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20 MediaMagazine | September 2009 | english and media centre
conclusion, closure, enigma or ending?

2. english and media centre | September 2009 | MediaMagazine 21
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All good things must come to an end
sooner or later – but Lost is a special
case: a philosophical conclusion which
defies resolution. David Bell explores
how the enigma of Lost challenges its
audiences.
I watched my first episode of Lost sometime
mid-2005 and, when it was over, I watched five
more. The sense of return it offered me – to a
world of escapades in the form of countless
hours of my youth spent scouring woodland and
welcoming exploration of any kind – gave me a
real sense of what Blumler and Katz really meant
when they came up with escapism or ‘diversion’
as one of their Uses and Gratifications.
One of the most talked about TV dramas of
the noughties, Lost meets its maker in 2010 with
its sixth and final season. ABC’s Entertainment
President Stephen McPherson promises‘a highly
anticipated and shocking finale’, adding that
‘We felt that this was the only way to give Lost a
proper creative conclusion.’
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3. 22 MediaMagazine | September 2009 | english and media centre
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Do we really want a
conclusion?
Though I would rather it didn’t have to end –
ever – like many audience die-hards I am eager
to see how ABC lives up to its promise. But if I’m
being honest, I’m hooked on the surge of enigma
Lost has given me over the last five years: smoke
monsters, Jacob, whispers, healing powers, and
by far my favourite – time travel. This got me
thinking: do I really want answers? What will we
talk about when all is said and done, and the
intrigue is no more? What might this mean for
the future of the show, after it’s all over?
For audiences of Lost, a world of adventure
and the unknown provides them with escapism
in its truest sense, a return to the fantastical
period of exploration and quest experienced
throughout childhood, in the face of the
unknown. Audiences are active by ‘diverting’the
daily rut, by yearning for a similar experience
of their own. However, because Lost is heavily
encoded with messages whose meanings can’t
been confirmed, the decoding process offers
multiple readings – endless possibilities that
have generated theory after theory attempting
to explain the philosophical significance of the
enigma codes that viewers have picked up.
As audiences are constantly negotiating and
challenging the preferred readings of textual
meanings, wouldn’t it be more enjoyable never
to have answers, to keep speculating, and
therefore keep the memory of the show alive?
The Uses and Gratifications theory assists
us here, with its emphasis on the cognitive and
emotional abilities of the audience that are used
to think, rethink, and reinterpret Lost and its
wider contextual significance. Characters named
after history’s most celebrated thinkers – John
Locke, Danielle Rousseau, Eloise Hawking,
Daniel Faraday, Desmond Hume – are carefully
constructed to get the blogs brimming with
speculation, creating an online world of pseudo
spoilers.
Shades of Twin Peaks
In 2005, a work colleague (who also happened
to have recommended Lost, so disloyal was
I in the beginning!), still under the influence
(unknowingly) of Katz and Lazarfield’s Two-
Step Flow theory, was ranting and raving about
a series that ‘everyone with a taste for mystery
and suspense’should have seen: David Lynch’s
1990 TV drama Twin Peaks, also broadcast by
ABC. Two series and a cliffhanger later, audiences
were left in the lurch, mulling over the Black
Lodge, Bob, and what happened to Agent
Cooper.
The show’s two-hour pilot attracted new
viewers because of what ABC researcher Alan
Wurtzel called ‘the water cooler syndrome’,
where audience members discuss the series
the next day at work. My own experience of
this syndrome meant that Twin Peaks was still
attracting new viewers – fifteen years later. The
second stage of the ‘Two Step Flow’was still
working its magic, and the ‘Water Cooler’effect
claimed its rightful place in the land of Media and
Cultural Studies.
It is this lack of closure, this mystery without
trace, that I argue gives such series a continued
lease of life. Unanswered questions that still
circulate in the subconscious resurface and
encourage a two-step recommendation in the
hope of a ‘let’s see what they think’response. The
more postmodern – unfathomable, eccentric,
and surreal – the enigmas are, the more potent
the enthusiasm for discussion and reflection will
be.
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SherylLeeinTwinPeaks(990-91)Credit:Lynch/Frost/Spelling/TheKobalCollection
Lost:image.net

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Lost has already been described by the New
York Times as ‘the show with perhaps the most
compelling continuing story line in television
history’, and although the introductory episodes
of Season 3 were criticised for being loaded with
mystery and lacking explanation, viewing figures
for Season 5 continued to rise, with over eight
million 18-49-year-olds watching episodes
fourteen and fifteen.
What does the future hold for Lost, post-
Season 6? In short: much. The show is, in many
ways, a prime example of one whose audiences
are caught up in a ‘battle for meaning that is
consensual and ongoing’, to use Stuart Hall’s
model of encoding and decoding. Audiences
may conform to one or more of the following
responses:
• Dominant – viewers accept that the island has
extraordinary scientific properties, and that they
are entirely natural in their origin; they therefore
accept the preferred meaning, in that there
have been no hints in the show that the island
might be the centre of alien experimentation,
for example.
• Negotiated – viewers accept that the island
is ‘special’, yet prefer to believe that there
has to be some metaphysical, otherworldly
involvement; readings are therefore adapted
to incorporate personal ideologies, perhaps
‘cultivated’as the season continues.
• Oppositional – viewers refuse to accept
that there is a simple and straightforward
explanation for the island’s existence, and that
the creators’reasoning should be challenged in
every way, shape or form.
I am certainly guilty of dabbling in all three
approaches, and I believe that is why the show’s
ability to anchor my curiosity might eventually
lead me to an all encompassing theoretical
perspective. But I’d rather it didn’t. Should
Abrams et al provide us with resolution and
closure in this next season, with answers to
questions that left many audience members so
angry and frustrated that they lost the will to
live (no pun intended), then perhaps they will
deprive us of this creativity rather than allow
our guesswork to evolve. I hope not, because in
fifteen years’time, when the blogs have all gone
quiet, I’d rather not be denied my water cooler
conversation – history’s chance to repeat itself
the way the island would want it to.
David Bell is a teacher of English & Media Studies at Morley
High School in Leeds.
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