watership down

March 1, 2016

Lost Exegesis (The Moth) — Part 2

Jane Campbellcharlie, continuity, exegesis, lost, mirrors, phantom tollbooth, saint jack, the moth, watership down4

You can find Part 1 of the essay here. Usually, the essay is spoiler-free until we get to the “Looking Glass” portion after an intertextual intermission. In this case our selected cultural artifacts are all much more interesting in how they function prophetically, so here’s your advance notice of spoilers from here on out.

Intermission

Saint Jack

SAWYER: Ah, damn. Didn’t I tell you? Word from the valley is Saint Jack got himself buried in a cave-in.

Let’s start with Saint Jack, a movie directed by Peter Bogdanovich based on the novel by Paul Theroux. Now, Paul Theroux, we should point out, isn’t just a novelist, he’s also justly known as a great travel writer, thanks to his travels to Africa, Singapore, and Japan. He’s earned the enmity of several governments, largely for bringing to light certain aspects of their countries which they’d preferred to keep covered up.

That said, I think the movie is much more celebrated than the book, so that’s what we’ll be attending to. It was shot in several months entirely on location in Singapore, under the pretense of being a standard rom-com (“Jack of Hearts”) as opposed to an adaptation of Saint Jack. After it was released, the movie was banned in Singapore for decades. So it’s got that, at least, in common with the book.

(What is it about “covering” things up? Come to think of it, Jack covers for Charlie at the end of The Moth, lying that Charlie has the flu to make his withdrawal more socially acceptable.)

The film is possibly some of the best work by Bogdanovich and lead actor Ben Gazzara, who plays the titular Jack Flowers. Jack Flowers is an American expat living in Singapore in the 70s. He makes his living by running a brothel, which also supports his drinking. Jack makes it work because he does not judge the people in his life. It’s not like he’s in a position to without being a hypocrite, but then we see all kinds of hypocrites in Jack’s line of work. He doesn’t use force or intimidation or privilege to navigate the world – no, he looks at everyone as deserving of his attention and respect and warmth, and even when he’s proven wrong he does little more than walk away. So Jack is a “saint” in this rather spiritual respect, in how he manages his relationships, not in terms of his “sins.” He’s a saint, but he’s no saint.

The movie meanders for quite a while, basically a series of vignettes featuring Jack interacting with his clients, workers, and other people, but it’s got a couple of pivotal moments. The first is when the local mob takes down Jack’s place of business, wrecking his establishment and dispersing his people, while marking his arms with tattoos comprised of various epithets and obscenities. This is actually about the halfway point of the movie. Jack goes to another tattooist to put down more tattoos that effectively integrate the Asian hieroglyphs into pictures of flowers.…

December 9, 2015

Lost Exegesis (White Rabbit) — Part 2

Jane Campbellalice in wonderland, exegesis, jack, locke, lost, mirrors, part 2, shephard, water is faith, watership down, white rabbit9

Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Alice in Wonderland

Next up in the Intermission is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Lewis Carroll, and directly referred to in the dialogue and as well as being referenced by the episode’s title. Before we examine the manner of the title’s use, let’s take a brief look at Alice. Her adventures cover two books (the other being Through the Looking Glass) and are often issued as a twinset. LOST will certainly play with the Alice story in future episodes – the Season Three finale is titled after the second book, and Jack will read from the “Pool of Tears” chapter in Season Four.

Alice is ostensibly a children’s fairy tale ruled primarily an aesthetic, one that’s largely surreal and operates according to dream logic, what with all the talking animals and such. But the aesthetic is not completely arbitrary – rather, it relies primarily on finding new and strange meaning within the familiar, and in teasing out and secondary meanings for words that it can muster. The famous Jabberwocky poem, for example, is loaded with new portmanteau words, but they’re not meaningless words – rather, they are hybrids, and only sound unfamiliar until you examine the constituent components. There’s likewise a good deal of wordplay – “lessons” become “lessens” which means each teaching gets shorter – while other concepts presented are simply reversals of what we’d expect, like remembering the future instead of the past. And yet the Alice stories aren’t bereft of social commentary. Especially the first book, which presents all manner of British cultural institutions as being faintly ridiculous, albeit heavily disguised in certain aesthetic codes.

And not only does Alice function as cultural commentary, it’s become a part of western culture itself. In his introduction to the year 2000 reprinting, science writer Martin Gardner says that he would not “consider a person educated” who has never read the books. Indeed, that a phrase like “the White Rabbit” can be part and parcel of our regular lexicon attests to that.

So this is where we get the title to this episode, which is directly invoked by John Locke: Jack is chasing his “white rabbit” just like Alice chased a white rabbit into a strange and magical place. Which, of course, suggests that the Island is a kind of “wonderland” and that it operates by different rules than the mundane world. This usage, however, has definitely become mundane in SF/F culture. In the Star Trek episode “Shore Leave,” for example, Dr. McCoy sees a White Rabbit (crafted much like the original illustration of John Tenniel in Carroll’s book) passing by shortly after transporting down to a new planet, which turns out to be an elaborate amusement park. The interactions that the various crewmembers have on the planet are derived from their subconscious, and that is likely a clue to understanding the nature of the Island.

Or perhaps we should consider The Matrix, where Neo follows “the White Rabbit” (this time a tattoo on one of his clients) to meet Trinity, and eventually Morpheus, who describes the experience of leaving the Matrix in Wonderland terms.…