Lost

 

 

 

Paradise Lost

 

In the final episode of "Lost," we find out that, in fact, all of the passengers and crew of Flight 815 died in the crash, instantly.  They are all, already dead.  So this "island," upon which most of the action of the show has been taken place, never existed in reality - it was a kind of illusion, or dream.  Or, better yet, the island does exist, but in a reality that is, in a sense, more real than our reality.  You see, "Lost" was a religious allegory, or perhaps not an allegory, but a very explicitly religious story, and the stories it tells are stories of an afterlife - with the possibility of something like the traditional concepts of salvation or damnation.

Within this illusion, dream, alternate reality, or what have you (movie? television show?), some of the passengers of of Flight 815 died instantly, whereas others died in the subsequent days and months.  Why is that?  Because many of the people who died in the plane crash (in our reality) could be judged immediately as either worthy of salvation or damnation, and so immediately went to their respective destinations, whereas a certain smaller group of people were problem cases - it was not easy to sort them into the "good" box or the "bad" box.  More testing had to be done.  

In other words, the "island" in "Lost" is something like the traditional concept of purgatory.  Indeed, the show borrows heavily from Dante's Purgatorio, the second book in his Divine Comedy, where purgatory is depicted as a huge island, or continent, on the other side of the Earth, the exact antipode of Jerusalem.  At the center of the island in Dante's Purgatorio is a gigantic mountain, rising up from the water. The souls here are tormented almost as much as they are in hell.  The pilgrims must make their way up the mountain, where people are tortured and purged of their sins, to the very top, which is the Garden of Eden, which is where Virgil must stop leading Dante, and from this point, Dante is led into Paradise by his beloved Beatrice.  Throughout "Lost," at many key points in the story, characters are either ascending or descending - themes that will play out in various ways, as we will see.

"Lost" freely makes use of imagery from the Purgatorio, and makes many references to other great works of literature, notably Shakespeare.  Not only does the island parallel purgatory, but it also parallels the island from The Tempest, a play in which a ship full of Italian nobles crash onto an island, only to be subjected to a series of a sorcerer's illusions and hallucinations, which torment them and test their character.  As in many Shakespeare plays, there are "woods" - when the inhabitants of the island venture into the trees, they are often visited by surreal visions, voices, strange phenomena, memories, horrors, confusing, fluid sexuality and changes to their identity.

The Dharma Initiative is an organization that torments the inhabitants for reasons that are entirely unclear to them.  But the answer is staring them in the face: when Jack demands, "Who are you?!" Ben replies "We're the good guys, Jack."  And they really are - they are the angels of purgatory, sent to torment the recently departed souls and test their faith.  (Ben Linus - literally, son of Linus, possibly a reference to 2.Timothy, tying the Old and New Testaments together.)  More precisely, the Others are truly angels, sent by God, and the Dharma Initiative consists mostly of human souls that have been struggling for centuries to attain salvation, under the guidance of the Others, and in so doing become, so to speak, angelic, or angel-like.  

Ben is a mysterious and complex figure.  The angels of heaven exist only to cause the most profound kind of joy; the demons of hell are there only to cause torment and pain.  But the beings of purgatory are very gray beings.  Their job is to sort people - the righteous from the wicked.  Ben can be, surprisingly, in certain ways, benevolent.  But he can also be sadistic, taking obvious pleasure in leading souls to their self-destruction.  He may be a servant of the highest spiritual powers, but he is also very deceitful, constantly tricking almost all of the characters and causing extreme confusion.  But if you pay close attention to his words, he rarely overtly lies.

Ben answers to a higher power.  This mysterious figure, who occupies the cabin, is sometimes called "Jacob".  There are only certain people, "chosen" people, who can see him; others can merely hear his voice.  He is spooky, like a spirit - a Holy Spirit.  Of course, in the Bible, Jacob is another name for that major patriarch who is also called Israel - and his twelve sons are the progenitors of the twelve tribes of Israel.  Later, when John Locke enters the cabin, which is something like the equivalent of the Temple at Jerusalem in the Bible, the house of God, he instead speaks with "Christian," who says that he can act as a representative for Jacob.  Possibly, the entity in the cabin appears differently for different people - perhaps he appears as "Jacob" (i.e., Israel) for Ben, because he is Jewish, while appearing as "Christian" for John, who is, well, Christian.  Jacob, Christian - J.C., i.e., Jesus Christ.

At first, the inhabitants find (and descend into) Dharma Initiative bunkers in which people have to do things like pushing a button every 118 minutes (roughly the length of a movie) for fear that something horrible will be released, if they don't (a bit of a Sisyphean task, worthy of an inhabitant of the afterlife, like the fate of Tantalus) - which is explicitly described, somewhat confusingly, as a test of faith.  Will you be able to keep it up for days?  Years?  Eternity?  Then they find surveillance centers that seem to indicate that earlier predicaments were nothing but psychological experiments.  In a way, this is true.  But the Others are not testing their material brains, but rather their souls.  The Dharma Initiative puts the inhabitants in cages which they can escape, if they want to.  Kate jumps out of hers fairly easily, almost comically, but then jumps back in; Sawyer's cage is unlocked but he refuses to leave - symbolic of their souls' progress.  When Jack is brought back into his glass enclosure, his guard makes a reference to the expression "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones," which works on several levels.

Solzhenitzen once famously said that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.  In Lost, all the major characters are conflicted - they usually are deeply flawed, yet they have some kind of saving grace, and it unclear which side of them will win out in the end.  

When characters die, it means that they have finally passed the test - or failed it.  Their time in purgatory is over - now it is time for salvation, or damnation.  The tests leading up to this occur in different ways for different characters.

Take, for instance, Boone, the first character to die (besides all of the corpses on the shore).  When he and his sister Shannon are introduced, they seem to be spoiled, obnoxious, bratty rich kids - supposedly, during the casting process, when they were searching for Shannon, they were looking for a Paris Hilton type.  Gradually it comes to light that there is a complex, on-again-off-again quasi-incestuous affair going on between the two of them (it turns out, may not be truly incestuous, since they are step-siblings rather than biological siblings, and met when their parents married, at which point they were both of age).  Not very long into season 1, it becomes clear that Boone was simply immature at the beginning.  As their stay on the island stretches into days and weeks, he becomes open-minded, helpful, heroic, brave, selfless, and obedient, ascending into the symbolic plane without a thought for his own safety, and in the last full measure of devotion demanding that the medical equipment not be used up on him, so that others may survive.  His last words are "Tell Shannon -" at which he breaks off and dies.  Some assume that the message he was going to give was his love for her.  I think it was not that, or not just that, but also that he wanted to tell her how to attain salvation.  He had to die, then, because Shannon had to discover that path for herself.

Then there's Walt.  He's already, essentially, a good kid, but he has some resentment issues to work out with his dad - feelings of abandonment - which will become another major theme for Lost.  (Boone, too, had daddy issues, as do so many characters on this show - perhaps the father is a stand-in for the Father, and the relationship of the soul with God.)  Once he learns to love and trust his dad, he joins the Others, becoming an angel-like being that only appears to the other characters in mysterious visions (for instance, through the computer screen).  Like Jacob, he can only be seen by people when their souls are in a sufficiently awakened state.

His dog, Vincent, also becomes another kind of semi-angelic character.  I suspect that Vincent is named after St. Vincent De Paul, a real-life saint, whose adventures - being captured while at sea by pirates and forced to live as a slave on an island - may have been one of several true inspirations for the novel Robinson Crusoe, which was, itself, an obvious influence on Lost.  In any case, it's a weird name for a dog.  Vincent disappears early on in the show (he is "lost") only to be found again, some episodes later, like Walt's faith.  (I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see....)

Claire, too, becomes a kind of angel, appearing in the cabin together with Christian - almost a Madonna-like figure, a Holy Mother.  Walt, Vincent, and Claire eventually become, not so much characters, as symbols for the possibility of redemption for other characters.  It is as if they become guides, leading the other characters upwards.  But they - together with Jacob, Christian, and, yes, even Ben - cannot reveal directly that they are the hope of salvation to the other souls - that would ruin the test.  The souls must make the right choice on their own, without explicit guidance.  And so these figures, especially Ben, appear in fearsome forms, intentionally frightening, so that the souls will be wary and will not trust them.  But, despite all these appearances, we must learn to trust them, in a way, because as Ben says, "I always have a plan."

On the other hand, although there are angels on this show, there are also devils.  Although the Others want to lead the human souls to heaven, the smoke monsters are always ready to drag people to hell.  How did Mr. Eko fail?  I have to admit, I feel bad for him and don't totally understand.  He clearly, sincerely, desperately wanted to do the right thing - perhaps he was too driven in this passion?

The survivors of Flight 815 are a motley crew, each in a way representing a different sin, a different knot in which a soul might become entangled - but not exactly reducible to that sin.  The rock star, Charlie Pace, is obviously a heroin addict.  But he also longs for family, warmth, togetherness.  Indeed, it was this longing that led him into drug addiction in the first place, trying to fit in with his older brother and bandmate and their friends.  He is adrift in the world until he finds resolution and purpose and winds up sacrificing himself for his friends and the people he loves.

What about Shannon?  Her sin would seem to be sloth.  When the other passengers are searching for food and water, and trying to do what they need to do to survive, she refuses to help.  She refuses to take on any responsibility, whatsoever.  But the reason for this is interesting: she thinks they will be saved any minute now.  In a way, you might say she has faith - perhaps, paradoxically enough, too much faith.  Or, the wrong kind of faith, a faith that keeps her isolated from the other passengers, causing her to be self-centered and selfish.  She has a redemption arc by getting caught up in the drama.  She starts small, by taking care of the dog Vincent, but works her way up to larger responsibility, at which point she starts to be able to see Walt, and finally reaches a spiritual awakening by falling in love with Sayyid.  Tragically, they cannot find happiness and consummate their love, because as soon as she has found a meaning for her life, outside herself, her test is complete and it is time for her to die - that is, it is time for her soul to move on to the higher realm.  She dies, running towards her vision of Walt.

Superficially, Hugo "Hurley" Reyez's sin seems obviously to be gluttony, but again things aren't so simple.  As with Shannon, the worldly sin is a metaphor for a deeper spiritual reality.  Hurley teeters on the edge of a kind of heresy, something like Gnosticism.  He is never sure if the world he sees around him is real, or if it is his own hallucination.  Of course, as things turn out, he is right to question the world of appearances.  He eats without hesitation, even though the material things he is stuffing himself with lack genuine spiritual substance.  Ben loves to torment him: Hurley shoves a cracker into his mouth, and Ben delights in telling him that it's 15 years old - the ghost of a cracker - a sad communion.

Ana Lucia's sin is obviously wrath. As a police officer, she frequently committed excessive violence and acts of police brutality, up to and including murder.  She's hotheaded and hardheaded, quick to judge and always ready to act.  But at her core, she is motivated by a strong sense of justice.  She has the chance to shoot Ben and achieve vengeance, but chooses not to, handing the gun over to Michael.  In that moment of mercy, her soul achieves salvation.  Thus, she too becomes an angel - and here we have the most direct reference to Dante's Divine Comedy, because in that work, St. Lucia (whose name literally means "light") is one of the three blessed ladies (together with Beatrice and Mary) who lead Dante's soul to paradise.

For that matter, there's also Michael himself, who ends up working for Ben and thus (again, despite appearances) becomes a kind of angel.  Not surprising, since "Michael" is of course the name of the most well-known archangel in the Bible.  Starting from the very first episode, Michael is trying, desperately, to be a good person.  Everything Michael does fits into Ben's "plan".

Throughout "Lost," names of characters are obviously very significant.  Many of the characters share names with famous philosophers or literary figures.  These form a kind of progression, which is easy to see once one understands that the central theme of Lost is that of faith and doubt.  There's John Locke, David Desmond Hume, Danielle Rousseau, Carl Martin, Goodwin Stanhope, Mikhail Bakunin, and Richard Alpert.