What was the character doing before he entered the scene and began talking
or inter-acting with another character, and then after the scene?
Waiting to deliver his lines? In "Lost", yes.
And characters
quite obviously undertake certain token tasks precisely so they can be paired with
someone for some dialogue necessary to advance the story. Nobody
has given much thought to who these characters are, what they think, how
they live.
In a Mike Leigh film, for example, you immediately believe that character
was up to something "real"-- something his character would really be doing
if this were a real world. Jack carrying firewood to the beach was so
transparently contrived, I laughed out loud. What if the actor, instead,
had developed an idea of what he was really doing-- and worked it out in
some detail. Better yet, what if the writers had thought of that
first, and developed the character somewhat. Why on earth, for
example, would Jin-Soo not have tried to simply get his watch back from
Michael before attacking him? Why does Michael only seem to
worry about Walt when it's time to have a big scene of him worrying about
Walt? Why on earth would Claire want to stay at the beach when the
doctor is at the caves?
Most of the actions in "Lost", in fact, seem to arise from the writer's need
to set up a dramatic confrontation of some kind, and most of the time they
seem to be what a writer thinks the audience wants to see, rather than what
he wants to tell.
Sure, you could rationalize every single move by every actor in the series--
doesn't change the fact that none of the characters' actions arise from any
particular insight into anything and nothing they say seems very
expressive, to me, of anything other than the superficial requirements of
the plot.
Check this: what else has J. J. Abrams done. Answer: "Armageddon".
"Alias". Alas.
What "Lost" really needs, to liven up the drama, is for an exchange like
this-- think about it:
Jack: Wow. You guys ask me to be a leader but then you won't
listen to me.
Hurley: Who made you leader?
I've been watching the first
season of "Lost" for the past few weeks. What a concept: a plane
crash-lands on a tropical island and the survivors struggle to survive.
Supernatural events intrude. The hunky stars sport perpetual five
o'clock shadows. An attractive woman falls for a guy who's no
good for her. The castaways gang up on an unpopular dissident and
torture him. He doesn't mind being tortured.
It's a combination of "Gilligan's Island" (without the humour) and
"Survivor" (without the circus master) and the computer game, "Myst"
(without the tedium). It debuted in 2005-- after 9/11.
The makers of the show claim that everything will make sense when the series
ends in 2011. Including the torture? I don't believe them.
It's hard to buy into a drama when the characters
act inexplicably for inexplicable reasons. This is not a comedy though it
has moments when you have to laugh out loud-- Jack carrying firewood around,
for example, for the obvious purpose of looking like he has a reason for
existing at that particular moment other than to hold a conversation with
Hugo. Sawyer enjoying a few moments of torture for no logical reason at all.
Sayed marching around trying to organize a fascist police state. All
the key male leaders with the only guns marching off into the jungle to look
for Ethan the day after he surprised them by coming up from the beach
instead. An anonymous extra is attacked and killed.
And everyone assuming, for no really logical reason, that Ethan was up to
something nefarious with Claire just because his name wasn't on the
manifest. Don't airlines officials make mistakes? Don't people
have middle names? And then everyone carrying on at the
beach strangely unconcerned about the fact that a pregnant woman has been
kidnapped by the same man, after he even tried to hang Charlie.
Did you think Charlie was dead? As from time
immemorial, none of the regulars die. At least not yet.
Sort of diffuses some of the tension, doesn't it?
And let's not forget about
Mike's girlfriend's husband who leaves Mike's son in Sydney to fly all the
way to Los Angeles to tell Mike-- in person-- that he can have custody of his son. This
is a strange, context-less world of spontaneous dramatic lurches and
unmotivated passions. It's a world in which no one, in the author's
mind, has any existence outside of their scenes. They find a
mysterious door. They obsessively chip away at it for days while the
rest of the islanders complain about not having any meat. Then the
door disappears from consciousness, as does the pork, while amnesiac Claire
falls in love with the most annoying castaway of all-- Charlie.
Everyone on the island only seems to be conscious of events in the script
for that week's episode.
So how on earth are the creators of the show going
to explain anything when it comes to a conclusion in 2011? They seemly
only dimly aware of what happened before the commercial break.
It is, by the way, a curiosity of Soap Opera that,
for obvious and not so obvious dramatic purposes, women regularly fall in
love with jerks. So Charlie and Sawyer attract the interests of the
two most attractive women on the island. I guarantee you that if
either of them ever consummate their desires for each other, neither will
express the slightest concern about getting pregnant or catching a disease.
Those things only happen many, many scripts from now.
If there is a consistent tone to the drama, it's in
the way sequences are sprung at the viewer like your annoying older brother
sneaking up behind you and going "boo". The polar bear would be far
more sinister if it behaved more like a real polar bear, instead of
announcing itself to it's prey with a deafening roar. When a character
is terrified by a sound, instead of seeing the source of the terrifying sound, we hear
more sound
effects and get the jerky, blurry camera movement . It's as if they
tried to dramatize the sinking of the titanic by by hosing a bunch of people
sitting on a deck and spinning the camera around.
The castaways seem to be thriving in terms of food
and health-- unlike the first crew of "Survivor" who would have starved to
death if the show's producers hadn't air dropped rice and other foods to the
desperate "tribes". Locke, in two days, acquired the hunting
skills and acumen most people require years to learn. To hunt
dangerous boar, no less! Even more remarkably, no one on the island seems to regard his
rapidly acquired skills as amazing. Nor does anyone seem
particularly grateful. Jin-Soo also seems capable of catching enough
fish to feed 48 people. Think about that-- how many fish would you
need to feed 48 people? In fact, the utter lack of interest in
explaining how the survivors are feeding themselves is breathtaking.
But where the series is most disappointing is in
it's utter lack of curiosity about how a group of 48 survivors would begin
to organize themselves and relate to each other on the island-- other than
the incipient authoritarianism expressed by Locke and Jack and Sayed, who
seem to believe that the others are all children who need to be herded to
the caves or back to the beach or where-ever and told what to do.
Charlie murders Ethan in cold blood-- there are no
consequences for that kind of behavior in this society. In fact, the
event seems to be regarded with the same seriousness as the missing pregnant
Claire.
I would find
it believable that there would be a few rebels and a few outcasts and a few
natural leaders-- but I find it unbelievable that everyone would just kind of
hang around, eat, drink water, make fires, relieve themselves, and chat
about that missing pregnant girl-- what was her name again? Anyone see
her lately?
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© Bill Van Dyk
2009 All Rights Reserved
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