sl-LOST.com

• Tweet
• Share
• Email

• Tweet
• Share
• Email

The pill contained enough poison to kill five men.

Jack swallowed the pill and Dogen rushed into action, performing the martial arts equivalent of the Heimlich Manoeuvre, dislodging the green capsule from Jack’s throat and forcing it out of his mouth.  Thank goodness for clear thinking and fast action, you say.  Indeed.  But let us imagine a hypothetical situation in which Jack consumed the pill in private, without Dogen’s knowledge.  What would have happened to Jack?

Nothing.  Jack would have gone about his business, suffering no ill effects whatever.

You read this thinking “Pearson has lost touch with reality–again.  The pill would kill even a person in perfect health.”  I do not argue; the pill would indeed kill a person in good health.  Death would be instant; the person taking the pill might as well have been holding in his hand a stick of dynamite, fuse lit, sparks flying, seconds left…  A person in good health would have been blown to bits, but Jack… not a hair on Jack’s head was harmed.  The green pill could have had no more physical effect on Jack than the dynamite had in the belly of the Black Rock.

But what would have been the effect of the green death on Sayid?

Here is a question worthy of deliberation and thought.  The only valid answer boggles the mind.  The single possible response to this query will bring us to the heart of a new genre of fiction, a radical way of thinking about drama, an audacious expectation of the audience, and the key to understanding LOST.

Des Confusions

Polar bears on a tropical island.  A statue with four, not five, toes.  Following a precise and undeviating northerly bearing leads a boat north, then west, and finally south.  A ship doctor’s dead corpse washes up on shore just as a group on the beach radios the ship, only to learn the good doctor is alive and well, and standing scant metres away from the ship’s communications officer.  A dark-haired man standing under the awning of a military tent in 1954 is not a day older when he is next seen in 2004.  A rocket payload, traveling fifty kilometres per minute, shot from a boat fifty kilometres away, requires two hours to reach its target.  A twenty-minute helicopter ride takes thirty-six hours.  With the turn of a wooden wheel hundreds of metres below the jungle, John Locke instantly travels eighteen thousand kilometres and wakes up not in the jungle, but in the Tunisian desert, three years in the future, but not more than a blink of the eye later.

The situations and events followed neither rhyme nor reason.  If there was logic to the laws governing the Island, it obeyed no syllogism that science or mathematics could divine.

The physical disorientations forced on the survivors of Flight 815, mind-bending and nose-bleed-inducing as they were, nevertheless paled in significance and impact when compared to the conceptual disorientations the newest inhabitants of Mittelos were forced to confront.

The weirdness of the Island, combined with the mindless violence of life on Mittelos, was too much for some.  Rose and Bernard could not move past the ear-blasting disorientation of time travel through a purple sky.  “Well, we built this place in ’75… and then the sky lit up again. So God only know when the hell we are now,” Rose told Desmond.  She didn’t know which year a current calendar would proclaim, she didn’t understand where the Island was, and she was in no position to predict anything that might occur in Jack’s strange jungle world.  But none of that mattered to her.  Rose and Bernard, each handed a Number Two lead pencil and an official MIGSAT test (Mittelos Island Governance Scholastic Achievement Test), decided to skip the examination.  They turned off, tuned out, and dropped out.  Theirs was not a bad choice per se, but their action was tangential to the trajectory required of anyone seeking influence on Island events.  The intention was not to provide a foundation for choice or a paradise for those too numbed by reality to continue an examined and thoughtful existence.  Rather, the intention was to destroy the foundations of knowledge, understanding, belief–eventually thought itself–so as to render the would-be players in the drama susceptible and amenable to a new way of thinking.

Demande d’Engagement

Turn on, tune in, drop out.

Activate your mind, seek to understand yourself by looking inward, and disengage from all commitments to the outside world.  Turn on, tune in, drop out was Timothy Leary’s slogan, and it became my generation’s mantra.  The Vietnam War was, in hindsight, a stupid and pathetic response to the perceived threat of Marxism.  The “Domino Theory” was flawed, for it was founded on the notion that human beings–selfish human beings–would voluntarily give up their self-centred desires in exchange for collectivism and social tyranny.  Leaders in the Kremlin and in the White House had not the intellectual tools to understand the Adam Smith’s capitalism and Karl Marx’s communism were opposite sides of the same counterfeit eighteenth-century coin.  The gold standard of human economics is neither laissez-faire free market nor centrally-imposed five-year plan, but the commitment of human beings, governments, and religions to full and harmonious engagement with the physical and spiritual worlds.

Your grandparents, children of the Greatest Generation, decided to disengage.  We smoked pot and hash.  We drank Sangria, Whiskey, and Budweiser.  We shot cocaine, LSD, and heroin.  We wore love beads, dressed in Nehru jackets, flashed the two-fingered peace sign, and thoughts ourselves advanced in every way.    We were for women’s rights (well, ah, to a point, anyway…) and we even thought Negroes should have equality.  Most of all, we were opposed to that oppressive military action in Southeast Asia, the one we saw every night on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite in the form of dead, maimed, and dying soldiers in red-earth ditches, on green army stretchers, on Huey helicopters.  “Hell no, we won’t go” and “All we are saying–is give peace a chance”, on their own, are among the finest sentiments of the human heart.  But my generation suborned the ideals of peace to the lusts of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.  We agitated and marched and chanted for peace in Vietnam not because we understood the war to be unjust, but because we saw no reason to die in a far-off jungle when the orgasmic pleasures of responsibility-free life beckoned.  “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” and “If It Feels Good Do It” were closer to the governing mantra of my generation than any pacifist or humanist or religious ideals.  We temporarily adopted those ideals because they suited our true objectives, which in the end proved to share not a single point of reference with any of the nobility of our parents’ hearts.

Timothy Leary made an appearance on Mittelos.  We knew him as Stuart Radzinsky.

The inevitable outcome of a Lucy-in-the-Sky-with-Diamonds, navel-gazing approach to life is the imposition of one’s will on others.  If the only reality we know is the gut-based impulses of self, we will move to ensure that others secure for us the satisfaction of our urges and desires.  We wake from LSD-induced stupor to find our taxes are too high, our government far too socialistic, our responsibilities too broad and too deep.  No PTA and bowling league and civic duty for my generation, thank you.  That was our parents’ life, not ours.  Just give me my remote, a few blow-em’-up action movies on the wide-screen TV, keep my taxes low, and stop telling me to participate, damn it.  Life isn’t about giving.  It’s about getting.

LOST is emphatic about few things, but this is one of them:  The Baby Boomer generation’s response to life is wrong-headed, inhuman, and uncivilised.  As I wrote so many essays ago (http://pearsonmoore-gets-lost.com/Magnificence.aspx), it is некультурный.  If we are to survive, if we are to make an enduring contribution to this world, if we are to realise Jacob’s Progress, we must engage.  We are compelled, by nature, by our truest selves, by everything holy and wise and good, to engage with this world and with each other in every dimension of life, spirit, and will.  We all need each other, for the only way into the Church of the Holy Lamp Post is with a Constant at one’s side, and the only way to move on into the warmth and light beyond is as a group, the congregation of all those who have interacted in harmony with each other to improve the human condition.  Goodness is not singular, but collaborative.  LOST presents all survivors with a Demande d’engagement.  It is not a choice.  It is our truest and only sustainable destiny.

La Vie En Rose

Most of us engage superficially.  Even if we are called upon to overcome adversity, requiring more than a typical level of collaboration, we nevertheless  extend ourselves only to the degree that we are allowed to survive and make a minimal commitment.  The life of singer Édith Piaf, portrayed by French actress Marion Cotillard, depicts one woman’s struggle to make enough sense of her world to bring us a disciplined and compelling voice and songs expressive of the human heart.  Out of her fractured and painful life came great music, great beauty, and an enduring contribution to the arts.

But Piaf is a helpless object of others’ pity.  She is blown about by chaotic circumstance and the whims of caring saviours and uncaring contemporaries, somehow managing in this purposeless milieu to train her natural talents into performances of hypnotic grace.  But at the end of her life, the best she can say of herself is to repeat the refrain from her most famous song:  Je ne regrette rien.  I don’t regret anything.

This is not enough for LOST.  Overcoming adversity does not suffice.  Indulging beauty, celebrating beauty, even creating beauty, is not enough.  LOST finds no merit in Helen of Troy, as beautiful as she is.

Kate Austen certainly had beauty to launch a thousand ships, but she was not called to flaunt perfect smile, golden body, or attractive spirit.  Her innate charm and grace were as useless to her as Jack’s ability with a scalpel or Bernard’s familiarity with a dental drill.  The Island required not that Kate be something, but that she become something.   She could be the Mona Lisa or Monica Callis or axe-wielding Lizzie Borden for all the Island cared.  For the purposes of Mittelos, she had to move beyond her narrow understanding of life into a realm that would allow her to help the other survivors and bring enduring benefit to the Island.   Kate Austen had to become not Helen of Troy, but Joan of Arc.

La Vision de Jeanne d’Arc

Joan of Arc had to let go of childish notions of leading an ordinary life.  Her destiny was to take charge of armies and lead a country to freedom.  This was no small matter in the history of France, and it was no trifle to the young woman’s turbulent and troubled soul.  She faced doubts, distress, and demons every day, for long months and years.  She defied generals and princes and kings.  The psychological and spiritual confusion nearly killed her, and to any of her contemporaries she must have seemed given to madness, a hair’s breadth removed from complete insanity.  Such is the state of mind required of those who move mountains, who conquer nations, who save an Island.

Kate had to be broken down, her former self destroyed, before she could become the woman destined to save her jungle land.  The pain and confusion she experienced off the Island was the necessary extension of the physical and mental disorientation begun on Mittelos.  This was the expectation of all the Island’s leaders.  Jin had to move beyond jealousy and chauvinist expectations to the full appreciation of Sun’s worth as a person and a wife.  Sawyer had to grow from his self-centred “lookin’ out for Number One” view of life to become the leader of his people during the Dharma Initiative’s final pre-Incident years.  Locke had to move beyond anger and frustration to acceptance of the Island’s role for him, even to the point of accepting the painful inevitability of his own demise off-Island.

Jack Shephard’s journey was the most perilous because it carried greatest importance to the Island.  His story was chronicled more fully than that of any of the other survivors.  I devoted a full 5700-word essay to Jack’s story (http://pearsonmoore-gets-lost.com/ApologiaProVitaFidei.aspx), but I have only begun to relate the significance of Jack’s voyage from science to faith to Protector of the Island.  He was one of the most fully-developed and multi-dimensional figures in fiction, and LOST is not understood without careful consideration of at least several of the deep facets of his well-mapped character.

Most important to LOST, and essential to this essay on metadrama, is the reality of Jack’s identity as fictional embodiment of Campbell’s monomyth of the hero:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder.   Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won.  The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”  (Joseph Campbell, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”)

Kate, Locke, and Jack had to be destroyed and re-built.  They had to come to the realisation that their knowledge and almost everything they believed they understood of life was incorrect, impractical, irrelevant to the Island.  They were obliged, for the fulfillment of their destiny and for the welfare of Mittelos, to embark on the emotional and spiritual travails of a dangerous and soul-wrenching journey over continents and across decades.  Their minds scrambled, their souls in despair, they would become the fertile and receptive vessels for a most precious vision:  a vision of life as it was intended to be, a vision of the Light.  Armed with a true understanding of life, carrying in their hearts a new-found vision of the Heart of the Island–the core of human civilisation–they would take charge of armies, defy a dark prince, and preserve the fragile heritage of our humanity.

Les Renversements de la Serie «Perdus»

In 2004 Jack was so faith-deficient he based his entire life on principles and logic that had no bearing on Island reality.  After Locke threw the knife that killed Naomi Dorrit, Jack lost whatever calm façade he had been able to project to that point.

LOCKE: You’re not gonna shoot me, Jack. Any more than I was gonna shoot—
[Jack pulls the trigger, but no bullet fires]
LOCKE: It’s not loaded.
[Jack attacks Locke. Sawyer and Sayid pull him away]
SAWYER: Come on.
JACK: Let go of me! Do you know what he did?
SAYID: (Shouts) Yes, I know what he did!
[Locke gets up]
LOCKE: All I did, all I have ever done, has been in the best interest of all of us.
JACK: Are you insane?
LOCKE: I know I, I have a lot of explaining to do. But, I never did anything to hurt any of you. I even risked my life to tell you there was a traitor in your midst. (He points to Juliet).
JACK: She helped us, John. All you ever did was blow up every chance we had of getting off of this island. You killed Naomi.

Jack’s life experiences, as broad and useful as they were in the outside world, did not equip him to understand the correctness of Locke’s actions.  To logical, law-abiding Jack Shephard, Locke’s expert use of the throwing knife as deadly weapon was illegal, illogical, and insane.  Three years later, every breath Jack pulled into his lungs, every step he took on jungle path, was informed by faith, trust, and hope.  He not only understood the meaning and merit of all of Locke’s actions, he knew them, felt them in his bones, consciously and unconsciously considered them worthy template for anything he might think, say, or do.  Jack’s reversal, from considering Locke a madman to revering him as mentor, was one of the major inversions in LOST.  There were many such reversals.  Possibly the saddest inversion was the one we experienced at the end of “The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham”.  Locke, at the end of his life, had lost enough faith that he planned his own death.  Jack became Locke.  Locke became Jack.

But LOST depicted other, even more important reversals.  One of the unique twists LOST brings to Joseph Campbell’s template of the hero is the reversal of common and supernatural elements.  Jack’s destiny was not to bring Island knowledge or abilities to confront evils in the outside world.  Rather, he experienced the greater part of the hero’s journey of disorientation in the common, outside world, and carried back with himself to the supernatural Island a firm sense of purpose, a resolute dedication to serve the Island’s needs.  The corrective actions of the great hero were accomplished not at the hero’s common place of origin, but in the realm of the supernatural itself–on the Island.  One might consider that this fact did not constitute a reversal at all, though.  When, after several years of searching, I abandoned the religious tradition of my youth and became a member of the faith to which I now subscribe, the pastor embraced me and whispered in my ear, “Welcome home.”  In like manner, we may well consider that Jack’s upbringing in the outside world was a mistake of geography, that his true spiritual origin was on the Island.  Campetin, Administrator at SL-Lost, made this statement with greater eloquence than my muddled thoughts can form into words:

La Réalité Selon «Perdus»

Whether we understand Darlton to have accomplished a fresh and interesting examination of the hero monomyth, we are obliged to agree on this point:  The Island is the focal point and most intensely real aspect of the series.  With Locke, we understand Mittelos as “… different.  Special.”  Perhaps we don’t want to talk about it.  Perhaps it is too scary. “But we all know it. We all feel it…. everything that happened here, happened for a reason.”

The Island, source of phenomena beyond description or understanding, was more real than anything in the outside world.  Jack’s Island was metaphor and examplar of our world–as it was and is (under Jacob), and as it could be (under Jack, then Hurley, and then… whoever replaces Hurley… not sayin’ I know who that might be or nothin’…).  The Heart of the Island is the repository of the most enduring and meaningful elements of our humanity, summarised in cuneiform script on the Cork Stone.   These are the cultural elements of human society worth living for.  They are the precepts of civilisation worth dying for.  They are the only possible origin of our rebirth.

The Island is our home, for it is the Source.  It is the place that most fully and faithfully expresses the widest range of who we are, that allows broadest latitude in culture and substance, that is the reliable and permanent foundation upon which we live and move and have our being.

Notre Renaissance

Every one of the thirty-five major characters across the six years had to experience life, death, and rebirth.  Surgeon Jack died and was reborn as Protector Jack.  Fugitive Kate died and was reborn as Dragonslayer Kate.  Con-Man Sawyer died and was reborn as Responsible Leader James.  They were ordinary, fractured, wounded souls whose essences were ground in a mortar, burned in agonising flame, and redistilled into lives of vital and unrelenting and committed engagement.

I feel a close kinship with the substantial and quite vocal minority of former LOST fans who now express contempt for this most compelling of television dramas.  LOST did not end in a manner that anyone could have predicted.  The series never engaged in linear, syllogistic, traditional storytelling.  Darlton took frequent pains to expand not only the story, but the format in which the story was told.  They were visibly and vocally proud of their flashbacks, flashforwards, and flashsideways.  Darlton intentionally pushed the envelope in their storytelling.  They never appealed to lowest denominators, never explained even the most irrelevant detail of this most complicated of stories.  We were left entirely on our own to make sense of their creation.  Even now, months after the series ended, Darlton tell us the story speaks for itself.  They are not going to explain it.  We are alone, and we always will be left to our own interpretive devices with no help from those who gave birth to the series.

This is the true essence of the problem, I believe–the aspect of LOST that separates those of us who believe the story complete, and those who feel The End was a touchy-feely mess that left the greatest mysteries unresolved.  For those who believe, “The New Man in Charge” is a pleasant but unnecessary epilogue.  For those who lack faith, not even “The New Man in Charge” can begin to assuage their disgust.  What we enjoy, those of us who consider the story complete, is full engagement with a very complicated piece of fiction.  What we lack, those of us who consider the story incomplete, is a reference point common to ourselves and the story.

Darlton gave birth to LOST.  We were never told, but we came to understand over six grueling years, that every one of us participating, the twenty millions of us around the world, would be required to act as midwives to LOST’s rebirth.  In fact, little did we know, we ourselves would have to be reborn.  With Kate and Jack and Sayid and Locke and Ben we would have to die to our former selves, embrace the truths of the Island, and understand events from the Island’s point of view.  With the characters, we would experience pain, confusion, loss, disorientation–whispering “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” (or variants not appropriate to polite society) under our breath or even lobbing a symbolic tomato at the television–or at Darlton–every now and then.

Midwives we are, though, and ever will be.  If we appreciate the story of LOST it is because we ourselves have been reborn.  Our struggles and pains and eventual rebirth were not accidental, not unforeseen.  They were planned, necessary and integral to the story itself; prerequisite, therefore, to any satisfactory understanding of the story as complete in its final 121-chapter form.

LOST is unencumbered with narrative structure.  In fact, it barely has structure, and certainly lacks anything that could be recognised as traditional television storytelling.  We, dear participants (and I do mean participants, and not “viewers”), supply the narrative structure.  We are the ones who, with Leonard Simms (and, ah… some other guy… not sayin’ I know who that might be or nothin’…) Connect Four, connect the disparate stories from flashback and the Sideways World and the Dharma Initiative of 1977 and the post-Dharma Island of 2004 into a cohesive whole that comports with our understanding of syllogistic cause and effect.  Without this essential input from our overworked minds there is no story, and The End seems a cheat, a cop-out, a short sale that is really a cowardly foreclosure on something that should have had structure and permanence and closure.  But thus will it forever be.  For those who have faith, no proof is necessary; for those who lack faith, no proof is possible.

To say we believe is simply to acknowledge that we are no longer beholden to logic as final arbiter of significance and value and causal priority.  We have perceived something of enduring grace and beauty and wholeness and magnificence.  Through our struggles, we have risen to the mountaintop.  Our eyes truly have seen the Glory–it matters not whether we are black men or white men, Muslim or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, for we see now the fog-shrouded green expanse before us, the Island that is Source, the destiny that is freedom, the Light that enshrines the content of our shared culture and depth of our character.

Métadrame

Metadrama is not a frequently employed word, though it enjoys occasional usage among academics and literati.  The word is defined by neither the Canadian Oxford dictionary (my authority of first resort) nor Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.  The English Oxford may well provide a definition, but I am decidedly North American in syntax and orthography and have not consulted this across-the-pond authority.

From the few academic authorities I have become familiar with, I have learned that metadrama can be thought of as describing a play within a play.  A frequently invoked example of this type of metadrama is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare.  But this is not metadrama as I understand the concept to be applied to LOST.

Metadrama as I define it is virtually unique to LOST.  No other story or theatrical production of my acquaintance (several hundred classics, modern general fiction, historical fiction, and several hundred more works within the genre of science fiction; scores of plays attended over my lifetime) places such an immense burden on audience or reader.  In fact, for most of fiction, those on the receiving end of an author’s creative work can be referred to quite accurately as audience or reader or viewer.  This designation is not appropriate for those participating in the artistic creation called LOST.  If we merely break out the beer and pretzels, plop down on the sofa, and “watch” LOST, we will never make sense of the work.  LOST demands our sustained and active engagement.  We, the viewing participants, supply the narrative structure.

Without our input, LOST lacks dramatic wholeness.  With our active involvement, the piece comes into its own, shining as few other works of fiction ever have.  This is my understanding of the new genre created by LOST:

Metadrama is that genre of non-linear, theatrical fiction whose narrative or causal structure is evident through neither chronology nor clear etiology, and must be supplied by engaged audience-participants.

In metadrama, the effect of events in Act Three may play out in the first scene of Act One, a flashback in Act Two may contain the full background required to make sense of the first words of the play, and the penultimate scene may have no apparent connection to the final scene, but may be the precursor to events in Act Two.  “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane is a weak example of non-linearity of this type, though Citizen Kane is a story told in mostly linear fashion, and it certainly requires not anything close to the audience engagement demanded by LOST.  The events and character arcs and plot are engineered by the audience, who may require several sessions to bring coherence and internal consistency to the structure.

La Vie en Vert

Even before Jack swallowed the green pill, he had solid reason to believe the gelatin liner contained poison.  By swallowing the pill, he was essentially committing suicide.  According to the rules of the Island, those designated potential Protector (“Candidates” in Jacob’s parlance) could not die of natural causes or by their own hand.  The Protector, Protector-Candidates, and the Consigliere (Richard and Ben after him) were granted eternal life on the Island.  Therefore, as Jack was aware of the pill as potentially deadly, the Island would have prevented him from ingesting it, or he would have suffered no enduring ill effect from consuming it.  If Dogen had given Jack no reason to believe the pill was dangerous, or if he had tied Jack down, forced his mouth open, intubated him, and forced the capsule down his gullet, Jack would have died, because murdering a Candidate, as unsavoury as it might otherwise be, was nevertheless allowed by the rules of Mittelos.

The status and significance of the green pill becomes even more complicated when we bring Sayid into the discussion.

[Jack unfolds the paper and exposes the capsule.]
SAYID: What’s that?
JACK: They want you to take it. It’s medicine, according to them.
SAYID: What about according to you?
JACK: I don’t know. And you know, before when you… when you thanked me for saving your life, I, I didn’t have anything to do with it Sayid. I didn’t fix you. They did.
[Jack takes the capsule in his right palm.]
SAYID: I don’t care who fixed me. I only care about who I trust. So, if you want me to take that pill, Jack, I’ll do it.

These were my thoughts after first engaging with this scene back in February:

We believed at first Sayid to have been reborn.  In the physical sense, perhaps he is not.  If we trust our intuitions about the interaction last week between Hurley and Miles, it seems clear the seer from Encino knew Sayid was never dead, even if he didn’t say so in as many words to Hurley.  If he was never dead, he cannot be reborn.

Yet we find ourselves aware of new life in Sayid.  When Dogen and Jack have their private talk, the Temple Master tells Jack he must give Sayid the green pill.  Jack demands to know the contents of the pill, and when Dogen says Jack must give Sayid the medicine, for the sake of his life, Jack counters with “He already died.”  This seems a rare and strange place for a healer to place himself.  Jack seems to be hoisting a list of ingredients to a higher plane than Sayid’s life.  Dogen expresses concern about Sayid’s “infection”, while Jack insists on broadening his knowledge of herbal medicines, and all the while, a man who miraculously regained consciousness and complete healing of wounds is dismissed as one who “already died.”  The strange discussion seems askew, the priorities grossly misplaced.

But this is not the only instance of Sayid’s life being accorded less value than abstract concepts.  When Jack presents Sayid with the green pill, Sayid’s response is Biblical:  “I only care about who I trust.  So if you want me to take that pill, Jack, I will.”

This is breathtaking in its audacity.  Neither Sayid nor Jack knows the contents of the pill.  Sayid places unrestrained faith in Jack, and now a crushing burden falls on the healer.  This is no longer abstract.  Sayid may die if he takes the pill.  The only useful question at this point in the episode:  What is Jack Shephard made of?  What value does he place on life, on trust, on knowledge?

As I watch Jack throw the pill in his mouth and swallow, my jaw drops open and I cannot process the event through my shock.  The sequence of events remains askew.  The problem is not that Jack is placing higher value on Sayid’s life than his own.  The problem for me, as I struggle to make sense of this most intense scene, is that Jack is not placing greater value on Sayid’s life.  Something else, apparently something carrying an importance more profound even than life or death, is at play.

Jack couldn’t give Sayid the pill.  He was planning to do so.  He had every intention of doing so.  He resolved to tell Sayid the complete truth, and that was what he did.  But then Sayid said those words:  “I care only about who I trust.  So if you want me to take that pill, Jack, I will.”

Ruth et Noémi

The Book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible relates a story about a pagan woman named Ruth who shows kindness to a Hebrew woman named Naomi.  When it is time for them to go their separate ways, Naomi encourages Ruth to return to her pagan village.

“Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”

But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.”

Ruth just gave up everything:  family, village, her former gods, everything she ever knew–turned her back on all of it, and gave herself over to Naomi and her God.  Ruth discovered something of greater value than even her own life.

Jack couldn’t give Sayid the pill.  Not because he valued Sayid’s life.  He certainly did value the man’s life, and his own.  But life did not carry greatest value in this scene.  Jack was able to risk his own life by swallowing that pill because he placed greater importance on something other than his own life.  Jack placed highest value on the trust Sayid had placed in him.

Sayid and Jack place greater value on their trust of each other than on their own lives.

This is audacious.  Rare.  This is story that burns deep into the soul, engages every faculty of spirit and sense and wonder.

With the intensity of this scene we begin to get a glimpse into the innermost core of LOST.  This is not a show about good versus evil.  It is not about free will versus determinism.  It is not about time travel or electromagnetic anomalies or spacetime displacement.  It is about our very humanity.  It is about who we are at the very centre of our conscious selves.

The audacity reaches even deeper than this, however, as we now know:

The physical effects of the pill depended entirely on the recipient’s understanding of the provider’s intent.

If the Candidate understood the provider of the pill to have malevolent intent, the pill, if self-administered, could have no ill effect.  If however, intent was misunderstood as remedial or beneficial, the pill would have caused immediate death upon ingestion.  That is to say, deadly intent would lead to life, and expectation of salutary remedy would lead to death.  In the end, whether Sayid lived or died upon consuming the pill was entirely a consequence of what he believed about the intentions of those who fabricated and provided the green capsule.

Imagine now that Jack offers and Sayid accepts and swallows the pill.  We cannot know a priori the outcome of this action.  In order to predict with any certainty the effect on Sayid, we must have unfettered access to the complete range of his thoughts in the moments around the discussion of the pill, immediately before he takes the pill, and during the time his stomach is dissolving the non-toxic gelatin shell containing the green poison.  If at any point in this chronology Sayid believes his life to be in danger, the pill will have no adverse consequences, or some Island-created situation will lead to his body’s rejection of the poison in a way that will protect him from ill effect.

La Couleur de la Confiance

LOST redefines causality.  Expectation of death instead brings life.  Knowledge of life brings death.

LOST redefines symbol.  Yellow is life and death and rebirth.  Green is trust and honour and commitment.  The green pill, like the Source itself, is at the same time life and death.  The pill is symbol of rebirth:  of new trust between Jack and Sayid, of deeper rapport between Jack and Dogen, of Jack’s recommitment to all of his people, even one considered to be the intractable agent of his deadly foe.

Just as green is the most prominent colour of the Island, trust is the most prominent expectation among the children of Mittelos.  Trust is the virtue that protects and sustains all the other truths of the Cork Stone.  It is the virtue passed down from Locke to Jack to Hurley to… whomever might replace Hurley (not sayin’ I know who that might be or nothin’…).

We can sum up LOST as la mort et la vie en vert, or simplify even further to the essential core:  Life and death and rebirth are the precursors and the final result of trust.   Trust is the basis of human civilisation, the commitment that allows the Source to give Light.  It’s what keeps the Island afloat.  It’s what makes the world go ’round.

The Audacity of Trust

Darlton entrusted us with the narrative and the plot.  They had their own idea of the way in which the 726 pieces (acts) of this 121-chapter, six-volume masterpiece were to be understood.  But we will never be granted the privilege of reading or hearing their own interpretation.  These two writers trusted us to create the narrative.  Never has a collaboration of this type endured the test of six long years.  Never have artists thought so highly, or expected so much, of the participating recipients of their most prized creation.  I am humbled, grateful, and very happy indeed, to have been a most active participant in this drama beyond dramas.

PM

August 13, 2010
Birthday of director, writer, and audacious storyteller, Alfred Hitchcock

Related posts:

1. Articles of Faith: The Culture of Trust in LOST 6.14 “The Candidate” by Pearson Moore
2. Ex Fragilitate Fortis: The Culture and Faith of John Locke by Pearson Moore
3. So You Could Find One Another: Cultural Perfections in LOST 6.17-6.18 “The End” by Pearson Moore

Tags: LOST Theories, Pearson Moore, recaps&reviews