I watched the Lost series finale yesterday and it’s been stuck in my head since. I won’t spoil it — by which I mean I won’t give any details on what happened — but I will say that it was 1) extremely disappointing from a plotting and craftsmanship standpoint, and 2) extremely affecting emotionally. It was like getting hit in the back of the head with a horseshoe, and I found myself in that weird borderland where if I could still cry, I would have cried, but since I can’t I just stared at the screen as the charged waters rose up around me, and when the water pooled around my ears I wondered if finally I would be submerged. It never happened, but I can’t recall the last time a work of fiction has moved me so.
I’ve spent an unsettled night and morning wondering how points 1) and 2) could coexist, and here’s what I’ve come up with: whatever else is true, I’ve spent something like a hundred-fifty hours with these characters, in this world: 6 seasons times twenty-four or so episodes per season. That’s a _lot_ of fucking time to spend with somebody, especially since those hours were peak hours. We weren’t sitting in the living room together, reading; we weren’t sleeping, or doing the dishes. A hundred twenty hours of intense experience, intimate revelation, trauma, striving, love, death.
So I shouldn’t be surprised at feeling unsettled today, and emotional. In elementary school, on the last day of the school year when you were just kind of milling around, and the teachers had flown the white flag and weren’t trying to control you anymore, and everyone was just kind of running out the clock, I’d look around the room at some of my classmates, kids I knew nothing about other than their name, who I never talked to, and who I’d see again in a few months for more of the same non-interaction –
I’d look at them eating glue or picking their noses or playing paper football, and I’d get a lump in my throat, because even if we didn’t know each other and had nothing in common we still had shared something, lived through something, passed the same hours walking the same stretch of road, and as it turns out that _is_ having something in common, is having something fundamentally important in common. Passing the same hours walking the same stretch of road means an awful lot in the end.
The other thing I realized, just a few minutes ago, is that Lost is our best national myth. It’s taken over from Star Wars, which seems kind of silly these days, but which did yeoman’s work for at least twenty years. It says who we think we are, what we aspire to, what we’re afraid of, and what we take comfort in. Viewed this way, despite its failures, it’s something to celebrate. There are worse places to live than a nation that closes its eyes and dreams this.