Last week's episode of Lost has stuck with me like a magic knife to the chest. (Ouch.) I remain troubled by and for Island world Sayid, a tortured soul torn between devilish deals, doomed to be forever used as a weapon by powerful, manipulative men. (Sideways Sayid, though still infected by a self-negating guilt and damnation, at least has some kind of moral compass, embodied by Nadia.) Despite staying up all night upchucking almost all of my ''Sundown''-fattened brain into my recap, chunky flecks of gooey thought remain in my skull, which I will now fork and fling into your face. Lucky you! For example, there's the title, ''Sundown,'' a word that's synonymous with ''twilight,'' which links to a host of provocative cultural references that may have something, everything, or absolutely nothing to do with Lost, including: The Twilight Zone (Smokey's prison break = ''The Howling Man,'' about the Devil escaping from an order of monks); the Star Trek: Enterprise episode ''Twilight,'' in which Captain Archer is inflicted with memory-eating parasites that are actually rewriting history; ''Twilight of the Gods'' or Ragnarok, a Norse mythology legend about an End Times war among the gods; and (my favorite) Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche, who uses the work to rail against any religion (especially Christianity) that emphasizes judgment and condemnation, and fails to recognize that ''everything is necessary in a unity.'' (Or, as the late Lennon's similarly deceased namesake once sang: ''Imagine there's no Heaven/It's easy if you try/No Hell below us/Above us only sky/Imagine all the people/Living for today.'') Oh, and I hear there's a popular line of vampire romance novels that make use of the ''twilight'' motif, too. (Team Jacob or Team Edward Smokenstein: pick a side!)
''Sundown'' left me wondering about all the ways Lost could be an allegory for contemporary spiritual experience. Consider these three stupid pretentious alienating theories, each of which paint me out to be a crazed religious nut-job and will make you totally hate me and never want to read this column again! Giggle-giggle!
STUPID PRETENTIOUS ALIENATING THEORY NO. 1: The Temple was a curious synthesis of spiritual ideas. Dogen was named after a Zen super-stud. His duties included managing an ancient spring of life and measuring good and evil in the human heart. His right-hand man/interpreter was (seemingly) named after John Lennon, an Eastern-influenced humanist whose most famous song imagined the deconstruction of Christian ideas and religious institutions. And yet, Lost's Dogen and Lennon weren't wimpy turn-the-other-cheek pacifists, either. They had guns! They knew martial arts! Killing? No problem! Was Lost trying to represent the strange brew that is American melting pot spirituality — part Old School Moralism, part New Age Zen, part What The BLEEP Do We Know?! mystic science? And was Lost extolling this system or criticizing it? The Temple's dirty spring could be seen as a metaphor for the current state of cultural mythology: cloudy, diluted, impotent extrapolation of Ur-spirituality. How then to decode Smokey's attack on the Temple? Divine judgment against a corrupt spiritual operating system — or the furious terrorism of an opposing spiritual ideology? Debate. Or not. Yeah, probably not.
STUPID PRETENTIOUS ALIENATING THEORY NO. 2: The Island is a metaphor for a kind of God, typically Christian, whose two defining characteristics are embodied by two separate agents/agencies: Jacob (grace/redemption/renewal) and Smokey (justice/judgment/death). Lost is arguing that the best iteration of God is one in which both components are perfectly balanced. We need the Holy Trinity of Peace, Love, and Understanding living in our heart — but we need them all packing heat, too.
NEXT PAGE: How Lost's relationship to answers is positively Job-ian
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