Just a quick note: I’m working my way through the Lost series finale on the DVR. I’ll be watching it during breaks in the day. Such is life. I just don’t have a three-hour chunk of time to devote to it. And besides, I’m not that fanatical. Really. I’m not. Really.
But rest assured, I’ll have opinions – indeed, already have opinions! – about how it’s ending and what’s gone on in the whole series.
UPDATE
I’ve finished watching it, but my thoughts are all over the place. I’ll write something about Lost when things settle down in my head a bit.
My dad asked me what I thought of it, and I told him, “I’m not satisfied.” (This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me. It came as no surprise to me, even.) But my dad challenged me: why aren’t you satisfied? The actors and producers and everybody did their job! They confused you, and got you to watch the whole series! The advertisers who bet on the show got their money’s worth!
So I told my dad to shut up.
True, I’m very much a romantic. But just because romanticism is a kind of distortion doesn’t mean that a story can be reduced to its fiscal bottom line or its Nielson ratings. That kind of … cynicism? reductionism? materialism? I’m not sure what the right term is, but it also is a distortion of reality.
The best I can put it is, stories are important because they give us vicarious experiences, ways of living and thinking and relating that we do not or cannot have in our own lives. They draw us out of ourselves and help us to live with and in and through other people. They form community and relationship. And, despite the business aspects of story telling these days, it’s a dehumanizing lie that a story can be reduced to mere business concerns.
Lost did a great deal of that very well. And I loved most of the finale. But there were a few aspects that just, well, missed the mark. And I’ll need to think about it a bit to figure out exactly what I was missing from the finale and (therefore) from the show as a whole.
Recent Comments