Live Together, Die Alone
Lost and the American Self
I’m re-watching Lost for the first time since the show ended in 2010. It’s been 6 years since the finale disappointed most of us, though I still cry when Claire and Charlie are reunited. Since then I have learned how to approach media in an academic way and I’m able to critique the show as a ‘cultural artifact’. By this I mean to ask how Lost both reflected and reinforced the cultural makeup of that time. To this end, Lost reflected and reinforced the feeling of being “Lost” in a post-9/11 world of new technologies and belief systems where we have begun to question Science as well as Faith. The show concludes with a message of love and community that is counter to our constructed self, and may explain why it was received so poorly.
In season 6 episode 3 we find Jack as his most Lost. Jack is given a pill by Dogen, the temple leader, and Jack must decided whether or not to give it to Sayid. Sayid has recently risen from the dead and Dogen tells Jack that Sayid is ‘infected’, the pill being the only way to save him. Dogen tells Jack he must trust him, Jack tells Dogen “How can I trust you if I don’t even trust myself?” Out of lack of options, he eats the pill himself. Turns out the pill is poison and Dogen does the Heimlich on Jack.
This scene reminded me of a story I read in Phillip Cushman’s book from the movie Love at First Bite. A psychiatrist, Jeffery Rosenberg, is deciding whether to burn Dracula alive in his Coffin. He says, “Can I really do this? A Freudian wouldn’t do this. A Jungian would do this. A Reichian would do this — But I’m a Freudian…” and then, in the middle of his intellectual paralysis, he exclaims “But wait, I’m also a Van Helsing!”, grabs the gasoline and lights Dracula’s coffin on fire. “When faced with the necessity of taking action in the world, action that will either protect or threaten what he values most,” says Cushman, “Rosenberg (and Jack), like the vast majority of twentieth-century Americans, do not know where to stand or how to act, even in an emergency. We are morally confused”. Cushman continues,
This is the tragedy of the twentieth century… By conceiving of a world that is based on doubt and irrevocably separates “inner” from “outer”, body from mind, science from superstition, the physical science framework makes it nearly impossible to use traditional ideas, philosophical thinking, and a means of moral authority — and thus to take a moral stand.
Jack is the show’s representation of Science, or at least a belief in Logic and Reason, and it has failed him repeatedly. Jack can’t fix everything, because science can’t fix everything. Jack relies on his stubborn foundation of “Getting off this island” because that’s what you do when you are stuck on a deserted island that has been killing and abusing your friends left and right. You get to safety. It’s logical conclusion. But when Jack finally does achieve that goal, he realizes he was wrong, that he was too stubborn and now everything is going to hell because he made the wrong decision. After getting back to the Island Jack is noticeably calmer, happier. He gives over all decision making to Sawyer, but the Island forces a decision onto him. Does he follow through with Daniel Faraday’s plan to blow up an atomic bomb? Jack decides to abandon his pragmatic, empirical self and have faith in Daniel and that they were there for a reason. It turns out Jack was wrong again, his decision to have faith a mistake, so Sayid and Juliet pay with their lives.
Jack, now holding the life of Sayid in his hands yet again and faced with a decision: do I give him the pill? His logical, scientific self would tell him to ignore these mysterious temple people who have just finished torturing Sayid and throw away the pill, but his trust in his logical self is gone. Dogen says to trust him, asking him to have faith, to believe in the people that just brought Sayid back from the dead, but his trust in faith is gone. He is Lost. Forced to make a decision, he decides to find out if the pill is dangerous by consuming it, risking his own life.
Jack discovers the hard way the pill is poison. Jack feels as if he has saved his friend, but Sayid is already gone. He has been taken over by the smoke monster. Killing Sayid was the right thing to do for Jack and the Island, but he has no way of knowing this. So in the end the decision is a catch-22. Either he gives him the pill, Sayid dies, and his conscience is now racked with the idea he killed a friend twice by having faith, or he doesn’t give him the pill and his friend becomes an assassin for the Smoke Monster because he trusted his logical side.
The show is great at making this kind of moral trap for the characters who rely on a belief, and then flip that on its head. Michael, his need to be a real “Father”, his decision to turn over his friends for his son’s safety and his resulting guilt. John having too much faith and dying or thinking the hatch was fake when it was real. Jack and leaving the island. Kate and trying to bring Claire back. Ben and Alex and Jacob. They all built up belief systems only to have them crushed by the island, or rather by the conflict between the Man in Black and Jacob.
To me, it seems like the post-9/11 generation keeps having this happen to them, or rather its a reverberation of the loss of innocence on 9/11. When I was growing up I had a belief in America that life was gonna be great and we were totally safe and God existed and everything kinda made sense. But when 9/11 happened that changed. It made me realize that the world isn’t idyllic, and isn’t safe. As I started watching the show in 2006, I went off to college, lost my faith and started to feel this same way as the characters in the show. I didn’t know what to believe in. I had no ground to stand on.
I don’t think any of us really know what to believe in anymore. The dream of a consumer America solving all our problems died when the center of that world was attacked. We were brought up to believe in that, that we were gonna be great, that we were special. That we’re gifted…
We’ve all been raised on TV to believe that one day we’ll be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And were very. very. pissed off.
Except we’re not pissed off. We’re just Lost.
The finale disappointed because it failed to answer the question everyone really wanted to know: “How do I stop being Lost?”. The show answers the question for the characters, but does so in a way that alienates them from the viewer. The characters are on a “save the world” quest and it gives their lives purpose and meaning. The finale then puts the characters in an afterlife where they are all reunited. Neither of these connect with an secular audience who’s lives are void of meaning. That void is why we connected with the show in the first place.
So, the audience is left screaming “You didn’t give me a payoff to the core question of the entire series! Science or Faith? What am I supposed to believe in?” I think if you look closely, the question was answered: it’s not about the quest, its not about the science or faith, its about your connections with other people. At the end of things, that’s all there is. Which I think is a great message and right on the money, but it doesn’t line up with how we, as Americans, view ourselves.
The American Self is isolated and we feel that isolation is the right way to be, so that when it is challenged by a community identity we feel threatened*. I think making the moral of the story about community and wrapping it in a religious cloak it turned off a lot of people and caused the finale to bomb. This reaction to the series reinforced what was already going on: people stayed lost. Instead of seeing the moral of the story that you are found within community (Live Together, Die Alone), we rejected the ending and continued the search for stability within the empiric, spiritual or consumer realms.
In this way, Lost is a politically subversive cultural artifact. It reflects the overwhelming failure of our modern belief systems. The religious fall into traps of self-deceit, the scientific are too stubborn to believe anything spiritual is possible, and we all end up being Lost. Within the cultural matrix of the show of being physically, emotionally and spiritually lost the core survival instinct becomes “Live Together, Die Alone”. It is not consumerism, logic or spirituality, but community that keeps us from being lost in this era of uncertainty.