Vantage Point: Lost (#408)

what it is: Lost
what category: television
vantage point: the story

I guess I'll always be surprised by the fairweather fans who distort the perception of success for anything popular.  "Success" isn't defined by popularity so much as achieving the original goal.

The original goal of Lost, for instance, was to tell the story of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 and the mysterious island they landed on.  As with any TV show, that's exactly what the show was about.  The fairweather fans started believing around the second season, and then definitely by the third, that the show had lost its mojo, and then the show's creators started to agree, and the network allowed them to produce shorter seasons, which was less to handle, easier to swallow, and therefore the series regained its favorable impression, until the final episode, "which was a huge letdown."

As you can see, I never shared the opinion that Lost was anything but what it always intended to be, and that it was a game of perceptions that suggested otherwise.

Simply put, the story was always king, even if it wasn't easy to see what that story was at the beginning or ending.  In the first season, it became incredibly easy to misinterpret what exactly the story was, because of the wild success of the creators to establish an incredible cast of characters, each of whom had a compelling backstory, so that the greater picture became obscured in expectations that distorted what was actually going on, and at a certain level, sensationalism was built into the series, or at least was a main hook, trying to figure out what exactly was going on.  The creators knowingly strung along certain fans who liked the concept of a mythology that seemed like it was actually bigger than the show, especially in the first two seasons.

Yet all of that work was merely a campaign to deepen the experience and to capitalize on a success that was greater than anyone could have anticipated.  I mean, the last time a group of people got deserted on an island, it was a bad sitcom filled with stock characters and ridiculous gimmicks.

Lost was always the inversion of that.  The first season was all about subverting expectations.  The moment you thought you knew what was going on, something happens to reveal that it was actually something else all along.  I think that idea was, well, lost on some fans, especially the ones who were just fans because the series was cool to watch.  The second season was all about this, especially how it actually introduced an entirely separate group of survivors without actually stealing time away from the ones we already knew, and of course the introduction of one of the most important characters in the series, Benjamin Linus.  (How long did it take you to stop thinking of him as Henry Gale?)

The third season seemed to frustrate a lot of fans, and I think it's because the story was slowly changing from the survivors being seen as in control of their own destinies to the island taking over, especially once we learned the truth about the Others, that they weren't the boogeymen we'd thought them to be but rather just another group of ordinary people, trying to figure out for themselves what was going on with the island.

The funny thing is, Lost continually went out of its way to explain that it was always a series about characters who couldn't figure out their own lives, couldn't solve their own problems, and that they needed extraordinary help.  John Locke was the first character to realize and accept that the island was going to be the solution, and yes, he was also the first one to realize that it wouldn't provide easy answers, that he would still have to work at it, and his dramatic arc in the first three seasons, and especially his eventual fate, forced everyone to really begin thinking about how they had to depend on each other to figure it out.

By the time we meet Jacob and the Man in Black, we realize the scope of the story, that the pattern has been going on for far longer than we could have originally realized.  It might seem to trivialize everything we'd been following from the start, but it actually gives that much more weight, because these are the people who finally figure it out, and they needed each other's help to do it.  If Jack hadn't had such a complicated relationship with Lock, for instance, he would never have reached the point where he both accepted the responsibility of the island and voluntarily gave it up.  If Hurley had never come to the island, he would never have found the courage to both trust and accept himself, and therefore become the unlikely new guardian.

And the finale really said, it's not really about the island at all, but about these characters using the island, using the extraordinary opportunity it presented, the clarity it provided them, to finally find peace for themselves, because before it, none of them had any chance of finding it.  The island was always a metaphor, a way of guiding each character along a path to trusting others and in that way trusting themselves, repairing their individual damage, finding balance and peace.

That was the story of Lost.  Some people came away from the experience wanting specific answers to every last detail presented along the way.  That wasn't really the point.  The point was the story, about redemption.  Everything else supported that, and Lost was an experience where most of it was absolutely brilliant, far beyond the scope of anything else ever presented on television.  Perhaps the fans who came to the experience just expecting something cool never allowed themselves to be prepared for what it was really all about.

And maybe, in time, they will be.  That was the point.

Vantage Point: Star Wars (#407)

what it is: Star Wars
what category: movies
vantage point: actors

There seems to be a great deal of confusion surrounding the Star Wars saga.  For instance, many fans of the original films hate both the new prequel films and the fact that George Lucas has repeatedly gone back and "tampered" with those original films, believing both to be entirely unnecessary actions that have damaged the original impact they fondly remember.

First of all, unless you can alter memories, you can't do that.  Secondly, don't be ridiculous.

Maybe it helps approaching approaching the saga from a different point of view.  It's easy to think of Star Wars for all the pop cultural references and the giant impact it made, right from the start, about Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the Force, the Rebellion, and the Galactic Empire.

Yet you also have to remember that Old Ben Kenobi himself, Alec Guinness, thought his role was a joke, that Lucas had scripted his lines horribly, and if you look at his performance that way, you'll see how stilted it is.  You never really think of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher that way, but they were working with the same material.  There's a good reason why they didn't become stars and Harrison Ford did, because he understood the material and what he could bring to it, whereas they merely filled their roles.

What I'm saying is, if you look at the original films from an acting perspective, you may see them differently.  They're not perfect.  Many fans seem to think they are, but they aren't.  I'm not just talking about Return of the Jedi.  They're really good, really imaginative, but they're not perfect.  They're not so different from the new films as some fans would lead you to believe.

Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen, and Ewan McGregor, aren't so different in the new films as Hamill and Fisher (though Portman is the closest to Ford that these films get, and Christensen did Shattered Glass, and hey, McGregor is a longtime star of indy films).  It's the vision Lucas has and the visual splendor that makes these films what they are.

James Earl Jones and Ford brought the real charisma to the original films, just as Liam Neeson and Ian McDiarmid do in the new ones.  They're supporting players who bring outsize personality to their roles.

When Lucas goes back and tries to make the visuals better in the older movies, it's to try and keep them relevant, not for existing fans, but newer ones, the same ones who are more likely to view the prequels the way old fans fell in love with the old films.  Stop me when this makes any sense, because chances are either you understand what I'm saying or I'm making you see Star Wars for the first time.

Stop viewing Star Wars as Star Wars, is what I'm saying.  Alec Guiness was not Kenobi in the same sense that Ian McKellen was Gandalf.  Maybe that'll clarify things.

Vantage Point: Harry Potter (#406)

what it is: Harry Potter

what category: books

vantage point: characters

I was still in high school when I first heard references of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, referenced in the arts section of USA Today.  I bought the first few books while in my freshmen year of college, reading them in the winter of 1999-2000.  My parents got me Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for my birthday, the first hardcover of the series in my collection.  And like everyone else, I then started to attend the release parties for subsequent entries.  

What is it that made these books so successful?  It's my argument that Rowling succeeded because she did what any author does, found what she did best in the medium she chose to work in.  With books, it's all about the characters.  I'll choose to illustrate how she did it by focusing on Prisoner of Azkaban, because it's still my favorite entry in the series and because it best illustrates my point (and is probably the reason why it's my favorite).

Harry Potter is the most famous modern orphan in literature.  Unlike Oliver Twist, he has the opportunity to discover his intrinsic worth in the world in a fairly sensational way, learning that not only is he a wizard, but that his parents died protecting him from the greatest evil the world has ever known, Lord Voldemort.  Prisoner of Azkaban is the entry that pulls the whole story together for the first time.  No, Harry never truly gets to meet his parents, only the remaining individuals who knew them best.

We've met Severus Snape already, and his story is the most fascinating one in the series, though Prisoner of Azkaban is the first time he seems human, even though it takes a long time in the book to realize it.  He's hated Harry since meeting him, even though curiously, he's saved the boy's life on numerous occasions.  Why can that possibly be?  He doesn't like the new professor in Defense Against the Dark Arts, either, Remus Lupin, who harbors a dark secret, even though he's involved in a secret relationship Harry and his friends are not privy to throughout the book.

Lupin immediately takes to Harry, not just because of the dramatic rescue from Dementors on the way to Hogwarts.  Where Dumbledore had been the kindly mentor in the first two books, there was a distance between them.  Harry was very much a child to the headmaster.  Lupin treats him like a peer.  Why is that?

Harry's biggest concern is Sirius Black.  He knows he should fear him, but why?

And Ron's rat Scabbers suddenly becomes the most important pet in the series.

The key to all these characters is that they're all connected to Harry's parents in weird and startling ways.  Snape, as I said, begins to blossom thanks to Prisoner of Azkaban, but it's the discovering of Lupin and Sirius and even Peter Pettigrew as complicated members of the inner circle of a previous generation, friends and betrayers of James and Lilly Potter, that deepens the story of young Harry Potter.

For most of the series, and especially in the first few books, it may be easy to assume that Rowling is writing a narrative of education angst, but no, she's deliberately building a world of immense complexity, through the eyes of children, not in a childlike way, but through a dawning maturity, and it's Harry who's always at the center of things.  His relationships define everything, and never before or after are the relationships and how he comes to understand them as important as those in Prisoner of Azkaban.  Here is where we discover how important her characters are to Rowling.

Why love this series?  Here's a good place to start, if you've ever been curious.