I feel that I am a creative. I work hard at being an artist. The day is approaching when I shall seek validation from my peers, and then the critics. For a long period in my life I was a creative but not an artist, and for a long period before that I tried hard to be neither. I still believed I was a good soul, but I was a lost soul.
Some of the characters in Lost, episodes 9-16 knew that they had become failures according to the norms of a good life, and knew they their souls were no longer good. Several also knew that they were souls alone, apart from the others, unable to fully connect with individuals or with groups.
The format of Lost is excellent. There is a cold start introduction, I believe that is the correct terminology for when you are taken into an experience without introduction, and it is only after the opening event has reached a climax that the credit roll before the story unfolds. However there is a prologue which links aspects of what happened before to the specific episode. A majority of the sixteen episodes which begin the first series, there are more to follow, are about the past of an individual with some of the principal characters meriting two to date. There is a build up to how they came together on the plane and to their recognition that where they are is not normal. They have come across one survivor from a previous marooning, although she was one of larger group. Skeletons have been found in caves, in a light aircraft, and in a sea vessel, a slave trader, now located a couple of miles inland, a Tsunami perhaps? The majority continue to seek a rational explanation for their predicament.
Some, once they have overcome shock, and finding the basics for survival, are content to remain where they are until? Well rescue seems unlikely. Others are desperate to get away and try and work out how to create a sea worthy raft. Some, whether they are stay'ers, go'ers or wait and see'rs, have already resolved the big problem in their lives and are in the processing of engaging in the everyday experiences of birth, death and trauma.
I also like the fact that most episodes are self contained, but also help unravel the growing number of questions about individuals and the collective situation as well as giving broad hints about what is come.
By the way I like critics, especially those who give as much of themselves, sometimes more, than the work being considered. The great ones also analyse the work against the context of what has gone before, something of the background of the work creator and if there are participants, something of their background, and then give a honest opinion of how they regard the work and do not spoil the potential experience for others, by giving away the ending, or highlighting clues which are significant from those which are not.
I do not know, in real life terms, successful artists, although I have encountered several during my life experience, but never to know them as I have known many others. I have known a lot about many creatives because of what they have said and written about themselves or other said and written of them, and which reinforces the opinion that each individual has many perspective, usually valid and which combined begin to assemble a whole truth.
It is in the natural order of things for artists, like any other interest group to come together first at school, then during the further education college, and that a decreasing few will remain life long friends. Others will met from time to time at organised gatherings or in associations, and sometimes in the street, or across a station platform. Because creativity activity is a solitary activity, the continuing challenges and comradeship of the team game is denied, although some will gravitate into colonies or surround themselves with apprentices and acolytes. Some who want but cannot do, teach, or become critics, or collectors. A few who can do, decide not to, or become teachers, critics and collectors in addition.
I must have dozed off at the beginning of the 9th episode, Solitary. The focus was not on a creative, or was it because the former member of the Iraqi military elite appears to have become an expert at interrogation. I can confess that it was not until I had watched all episodes 9-20 that I checked the available internet info and found out how Sayid (Naveen Andrews) came to return to the fold having gone off in an understandable huff. It is in this episode that he encounters Rousseau, the last survivors, or is she, of a previous survivors group. Having already mentioned that one of the principal characters is referred to by his surname Locke, you may begin to get the drift of one aspect of the series.
This episodes also makes more explicit another aspect that of supernatural phenomena. So while I can still recall images from childhood viewings of the original Blue Lagoon and Robinson Crusoe this island is most contemporary.
Episode 10 Raised by another has at its focus the former life of Claire (real name Emile De Raven!) the young woman who is pregnant and here the supernatural aspect is pursued by her recollections of consultations with a psychic and her intentions regarding the future of her baby. An important sub plot is the awareness that one of the survivors is not listed in the passenger manifest.
Episode 11 All the Best Cowboys have Daddy Issues centres of the relationship between Jack (Matthew Fox) the chosen leader because he is a doctor, and his father also a leading doctor at the same hospital and how their relationship was shattered. However there are two other important sub plots, one of which is directly linked. This concerns Claire, the unlisted survivor and more supernatural events, and Claire's developing relationship with Charlie the former rock star druggey. Jack is able to progress his redemption because of an event concerning Charlie as Claire disappears. The episode also ends with a discovery which introducers the science fiction option.
Whatever the Case May Be, episode 12 concerns a case and its contents and the relationship of the contents to Kate (Evangeline Lilley and who has quickly emerged as a strong one with leadership qualities alongside Jack). There is a developing triangle relationship of man man v woman and man man re everything else involving Jack, Kate and the everyone agreed baddie Sawyer(Josh Holloway), and between Sayid, and the over indulged Shannon (Maggie Grace) and her brother who is not her brother. Clever calculating and emotional Shannon is translating the notes of French woman Rousseau.
It was at this point I unwittingly jumped over four episodes, and then had to catch up on Hearts and Minds. (13) Shannon's brother (Boon played by Ian Somerhalder) who is not really her brother, has joined Locke in trying to work out what it is they have discovered and which is kept secret from the rest. Shannon suspects her brother is up to something as we learn something of her background and relationship with Boone. When she attempt to find Bone and Locke the unseen monster, except perhaps by Locke, reappears, and so all the main ingredients are into play simultaneously. Other relationships and backgrounds are developing between Hurley (Jorge Garcia), the size challenged creative and the oriental dimension of non English speaking couple of Jin (Daniel Dae Kim) and Sun (Yunjin Kim) the nicest of everyone, between Jin, Sun and the Black dimension, Michael (Harold Perrineau) and his son Walt (Malcolm David Kelly)
There is a sense of a building up to something when Michael confronts Locke who is teaching his son survival skills. This episode Special 14 make explicit another possible explanation of what is happening as individual and collective projections of fears and fantasies. There is bonding between Walt and his father when Michael rescues his son from the clutches of a Polar bear after father fed up with the behaviour of the son throws a comic book he has been reading into the fire, and the camera reveals that that the story is about a polar bear. The episodes also explains how father and son had become estranged and reunited.
Homecoming (15) sees the return of Claire who cannot remember what has happened to her, although we learn that she has been held prisoner by the mysterious Ethan (William Mapother) who was not on the manifest. We learn more about the background of Charlie (Charlie and Clare, Clare and Charlie they already sound a couple) and in the dramatic finale their bonding becomes irrevocable and we witness the end of Ethan which is unfortunate because alive he might have been able to reveal sufficient to shorten the series.
The last in this series of my translation Outlaws (16) features the back story of Sawyer, and what a story it becomes with the immortal words, I have become the person I hunted, and which is the epitaph of many a devil hunter.
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