Yesterday, two interviews with Lost head writer Damon Lindelof and showrunner Carlton Cuse popped up that seem almost tailor-made to be illustrative of two conflicting schools of Lost fandom.

On the one hand you have comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with the pair for TV Guide. This is the first question he asks:

The island heals some people and doesn’t heal others. For instance, Ben needed an operation from Jack to beat cancer, but it seems like Sawyer gets injured every sixth episode and by the next, he’s fine. Is that just a TV thing?

The last sentence kind of skews the question in a process-oriented direction rather than just an “OMG what’s going on???” one, but I still think it points to the outlook of the kind of fandom that has me so flummoxed lately. To the extent that they do have considerations other than plot those considerations are still focused on logistical issues–trying to figure out why and how things happened behind the scenes. Simply mulling over and discussing the emotional, intellectual, and certainly the aesthetic impact of what we’ve seen doesn’t enter into it. In many ways, it’s like interviews with superhero comics writers, where nearly all the questions are dedicated to either “What’s gonna happen to Wolverine next?” (in-world questions) or “How did you decide to do that to Wolverine?” (making-of questions), with no real critical response to speak of (unless you count “tearing the internet in half,” whether positively or negatively, as a qualitative observation, which you shouldn’t).

But Kimmel’s interview gets at some of these distinctions itself. For example, there’s this blockbuster section:

Kimmel: People come up to you all the time with theories. Has anyone come close to cracking the code?

Cuse: I think there are two assumptions that people make that are incorrect. One is that the whole answer to Lost reduces down to a sentence. It’s not like searching for Einstein’s Unified Field Theory. And the second is that you have enough information to “crack the code.” The flash-forwards completely changed your notion of the show. So how could you do some accurate theorizing before you even knew those existed?

My sentiments EXACTLY! Seriously, it’s almost eerie to be echoed by one of the show’s head honchos just, like, two weeks after this first even occurred to me. But the best part of Cuse’s quote is that it goes beyond refuting the Theorizers on a logistical level (you can’t possibly know because you don’t have all the information yet) and rejects that approach on a philosophical level as well (you can’t possibly know because it doesn’t work that way anyway).

Furthermore, when Kimmel presses the issue, Cuse responds:

Even though we get asked a lot of questions about the mythology, Jimmy, we’re really trying to write a character show. We spend about 80-90 percent of our time talking about how the characters are lost in their own lives as people. The mythology is kind of the frosting on the cake.

About the only discussion of Lost I’ve seen that treats the show this way was from Andrew Dignan’s now-defunct weekly Lost reviews at The House Next Door, which really bums me out. Now, I don’t think the show would be as important to me if the mythology weren’t there–as a character show it’s not up there with the great HBO dramas–but this is such an amazingly undervalued way of approaching the series–including by the creators themselves, no matter what they say to the contrary, so long as they continue to participate in stunts like USA Today’s “post your theory, get comments from the producers” contest.

(Now there is, of course, the “Lindelof’s Mom” viewer, who supposedly tunes in to the show to see who hooks up with whom and cares not one whit for the monster or the Hatches or any mythology aspects. But as a friend of mine pointed out to me, the kinds of people who fixate on “who falls in looooooove” are almost as bad as the clue-hunters, and they’re certainly a different beast than people who consider the overall effect of the show rather than the romance aspect alone. Theorizers and Shippers–the Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary genre fiction.)

And I also appreciated this bit from Lindelof, regarding the freeze-framed, digitally processed search for “clues” in every episode:

We would love in moments like that to go, “Yes. We knew we’d be introducing the idea of the Dharma Initiative in the second season premiere and we wanted people to go back to the pilot and see that the symbol had been burned into the fuselage.” But if we had known, we wouldn’t have done it in such an oblique way. Sawyer would’ve went [adopts Southern twang], “Hey, what’s this?” We want people to see our Easter eggs.

This is a separate aspect of clue/theory-based fandom that irks me: the tendency not just to see hoofprints and think of zebras instead of horses, but to invent zebra prints when there aren’t any there. Perhaps the most infuriating discussion about Lost I’ve ever had took place on a message board I hang out on, where I spent two or three weeks being told that there’s no way baby Aaron could be one of the Oceanic Six, basically because he wasn’t a ticketed passenger. Now, the label “Oceanic Six” is, in the world of Lost, a media-generated nickname for the survivors, so for Aaron to not be considered one of them would therefore mean the international news media ignored a baby born on a deserted island to a plane crash survivor–basically the greatest human-interest story ever–on the kind of technicality that only people who sit around making anagrams out of supporting characters’ names would appreciate. The adamant refusal to consider basic tenets of human behavior, instead focusing on clues and rules and regulations like the show is a board game, is so baffling to me.

Interview number two is conducted by the Onion A.V. Club’s Noel Murray. This interview is distinguished from every other interview I’ve seen with Lost creators, including the two I myself have conducted, in that it doesn’t as a single in-world question. Also, the making-of questions aren’t all variations on “do you know where this is going?”, which is in a way just an in-world question in disguise. The resulting answers make for fascinating reading, and I’m so enthusiastic about it I’m basically going to reproduce vast swathes of it while encouraging you to click over and read it yourself.

For example, here’s Lindelof on the difference between flashforwards and flashbacks as storytelling mechanisms:

…whereas the flashbacks before had been an emotional storytelling technique—like, “Here’s how Sawyer became a con man, here’s the time that Jack ratted out his father, here’s when Kate held up a bank”—on a story level, they weren’t that complicated. They were sort of the one thing the audience could grasp onto, no matter what sort of wackiness was happening on the island. The flash-forwards are the exact opposite of that. When you see [Character X] in the future killing people for [Character Y], that’s all story. Or when you see [Character A] being approached by [Character B], that’s all story. So the show actually becomes vastly more complicated.

All the flashforwards so far have shown the characters involved in extremely tense and discomfiting places emotionally so it’s easy not to notice that they’re now plot pieces as well as character pieces, but this is a point well taken.

Then there’s Cuse on the different difficulty levels, for want of a better term, for the show’s mysteries:

I also think that it’s rewarding for the audience to not always be frustrated and behind. We have certain mysteries on the show that we hope the audience figures out on their own, and can have the satisfaction of saying “Aha! I knew that! I knew that the guy on the boat was going to be [Character Q]!” But there are other times when we have real surprises, like [Character U] shooting [Character V] and [Character W], where we go to great pains to make sure that nobody sees it coming, so you’re genuinely surprised. We intentionally mix up the degree of difficulty in solving the puzzle.

I still find it immensely frustrating when the show is spoiled by its own opening credits, but again, this is a point well taken.

The pair also talk candidly, and to my mind somewhat disappointingly, about the impact fan reaction can have on the story itself. While they both disavow Lost messageboards as overly plot-centric and nitpicky, they also admit that the public reception of characters–they call this “market fluctuations”–can lead to their premature exit from the show. So too can outside considerations like actors simply wanting not to live in Hawaii anymore, which bums me out enormously, as such things have ever since I found out that the Frankie Pentangelli role in The Godfather Part II was originally supposed to be Clemenza. On the other hand, actors who really click in a role sometimes see their parts get beefed up, and for whatever reason I have no problem with that–I suppose because it’s an issue of collaborating artists, rather than a business concern or an audience concern.

There’s a lot more, including the now ever-present discussion of how having a set endpoint has altered and reinvigorated the storytelling dynamic, an interesting passage about how the DVD/download viewing model is really going to be the norm once the show ends and the actual week-to-week airings are a historical fluke by comparison. You should read the whole thing.

(Links via Whitney Matheson)

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.