Unbridled optimism (about cultural ephemera).

I typically don't respond to BoingBoing, but that's because machinima furry porn convention photos posted under a Creative Commons share-alike license are not my bag.  But Steven Johnson's post on Lost is bag-worthy, because it inspired an analogy for why I still watch the show that possesses actual explanative power.  It maybe even convinces me.  Johnson writes:

Lost has the unique opportunity of proving you can build a narrative of mesmerizing implausibility that ultimately turns out to be entirely plausible simply by changing one elemental rule of the universe--and then not telling your audience about the rule change until the third act. Mainstream entertainment toys with the conventions of reality constantly (see Back to the Future, or pretty much every Jim Carrey movie) but invariably it lets the audience in on the rule changes early in the story.

Johnson claims that, narratively, Lost opens in what would be the third act of Back to the Future.  Consider:

A boy with a head injury wakes up in a bedroom circa 1955.  In his hands is a picture.  An attractive young woman who's hot for him enters.  He eats an awkward dinner with strangers he seems to know then leaves.  A short while later, he meets a professor.  The boy tells him about the thing the professor had invented that very morning.  After a confused conversation, the scene shifts and viewers catch their first glimpse of a modded DeLorean DMC-12 clearly not of 1955 vintage.  In this car is a damaged model of the device the professor had invented that morning.  The film skips back to the besotted young woman.  The boy is trying to set her up with someone else.  His motivations are unclear.  He stares at the picture and redoubles his efforts . . .

Keep spinning that yarn out—slowly revealing the purpose of the flux capacitor, the odd rules governing the DeLorean, and the relation of the boy to the young man and woman—and you end up with the narrative equivalent of Lost.  Or so I hope.  As much as I slag faith in politicians, I actively cultivate faith in show-runners: 

"Buffy will improve on its sixth season," I insisted.  "Because Joss Whedon knows from narrative." 

"Alias will one day make sense," I insisted.  "Because J.J. Abrams is being paid good money not to make it up as he goes along."

"J.J. Abrams already tried to make it up as he went along with Alias," I insist.  "Because he's not going to make the same disastrous mistake twice."

Comments

[The Modesto Kid]

I have never watched Lost; but if I'm reading the bit you quote from Johnson correctly, I think the quality he's talking about is shared by a lot of interesting speculative fiction -- for instance in His Dark Materials, you generally have to figure out the differences between Pullman's universe and our own -- he does explain them but in most cases not until well after the point where important things have started happening in the plot that are dependent on the as-yet-unspecified point of difference.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Not x-posted? Huh. So this is the exact template for the content that belongs here and nowhere else.

It's interesting to see the same syndrome in media that are not run by well-paid big shots and that therefore don't have the opportunity for the same excuses that you give. Let's take the Flash game Sonny, for instance -- mysteriously highly popular among people who like Flash games, for reasons that seem mostly atmospheric in the same sense as why people seem to like Lost et al. But flash games are written by amateurs, basically, or at least poorly paid professionals, because there is never a lot of money to be made from them. So, when in Sonny, the first chapter has the protagonist's dying mentor handing him a cassette tape, telling him urgently to listen to it, and the tape is pretty much forgotten by the end of the second chapter, you have to shrug and say that the game designer just ran out of time or didn't know how to follow through.

Certainly game-players joked to each other about that tape and what was on it. And in typical new-media fashion, these fan jokes were incorporated into the next version. In Sonny 2, which slavishly follows the structure of the first game, Sonny and his sidekick finally get to play the tape at the beginning of the second chapter. And a song begins to blare as his sidekick says something like "I always said it was probably a mix tape of his favorite tunes." But now they think maybe there's a secret message in it, so Sonny & co are off again. It's the use of irony about this same cynicism about whether the writer is making it up as it goes to paper over the fact that the writer is making it up as it goes.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

Really little if anything to do with the post, but I actually am among the apparently small minority who liked Season Six of Buffy. (But then I'm one of the weirdos who liked Dawn, too.) Season Seven, however... Oooof!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

in His Dark Materials, you generally have to figure out the differences between Pullman's universe and our own -- he does explain them but in most cases not until well after the point where important things have started happening in the plot that are dependent on the as-yet-unspecified point of difference.

I'm inclined to agree. Off the top of my head, this is certainly the case in Octavia Butler's novels. They're interconnected, but you don't know how until you read the next novel, which provides the history of genetic tampering that resulted in the future events narrated in the previous novel. But I do think he's onto something vis-a-vis serialized television, because series-loyalty is so fickle that a show of this sort that missteps early either never establishes an audience or does only to lose it quickly. The conversation over at The House Next Door is instructive, as Wally (a.k.a. Waxbanks) reveals that he's about to ditch the show, despite having spent years writing smart dissections of its strengths and weaknesses.

So this is the exact template for the content that belongs here and nowhere else.

Not exact, Rich, but close. It's not political or historical, nor is it literary or literary-historical, so it lands here. Of course, I just posted something over one of those there that's also about television, so, um, I'm ending this sentence now.

It's the use of irony about this same cynicism about whether the writer is making it up as it goes to paper over the fact that the writer is making it up as it goes.

This is endemic to serialized narratives though, isn't it? They either tend to Marvel Comic-type re-imaginings, in which the clutter of continuity is wiped clean then referred to, jokingly, in the newly reconfigured universe; or to Cerebus-style boot-strapping, in which the plan is revealed always to have been the plan, complete with the brand new wall-paper that's always been there (so long as you don't read the back issues). I'm surprised, though, that it's allowed on a network television show. What's the pitch? "We have half a plan. You'll love it!"

Really little if anything to do with the post, but I actually am among the apparently small minority who liked Season Six of Buffy. (But then I'm one of the weirdos who liked Dawn, too.) Season Seven, however... Oooof!

I don't actively dislike it, as I did when it was aired, and retroactively it fits into the grander narrative, but at the time? That season was referred to around these parts as "Once More With Feeling," as that was all that we saw fit to re-watch for years. As for season seven, I'm the apostate on that one: everyone would groan when Buffy started speechifying, because they all considered her frequent speeches poorly written attempts to reestablish the character. Me, I thought they were Buffy trying to look the part so that she might come to feel the part, and as such, they were purposely pathetic and ineffective. I mean, before every class I pump myself up, try convince myself that I'm The Teacher, then I spend every class trying not to let the class in on the con . . .

[Rich Puchalsky]

"This is endemic to serialized narratives though, isn't it? They either tend to Marvel Comic-type re-imaginings, in which the clutter of continuity is wiped clean then referred to, jokingly, in the newly reconfigured universe; or to Cerebus-style boot-strapping, in which the plan is revealed always to have been the plan"

No, actually something feels new about it. It's the laugh at the viewer, really. Comic book continuity rewrites or boot-strapping always seemed to have a certain seriousness about them, a certain attempt (however doomed to fail) to convince. Despite Cerebus comic book satire, it, too, wanted you to think that there were jokes, and there were jokes about the rewritten narrative, but there was also serious narrative. Now there seems to be more and more serials that just joke in a kind of perfunctory, easily ironic way about the narrative, as if to say "What, you expected continuity? Why should we bother when we know you'll watch anyways?" That's how these shows are pitched to network television as half a plan, I think. Why bother with a full plan? Those fans who care will fill one in, more or less. And having a full plan involves the risk of tedious overplotting, which is much more immediately deadly to a series of this kind.

[Adam Roberts]

I have it on good authority that the actual twist in Lost will have nothing to do with time travel: it is that the entire show is taking place in the background of a machinima furry porn convention photo.

[Wally]

Jesus Christ, did you pick this confluence of topics just to enrage me? Johnson, Lost, BoingBoing? Why not throw in a 'George Bush really did keep us safe' line and talk about Dark Side of the Moon is your favourite fucking album?!

I am physically unable, at this point, to say anything other than these two things:

The awakening-in-the-50's portion of Back to the Future is Act Two of that three-act story, but point taken.

Johnson makes a living saying 'contrarian' shit like 'Lost is worth watching,' but his praise is, near as I can tell, misguided in every possible way, starting from his definition of 'complexity' and moving ever on from there. It...GAH. Blargh! My fingers just broke themselves to keep from having to talk;asfd apbout t hist ;otpioci

[The Necromancer]

I never watch(ed) Lost. It, like so much of the contrived, elongated episodic drivel out there in the vast wasteland, seems too dependent on the same conceit that keeps postmodern thought going. That is if it is mind-bogglingly complicated it must be good or worthwhile. There needs to be a moment of neo-Darwinian "punctuated equilibrium" applied to pop-culture -- a great Burgess Shale die-off -- leaving only the essence of television -- something I imagine boils down to re-runs of Scoobie-Doo. (Zoincs!, that was complicated...).

[Adam Kotsko]

I'm sure that a similar twist will be shoehorned into the few remaining episodes of Prison Break in a desperate attempt to make it make sense -- but I suspect that at this point, the only thing they can do is declare that it was "all a dream."