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20 MediaMagazine | September 2009 | english and media centre

conclusion, closure, enigma or ending?

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All good things must come to an end sooner or later – but Lost is a special case: a philosophical conclusion which defies resolution. David Bell explores how the enigma of Lost challenges its audiences.

I watched my first episode of Lost sometime mid-2005 and, when it was over, I watched five more. The sense of return it offered me – to a world of escapades in the form of countless hours of my youth spent scouring woodland and welcoming exploration of any kind – gave me a real sense of what Blumler and Katz really meant when they came up with escapism or ‘diversion’ as one of their Uses and Gratifications.

One of the most talked about TV dramas of the noughties, Lost meets its maker in 2010 with its sixth and final season. ABC’s Entertainment President Stephen McPherson promises ‘a highly anticipated and shocking finale’, adding that ‘We felt that this was the only way to give Lost a proper creative conclusion.’

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22 MediaMagazine | September 2009 | english and media centre

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Do we really want a conclusion?

Though I would rather it didn’t have to end – ever – like many audience die-hards I am eager to see how ABC lives up to its promise. But if I’m being honest, I’m hooked on the surge of enigma Lost has given me over the last five years: smoke monsters, Jacob, whispers, healing powers, and by far my favourite – time travel. This got me thinking: do I really want answers? What will we talk about when all is said and done, and the intrigue is no more? What might this mean for the future of the show, after it’s all over?

For audiences of Lost, a world of adventure and the unknown provides them with escapism in its truest sense, a return to the fantastical period of exploration and quest experienced throughout childhood, in the face of the unknown. Audiences are active by ‘diverting’ the daily rut, by yearning for a similar experience of their own. However, because Lost is heavily encoded with messages whose meanings can’t

been confirmed, the decoding process offers multiple readings – endless possibilities that have generated theory after theory attempting to explain the philosophical significance of the enigma codes that viewers have picked up. As audiences are constantly negotiating and challenging the preferred readings of textual meanings, wouldn’t it be more enjoyable never to have answers, to keep speculating, and therefore keep the memory of the show alive?

The Uses and Gratifications theory assists us here, with its emphasis on the cognitive and emotional abilities of the audience that are used to think, rethink, and reinterpret Lost and its wider contextual significance. Characters named after history’s most celebrated thinkers – John

Locke, Danielle Rousseau, Eloise Hawking, Daniel Faraday, Desmond Hume – are carefully constructed to get the blogs brimming with speculation, creating an online world of pseudo spoilers.

Shades of Twin PeaksIn 2005, a work colleague (who also happened

to have recommended Lost, so disloyal was I in the beginning!), still under the influence (unknowingly) of Katz and Lazarfield’s Two-Step Flow theory, was ranting and raving about a series that ‘everyone with a taste for mystery and suspense’ should have seen: David Lynch’s 1990 TV drama Twin Peaks, also broadcast by ABC. Two series and a cliffhanger later, audiences were left in the lurch, mulling over the Black

Lodge, Bob, and what happened to Agent Cooper.

The show’s two-hour pilot attracted new viewers because of what ABC researcher Alan Wurtzel called ‘the water cooler syndrome’, where audience members discuss the series the next day at work. My own experience of this syndrome meant that Twin Peaks was still attracting new viewers – fifteen years later. The second stage of the ‘Two Step Flow’ was still working its magic, and the ‘Water Cooler’ effect claimed its rightful place in the land of Media and Cultural Studies.

It is this lack of closure, this mystery without trace, that I argue gives such series a continued lease of life. Unanswered questions that still circulate in the subconscious resurface and encourage a two-step recommendation in the hope of a ‘let’s see what they think’ response. The more postmodern – unfathomable, eccentric, and surreal – the enigmas are, the more potent the enthusiasm for discussion and reflection will be.

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York Times as ‘the show with perhaps the most compelling continuing story line in television history’, and although the introductory episodes of Season 3 were criticised for being loaded with mystery and lacking explanation, viewing figures for Season 5 continued to rise, with over eight million 18-49-year-olds watching episodes fourteen and fifteen.

What does the future hold for Lost, post-Season 6? In short: much. The show is, in many ways, a prime example of one whose audiences are caught up in a ‘battle for meaning that is consensual and ongoing’, to use Stuart Hall’s model of encoding and decoding. Audiences may conform to one or more of the following responses:• Dominant – viewers accept that the island has

extraordinary scientific properties, and that they are entirely natural in their origin; they therefore accept the preferred meaning, in that there have been no hints in the show that the island might be the centre of alien experimentation, for example.

• Negotiated – viewers accept that the island is ‘special’, yet prefer to believe that there has to be some metaphysical, otherworldly involvement; readings are therefore adapted to incorporate personal ideologies, perhaps ‘cultivated’ as the season continues.

• Oppositional – viewers refuse to accept that there is a simple and straightforward explanation for the island’s existence, and that the creators’ reasoning should be challenged in every way, shape or form. I am certainly guilty of dabbling in all three

approaches, and I believe that is why the show’s ability to anchor my curiosity might eventually lead me to an all encompassing theoretical perspective. But I’d rather it didn’t. Should Abrams et al provide us with resolution and closure in this next season, with answers to questions that left many audience members so angry and frustrated that they lost the will to live (no pun intended), then perhaps they will deprive us of this creativity rather than allow our guesswork to evolve. I hope not, because in fifteen years’ time, when the blogs have all gone quiet, I’d rather not be denied my water cooler conversation – history’s chance to repeat itself the way the island would want it to.

David Bell is a teacher of English & Media Studies at Morley

High School in Leeds.

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