I’d considered doing another post about LOST today, in honor of the series finale, which I just finished watching. I wanted to talk about how, in the end, the show came back to character and how despite the sci-fi elements, I’m inclined to call it literary. But then I made the mistake of going online to see how other fans had reacted, and I saw a lot of hatred—hatred that I saw mainly stemming from (what I consider to be) a lack of understanding, and I decided I wanted some time to digest the show on my own, without having to explain why the first 120 episodes, each individually, meant more than the finale, but why the finale was still absolutely essential to the closure, and the shape of the show. You’re just going to have to trust me on this, or keep watching over and over until you get it.
Instead, I’m going to talk about the Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, which actually kind of relates, because the criticism that most infuriated me tonight was one where a blogger clearly dissected the entire show to fit an idea she wanted to have about it—that it’s a sexist, racist piece of crap with “plot holes the size of {her} Hyundai,” poor writing, bad dialogue, and the list goes on and on. (I guess the millions of fans are just all stupid, but then again, I can think of some stories I would say similar things about, so maybe I’m just being elitist here.)
Anyway, back to this test. I swear I can stay focused. And that this really isn’t a post about Lost. Not entirely anyway.
This test was created a while back to evaluate gender equality in movies. Take a look below the cut here.
At first I wasn’t sure what to think of it: Keith Olbermann in a brown leather chair reading from what looked like a library copy of a James Thurber collection. At first I was skeptical. But then I sat down and listened, and I was impressed. I felt like I was witnessing a history-making event. Maybe I’m young and uninformed, but I’ve never seen a newscaster read literature on the air. Is this something that used to be done? I don’t know, but I have to say, I’m excited. We’ve talked a lot on Bark about why “people” (whoever these beings are) aren’t reading literature, or reading at all, and how to change that. We’ve also talked about trying to find creative ways to get our work out there, including using mixed media. So seeing Keith Olbermann reading short stories during his hour-long cable news show was kind of surreal. It was as though he’d been reading Bark and had taken on our cause, but no, his motivation was personal. See, his father just passed away, and during his final days, Keith read James Thurber to him. According to Olbermann, his father suggested that he read the stories on the air. It was a final wish of sorts, and so Keith did it, twice. The first time he read “A Peacelike Mongoose,” and the second time, the show I saw, he read “A Box to Hide In.” Both stories are really short and easy to follow; they’re kind of fable-like in their simplicity and morality, but more than anything they are good, thoughtful stories. And they were read for millions to hear right there on prime time cable TV. And Keith said he might keep doing it from time to time. How about that.
My tenure at Willow Springs will be up in June, when issue 66 hits the stands, and then I’ll have to pass the reins to my awesome assistant and find a new job. So, I’ve been looking into opportunities that involve writing. Going across different media involves various challenges. For example, how does one write for news? We all know that you keep it in iambic pentameter, and use human interest stories to get the viewer’s attention. I’ve been looking at structure lately, and found a couple excellent examples:
Of course, my fifth grade teacher always said, “You’ve got to answer the five W’s.” Where is the bullshit and who’s dealing with it? When the bullshit happen? Is the bullshit actually breaking news? Keep it current. Why is the bullshit happening and how are we dealing with the bullshit? What do authorities think of the bullshit?
That all sounds simple enough. And remember to write the bullshit in the old inverted pyramid: start with the most important facts about the bullshit and expand from there. Keep the bullshit objective. Don’t get flowery when talking about bullshit. Give your bullshit an angle.
If you’re writing bullshit for the television, images are super important. And yes, there’s a formula for selecting and filling in the video:
Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. Read more »
Best television show ever? I'll fight you over that.
I’m an absolute huge fan of Lost (so much of a fan it required two adjectives), and unless you’re living under a rock, you probably know that the sixth and final season started a few weeks ago. I won’t go into how depressed I am that the show is going to end, or how upset I am that they switched it to Tuesday nights while I’m in class (the nerve of ABC, not checking my class schedule).
While Lost has its roots firmly in science fiction (as the producers said, a non-genre answer to all the questions wouldn’t be satisfying), it also has a tendency of throwing little bits of awesomeness to the literary crowd. Namely, the show has featured all sorts of books, sometimes as just tiny details, sometimes as works that affected characters lives. One character, Desmond, talks about how his love for Dickens and names his sailboat Our Mutual Friend. Two antagonistic characters quote Of Mice and Men at each other. The conman character reads everything he can get his hands on and a fight erupts over Watership Down. There’s a nod to Carroll with an episode title. There are more, but others before me have already done lists of the works featured.
So on the one hand, we have something self-labeled as sci-fi. On the other, with reference to a wide range of books, making the (well developed) characters feel like they’re actually in our world, like they might actually exist (or maybe that last is my wishful thinking). Genre vs. literature wars aside, I love this show, and completely want to believe that watching it, in someway, makes me literary. Maybe once I graduate I’ll read my way through the Lost reading guide.
7 Comments 
