I wasn't there for the Lost party, so I kinda feel like I'm butting into an overheard conversation.
We can talk about magic beans and Wonderland, but really what we're dancing around is the notion of willing suspension of disbelief. All stories are false; that's what distinguishes stories from histories. But some stories aren't merely false, but impossibly false. Sometimes authors spew out shit that's just completely ridiculous, but the audience goes along with it anyway. The audience has, for whatever reason, chosen to check their disbelief at the door for the duration of that story.
I'm gonna tell you guys now about one of my all-time favorite shows. You've probably heard of it. It was a speculative-fiction-type show, set in a universe parallel to ours. The world of the show was almost identical to ours, but not precisely. Some major details were different. There were different countries, the maps were different, recent history was different. The whole premise of the show revolved around some event sometime in the 70s that caused the in-show universe's timeline to diverge from our own. It was a big mystery on top of which this character-driven story was constructed. The show always played a little fast-and-loose with the chronology — they did a lot of flashbacks, in particular — but in the last couple seasons the writers got more ambitious, playing with flash-forwards and Rashomon-style point-of-view shifts. But under it all, throughout the whole show, there was this one underlying mystery.
And you know what? That central mystery of how the two timelines diverged, the big back-story of just exactly what happened to cause the differences? It was never explained. The finale came and went, and absolutely no explanations were ever offered for it.
I am, of course, talking about "The West Wing."
Now Jeffery, you say. Surely you are being silly. Surely you are making up lies to entertain strangers over the Internet. But I say to you that I am not. Think about it. In the universe of "The West Wing," not only is there a different president, but they have their presidential elections in the wrong years! Obviously it's a parallel universe that diverged at some point from our own.
And yes, there were Internet people who got lost in the tall grass on that one. Here's my personal favorite fan theory: When Agnew resigned, Nixon appointed Ford to be the new vice president, just like in our world. When Nixon subsequently resigned himself, Ford succeeded him becoming the only president in US history to assume the office without ever having been elected as either president or vice president — again, as in our world. The point of divergence is that, seeing a possible Constitutional crisis looming, Congress called for a special election in November of 74, in which Ford won a full term and was reelected in 78 — he was eligible for two full terms under the 22nd — which threw the cadence of elections off, leading to Bartlet being elected in 98.
But that's just a fan theory. I read it on the Internet. It's not in the story itself. In the story, Bartlet's the president, elections happen on different years, and that's just how it is. It doesn't matter. It doesn't bother anybody. And the fact that how-this-all-came-to-be was never explained didn't stop the show from becoming one of the most acclaimed and popular shows ever until Sorkin quit and the new fucker Wells left Leo dying in the woods and I absolutely refused ever to watch another episode after that. Fucker.
Ahem. Anyway.
An author always proposes to make a deal with his audience. He says, "If you give me your attention and your credence, I will captivate you." Notice that's an equation with three variables: attention, credence and captivation. If the author doesn't captivate the audience, it doesn't really matter how much attention or credence he asked for; even a five-minute, totally-grounded short film can bore. On the other hand, if the story is sufficiently captivating, the audience will go along with anything, and virtually for as long as the author keeps talking. In that way, we are all still children. When we reach the end of a beloved bedtime story, we all want to ask, "And then what happened?"
Though I didn't participate in the whole Lost thing myself, it sounds like a lot of people got suckered into a different kind of deal with the authors. It sounds like the deal those authors pitched was, "If you give me your attention, I will tell you a secret." Maybe you were captivated along the way, maybe you weren't, I dunno, that's between you and your God. But from what I've heard over the past couple days, at least a few people (mostly folks I know on Twitter) were, by the end, only in it for the answers. And those folks came away disappointed. Because at the very end, the authors pulled a Vader and altered the deal. "No, no," they said. "You were supposed to be captivated this whole time. See, it's not about the secret, it's about the characters."
To which at least a few of my acquaintances said, "Fuck that shit."
My advice, if I were in an advice-handing-out mood, would be to be ever suspicious of an author who promises you great wonders tomorrow in exchange for your attention today. Appealing to pure monkey curiosity is easy, and rarely worth doing.
But underneath all this wankery is a concept I call "the stupid line." I call it that because I just don't know how else to describe it. At least with me, there sometimes comes a point where a tiny homunculus of Graham Chapman appears in my head dressed in a brigadier's uniform and goes "Right, stop this now, this is entirely too silly." I don't always see him coming, either. Often I'm right with the author all the way — "and then the daddy fish meets another fish with anterograde amnesia, yes, yes, and then what?" — until wham. Suddenly we've hit the stupid line.
The stupid line is, for me, the point where I'm no longer sufficiently captivated to extend the author any more credit. It might be because I've been asked too much all at once — the second magic bean, in Brian's terms — or it might be because I think I'm gonna have to shell out more attention than I want to get to the good part. For me, Lost fell into the second category. Roundabout the middle of the first season I suddenly just couldn't be arsed any more, because I was of the opinion that the authors were more interested in setting things up than paying things off. And frankly, the characters weren't sufficiently interesting to me to justify sitting on my couch for an hour a week watching inexplicable shit happen in an inexplicable place.
But that's just me.
Sorry. I used way too many words.
