Lost as Interactive Television

2. Lost as Interactive Television

Just as Twin Peaks represented one of the first television shows that could not be “completely” understood without access to a VCR (and, for many viewers, participation in Usenet discussion groups), Lost represents a new generation of “convergence-era” television texts: programs with narratives complex enough to require repeat viewing and careful analysis, whether on DVR, DVD, or the Internet. Yet, like Twin Peaks, Lost is often described as a more “interactive” form of television, due to the unusual nature of the relationship between the show’s creative team (i.e. writers and producers) and the audience.

That relationship, as it turns out, bears a striking resemblance to the relationship between the producers and fans of Lost’s less fictional predecessor Survivor, as detailed in Jenkins’ Convergence Culture. Writing about Survivor fan communities as examples of “collective intelligence,” Jenkins proposed that

Survivor was “television for the Internet age—designed to be discussed, debated, predicted and critiqued.” 6 More interesting still was his observation that many of Survivor’s most actively engaged viewers interpreted

the show as an aggressive competition not only between the show’s featured contestants, but also between the viewers (who hoped to uncover the identity of each season’s winner before the results aired on television) and the show’s producer (who hoped to keep that identity secret). Describing how members of the show’s spoiler community often collaborate to uncover and draw conclusions from “hidden” information, such as satellite photos of locations where the current season of Survivor had been recorded, Jenkins suggested that

6 Jenkins. 25.

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Survivor fans had a great deal in common with the interpretive communities that had formed more than a decade earlier in Usenet groups to “solve” the mysteries of Twin Peaks.

As both a literal and spiritual hybrid of Survivor and Twin Peaks, it should come as no surprise that Lost audiences have inherited the interactive legacies of both programs. Like the Survivor spoilers, Lost fans have turned to a wide range of unexpected (and often extratextual) resources in hopes of better predicting the answers to Lost’s innumerable mysteries. During the second season, the parallels to Jenkins’ example became unavoidable, when participants in several Lost communities correctly anticipated that two characters were going to die in an upcoming episode, based on their analysis of unauthorized production photos that showed two grave-sized holes on one of the Hawaiian beaches where the program is shot. Furthermore, when script pages used for casting auditions were leaked before the show’s third season, Lost’s producers followed Survivor’s example and “leaked” their own false spoiler (or “foiler”) information to fan communities.

As with Twin Peaks, however, the competition between fans and producers also unfolds in a more authorized and sanctioned format, with program viewers collaborating to formulate theories that “solve” Lost’s various mysteries by drawing upon a wide range of specialized knowledge (e.g., translation of ancient

Egyptian hieroglyphics, application of experimental quantum physics, etc). Unlike Twin Peaks, however, Lost’s producers are more than willing to participate in a “giant cat and mouse game” with their fans, and are infamous for seeding “easter eggs” and hidden clues in almost every episode of the series.

Openly embracing its partial status as a cult television program for the post-broadcast era, Lost is designed to encourage and reward the level of microscopic analysis that DVR, DVD and high-resolution streaming video files make possible. In fact, while the most devoted Twin Peaks fans used VCRs to scrutinize each episode of that program on a frame-by-frame basis in hopes of uncovering clues, Lost’s producers go several steps farther and actively anticipate such behavior. James Poniewozik offers one well- known example of how Lost’s producers actively encourage this sort of viewing, describing a moment during an episode in the show’s second season where:

Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a former Nigerian drug lord, has a religious epiphany when he

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encounters the smoke monster in the jungle. Viewers who TiVoed the scene and played it in slow motion saw a series of images in the cloud: Eko's dead brother, a man Eko killed, a crucifix. The images flash by in

fractions of a second. A casual viewer would not have noticed them at all. 7

As a result, Poniewozik suggests, Lost functions on several possible levels at once: viewers can opt for

a more traditional role, which allows them to “sit back and enjoy the story,” or a more active and engaged

role, treating the program “as if it were an adventure-puzzle game like Dungeons & Dragons or Myst.” 8 And indeed, many academics, critics and fans agree with Jennifer Buckendorff’s assessment that “Lost is the first television program that owes its soul to video games,” 9 and that – like many video games – Lost attracts both “casual” and “hardcore” viewers. In his earlier writing on Twin Peaks, Jenkins describes the aspects of the program that lent it a game-like quality:

The narrative abounded with cryptic messages, codes, and chess problems, riddles and conundrums, dreams, visions, clues, secret passages and locked boxes, shadowy figures peering through dark windows and secondary narratives appearing in the televised soap (Invitation to Love) that forms a backdrop to the first season’s action.

Dan Hill’s recent assessment of Lost as the best available example of a complex, engaging multiplatform text made an almost identical claim, noting that

Lost episodes are famously laden with arcana to pore over, deconstruct and even construct in the first place, such is the collective-imagination-run-wild of the show's fans. For instance, [one fan site] supplies transcripts of the eery 'whispers'; character names are opportunities for anagrams ('Ethan Rom' = 'Other Man'); there are numbers, codes everywhere; hieroglyphics; mystical allusions; references to philosophy

(Locke, Rousseau); the constant casual appearance of literary works etc. 10

As such, Lost (as Jenkins wrote of Twin Peaks) “invite[s] the viewer’s participation as a minimal condition for comprehending the narrative, and even closer consideration if one…hopes to solve the compelling narrative hook.” 11 But while Twin Peaks hung on a single infamous narrative hook (“Who killed

Laura Palmer?”), Lost swings from dozens, introducing and advancing new narrative hooks during each episode, with many of the largest (e.g., “What is the island?”) poised to last for the majority of the show’s six

7 Poniewozik, J. "Why The Future of Television is Lost." Time. 2006. 8 Ibid. 9 Buckendorff, J. "Fans play TV series "Lost" like an interactive video game." The Seattle Times. 10 January 2006.

10 Hill, D. "Why Lost is genuinely new media." City of Sound. 27 March 2006. 11 Jenkins.

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season run. This gives Lost a distinct advantage that Twin Peaks didn’t have, in that it can provide the satisfaction of narrative closure by resolving some of its mysteries, while still holding viewers with the promise that it will eventually “explain everything.”