And that's obviously the actions of a completely upredictable, dangerous Sawyer still reeling from Juliet's recent death. Because the Sawyer of seasons past wouldn't, y'know, con everyone in sight to save his friends. Ever. Except if they were all stranded in 1977 or something. But otherwise, no.
All of these things keep insisting that the next episode could be the big one, the one that resolves all of this set-up and makes it all worth-while. And the episodes keep ticking away, turning in a decent if unremarkable product by Lost's high standards. Anyway. All this talk about potential seems now somehow deceptively optimistic. So let's conclude with a final failing demonstrative of Lost's uninspired story-telling come Season 5... and now, unfortunately, 6:
The Alex crutch. Or should I say, the Alex hammer (the better to hit us over the head with). I agree with the writers, Alex's death was a significant moment both for the show and for Ben personally. But when it's used as it was in "Dr. Linus," simply to save time for a monologue that would have otherwise taken genuine effort to write (might have even been forced to turn it into a conversation!)... we have a problem. The writers should have learned their lesson with "Dead Is Dead," which was an outstanding episode save for the title, the death of Caesar (who was infinitely more interesting in his four scenes than Ilana has been over both seasons so far), the anti-climactic flashbacks, and the anti-climactic climax. Well, OK, it might have been just the Ben and 'Locke' scenes that were any good. But the point is, the judgment over Alex's death was built up as this huge thing, and it turned out to be no more than a replay of things we've already seen, with a 10-second cameo by the Smoke Monster in the form of the Man in Black in the form of John Locke in the form of Alex Rousseau. And it didn't even take. What makes this redemption any more definitive? Absurdly enough, I'm almost happy this is the last season. I'm not sure I'd be able to take another episode where I successfully predict that Ben will make yet another earnest (oh, but so much more earnest than last time!) effort to redeem himself, for the umpteenth time in a row, just to demonstrate how difficult it is for some people to change their ways. I'm not sure I could stand to see one of Lost's finest reduced into a Kate.
But "Ab Aeterno" is just around the corner. Little birdies tell that it's going to reveal some of Lost's biggest mysteries -- those secrets that go to the show's very heart. Talk about potential, right? And it's great. It sounds like there's so much they could do with that.
You know... in the future.
-p.W
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