Did the protagonist called John Locke add a philosophical dimension to all those workplace water cooler conversations over the television series “Lost”? If nothing else, “Lost’s” bald-headed enigma launched a thousand Google searches for the 17th-century British thinker; he also sparked a pair of academic philosophers to write an interesting article on the series in a new essay collection, The Philosophy of J.J. Abrams (University Press of Kentucky).
Edited by Patricia Brace and Robert Arp, the book grows from an assumption of depth in the Hollywood wunderkind’s oeuvre that’s not borne out in all of his productions. Some of the essayists strain to locate profundity; however, Elly Vintiadis and Spyros D. Petrounakos are on firmer ground in unpacking the meaning of “Lost.”
Vintiadis and Petrounakos identify one of the philosophical levels in “Lost” as the struggle of faith and empiricism, played out (in part) between John Locke and Jack Shephard. Although the 17th century Locke was an empiricist, his ideas were more nuanced than many successors. Locke believed that we learn through our senses but that our intellect makes sense of all the sensory input; that God established divine laws that can be discovered through reflection; and that those laws included the human rights of life and liberty that Jefferson adopted in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. That “Lost’s” man of faith was named for this philosopher is one of the story’s many twisty elements. The identification between the two Lockes requires a degree of reflection. Shephard represents the harder-headed scientism of nowadays and his struggle with Locke raises a question heard often in “Lost”: “What is the right way of acquiring knowledge of the world.”
Level two of “Lost” has to do with its intentionally disorienting storyline. The flashbacks complicate rather than clarify the narrative. The flash-forwards are explicable only in hindsight. The “flash sideways” seems to imply parallel universes. Unlike the stories that try to simplify reality into linear patterns, the puzzling aspects of “Lost” suggest the complexity of reality. “Lost” does not resolve the mystery behind all of the questions it raises.
The popularity of “Lost,” which threatened to transform expectations in TV storytelling, is yet another poke in the eye to Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno, who famously held that pop culture is nothing but a shoddy commercial product line passively consumed by its audience as the opiate of modernity. For “Lost,” audience members were active participants in the search for meaning.
