Can we talk about irony for a second?

Yeah, I know: this is an Overthinking Lost post.  We should be talking about Egyptian mythology, or Jungian psychology, or, I dunno… Jesus?  But today I’d like to take off my former-English-major hat, if only for a moment, and replace it with my writer hat.  Because, damn, people.  That was a well-written episode.*

Irony in Lost: A Retrospective.

In Ancient Greek, the word “eironeia” (a.k.a. “irony”) means “deception,” so what better episode to discuss this concept than one about Ben Linus, the most deceptive character in the history of ever?  Almost every millisecond of Dr. Linus was infused with some brand of irony:

Verbal irony: Miles’s delicious “UH OH!” before the title screen.

Situational and/or cosmic irony: Lapidus missed Oceanic 815 because he overslept, but he still ended up crash landing on the Island, anyway.

Another example of situational irony: Now RICHARD is the screwed-up suicidal unbeliever and JACK is the one with all the answers.

“Ironic echo”: When Miles repeated Ben’s line about seeing someone standing over a body with a bloody knife.

An example of what I like to call “meta-level” irony: That moment when Miles mentioned Nikki, Paolo, and the diamonds, which made me chuckle and say, “Hey, the writers DIDN’T forget about them, after all!”

But really, the big winner in this week’s “irony contest” was Aristotle’s favorite: dramatic irony.  In case your memory is foggy, that’s the type of ironic tension that occurs when the audience knows something that the characters do not.  For instance, when Othello says, “Man, Iago, you’re a really great friend,” that’s dramatic irony.  And when Oedipus says, “I’m going to catch that bad man what killed my paw!” that’s dramatic irony, too.

It’s also type of irony that I think I’m going to begin referring to as HA!-type irony, because if you look at my notes from this week’s Lost episode, this is what you will see:

• HA! Alterna-Ben’s talking about Napoleon’s exile on an Island!  (Alterna-Ben doesn’t know he’s a Napoleon figure.)
• HA! Alterna-Ben is an idealist who cares about the children!  (He doesn’t know that, in 2007-World, he’s a selfish, amoral pragmatist who murdered the Dharma children and let his own teenage daughter die.)
• HA! Alterna-Ben is lovingly gassing his dad!  (He doesn’t know that, in the other Universe, he killed his dad by gassing him.)
• HA! at “Dr. Linus, you’re the best!”  (Alterna-Ben doesn’t know that, in the other Universe, Alex loathed him.)

And so on.

We Lost fans are always going on about how little we, the audience, know in comparison to how much the writers know and withhold from us. That’s obviously a huge part of Lost, but Dr. Linus reminded me that it’s not the best part.  No, Lost is at its best when it operates the other way, when the viewers know more than the characters do, not the other way around.

I’d argue that this is why Lost’s season 1-3 flashbacks were so popular.  Yes, it’s always great to have background information to round out a character.  But you know what’s better?  Knowing things about a character that the other characters do not know! Shocks and surprises are loads of fun—remember when Sun started speaking English out of nowhere?  Pretty great, wasn’t it?  But wasn’t it also great to watch Sun try to not speak English in front of Jin, even when we, the audience, knew that she could?  Mmm, the dramatic tension!  Didn’t you just want to eat it up?

Lost’s dramatic irony became even more pointed during season 4 when the writers started making use of the flash-forward.  On Island, we saw Jack saying, “I’m going to get these people home to the mainland, and we’re going to have our happy ending, damn it!”  But we already knew from the flash-forwards that only six of them were going to be saved and that Jack wasn’t going to be happy about being home.  Dramatic irony: the stuff flash-forwards are made of.

Dramatic irony, then, was the reason I originally thought the flash-sideways were a fun idea.  Okay, some of them didn’t work so well (*cough* Kate’s), but the best of them show how Lost can wield dramatic irony like a knife, not only in a superficial “ha-ha” way but in a tragic “if only they knew!” way.

Don’t you agree, Dr. Linus?

Irony in ”Sundown” and “Dr. Linus.”

This is the reason I liked this week’s episode so, so much more than last week’s.  Sayid and Ben have long been two of my favorite Lost characters, so I should have appreciated their “centric” episodes equally.  But Sayid’s episode, for all of its sound and fury, fell flat for one simple reason: it lacked irony.  Let’s compare and contrast, shall we?

Sayid’s story has always been the same.  It’s a tragic tale of thwarted redemption.  Sayid has tried harder than anyone, since the beginning of the series, to make up for his violent past, but, time and again, he falls back into his old patterns.  “My name is Sayid Jarrah, and I’m a torturer.”  Tragic, man.  Just tragic.

But by the sixth season, I wanted to see something new in his story.  In the flash-sideways of other characters, we saw their old stories from a new angle.  Jack’s flash-sideways in Lighthouse, for example, looked at his old themes of daddy-hatred, but this time Jack was the father, not the son.  We also saw that, contrary to what 2007-Island-Jack said, he actually has the capability to break the cycle of abuse, move past his daddy-issues, and become a better father.  That’s dramatically ironic, but in a more subtle way: we, the audience, now know something Island-Jack doesn’t know about himself.  To me, that’s really satisfying.

Likewise, this week, we learned something about Ben that Ben didn’t know about himself: that he could be selfless.  That’s not “ha-ha funny,” but it is ironic.  We know more about a character and his situation than the character knows himself.  For once, we had a leg up on old Ben Linus.

Sayid’s flash-sideways, on the other hand, merely rehashed his old story.  Nothing new was learned, either by Sayid or by the audience.  Oh, he’d kill for Nadia?  Shrug.  He had already shot himself for her back in season one.  So color me unsurprised when he shot Keamy, a character almost anyone in their right mind would shoot without a second thought.  This isn’t dramatic irony.  This is repetition.  Boring, bleak repetition.

Here, look at this chart I made.  It’ll probably make my point better than my paragraphs ever could:

If Sayid’s flash-sideways had included more dramatic irony, I might have bought his Island-side conversion to the Dark Side a little more.  If I had written Sundown, the chart would have looked a little more like this:

2007-SAYID THINKS: That no matter how hard he tries to be redeemed, he’s fated to be a murderer

WE LEARN FROM THE FLASH-SIDEWAYS: That Sayid never actually wanted redemption at all; he just wanted Nadia

HOW WE LEARN THIS: The flash-sideways starts the same way as the one we saw in Sundown, except Keamy DOES kill Omer.  Then alter-Sayid steps out of the shadows and says, “Well done, Keamy.  Here is your payment.”  And THEN he shoots Keamy in the chest.  The end of the flash-forward is at Omer’s funeral, where evil!Sayid comforts the bereft Nadia.  (This fake episode would get bonus irony points if Nadia said something like “Sayid Jarrah, you are a good person” before the credits rolled.)

My version of Sundown would be just as bleak as the real version, but—with the Power of Irony!—it would develop Sayid’s character more and make his turn to the Dark Side more believable.

Conclusions.

I’m not saying that irony is the most important tool in a writer’s literary arsenal, although others might agree with that statement.  But Lost’s writers have long shown that they know how to use dramatic irony better than any other writing staff on TV—and dramatic irony only gets better and easier to use the longer a story goes.  Once you have such well-established characters with five seasons of backstory on their shoulders, adding little ironic twists and flourishes is a way to surprise the viewer, to make her cry, to delight her.

[Agree? Disagree? Want to continue gushing about how good Michael Emerson is?  Let loose in the comments!]

*Okay, the episode wasn’t perfect, writing-wise.  The “Ben Linus, schoolteacher” storyline arguably had a couple of holes in it, and, as the AVClub said, some of the dialogue was a little “on the nose,” as it were.  But, honestly, the rest of the episode was so good that I could overlook those little hiccups.  Your mileage may vary, I suppose.

Matthew Wrather hosts with Natalie Baseman, Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, and Josh McNeil to overthink cult entertainment, what makes a cult, Chat Roulette, and this totally weird Bar Mitzvah Natalie went to this one time.

→ Download Episode 89 (MP3)

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Overthinkers of the world, unite! You have nothing to open but your threads.

In rap news, Lil’ Wayne began his one-year jail term this week, pleading guilty to attempted weapons possession. The obvious joke is that doing a bid can only help a gangsta’s career, but that actually hasn’t been true. It certainly hasn’t helped Mystikal’s career any, though he only just got out.

Question: what should Lil’ Wayne do with his year off from recording (other than reflect on his crimes, rehabilitate, blah blah etc)?

Second, have we all taken a moment to let our jaws drop over the Tron Legacy trailer? Because really, wow.

Question: A revanchist Alice in Wonderland; a mature Tron sequel; and even that trailer for The Sorceror’s Apprentice looked a little edgy for a movie inspired by a Fantasia cartoon. Has the success of Pirates of the Caribbean inspired Disney to treat its properties in a more adult manner? If so, what does this suggest for the future?

Finally, we doff our bandannas for Corey Haim, who apparently succumbed to a drug overdose earlier this week at the age of 38. Best known for his adolescent attitude in such 80s classics as Lucas, License to Drive and The Lost Boys, Corey had regained some D-list cred by teaming up with Corey Feldman in “The Two Coreys” and a cameo in Crank 2: High Voltage. Fame treats few of us kindly, and young Mr. Haim worse than most.

Man, Lil’ Wayne doing a bid, Corey Haim dying: does OTI have any good news this week? As it happens, we do! Overthinking It is sending correspondents to PAX East, Penny Arcade’s East coast convention and gamer expo! OTI staff will be wandering the floor, documenting the happenings on the official Overthinking It Twitter account.

“But Perich,” you’re asking, “how will I recognize the OTI crew? Or how can I identify myself as a loyal Overthinker?” Well, you could always buy an official Overthinking It branded T-shirt!

Are you coming to PAX East? Do you want to catch up with the Overthinking It staff? Sound off in the comments, since this is your … open thread.

On my bookshelf, there’s an old VHS tape with a faded, hand-written label. It says, “Convoy, 1st Gen.” This is because in 2000, when I tracked down and rented a copy of the 1978 Sam Peckinpah movie, after years of searching, I was so excited that I made two copies of it. Then I made another six copies off of those two copies, and gave them away to friends. (I am blessed with the sort of friends for whom a bootleg copy of Convoy is a great gift.) Anyway, the “1st Gen” on the copy I’m looking at indicates that this one was dubbed right from the original. I’ve lugged it from apartment to apartment over the last ten years, even though I haven’t always had access to a VCR.

But I probably won’t ever watch it again. If I wanted to see Convoy now (and I kind of do, after writing the last paragraph), I could just put it on the top of my Netflix queue. They’d send me a nice new DVD that would look ten times better than my old videotape. Actually, I don’t even have to wait for the DVD. Convoy is currently a “Watch It Now” movie on Netflix, so I can stream it right to my computer. Or I can use my XBox to watch it on my TV. And if I wanted to buy it, the DVD is $13 via Amazon.

This is simultaneously awesome, and a teeny bit sad.

It’s easy to forget that only 15 years ago, finding a movie was a very different experience.

Here were your options:

• You went to Blockbuster. If they didn’t have the movie you wanted, too bad.
• You went to Suncoast, Tower Records, or another then-thriving-now-bankrupt movie store. If they didn’t have what you wanted, maybe they could order it for you. But probably not.

And that’s it. I know this seems unthinkable to those of you under 20, but as recently as the late 90s you only had access to the movies you could drive and pick up. In those dark days, a well-stocked video store was a geek’s best friend. I will always have a deep fondness for Best Video, located in Hamden, CT. At Best Video, you stand little chance of finding anything without one of the clerks to help you. For instance, the Comedy section is divided into “Comedy” and “Best Comedy.” But there are also comedies in “Best of the Best,” and certain directors have their own shelves. I preferred to wander aimlessly, discovering movies I had never heard of but couldn’t wait to see. There were days when I’d rent ten tapes, watch five of them, and dub the other five to watch later. I was a kid in a candy store.

My favorite find there was a horror movie from the Philippines, called The Killing of Satan. The cover asked one of my favorite questions of all time: “What power should a man possess to challenge the Prince of Darkness?” It’s the word “should” that really makes it work for me.

Back in its heyday, Best Video would rent movies by mail as well. You could literally have them mail you a single VHS tape, which you’d watch and mail back in a week. Geeks all over the country happily took advantage of this. In the days when watching anything more bandwidth-intensive than the Hampster Dance seemed impossible, Best Video was the only way to see some of these rare imports and limited editions. The video store is still around, but they’ve shut down the mail order rental business. Between eBay, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and BitTorrent, almost anything ever made can be yours to watch, in days if not instantly, at little cost. For instance, The Killing of Satan can be had for under $10.

Once again, let me make it clear that this is a good thing. I love movies, and I love having them at my fingertips. But something has been lost. Part of being a movie geek is priding yourself on seeing the obscure stuff that lesser geeks and mere mortals don’t bother with. This used to be challenging. Today, a movie can have cult status because only a small group of people like it… but not because only a small group of people have access. Finding the movies is never a challenge (finding the time to watch them is another story).

But what I really miss is the sense of community. Back in the day, the best way to expand your movie-going horizons was to find friends with the same passion, and borrow, trade, and share each other’s collections. There’s even an episode of The Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse discover Comic Book Guy’s secret room of bootleg videotapes, and make serious money by charging admission to screenings. I have totally been to parties like that. The episode aired in 2001. Less than five years later, it was completely obsolete. Nowadays, Comic Book Guy’s random clips wouldn’t be on VHS tapes--they’d be all over YouTube. And the people of Springfield would watch them at home, alone.

In 1999, I got a copy of Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles off of eBay. This is a spoof of the Muppets that he made at the tender age of 28. An early scene features a puppet cat performing oral sex on a puppet walrus. The whole thing is very funny and strange and wonderful. When it arrived in the mail, I watched it with 20 people, and again the next week with 20 other people. Now, you can see the whole thing on YouTube:

Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue is a half-hour special produced in 1993, in which a dream team of Saturday morning cartoon characters join forces to help a teen give up drugs. My favorite part is when Alf threatens to eat Garfield. When I got a copy of that one, I had to reserve my dorm’s common room for a giant screening. Once again, it’s on YouTube now:

And then there’s the Star Wars Holiday Special. This was George Lucas’ fantastically ill-advised 1978 variety show, in which Harrison Ford tries to get Chewbacca home to his family in time for “Life Day.” The most jaw-dropping of many painful moments is probably Bea Arthur, singing a song in the Mos Eisley cantina. The Special was aired exactly once, and (unsurprisingly) never released on VHS. For years, it was a kind of geek legend. No one I knew had ever seen it, but everyone had heard stories from friends of friends. “One day,” us young geeks told each other, “we will get our hands on a copy of that!”

And now, it’s on YouTube:

This all applies to more than movies. When I was a kid, my brother was a giant Phish fan. And any real Phish fan knows their commercial CDs aren’t where the special sauce is--you need to listen to live performances, where they could spend 45 minutes playing one song.

So Danny would hit up the tape trading websites. While he was doing his homework, he’d be running off dubs of his collection, to exchange with fellow Phishermen. And when a new tape arrived in the mail, he’d put aside whatever he was doing, run into his room, and emerge two hours later humming meandering guitar riffs to himself. He even had a special rack for storing his carefully organized Phish bootlegs.

Nowadays, you can get all your concert recordings online, no communication with other human beings required. TapeTrading.com is actually for sale. I doubt anyone will buy it.

Overnight, we’ve come to expect any movie ever made to be available at the click of a button, and we usually get our wish. It’s an amazing embarrassment of riches. But when entertainment flows as freely as water from a faucet, we start to take it for granted. We don’t get the pleasure of seeking it out, and we don’t bother sharing it with friends. Part of the fun of watching obscure movies used to be the thrill of finding something rare… but in the Internet Age, no movie is rare. And like I said before, that’s a good thing that makes me a little sad.

[Update: We took up the question of what makes a movie a "cult" movie on a recent episode of the Overthinking It Podcast [iTunes link]. Download Episode 89: Wang-Free Zone. —Ed.]

My oh my, it’s been a while.  But here I am with another installment, which will be spread across two days, because I couldn’t get the whole thing polished in time and these posts tend to be way too long anyway.  For the record, if you’ve been following this series of posts from the beginning, you’ve read just over sixteen thousand words of my natterings about a decade-old TV series, which works out to well over fifty typewritten pages.  Almost a hundred pages, if you use Courier New with wide margins and jigger the kerning.

Before getting to the episodes on Disc 4, let’s take a quick look back over the series so far, which is just, just over halfway done.  (I’m cutting this off after Jupiter Jazz, the literal halfway point.)

Note that when I say focus character, I mean more than just who gets the most screen time.  I say that the episode is focused on a character if we derive significant insights into their motivations or backstory, or if it plays an important part in their character arc.  So while Spike doesn’t do a whole lot more in Waltz for Venus than he does in Gateway Shuffle, his stepping in as a mentor for the hapless Rocco is a really important moment for his character development.

The balance of “light” and “dark” episodes is pretty interesting.  But more significant I think is the way that we get exactly one episode dedicated to each of the main characters other than Spike.  The series thus far is tidy.  It’s not mechanistic or anything, but you could definitely imagine the writing team sitting down to work out this general structure ahead of time (even if, as some of our more anime-savvy commenters have pointed out, that almost certainly didn’t happen).  You could also make a much, much more complicated version of this chart that also includes thematic links between the episodes, like the music boxes that show up in 1, 5, 8, and 12/13, or the big food sequences in 1, 4, and 11, and so on.  But I’m not totally sure that there would be anything to gain from this other than the “Okay, it’s all a dense tapestry” factor.

Anyway, the second half of the series is, for want of a better word, a lot sloppier.  I’m still not quite sure what to make of that.  The individual episodes are still fun, but the stakes just aren’t as high, and the connections between them are a little harder to figure out.  If one were feeling uncharitable, one could suggest that the show had jumped the shark. That the writers had run out of good ideas, and were simply spinning their wheels.  One could also blame pressure from the network censors:  Cowboy Bebop was very nearly cancelled after thirteen episodes because of concerns over adult themes and situations.  And The second half of the series is a lot more, uh, laid back.  Most of the time.  But plausible as they seem, I think that both of these explanations are mistaken — that there’s more to these later episodes than meets the eye.

One thing to note:  in the first half of the series, Jet, Faye, and Ed each got exactly one episode dedicated to their antics.  In the second half – well, I haven’t actually finished it yet.  But on this disc alone, Jet and Ed get an episode each, and Faye gets two.  And I guess Spike just takes a cigarette break, or practices Jeet Kune Do, or something.

15)  My Funny Valentine

This disc leads off with a Faye episode, in which we finally find out the truth behind her backstory.  Sort of.

The facts – presented in flashback and dream sequence over the first half of the episode – are these:  in 2019, a young woman was put into cryogenic storage.  When she woke up fifty-four years later (a couple of years before the show proper begins), she had no recollection of her identity or why she was frozen in the first place.  The doctors that thawed her out couldn’t help much, although they were able to give her a name – Faye Valentine – and to slap her with a 300,000,000 medical bill.  Harsh!

(Longtime readers will of course remember that Faye’s debts were brought up in the first episode she appeared in.  At the time, we were given to understand that she owed money to the mafia.  Turns out it was the Blue Cross Blue Shield.  Make of that what you will.)

So as you can see, we don’t get to learn much about Faye’s past at all.  In fact, as we’ll learn later on, even these minimal “facts” are mostly fabrications:  the doctors were running a scam where they pulled random bodies out of cold sleep and stuck them for massive medical fees, and the name “Faye Valentine” was assigned more or less at random.  In a typical Cowboy Bebop move, the “Faye Valentine Origin Story” episode turns out to be about how Faye Valentine doesn’t really have an origin.

However.  If we accept the idea that our personalities are largely the product of our past experiences (which is generally accepted in life, but relatively uncommon in fiction, which tends to posit some sort of essential, transcendental “selfness”), then yeah, this is an origin story.  Faye comes out of the freezer a blank slate, and her current personality is shaped by what happens to her afterwards.  Which means that most of her personality comes from a whirlwind romance with this guy, Whitney Hagas Matsumoto, who Faye refers to as “the guy with the thin eyebrows.”

Whitney is a lawyer assigned to Faye by her medical insurance company to help her fight the massive lawsuit that they’re slapping her with.  I don’t think you actually get an attorney appointed to you in a civil suit.  I certainly don’t think the insurance company that is suing you would have to provide you with one.  But hey, maybe the legal system has changed with the times.   (Plus – spoiler alert – it turns out to be a fraud.) Anyway, Whitney also has the job of getting Faye acclimated to life in the 2070s.   This leads to a cute little scene here where he tests Faye’s memory by having her identify various objects in the room

only to flip the script on her and reveal that these are actually

It’s kind of like that Family Guy parody of Ricki Lake:  “I’m not actually a horse, I’m a broom.”

Faye’s reaction to all this is to run away.  Well first she faints, but then she runs away.  And this is pretty understandable, all things considered… but it’s no real way to deal with your problems.  Whitney tracks her down and convinces her to try to make a new life for herself, and pay off her massive debt a little at a time.  “And if you hang in there, maybe you’ll meet someone wonderful!” he says, staring soulfully down at her, from under his conspicuously normal-sized eyebrows.  And I’m thinking:  “Worst.  Lawyer.  Ever.”

It turns out that he is pretty bad, at that.  Because after a brief romance montage, Whitney fakes his own death in order to trick Faye into assuming responsibility for his own not-inconsiderable debts.  And this, honestly, explains a lot about Faye.  Her mercenary nature.  Her instinctive distrust of anyone who tries to help her.  Her tendency to cut and run.  And so on.  Compared to this, the second half of the episode – where Jet drags in a minor bounty who happens to be Faye’s ex boyfriend, and she busts him out of the brig in hopes of getting some answers about her past – is relatively uninteresting.  Well, it’s uninteresting if you already know that no answers are forthcoming.  And I already told you that.