“Knowing Television, Knowing Oneself: Returning to the I-land” by Corey Gates

My previous project focused on televisual information and catastrophe with specific reference to my favorite TV show: Lost. I looked at the way the show’s narrative embraced the technical form of television, that is, its signifying problematic in terms of post-9/11 anxiety, and concluded that the goal of this process of cross-pollination between our world and the world of Lost (non-fiction and fiction TV forms) was to create a profit. For it seems television waits for and (via fiction shows) produces catastrophes to avoid the real catastrophe of it all: the breakdown of TV’s commercial system. Two factors influenced my (admittedly bitter) statement about TV: that I had restricted myself to TV theories solely pertaining to the concepts of information and catastrophe, and that I was still recovering after Lost’s series finale broke my heart. I’ve had relationships with TV serial fictions all my life that have ended badly, and I always swear that I’ll never get hooked on one again; Lost was no exception. My former conclusive statement was a vengeful attempt to work through my pain—and “working through” is what I will be exploring here. My selected textual examples all pertain to Lost; however, I think that they demonstrate a process of working through TV’s information and catastrophes that applies to the viewer and to TV itself.

John Ellis defines working through as “a constant process of making and remaking meanings, and of exploring possibilities,” and notes, “[it] is an important process in an age that threatens to make us witness to too much information without providing us with enough explanation,” (79). Like Lost’s viewers, anyone who saw the 9/11 coverage witnessed infinite contradictions and red-herrings to the big ‘why’ behind it all and got little explanation—we are still fighting two wars and have yet to find the widely-agreed-upon prime suspect for the attacks. By the time Lost entered its final season, the plot had become so convoluted that it literally split in two following an explosion that causes the screen to go blank for several seconds. This clip from the opening scene shows the final season’s narrative device: the ‘flash-sideways,’ which depicts two separated in space, but united in time plotlines—TV’s definitive characteristics of simultaneity and repetition.



The narrative logic for the split is that the characters believe there is mythical power on the island that will allow them to travel back in time to prevent their plane from crashing and stranding them there in the first place (which by then had accumulated a shroud of conspiracy and myth all its own), and the only way they can accomplish this is to detonate a hydrogen bomb. Lynn Spigel notes that post-9/11 programming utilized narrative and mythical framing of events, especially the clear-cut binary of WWII, to “[offer] people a sense of historical continuity with a shared, and above all moral, past,” (245). Putting the chaotic events of 9/11 into terms we could understand—like Pearl Harbor, highlighting problematic civil rights issues within the culture of extreme Islam, and an all around desire for good old American values—allowed us to work through the shock of the incident. Lost, situated in history from 2004 to 2010, seems like resistance to the return of the repressed with events similar to the real-life catastrophe of 2001 yet no mention of 9/11 whatsoever over the course of its six seasons (but references the 2004 MLB World Series and quite possibly WWII with the hydrogen bomb being the solution to all their problems). This is OK; we know that resistances will spring up in the process of working through and Lost certainly helps us through in a way that places us in, what Ellis calls TV’s distinctive contribution to the modern age, a “safe area in which uncertainty can be entertained, and can be entertaining,” (82). But what about working through the catastrophe (at least for fans and TV networks that make money off it) that is itself the conclusion of a show as epic as Lost?

This next clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live! aired during a special Lost commemorative episode immediately after Lost’s final episode ended. Throughout the final episode, Kimmel’s show was advertised as having three alternate endings to Lost that would screen following a Q & A with the actors.



As you can see, these were not legitimate alternate endings but parodies of famous past TV show finales (across different genres) starring the writers and stars of Lost: Survivor (reality show), The Sopranos (serial fiction) and Newhart (that sitcom whose finale was the stuff of intertextual legend). In fact, these intertextualities facilitate the process of working through by “rendering familiar, integrat[ing] and provid[ing] a place,” (Ellis, 79) in TV’s megatext. Even though we know that Kimmel is merely capitalizing on Lost’s popularity; that it is “television’s embracing self-perpetuation as a medium,” (White,52) we get the feeling that somehow all is right with the world as this difficult show finds its place among the TV legends—and are reminded that there was and will always be epic TV. This is comforting to audiences and network big wigs alike.

My final clip, a trailer that aired during Lost’s fifth season, further demonstrates TV intertexuality’s pursuit of perpetuating itself in form and content while “working through.” Right away we are told that this show has something directly in common with Lost before we even find out that it too deals with working through a catastrophe, shares many of the same actors, and that it takes as its title the narrative device employed by Lost during its fourth season—and to top it all off, this show’s premiere was exactly five years after the same date as Lost’s premiere.



For better or worse, Flashforward did not survive its first two seasons; perhaps on account of its central catastrophic event seeming too ironically similar to TV’s hypnotic effect on the viewer. But it could also be the case that audiences received the occasional unpleasure of repetition from the show—the interest of this particular type of show has been worked over—suggesting that the issues it represents have been worked through. However, the question that this trailer asks (‘if you saw your future, what would you do?’) seems pertinent to my reformulated general understanding of television, for it positions the viewer in the impossible position between our world and TV’s world via direct address and infinite subjectivity within TV’s super and mega texts.

I have worked through my issues with Lost and can appreciate it in terms of its mastery of TV form, instead of being bitter because my own hopes for narrative content were not fulfilled. This time I did not swear off TV fandom, I have accepted that I will be back for more. Which is why, if I saw my future, I would do nothing except watch TV and take comfort in the image of my present reflected back at me. I have come to the conclusion, via my understanding of its process of working through, that we know TV as we know ourselves. Just what kind of “self” we are dealing with could be too much to explain here. However, I think Borges hits near the mark in his descriptions of the First Emperor of China and Shakespeare. The former ordered the construction of the Great Wall while simultaneously ordering that all books containing information of the past prior to him be burned, perhaps thinking that “the wall in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death,” (82). And of the latter, that like God, he was “many and no one,” (93). The combination of these two comes closest to the TV viewer self that watches to expand itself through the infinity of possibilities that TV presents, or to reinforce itself by only looking for its reflection in the static. Personally, I’m going to go with the “flow.”