'Lost': Go Ask 'Alice'

Doc Jensen connects the dots between the show's Lewis Carroll references -- from fantasy vs. reality themes, to the Looking-Glass resonance, to more on the black/white, good/evil themes -- creating a fuller picture of Jacob and the Man In Black?

ALL GOOD FANTASIAS MUST COME TO AN END
In which the author explores Lost's curiouser and curiouser fixation with Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, especially as they pertain to last week's episode ''Lighthouse'' and how Lewis Carroll's wondrous works suggest Big Meanings and possible conclusions for the show. But first: some useful terms are defined and exemplified:

FANTASY: (1) ''a situation imagined by an individual or group that has no basis in reality but expresses certain desires or aims of its creator.'' (2) ''a musical composition with its roots in the art of improvisation.'' (3) ''a genre that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, and/or setting.'' (All definitions/quotes from Wikipedia.)

EXAMPLES OF FANTASY, AS THEY PERTAIN TO LOST: (3) ''Lighthouse'' included references to Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and most significantly, Lewis Carroll's pair of fantasy lit classics, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There. (2) ''Lighthouse'' also made use of Chopin's ''Fantasia Impromptu,'' an impromptu being an ''improvisation as if prompted by the spirit of the moment, usually for a solo instrument, such as a piano.'' David Shephard, the son of Jack Shephard in the Sideways world, played Chopin's piece in last week's episode, just as Daniel Faraday did last season in the episode ''The Variable.'' (1) TBD. Is the Island world an ''imagined situation?'' Or is the Sideways world the fantasy? We won't know until one of them — or maybe both of them — does one thing. It is the same thing all stories must do in order for any kind of clarity or meaning can be gleaned, lest they drag on forever into total confusion, chaos, and so much jabberwocky. That one thing:

One of them must end.

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Lost has referenced Alice In Wonderland often enough now to take it for granted. Yeah, yeah, fantastical tale about someone falling into a weird otherworld that challenges his or her notions of time, reality, and self...yadda yadda yadda. But we run the risk of missing out on added layers of richness and possibly clues to Lost's greater mysteries — or at least a semi-interesting blog entry of dubious relevance — by not investigating Lewis Carroll's book anew each time the show flicks at it. In last week's episode, ''Lighthouse,'' we saw Sideways Jack pick up a thick copy of The Annotated Alice in his son's room and reminisce about reading it to the lad when he was wee younger. The moment reminded us of the season 4 episode ''Something Nice Back Home,'' which had Flash-Forward Jack reading Alice's Adventures In Wonderland to Claire's creepy kid. It also reminded us of the season 1 episode ''White Rabbit,'' which had Island Jack chasing the ghost of his father across the Island the way Alice chased her white rabbit down a hole into a topsy-turvy underworld, part fantastical imaginarium, part subconscious projection, pure solipsistic wonderland. The Annotated Alice functioned as a key word that we could input into the Lost search engine (or maybe just Lostpedia.com); the results give us richer context for this latest diagnostic on Jack's unresolved father issues and complex relationship to the whole notion of fatherhood, be it expressed as protective castaway paterfamilias or literal parent. Welcome to the Annotated Season of Lost, where the margins are filled with acknowledgements of source texts. Welcome also to the Narcissus Season of Lost, filled with healthy self-reflection — and possibly deadly self-absorption. Welcome to the end of this flabby paragraph.

If all we did with the Alice citation in ''Lighthouse'' was note occasions when Lost previously name-checked or evoked Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels, we could pride ourselves on being careful watchers of the show. Look at us being careful! Our English teachers are beaming! (Or they are dead.) But consider again the scene in ''Lighthouse'' in which Jack picked up The Annotated Alice. ''I used to read this to you when you were little,'' Jack said, waxing nostalgic. ''You always wanted to hear about Kitty and Snowdrop, they were Alice's...'' But Jack never finished his sentence because his angry adolescent huffed out on him. This was a really conspicuous choice, and I remember thinking that I should really follow up on it and investigate what Lost had decided to leave unsaid. When I finally got around to that research this past weekend (and by ''research,'' I meaning loitering for 45 minutes at the display of various Alice In Wonderland books at my local Barnes and Noble, timed to capitalize on the release of the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie), I made one of those great discoveries that electrifies my Doc Jensen theory-making brain.

How Kitty and Snowdrop may give us profound insight to the Jacob and the Man in Black


For starters, Kitty and Snowdrop are not all that important to Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. However, they are extremely important to the sequel, whose title is of loaded significance to this mirror-strewn season of Lost: Through The Looking-Glass. What Jack wasn't allowed to say was that Kitty and Snowdrop were Alice's kittens. And if David had stuck around and engaged his father in literary exegesis about the book, they may have together noted the following detail, which should blow up any self-respecting crazy Lost theorist's brain:

One kitten is black, and one kitten is white. One is bad; one is good. Kitty's the black one; Snowdrop's the white one. Kitty's the bad one; Snowdrop, the good one. Think: black and white rocks in The Caves; think: the black and white stones in The Cave of Names; think: Man in Black and Jacob; think: John Locke's backgammon story. ''Two players. One black. One white.''

This is why it's actually important to read the literary references that Lost gives us, because a mere Wikipedia summary of Through The Looking-Glass doesn't tell you about the kittens and their color coding. It also doesn't tell you this: the title of the book's first chapter is ''Looking-Glass House.'' Which totally evokes the title of last week's episode (''Lighthouse,'' also awkward for its missing/implied ''The''), not to mention the Lighthouse itself, which was less notable for being a beacon for bringing ships to the Island than for the magic mirrors in its tower — for being a real ''Looking-Glass House.''

Moreover, the very first sentences of this opening chapter bring us immediately to Kitty and Snowdrop and their day-and-night personalities. Reading these words, it's hard not to think of Jacob and Man In Black and the current great debate in Lost fandom concerning them: Which one is ''good'' and which one is ''bad''? The opening salvo of the book:

One thing is for certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it — it was the black kitten's fault entirely. For the white kitten had been having its face washed by the old cat [the kittens' mother, Dinah] for the last quarter of an hour (and bearing it pretty well, considering); so you see that it couldn't have had any hand in the mischief.

Perhaps by name-dropping these kittens last week, Lost was trying to tell us that Smokey/the Man In Black really is the evil one and the guy in the white shirt, Jacob, is the good one. But that assumes the old school thinking that ''black'' = bad and ''white'' = good. Let's leave this tricky bit of business behind for a second. As we read further into Looking-Glass' first chapter, we learn exactly the nature of Kitty's alleged ''mischief.'' The cat had taken Alice's ''ball of worsted'' and pawed it until it had become completely unraveled. A ''ball of worsted'' is a big ball of yarn or thread, usually comprised of discarded scraps. We remember last season, when we saw that Jacob occupied his time in the Four Toed Safehouse by...weaving thread. And we remember what we've heard Man In Black indict Jacob for, making a knotted mess of castaway lives; perhaps in his eyes, Jacob's meddling in human affairs and bunching together of individual destinies produced nothing but a big ball of worsted scrap, to which he'd like to take an angry paw and shred apart. (Should we pause and try to needle some significance out of the word ''worsted'' as it may apply to castaway lives defined by flaws, sins, and redemption issues, their ''worst'' characteristics? Done, and moving on.)

NEXT PAGE: Alice and the nature of fantasy vs reality

As the chapter continues, Alice bitterly reprimands the black kitty for its bad behavior — and then scolds Kitty's mother, Dinah, for not raising her child to have proper manners. (See: the ''Lighthouse'' meditation on the legacy of misguided, craptastic parenting.) Then Alice goes on a stream of consciousness rant. She begins reminiscing about a game of chess she played earlier that day, which leads her to recall how the day before she had tried to cajole her big sister into pretending they were kings and queens in a chess game brought to life, and how her imagination-challenged sister tried to decline, because after all, there were only two of them, and chess has so many more pieces/characters. Alice's provocative rebuttal: She'd play all the other roles if her sister would just play one. Moving back into the moment with her kitten, Alice asks Kitty to play the same chess-come-to-life game with her and demands that the puss play the role of the Red Queen. Natch, Kitty, being a kitty, can't perform the way Alice wants her to. Alice's reaction is totally reasonable. And by ''reasonable,'' I mean the opposite of that. She gets totally pissed, and threatens her with a very odd punishment. She picks up Kitty and takes the pet to a mirror and holds it up to the mirror and says that she'd like to banish the cat into the reflection — into the ''looking-glass house'' version of her own room. But then Alice goes gonzo for her own idea. She becomes taken by the notion of slipping into another world that's basically an inverted/reverse/bizarro articulation of her own world. She decides to pretend that the glass in the mirror becomes ''soft like gauze,'' like a ''mist,'' and with that, she passes through the looking-glass into her Sideways world, and the story proper begins...

Now, before I try to apply all of this to Lost, we do need to backtrack and consider Alice's arc across both of Carroll's two books. In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, we find the heroine profoundly bored. She's hanging with her sister who's reading a book with no words or pictures; Alice finds this really rather sad. ''[W]hat is the use of a book,'' thought Alice, ''without pictures and conversations?'' The answer: An invitation to fill those pages with your own story. (Why am I hearing this song right now? Make your own kind of music/make your special song/make your own kind of music/even if they won't sing along...) And at that moment, Alice spies a supernatural entity and instinctively chases after it down the rabbit hole. Destination: Unknown. Skipping over bunches of other stuff: Alice goes on a crazy journey that challenges everything she knows about reality, meets some very strange characters, and in the end, finds herself in a logic-challenged, Kafka-esque trial concerning the Queen of Hearts' stolen tarts. Throughout the proceedings, Alice continuously questions the court's fuzzy rule of law, or rather, the total absence of it. As she does, she grows bigger and bigger, thus regaining her real world size, or rather expressing her yearning to return to her ''real world'' of logic and order. This is fine with the King of Hearts, who evokes ''the oldest rule of the book,'' rule number 42 (Lost Numbers Alert!), which states that ''All persons more than a mile high'' must leave the court. But Alice doesn't want to leave yet. She wants to give Wonderland's corrupt royalty a piece of her mind for their maddening management of reality. The Queen's furious response to Alice's defiance: ''Off with her head!'' Alice then curses the reality, calling it a ''deck of cards,'' and then, suddenly, Alice is attacked by...a deck of cards. But Alice has an ace in the hole: since she's the true master of this absurdist, rigged-game reality (it is, after all, a fantastical simulacrum of herself), she can shut it down by simply...waking up. And so she does, in the company of her sister, who hears out her story and calms her frantic, frazzled mood by saying: ''It was a curious dream, dear, certainly; but now run in to your tea, it's getting late.''

Through The Looking-Glass is in many ways the same story as Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, but there are some profound differences. In this story, Alice doesn't journey into her previous Wonderland; it's pretty much a whole new place, albeit with some similarities, because after all, it's but another projection of her inner world. Moreover, Alice doesn't stumble into this world — she actively creates it by peering into the mirror and saying the magical words, ''Let's pretend.'' (The kid equivalent to ''Let there be light!'') We are left to wonder if Alice was changed by her Wonderland adventure, if perhaps she's become quite skilled at manufacturing fantasy — and maybe even addicted to escapism. In fact, I found myself wondering by the end of Through The Looking-Glass if the adventure was designed to teach Alice lessons about narcissism, self-absorption, the correct use of imagination, and the proper relationship to fiction. At book's end, Alice finds herself but crowned queen of this new fantasy world and is about to celebrate with tea. But then something disturbing happens. The world begins to inexplicably warp, and Alice begins to suspect that she might not really be the master of her reality after all. Is someone — or something — else authoring her story? She pulls the plug on the fantasy (''I can't stand this any longer!'' she says as she wrecks the tea table) and seizes upon her nemesis, the Red Queen, and shakes the villainess until it reveals itself to be none other than...alleged ''mischief'' maker, Kitty, the Cat In Black. She then speculates that white kitten Snowdrop was most likely also playing a role in the fantasy, too. Ditto the kitten's mother, Dinah. The book leaves us with a noodle-cooking question: Who was dreaming who? Who was the true ''author'' of her story? Alice presents two possibilities: herself or (and this is trippy) Kitty/Red Queen's utterly fictional mate, the slumbering Red King. Was Alice dreaming her Sideways world — or was/is the Sideways world dreaming her? What reality is ''real?'' Who is ''real?'' Carroll — the story's true author, of course — answers the question for the reader by...asking the reader to decide for themselves.

Sound familiar?

NEXT PAGE: Hurley's mark of servitude?

We could spend much time sifting through ''Lighthouse'' for all of its Alice references. Here's a fun one. Remember at the end of the episode, when Jacob rewarded his faithful servant Hurley by...teasing him for having ink on his face? In Alice In Wonderland, there's a character named Bill the Lizard who at story's end gets ink spilled on his face. Bill's job in the story: to do all the hard work for the White Rabbit and help Alice. Sounds a lot like Hurley-Jacob to me. But Hurley plays the role of Alice, too. We found him bored and angsty, playing life-sized tic-tac-toe with Miles. Their game ended in a draw, the latest of many, but whereas Hurley wanted to continue, Miles wanted to quit. What do we know about Hurley when his will is thwarted? He eats. And so his response to Miles: ''Hungry?'' Notice that when Miles replied ''Are you?'' Hurley didn't say: ''Yes.'' He said: ''I could eat.'' Of course, Hurley could eat. He can always eat. This was Hurley's old addiction pathology re-claiming him. Enter Hurley's White Rabbit, Jacob, who redirected Hurley's energies toward more constructive, redemptive goals: getting Jack and Hurley out of the temple; pushing Jack toward the Lighthouse. One of the episode's best scenes echoed Alice's heroic defiance of the Queen of Hearts. Heeding Jacob's instruction, Hurley asserted his will and claimed his Island mastery by embracing his ''candidacy'' and telling Temple Master Dogen to buzz off. You could sense Hurley growing larger in stature right before his eyes. Dogen's response, in Japanese, surely must have been a wink at the Queen's ''Off with her head!'' The translation: ''You're lucky that I have to protect you. Otherwise I'd have cut your head off.''

Speaking of eating, food played an interesting role in ''Lighthouse,'' just as it does in Alice. In Tan Lin's introductory essay to the Barnes and Noble Classics' edition of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, the critic notes how physical hunger in Alice, and any story for that matter, serves as a visceral metaphor for some profound unfulfilled desire that needs to be met, some unresolved issue from the past that needs to be reconciled, neutralized, or eliminated altogether for the hero to move into the future. When the quest has concluded, the hero typically celebrates with a meal or feast; the desire has been sated, the anxiety resolved. Alice celebrated her survival of Wonderland — and the gift of having been given an empowering, expanding adventure — by running off to tea. Back to Lost. In ''Lighthouse,'' Hurley interrupted Jack as he was eating an apple to rouse him to adventure by stoking an even greater hunger: Jack's yearning for closure with his father. At the end of the story, Island Jack remained unfulfilled and troubled, and so he does not eat. But Sideways Jack experienced catharsis for and release from his father issue via a redemptive encounter with his son. And how did they celebrate?

JACK: I've got some pizza back at the house. You hungry?
DAVID: Sure.
JACK: Good. Let's go home.

Looking at Lost through Alice-eyes suggests noodle-cooking possibilities about how the story might end. Perhaps the Sideways world is the fantasy of the Island world — and/or vice versa. For Castaway Jack, redeemed Sideways fatherhood is the fantasy that resolves his frustration/thwarted will about his father issues. For Sideways Jack, Island adventure is a (now outdated) fantasy that provided escape from his frustrations/thwarted will, albeit one that always led him to losing confrontations with his unresolved issues the longer he stayed within the fantasy. And then there's this idea, and buckle up for it. Perhaps the first trip to the Island via Oceanic 815 was ''real'' and ''legit,'' but a good portion of the experience that followed the Island's disappearance and the Oceanic 6's escape — the Flash Forward off-Island experience; the trip back to Dharma times; and especially the current post-Jughead drama on the Island — might be ''unreal'' and ''illegitimate,'' perhaps the shared fantasy of ghosts who don't realize and can't accept they're dead, or perhaps some illusory prison created by a single powerful, fantasy-casting mind, or multiple, competing imaginations, à la the ending of Though The Looking-Glass. Such a story could end with, say, Jack finally ''waking up,'' and pulling the plug on reality and doing everyone else ensnared and slumbering in this psychic trap the favor of waking them up. In other words: Maybe it's all kinda like The Matrix.

NEXT PAGE: What is our role in the story?

There's also a variation on this scenario, one less ominous and inspired by Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, which concludes with a ''twist'' that is as poignant as it is bold. As I mentioned earlier, Alice wakes up from her dream/fantasy and is shooed away to tea by her big sister. But there's more. As she goes to eat, Alice experiences a new sense of fulfillment. The ''fright'' and ''anger'' that she had felt in her last moments in Wonderland, before she pulled the plug on the fantasy, were now gone. Her fantasy was now ''wonderful;'' it had meaning. Then Lewis Carroll moves away from Alice and back to the sister, sitting by a riverbank and thinking — kinda like Jack at the end of ''Lighthouse,'' staring out at the ocean and mulling his fate. This is the same sister, remember, who at the beginning of the story was reading a book full of blank paper. A rather dull girl, right? Wrong. The sister closes her eyes and begins dreaming. She first sees her little Alice telling her the story of Wonderland. Then, she sees Wonderland itself, experiencing it like an improvised yet sophisticated fantasy, a Fantasia Impromptu, if you will, that fills and even changes the space of her dull, tedious world like music, albeit oh, so briefly. And then she has a wholly original fantasy of her own, one in which she sees Alice as an adult — a happy, well-adjusted, well-balanced soul, fully mature yet forever young, and telling stories of her own making to other children, stories full of empathy for children and the way they experience the world, adults, and themselves. With her own dreaming, Alice's nameless sister takes the raw material of Alice's wondrous fantasy, combines it with the raw material of Alice's young life, and conjures a fantasy about Alice's future and the woman she will become. We are left to believe — or rather, we are left wanting believe — that the sister's vision for Alice will come true. How might any of this apply to Lost? One word: Jacob. Perhaps in the story of Lost, Jacob is akin to Alice's sister. He's taking the raw material of castaway lives and desires and redeeming it with shape, purpose, and future. Or at least, he is trying to. After all, these characters do have free will, and they can choose to use it to produce a quality of life that's beyond salvaging....

Finally, there's one more idea we must consider: our own role in the story. Both Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass end in such a way that begs interpretation. Literally! Looking-Glass concludes with the author addressing the reader and asking/demanding that they make a choice about what the heck happened. We are empowered (or, if you prefer, burdened) with the responsibility of giving the story meaning. Put another way: we are asked to play the role that Alice's sister played at the end of Alice In Wonderland. It'll be interesting to see if Lost puts us in a similar position at the end of its story....

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One thing's for certain: the Lost fantasy will end. And like both Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, my guess is that the Lost fantasy will end ''suddenly,'' ''violently,'' and ''ambiguously,'' to use words borrowed from Tan Lin's essay on Carroll's books, and my hope is that Lost will be all the better for it. But the mere fact that the producers were empowered to end the show, and have been able to compose and craft Lost toward an ending, will make the show ''better'' than what it could have been. By being able to end, Lost will have meaning; if it had continued, operating like any other series, one whose continuing story isn't led by creative vision but by creative necessity, Lost would have risked collapsing and diluting into meaninglessness. Not that Lost will finish as some perfect thing: We must mull the cost of a show that began and ran for three seasons without the benefit of knowing if and when the series could self-terminate. Still, I stick to my optimistic guns that Lost is the equivalent of a musical fantasia or musical impromptu — a work of sophisticated improvisation; a work that will be completed with at least some degree of redemptive, meaningful shape, purpose, and design because the writers were allowed to actually complete it. Curious that Lost found ways to reference both Star Wars and Indiana Jones in last week's episode. Both are landmark fantasies that had great impact on the culture. Yet both are franchises that have been criticized for not ''letting go,'' for continuing to produce new stories of varying degrees of quality, urgency, and significance when their respective moments of optimal relevancy (and certainly creative potency) has passed. (That was another way of saying that a lot of people think the Star Wars prequels and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull sucked.) But perhaps we only have ourselves to blame. Those too-late prequels and sequels would never have been made without our culture's obsessive, even unhealthy interest in them — without our inability to let go of them.

NEXT: Who's fooling who?

I'm being wayyy too harsh. (For the record, I was totally not a prequel hater and I was only disappointed in Crystal Skull, not resentful of it.) But I think it's fair to make this point: Like the Island on Lost or the addictive patterns of its characters, our fantasy worlds can become traps, either of our own making or someone else's design, or both. We can get lost within them, unless we do what Alice did: exert our mastery over them, end them, and leave them behind, but not forget them; we can learn from them and put them to redemptive purpose in our lives, by letting their values inspire us to live more vital lives, or by becoming creative people in our own right. Something for all of us — none more so than yours truly — to keep in mind when Lost comes to an end in May....

And perhaps, something to keep in mind right now as you frame your final theories of Lost. Because in case you didn't see through my hackneyed analysis of culture and psychology in the previous graph, I was actually trying to tell you a theory about Jacob and the Man In Black — especially that pretentious blather about our fantasy worlds becoming traps of our own making or someone else's design or both. Who are we to trust, Jacob or the Man In Black? Which one is ''good'' and which one is ''evil''? My guess is that neither occupy a zone of pure black and pure white. My guess is that neither is telling the castaways the whole truth of their intentions. My guess is that both are selfish and that both are using the castaways to achieve a self-serving goal. My guess is that all of Lost will come down to the castaways choosing to align themselves with the Power Player that offers them the most compelling personal benefit. We can only hope that what the castaways will deem as ''the most compelling'' choice will also be their best, healthiest choice, too. And I think there can be little doubt as to what the best, healthiest choice could be. It's the same choice we, too, must embrace at the end of the series, and it is this:

Am I right or am I right?

Right!

Coming later today: ''Countdown to Lost'' on PopWatch, followed by my instant reaction to tonight's episode after it airs on the east coast.

Tomorrow: The full recap.

And right now: Totally Lost!

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