Recently, I was “flashing back,” if you will, to last summer, back when I first started watching Lost and writing this crazy column. Back in June and July, I asked a lot of silly questions: Who are the Others? Can science and faith ever be reconciled? How is Lost’s season two like a game of Civilization IV?
I’m not going to answer any of those questions today. No, today, the question I want to revisit is the question I asked at the tail end of Lost’s season one: What kind of show is this, anyway?
That question still hasn’t been sufficiently answered. Back in June, I wondered if Lost was science-fiction, fantasy, or some other genre. (The answer, it turns out, was “all of the above.”) Now, in February, I’m wondering something else: Is Lost a “hero’s journey” or a Shakespearean tragedy? Or is Lost’s narrative something else, entirely—something more interesting? Something more…subversive?
“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”
— Thomas Jefferson
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“The spirit of enterprise, which characterizes the commercial part of America, has left no occasion of displaying itself unimproved.”
— Alexander Hamilton
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“Excuse me, I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.”
— Robocop
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I had always intended for the second installment of this oldest and most waited-for (if not awaited) Overthinking It series to be about a character I have often described as the Quintessential American Tragic Hero: Alex Murphy, a.k.a. Robocop from the truly excellent Paul Verhoeven film of the same name. Then, of course, other things happened.
Well, this is VerhOeverthinking It week, and as Darren Aronofsky will hopefully showcase for us Robocop’s durability — both as a cinematic subject and as a cybernetic apparatus — so will I persevere in hewing to one of my earliest intentions on this site.
Let us venture into the glory, the flaws, the fall and the suffering of that bechromed bulwark of semivoluntary justice — the American who is Half Jeffersonian, Half Hamiltonian, All Cop.
Do you want to learn more? Well, dead or alive, you are coming with me –
I recently read an article about the possibility of more Indiana Jones movies, which included this little gem:
Lucas sat down with AP Television at his Big Rock Ranch outside San Francisco, where he said he didn’t pay much attention to the reception from critics and fans to “Crystal Skull,” a sci-fi adventure set in the 1950s.
Let’s just mull over that for a sec.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.
—”The Rich Boy”, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1926)
This passage is probably the source of the supposed exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway. (F. Scott: “The rich are not like you and me.” Ernest: “Yes. They have more money.”)
I wonder what the author of Gatsby would think of Gossip Girl, whose second season bowed last night on the chronically under-performing CW network. I guess money and scantily clad young things don’t pull viewers like it used to, though we would be mistaken to take this as encouraging evidence about the taste of the American public.
Or maybe Hemingway’s (alas, apocryphal) ironic comment is the more revealing here. By seeming to misunderstand Fitzgerald’s point, he suggests that he doesn’t have one.
I think that Gossip Girl is, at bottom not a show about money at all (though money has a great deal to do with its deeper significance). Mild spoilers and spicy overthinking after the jump. And yes, I am going to make this a weekly series.
Belinkie, Wrather, and Fenzel analyze presidential and gubernatorial sex scandals throughout American history, touching on Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen” (Ashley Alexandra Dupré), Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Hugh Grant and a cut rate Sunset Blvd. hooker, and Grover Cleveland.
Excuse the bad Skype connection and light production values. This is Episode 4 of our podcast, and as our podcasting kung fu becomes mightier, we have been trying to use musical bumpers, get good sound quality, and so forth. But we wanted to get this up while it was still relevant.
Download Episode 4 (AAC Format)
