Catholic Film Reviews

LOST: the TV series

After our keen disappointment wasting 24 hours watching the first season of the misanthropic “24″ a while back, I promised myself I’d never watch series television again without getting a helluva reco from a friend who knew my proclivities. Well, we got such a reco recently for LOST, now in its fifth season, I understand, so the Clan and I sat ourselves down and started watching.

And watching, and watching…

Okay, I confess: we’re two eps short of the end of season one, the second season is lined up in my Netflix queue, and I’m good and hooked.

This, for two main reasons: first, the show breathes a refreshingly benevolent air–the creators clearly like these characters, and wish the best for them; second, the creators have also astonishingly remembered that not only are many members of the tribe Homo Sapiens inherently spiritual in outlook, some of us are actually and overtly religious. I mean, this is a show where characters, sans irony, pray, go to confession and look for the meaning of life (or at least The Island); have a shot at redemption and a second chance; where a rosary may drop from the leafy treetops at any moment.

Indeed, the scripts are so thick with a mixture of Jungian archetypes and Judeo-Christian tropes that I’m wondering if the answer to all the mysteries of the show aren’t somehow answered by the Catholic notion of Purgatory, or at least its more generic cousin, the concept that every person faces a life-reviewing personal Last Judgment at the time of death–I’ve even gone so far as to wonder if the show’s creators weren’t suggesting that the characters all actually died in that plane crash, and what we’re seeing is a sort of “Limbo of the Lost”.

Be that as it may–I’m still very early in the show–there’s no question in my mind that a large portion of LOST’s popularity and “cult” status is derived, not in spite of the series’ overt spirituality, but because of it. Even among skeptics, the old religious tropes are powerful–indeed, they undergird the structure of western art.

For more on this subject, Mark Lawson of the Guardian U.K. has written a perceptive little article on “why artists can’t resist the lure of Christianity”. Here’s just one paragraph:

Christianity, as well as being a safer subject [than Islam], is also a rich one. The faith has become a cultural battleground because of a gulf between the astonishing boldness of the religion’s central stories, and the pinched timidity of many of the people who have practised it. Its narrative elements – the fallen angel Lucifer becoming Satan, the birth to a virgin of the son of God, becoming man and dying on the cross – are, regardless of whether or not you believe them, intensely dramatic.

Which is why, I dare say, as someone once pointed out, one never hears of “the great Buddhist novel”.

Anyhow, for the rest of Lawson’s article, click here.

Tags: christian tropes, Drama, lost, Television