Lost
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[edit] Blurb
But "Lost’s" deepest dharmic resonance is probably the experience of lostness itself. Ironically, as the characters struggle to get unlost, viewers tune in precisely to get lost—not only to hang out vicariously on a lush uncharted island a thousand miles off course somewhere between Sydney and L.A., but to get good and disoriented by the ever-twisting, ever-widening plot. To plunge into lostness is to plunge into mystery, to run off the narrow rails of reason into the wide realm beyond, where one hand can clap and jungles can harbor polar bears. It’s a setting forth, out of the insulated palace of the comfortable and familiar, into the (initially) scary actual world, where nothing is permanent or certain. This is what, in another tradition, is called the fear of the Lord and the beginning of wisdom.[1]
[edit] View from Nowhere
[edit] Other Views from Nowhere
Originally posted: February 19, 2006 Dharma boom
There are a million theories about “Lost.” That’s one of the show’s key strengths: Just about every fan of the show has his or her own idea about what’s transpiring on that mysterious island, and events on “Lost” can be interpreted to support as many theories as viewers can come up with.
Personally, my interpretation has, of late, involved pirates; surely that explanation covers the buried treasure, i.e., the hatch, the mysterious, violent band of radicals terrorizing the plane-crash survivors, not to mention the climactic battle at sea last year between Jin, Michael and Sawyer and the Others, who happen to have their own rickety boat and who stole a child, a maneuver worthy of Captain Hook. It’s as valid a theory as any, though perhaps overly indebted to recent readings of “Peter Pan,” one of my son’s favorite bedtime stories. But I digress -- as one does so often when one’s talking about “Lost.”
But this season, a truly compelling explanation of the island happenings has emerged: Episodes aired in the fall revealed that the island is an experiment run by a collective known as the Dharma Initiative. Dharma is the word used to describe the collected teachings of the Buddha.
“What’s going on here? Is mainstream TV really making a meaningful foray into the Buddhist world? Or is it merely rummaging through the thrift store of Buddhist terminology for the odd hat or trinket with which to play dress up?” Dean Sluyter writes in the current issue of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. There’s reason for Sluyter’s wariness; he notes that the last time the word “dharma” was prominently mentioned on TV, “it turned out to mean a cute blonde hippie girl married to an uptight yuppie named Greg.”
But Sluyter noted other Buddhism-related clues in the show: The computer that must be tended to every 108 minutes may be a reference to the 108-bead string, or mala, that some Buddhist practitioners use during meditation.
And he sees John Locke, the enigmatic character played by Terry O’Quinn, as a man with a lot of relevance to Buddhism: “Thanks to O’Quinn’s gravitas, when flashbacks reveal Locke as a loser,” Sluyter writes, “we accept his emergence in the forward action as the macho paramilitary survivalist of his own dreams, the warrior-sage who may well prove to be the salvation of his people. Yes, even schmendricks like us may rise to be bodhisattvas,” or enlightened beings. (Of course, Sluyter's piece was written before we saw Locke permit Sayid's torture of the man thought to be one of the Others).
An ABC publicist said that neither of the show’s main day-to-day executive producers, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, is a Buddhist. Still, Sluyter notes in his piece that, aside from tossing about words such as dharma, the show does address core issues that sound familiar to anyone on the Buddhist path.
“To be lost is to be stripped of the cozy but confining assurance that you’re on course, on a tidy, logical trajectory from Point A to Point B,” he writes. “If you’re really going somewhere new (toward enlightenment, let’s say), any concept you have of the destination or the path” that you’ll end up on “is necessarily an ignorant concept.”
“Whenever we practice” Buddhist concepts such as meditation and mindfulness, Sluyter concludes, “we must be willing to get lost, to cast off the moorings of what we know or think we know. In that sense, `Lost’ … has provided a kind of mass-audience quasi-meditative experience. How long its creators can maintain the mystery, without resolving it into mere rational explanation or exhausting the audience’s patience, is another question.”
And that is a good question, to digress again.
In my opinion, the episodes of “Lost” that have aired since the start of 2006 have not been great. “The Long Con,” an episode centering on Sawyer, was pretty good, but the other episodes we’ve seen over the past month or two have been subpar. And the effort, via "The Long Con" and the Sayid-centric episode in which Sawyer crushed a frog, to turn Sawyer from Roguish but Possibly Redeemable Guy to Bad Dude has been overly obvious. Sawyer is a Bad Dude. I get it already.
The recent episode about Charlie, in particular, was a disappointment, and as far as I’m concerned, the glimpses we got of the Others and the smoky, black “monster” were anti-climactic and poorly handled. The new characters aren't as interesting as the old ones, the flashbacks are getting predictable, and the mysteries of the island just don’t seem as … well, mysterious anymore. And why is it that characters such as Claire look as if they just came from a Beverly Hills spa?
Many of these problems were bound to crop up in Season 2; what was once radically new is now familiar, so some disillusionment was bound to creep in.
But when we speak about Season 2 of “Lost,” we must turn to another concept familiar to Buddhists and Hindus, a concept recently popularized further by Earl Hickey of “My Name Is Earl.”
Karma, Hickey’s inspiration for turning around his life, is defined by the American Heritage dictionary as “the total effect of a person’s actions and conduct during the successive phases of the person’s existence; [it is] regarded as determining the person’s destiny.”
In the past season and a half, “Lost” has built up a lot of good karma, with this viewer and millions of others. For that reason alone, I’m inclined to give it a break, for the time being. But not forever.
Let’s hope that during the next phase of the show’s existence -- namely, from now until May -- it ascends to a higher plane of existence.[2]
