Was Lost Gothic? Do We Care? (Part 2)

Last week, I suggested that the popular television show Lost was an essentially Gothic story in the spirit of Beckford’s Vathek, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and other “oriental” Romances.  I claimed that the popularity of show would be a powerful argument for the continuing effectiveness of the Gothic mode.  But let’s go beyond that and take a closer look at the actual gothicism of Lost, and how it responds to and acts upon a 21st century viewership.

If we look back to Vathek published in 1786, we have to note that the Gothic tradition as understood today was really first articulated in late 18th century England.  Though the Gothic novel drew on continental traditions, it was born as we know it in England.  And this was a time when the British Empire was asserting itself in the face of French Republicanism and when the British were extending their control over India and Africa.  Richard Davenport-Hines has persuasively argued a definition of the Gothic in terms of power relationships:

Images of power have always been paramount to the meanings of gothic revival symbolism: the power of natural forces over man, man’s power over nature, the power of the autocrat, the mob, the scientist; for much of the twentieth century, the power of inward goblins to torment one’s psyche… The suggestion that submission is empowering is often reiterated by goth writers.  Dominance and subordination – the interdependence and mutuality of ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ – provide one of gothic’s themes.

These inversions are visible everywhere.  In Dracula, the medieval eastern European colonizes an industrialized, modern England.  In Frankenstein, the creature gains power over its creator.  Even in the oldest and most embryonic Gothic novels (think Otranto, Udolpho, The Monk) the cunning and manipulative villains are reduced to impotence through a combination of incompetent servants and restless apparitions.  And in Heart of Darkness, the violence and depredation of the Belgian Congo corrodes the moral code of the profoundly civilized Mr. Kurtz.  It is a controversial example, for its ambiguous and uncertain perspective on both race and colonialism, but for that reason is all the more relevant.  “What if,” the Gothic asks, “the victim is master?”  This question and issue comes closer to a universal Gothic trope than anything else.

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Lost was created in a (theoretically) post-colonial world, and the show’s execution reflects this.  The cast was probably one of the most deliberately diverse in television history; major characters include a men, women, African and Mexican Americans, an Iraqi, Koreans, not to mention European-descended white Americans, Scottish, British, and Australians.  Where these characters themselves run the gamut and status, it may seem that colonization is not in play; what inversion can take place?

In fact, the inversion is thoroughly conventional, in terms of a Gothic colonialism.  The main characters — the survivors — find themselves up against the natives of the Island (referred to as “The Others”) and typically at a disadvantage.  The Others (who are, significantly, as pancultural as the survivors)  have strange traditions and an unfamiliar history.  They act without explaining their motives, but there is a justification, or at least a rationale, behind many of their actions.  Just at Mr. Kurtz is seduced by the sorcerous energy of the Congo, or Vathek is compelled by greed to seek out Eblis, characters like John Locke, Jack Shepherd, and Desmond Hume are driven to and from the Island by impulses that have nothing to do with self-preservation.  John Locke is perhaps the most obvious example of this spell at work, but who can forget the straight-laced Jack, hungover and miserable, yelling on an airfield at the end of Season Three: “We have to go back, Kate!  We have to go back!”  He is haunted, pursued — hunted — by that which would have been colonized.

Now one may object, and reasonably so, that the survivors aren’t exactly your typical colonizers; after all, they were only passing over the South Pacific, en route from one controlled “safe” region to another.  But Charles Widmore is such a stereotype of colonization — from his boatloads of mercenary thugs to his expensive one-of-a-kind scotch — that further explanation is almost unnecessary.  Even this, however, might make an incomplete case, if not for numerous other cases.  Isn’t, for example, the Dharma Initiative a colonizer, forcibly establishing itself where it is not wanted and waging a war on the native “Hostiles” while exploiting the natural resources of the Island?  There was obviously some colonial intent among the Roman-era settlers of the island, revealed near the very end of the series; they dug their well to access the mysterious light there.  Even the crew of The Black Rock must be regarded as wayward colonizers, waylaid en route with its cargo of indentured servants, almost like poor Captain Bligh with his breadfruit.  In all of these cases, however, the colonizers are either brought into submission or to a miserable end.  Many of the survivors die or are subsumed into the Others, Widmore’s lackeys are twice annihilated, the Dharma Initiative are exterminated as are the Romans, and the sole-survivor of The Black Rock is a lowly widower who becomes one of the Island’s most steadfast servants.

Lost was written for a post-colonial era, and its racial and social perspectives reflect this, but in its enunciation of a colonial struggle it calls upon over two hundred years of literature and art.  In fact, the show rather profoundly argues that colonial-era dilemmas and contradictions continue to pursue us in a post-colonial era.  This argument is fundamentally Gothic.

Next Week, we’ll continue our discussion of Lost with the supernatural, the symbolic, and the eternal Gothic (and Gothic Funk).

Click here to read Part 3.

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