Michelle Dean on Lost, pluralism, and white dudes:
Lost began with a compelling premise, attracted a strong following, and subsequently annoyed the hell out of us with plodding story lines, dangling plot threads, and a lackadaisical attitude toward character development. Though ratings have fallen off as a result, ABC is nonetheless trying to keep expectations high for Sunday’s finale, promising “the television event of the decade.” But even a disappointing endgame will be a fitting end to a series that has waged a war of attrition on its millions of viewers. Colson Whitehead may have tweeted it best with this faux “spoiler,” anticipating the big reveal: “They made it up as they went along & every ‘answer’ will be a gross insult to your intelligence.”
It’s a shame that things turned out this way. When Lost premiered in 2004, it held incredible promise not just as entertainment but as a narrative with liberal political commitments. The initial cast was diverse in race, gender, and national origin. Characters were named after political philosophers: Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Bentham. The plane-crash survivors initially adopted, as their slogan, the phrase “Live Together, Die Alone” — a battle cry for a social democratic polity if ever there were one. Moreover, the entire series almost offered a fictionalized version of philosopher John Rawls‘ “original position”: Take a group of people, strip them of their material advantages, and see how they decide to share resources. Initially at least, Lost was about the possibility of building community from scratch. And it approached the task with idealistic optimism, usually glossing over the divisions of race and gender among the castaways. In fact, the series can certainly be said to have taken a “post-racial,” “post-feminist” approach to its pluralism, emphasizing the castaways’ common humanity over their differences.
