Lost by Brady

I am enjoying this season of The Office, but I must admit that I am looking forward to the 3-hour season premier of Lost this spring. A couple of my friends and I were talking about the show and rehashing the storyline, and it made me start thinking about the appeal of the show. Even though a couple of seasons have been far inferior to the first one, my friends and I all agreed that we couldn’t give up on watching the show now because we have invested too much into it. In fact, I would go as far as to say that there is a cultish following of the show, and I am completely caught up in it. Last year I registered on some weird Dharma website that kept sending me junk e-mails, and they started freaking me out a little bit so I requested to be removed from the list. But in this cultural phenomenon known as Lost, what is it that is causing so many people to get sucked into this quasi-Sci-Fi plot?

I think that it is the fact that Lost is the definition of a postmodern show. There are deeply “spiritual” or “supernatural” things that go on with the characters on the island, but none of it is exactly orthodox when it comes to faith. There is also the element that the audience is not aware of the full story going on, and we are only getting pieces of it episode by episode. This is a distinguishing characteristic of postmodernity, in that the majority of postmoderns do not feel connected to a story that is larger than their own lives (it is called a loss of metanarrative). But the thing that I think that is most telling why people are so intrigued by the show is the battle between good and evil is distinctly postmodern.

The show has a cast of characters that are dynamic and “round” individuals. I overheard some people a couple of months ago talking about the show, and one guys said, “I hate Jack. He’s so self-righteous.” Only in a culture as jaded as ours would a show’s primary “hero” be as unimpressive as Jack Shepherd. Sure he’s a spinal surgeon, he’s good looking (so I hear), and he’s decisive, but he’s also an alcoholic, narcissistic, noncommittal, and schizophrenic at times. The person we should all be cheering for is not innately good or evil. He is a conglomerate of both the best and worst of humanity.

But this doesn’t stop with Jack. Benjamin Linus, the show’s main antagonist (by the way, Michael Emerson is doing one of the best acting jobs on TV in this role), has qualities that evoke empathy from the audience at times. I find it hard to hate him like I do other villains in movies and TV shows. His childhood makes you feel sorry for his upbringing, and I am still not 100% sure he’s the true “bad guy” in the show. After 4 seasons, the audience still does not know what or who the evil force is, but that does not mean the show has lacked in drama or nerve-racking moments.

All of this is characteristic of what is going on in Christianity today. One of my favorite emergent church authors to pick on is Brian McLaren because I think he is nearsighted in his doctrine, and he is too bold when it comes to pushing postmodernity into Christianity. The root of my major complaints with him is that he rarely filters out society in an attempt to redeem it; rather, he usually slurps up our current cultural climate and tries to make Christianity fit into that box. In his book called The Story We Find Ourselves In, the character that represents the postmodern culture named Neo (pointing towards his neoorthodox theology) discusses the issue of evil and the person of Satan. He says, “You know, if you go back into the most ancient parts of the Old Testament, there is no concept of Satan. That idea comes along much later. It seems to have been borrowed from the Zoroastrians, actually. Maybe it’s no sin to think of Satan as a metaphor—a horribly real metaphor for a terribly real force in the universe, mind you.” (Pg. 145) Does this metaphorical force sound a little similar to the forces at work on Lost? And my other question is, if Satan is merely a metaphorical evil force, then what makes God anything more than a symbolic good force?

What is it about the world today that makes us doubt that anyone or anything can be purely evil or purely good? It concerns me when people justify Adolf Hitler because of his upbringing or mental conditions, but not because I think Hitler is the embodiment of all things evil, but that I think that this is a roundabout way of denying pure evil and unsullied good. I personally believe there is an embodiment of evil and he has a name: Satan. This word makes most people in society cringe, and I think that it is only a matter of a few years that people will cringe when God is mentioned. We are all much more comfortable with donating a couple of bucks towards AIDS relief rather than dealing with the cause of the disease in the first place. We all want children to have clean water, but we do not want to square with the reason that poverty exists in this fallen world. In spite of this growing trend in culture, we cannot escape the fact that we are drawn to the drama that unfolds between good and evil as humans. This is because we all know in the depths of our being that there is an originator of all things good and beautiful; there is also a being that started all things evil and rebellious. Until you come to grips with this reality, chances are you will feel a little lost.