After finishing Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which was a marvelous listening/reading experience, I decided to follow it up with another one of the classics available for free on Kindle Unlimited, many of which also have audible soundtracks. My checked-out list on Kindle Unlimited is always at the maximum of ten, and so when I find something I want (that I can thus read for free), I have to return one of the ones on my list. It's always fun to be able to return one that I've actually read, instead of one that has been sitting on my library list on my iPad for two years running, but which I don't want to return, lest it not be available for free any longer.
I decided the next logical choice was one of the suggestions that Amazon provided for me, The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. I had never read a Verne novel before. My late father was a science fiction fanatic, devouring paperbacks one after another, and he considered Verne to be the father of that genre. I felt a connection to my father in finally being able to read a Verne story. I thought of beginning with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but I discovered the Mysterious Island was. prequel to that story, so I resolved to read it first.
Moreover, I knew that both The Lost World and The Mysterious Island were supposedly inspirations used for the television series Lost, which I watched in real time without a DVR (the old school way) as it was broadcast on ABC from 2004-2010. It was the last such television series I watched that way, for reasons I'll describe.
I loved Lost when I first started watching it. I debuted in the fall of 2004 during the Presidential election. At the time I had just left New York and began a cross-country trip on my own, at the start of what would be years of wandering. Without going into much detail I'll just say that it was not a happy time in my life. Five years after gong to New York in 1999, I had left broken, confused, and disoriented.
The premise of the television show seemed to capture not only the confusing surrealism I experienced personally, but of the entire country. The premise---of a group of survivors of a plane crash who find themselves stuck on an island in the Pacific, where weird things begin happening, and where they seem to be cut off from the world in some unexplainable way, seemed to reflect exactly what America had become in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq War. Nothing made sense. There seemed to be no way back to the reality we knew.
I picked up watching the show a few episodes into it, while I was staying in Portland with my friends Adam and Marie, who were generous and to let me stay their attic bedroom, where I rigged an old television to get the broadcast. At the time Marie was about to deliver her first child. I was imposition on them being there, while working out some disastrous consequences of personal decisions in my life. For this I am forever grateful to them and nothing that has come between us since then could ever change that. Despite our estrangement, Adam gets a lifetime pass from me in regard to mending fences due to political differences, although I think it will be a long time before that comes to pass.
I was hooked on Lost from the beginning---the characters, the spooky storylines, and the plot twists. I was blown away, as most people were, by the season finale. During the following summer I eagerly awaited the start of the second season and the mad rush of ecstasy when it premiered. Damon in the bunker listening to Cass Elliot. Why was that so perfect?
Of course nothing made sense in Lost. It was one weird unexplained mysterious twist after another, all told with multiple overlapping storylines from point of view of different characters, and jumps back in time to the life of the various passengers before the crash. Somehow we got to learn what put each of them on that plane.
All during the show's run, people speculated online as to what things meant. This was before social media had taken off, so such discussions were much more limited than now. I didn't spend time pursuing these thoughts shared by others, the way I might do now. I simply enjoyed and savored the show in real time as it was broadcast, the way people used to do.
Or at least I did so until the final season, and the series finale. As I would tell people later, when the series finale was done I felt like throwing my television set out the window.
I felt like I had been taken on a six-year long con job. Almost none of the storylines and mysterious plot elements that had been established by the writers was resolved. It was a big chaotic wreck. What resolution we did get was on the level of a children's story. There was no sophistication. There was no satisfaction of anything making sense.
Instead all we got was a strung-out spooky set of premises that was left mixed up and in pieces. It was clear the writers never had any grand plan for the strange plot elements they had introduced. It was just the feeling of a storytelling.
Nevertheless the writers and showrunners were hailed as creative geniuses. One of them has gone on to be one of the highest paid directors and storytellers in Hollywood, and was gifted the direction and writing of one of the Star Wars sequel movies. He commands the highest of salaries today.
He has done so by wrecking nearly every story he touches. He destroyed the entire universe of Star Trek, for example. His reboot of that old series, featuring a young Kirk and Spock, was brilliant in the feeling it conveyed, but the story was junk and made no sense. In fact, he destroyed the canoncical narrative of that series.
The fact that he is regarded as one of the greatest geniuses in Hollywood tells you a great deal about what has happened to the industry of cinematic storytelling. To be blunt, it no longer exists as it once did. All you need now is a premise. You don't need story. You don't need narrative.
Looking back I can chart those years between 2004-2010, I see the decline of narrative in America until we have worthy storytelling left. The last two years of that series overlapping with the obsessive movie watching I did while traveling the country and starting this blog. At the time I was in search of narrative. I was trying to discover how stories are told. Movies of that epoch still held together, but I don't think they do anymore. All storytelling is about affirming political truth now. It is about being woke. All story elements are codified elements of political messaging. Hollywood has destroyed itself on this principle, but first it had to destroy narrative, and Lost was the vehicle by which this was done.
I did not watch Game of Thrones. My sister and her husband were big fans of that show, and they introduced me to it while I was staying at their house. I watched part of an episode and zero interest in watching anymore., My impression of how that show ended its run in 2019 is that a great many of those watching it were as upset by the lack of story resolution as I had been with Lost in 2010. My sister told me she was satisfied with the conclusion, but the hesitancy with which she answered my query on this made me suspect that she was deceiving herself, and did not want to admit she had wasted so much time on a narrative trainwreck.
But this trainwreck is par for the course now in Hollywood. A coherent meaningful story is rare now. Meaninglessness is in vogue. Meanwhile our culture cries out for meaningful narrative. The video bloggers I watch, such as Nerdrotic and Overlord DVD* and others, emphasize this point constantly, while expressing their disappointment in one Hollywood failure after another. The situation is always the same. The story starts out with some exciting premise, and then descends into incoherence, asserting its own genius on the grounds of its correct political posturing after race and gender.
The revolution was televised after all, and it sucks.
Yes, we cry out for narrative. We yearn for a narrative that bring the country and the culture together instead of contributing to the further disintegration of meaning. As I said before, I regard this.current political conflict as a War on Meaning. I spent a full year understanding Derrida and Deconstruction in part so I could fight back against it. It was like ninja training against the Critical Theorists, who have only one weapon in their narrative arsenal---take things apart and leave them broken, then pat yourself on the back for changing the male heroes into female ones, and showing how white supremacy is at the root of all bad things in human nature. Yuccch.
The only good thing about Lost I can say now is that is that it predates most of the Woke Cultural Revolution that took over our society after 2014. There are elements of that in there, to be sure---the idea that the little black kid has magical powers because of his blackness---but they seem downright harmless by today's hyper hamfisted standards.
I wanted so much to like that show. Even looking back, there are elements of stylistic genius, such as the Dharma Initiative, which was a 1970's era techno-utopian cult with the values of the counterculture. I remember when that kind of thing was in vogue in the future---the promise that the space age would create new types of human beings with new values in a better world, in balance with each and nature, all while living in geodesic domes. In the 2000's this was so wild and retro. Those decades seemed long in the past. It was a refreshing nostalgia to the culture I saw in paperback books in the tobacco store, the bestsellers that told us how psychology was changing our cultural awareness. This was of Lost was brilliant because it turns out to have anticipated exactly where we were heading in our nation. We got throw into surreal confusion by 9/11 and landed in a totalitarian woke cult.
But they never paid off on that premise. Instead they squandered it in ridiculous character arcs and meaningless plot twists. At the end of the show it had all the depth of a Hallmark greeting card. The final scene was in a room that evoked an airport chapel (I have a hobby of visiting those when I can). All that promise of the premise crumbled away because the story failed. The warning about where we were heading as culture---into the nightmare of woke cults and transhumanist hyper-processed Beyond Meat diets---landed without an impact.
This brings me back to Verne. By today's standard, the movie is absolutely reactionary and white supremacist, even though the main character (at least in the early story) is Union soldier who is an abolitionist, and the island is named after Abraham Lincoln. It even has a strong black character. We know that counts for nothing now. The only thing we have now is obese lesbians of color marching down the streets of Pacific Northwest cities followed by obedient white kids in their slave masks haranguing people in their homes about how awful they are. You are supposed to take it and grovel in humiliation, and if you don't you are labeled all sorts of words, none of which have any meaning to me now, and to which my response is whatever.
I love The Mysterious Island for all the reasons that would now get it labeled as white supremacist literature. Verne truly loved American culture, and found much virtue in it. The five Americans (four white, one black) who land on the island at the beginning of the story are clearly meant to represent the best of American society in the 1860s.
As for the narrative, well I can't make a judgment about that part yet. I assume that it's going to hang together. So far I'm 22% into the story (as Kindle tells me). Verne is only beginning to reveal the "mysterious" parts of the island. But somehow it's gripping as I watch Captain Harding use his pocket watch and stick to reckon the latitude and longitude of their location in the middle of the South Pacific.
Now that's a hero. Heroes require meaning. Someday we will have them again. Maybe sooner than we think.
*Overlord DVD has spoken of Lost in almost the same words I have used, and with the same furious anger whenever the subject comes up. He can go on for minutes on end about it during his livestreams.
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