RIP Allan Calhamer

RIP Allan Calhamer, inventor of the greatest of polisci-gamer games, Diplomacy. http://www.suntimes.com/news/obituaries/18566253-418/lagrange-park-mailman-who-invented-board-game-diplomacy-is-dead-at-81.html …

Postapocalyptic hellscape

[I think that this hasn't previously found any home on the google-able internet, though I've shared most of it on fb at one time or another.  I wrote most of it up last year (oddly) in a reply to a BBC reporter who was thinking about a decades-debate, but that fell through.]

I no longer worry about cultural decline.  It is my considered judgment that the world already ended, right around mid-2000.  We live in a postapocalyptic hellscape now.  There's nothing that, say, reality TV or Glee can throw at us to make me say "the world is going to hell in a handbasket."  It already went.  I find this tremendously liberating.  Any day at the end of which I can say "the zombies didn't eat my brain today" counts as a win, even if that day also saw the release of Transformers vs. the Human Centipede.

As Todd Seavey has long noted, the matrix inside 1999's The Matrix seemed to be set in the then-current day.  In other words, when Agent Smith told Morpheus that the matrix was set in "the peak of [human] civilization" it seemed to be 1999 that he was talking about. And then it all went so terribly wrong...

Why mid-2000?

On the non-cultural side, by the end of the 90s the internet bubble combined with some longer-term social trends to really make American society feel brighter than it ever had before.  Unemployment was at a generation-long low; US median income was, IIRC, the highest it has ever been in any large country.  (That is, in inflation-adjusted terms that peak still hasn't been matched in the US, though places like Singapore have surpassed it.)  Crime had been falling for the whole decade and people were coming to realize that American big cities had generally become very safe; and population was flowing back into them.  Teen pregnancy down, welfare down, massive unexpected budget surpluses creating competing fantasies of what to be done with it all, productivity growth up, etc.  The bubble popped in the first quarter of 2000, but it took a while for the consequences to fully reverberate through the whole economy.  The contrast in mood from, say, December 1999 to mid-2001 even before 9/11, was, as I remember it, just huge-- and then 9/11 began a chain of dominoes for a much darker decade-- two wars, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and then the financial collapse. In Europe, the end of the Kosovo war brought the violence of the long breakup of Yugoslavia to a close, Russia wasn't yet resurgent, and I think there were as good of grounds for optimism as there had ever been: a peaceful and united Europe looked to be at hand.  So, as with memories of the 1890s and 1920s, memories of the culture of the 1990s are partly also memories of the decade in a broader social, political, and economic way.  The popping of the bubble and the election of George W. Bush do seem like a good way to date the end of an Era of Good Feelings.

That said, my view of television is that the 2000s saw possibly the best scripted television ever-- with tiny niche audiences that were generally sustainable on pay cable, mostly not on the networks.  The Wire and The Sopranos did fine on pay cable.  Arrested Development and Firefly did not, on networks.  But the tidal wave of reality TV awfulness that hit starting in mid-2000 lowered the quality of what the average watcher was watching at any given time precipitously-- I'm willing to say to its lowest point ever, lower than in the Three's Company era or the Beverly Hillbillies era of dumb sitcoms.  

And that's the kind of consideration I have in mind overall.  It's not that there aren't gems after 2000.  Human creativity and genius don't disappear.  In the most barbaric times of the Middle Ages the monks were still producing some beautiful manuscripts for an audience that might total dozens over the following centuries. In the 2000s we haven't had the same combination of quality and creativity with broad markets and general cultural impact that we had in the late 90s. Instead, we've had Fear Factor (launched 2001) to set new lows, and American Idol (2002) to celebrate the aspiration to do cover songs of middlebrow hits of bygone days, and eventually Glee to turn American Idol into a middlebrow scripted show.

Plus: Mid-2000 saw Dawn introduced on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and once we got to the season that started in 2001, that once-great show went far, far off the deep end.  Mid-2000 saw Mulder leave the X-Files, and that once-great show went off the deep end.  Hell in a handbasket, I tell ya.

In movies, the indie explosion of the 90s was absolutely wonderful for creativity.  In 1999, we had The Sixth Sense, Blair Witch, Being John Malkovich, and the first Matrix (in which Agent Smith showed video of what seemed to be real-world 1999 and referred to it as "the peak of your civilization" while interrogating Morpheus).  I think those four added up to as robust a sense that anything-is-possible in a commercial artform as I've ever seen-- maybe something like it was true in the early post-studio days of New Hollywood in the 1970s, but I'm too young for that.  There was plenty of dreck, of course, with Phantom Menace at the top of the list.  But: The Iron Giant, Girl Interrupted, All About My Mother, Run Lola Run, Office Space, Fight Club, The Straight Story, ExistenZ, and even the South Park movie-- it was an absolutely extraordinary last year to the decade that Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, and Harvey Weinstein helped usher into being.  Now, it's Michael Bay's world; we just live in it, if you can call that living.

The 2000s have been the golden age of fantasy and comic book movies.  That's not a complaint from me; loved the Lord of the Rings, loved the new peaks of the superhero genre from X-Men 2 and Spider-Man 2 through Dark Knight and Avengers.  But, along with other franchises good (Harry Potter) and bad (Transformers),  they've sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the rest of the movie business. "Anything is possible" now means "what we can make with CGI," not "what kinds of movies we can make."

The Oscars are  a separate problem from movies in general-- but if the Best Picture win for A Beautiful Mind in 2001 wasn't a sign of the end of the world, I don't know what would be-- except for the 2005 win for Crash.  After those two, I wouldn't even have blinked had the loathesome Avatar won (though of course, like all good people, I'm glad that it didn't.)

I think that by '99 music mass-market was a couple of years past its peak-- the era of Britney, Christina, Backstreet Boys, and N'Sync was upon us.  And year-for-year I prefer the music of the 80s.  But there was something special in the early/mid 90s, when alternative went mainstream (or the mainstream went alternative), when the barriers between hip-hop and rock started to weaken and grunge provided a new infusion of energy, and the huge commercial rock bands were REM and U2.  

Impressionistically-- I'm less confident here-- I think English-language literary fiction has lost a lot of its cultural reach, too.  Here the peak is a little bit later: 2001 was when both The Corrections and Atonement came out, and they had really significant cultural reach between them.  The rest of the 2000s had gems (Kavalier and Klay, Fortress of Solitude, Oscar Wao, On Beauty, Middlesex, Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but I'm not sure they ever added up to that 2001 level of impact.  Just today [NB: this was written in April 2012] the Pulitzer committee declined to award a prize in fiction for last year; and I'll bet that this is not received as a scandal. 

1999's Booker was won by Coetzee's Disgrace-- the most recent great novel by the most recent person to win the Nobel Prize in literature for work in English that was done in recent memory.  (Lessing and Pinter were recognized for much older work.)  Maybe that's as good a measure as any.  Of the other Anglophones at all likely to win it, DeLillo, Rushdie, and Updike did their best work decades ago; only Cormac McCarthy still seems to be producing major work.  

Upshot: The late 1990s into very early 2000 were at least a local peak... and then things went to hell.  Once one accepts that things went to hell, all surprises are pleasant ones, and one doesn't have to worry that Honey Boo Boo is a harbinger of things getting any worse.

Thoughts on a second viewing of The Hobbit

1) The 2D, 24 FPS is much, much, much better than the 3D, 48 FPS.  This time I was visually taken in; the first time, I wasn't.

2) Glamdring and Orcrist only occasionally remember to glow.

3) Which is OK, since "glows brightly when orcs are around" isn't actually Tolkien's best idea; it makes the bearer awfully visible at inconvenient times.

4) Dwarves have 10,000 HP each, or else the Misty Mountains are made of cotton airbags.

5) If I ever build my whole civilization over bottomless chasms, I'll build sturdy bridges with real handrails that are supported by redundant ropes and knots.

6) Christopher Lee has gotten really, really old.  It's tough to pretend that he's 60 years younger.

7) I've decided that it's lichen on the side of Jar Jar's Radagast's face.  That makes me much happier than what I thought it was the first time I saw the movie.  If I'm wrong, don't tell me.

8) The Battle of Five Armies is going to feel kind of anticlimactic after we've seen Thorigorn and his adventuring party kill orcs and goblins by the hundreds time after time.

9) How does the Great Goblin recognize Orcrist and Glamdring?  Even Gandalf didn't know which particular Elvish swords they were.  Orcs don't live for thousands of years...

10) Trailers: Man of Steel looks terrible.  Whose idea was Kevin Costner?  Even Amy Adams, whom I really like, looks hopelessly out of place.  Jurassic Park 3D: we've now moved beyond sequels and remakes; we're just getting the same movies rereleased with the latest whizbangs.  Pop culture devours its tail.

11) I actually liked Cate Blanchett's Galadriel better in the invented White Council scene here than in LOTR.

12) I of course like that Gandalf is never a 20th-level D&D wizard throwing fireballs and meteor swarms all over the place, nor a even a flashy Dumbledore.  A flare in Goblintown is as showy as his magic gets in The Hobbit; his offensive magic is largely limited to setting pine cones on fire.  I even like that, in the movie, there's some teasing about this: "How many dragons have you killed?"  "Is he a great wizard, or is he more like, well, you?"  But this all sits strangely with the Aragorning of Thorin and the Indiana Jonesing of all the dwarves.  If everyone else gets turned into a 10,000 HP action hero while Gandalf stays the same, he starts to look pretty unimpressive.

13) Overall: not remotely as good as FOTR or Two Towers, and overall I'd still rather have the smaller Bilbo's-eye story.  But I did like it better the second time around.

According to blogger, and with apologies to Bilbo

this is my eleventy-eleventh post.

Lost revisited

Apparently today is the one-year anniversary of the series finale of Lost, an event I've spent the last twelve months trying to purge from my memory. Here's why.

And they all died happily ever after

First draft thoughts on the Lost finale, to be updated as time permits:

I'm pleased to see that the critics are nearly unanimous in their correct view that the finale was terrible-- though one of the highest-profile Lostologists, EW's Doc Jensen, inexplicably sticks to the incorrect view that it was not terrible.

------
http://io9.com/5545911/lost-was-the-ultimate-long-con?skyline=true&s=i
"Lost, arguably the most important genre show of the past decade, ended with a fizzle. People will tell you it was fine until the last 15 minutes, but they're wrong."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/arts/television/25lost.html?ref=television

"Desmond and Jack walked into a cave for the final showdown with evil, and Desmond said, “This doesn’t matter, him destroying the island, you destroying him.” Jack, serious to the end, replied, “All of this matters.” It was the sort of thesis-antithesis, drama-of-ideas moment that the show had always specialized in. The problem was that several hours later, after the show’s mystical, walk-into-the-white-light ending, it was Desmond who would be proved more right."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2255005/
"I can only hope that some pissed-off, enterprising Lost fan will do for the final season what other irate fanboys have done for the Star Wars prequels: re-edit the whole sloppy mess into something better."


http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254926/
"Well, shit."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254865/
"That spooky island that so much blood and treasure were spilled over—the one that holds the key to life and transfixed 20 million viewers each week at its peak? Oh, it's still out there. Don't trouble yourself about it. Just join us in this cheesily nondenominational church and let the good times roll. In lieu of a truly clever conclusion, please enjoy watching a minute of slow-motion hugging between the characters."

http://www.slate.com/id/2242745/entry/2254778/
"After six seasons, you call a prom of the dead in a chapel of love where everybody is farting rainbows, where all the primary Oceanic 815 survivors are redeemed, where a loving "Dad" opens a Spielbergian door of light to the greater beyond ("Where are we going?" "Let's go find out.")—a finale?"


http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/review/2010/05/24/lost_season_finale_recap
"A series like "Lost" doesn't need to solve all of its riddles, but it does need to address the right ones. (The first season of "Twin Peaks" is an object lesson in how to provide enough resolution while preserving the delicious mysteries of a fictional universe.) From statements the producers of "Lost" have made over the past five years, they developed a dynamic with die-hard fans (and disillusioned fans and skeptical non-fans) that was infinitely more complex than any of the personal relationships among the series' characters. Could it be that in resisting the geekiest, nitpickingest, most Aspergerian demands of their audience they swung too far in the opposite direction, dismissing as trivial everything but the cosmic (the tedious and largely unnecessary Jacob-Smokey background) and the sentimental (making sure that every character receives his or her designated soul mate or therapeutic closure of the most banal Dr. Phil variety)?"


http://defamer.gawker.com/5545877/the-lost-finale-was-incredibly-dumb
"Once upon a time, there was a television show about a bunch of people on an island. For six years it was one of the most fascinating things on TV. And then it ended, in the worst way possible. Lost ended tonight, and with it the hopes and dreams of millions of people who thought it might finally get good again. SPOILER ALERT: It didn't. "
--------------

I'll begin positive. Absolutely loved the Jack-Fake Locke conversation about the real Locke, and the final exchange between Ben and Locke (although I can't entirely disagree with this critique of that moment, either). Got a kick out of the Star Trek II visual reference. Happily endorse Hugo's ascension and mostly endorse Ben's resolution-- though the latter desperately needed for him to do something, when instead he was utterly passive at just the wrong moment, neither Gollum at the Crack of Doom nor Vader helping to strike down the Emperor. Yay, Frank's alive and awesome. Yay, Miles and duct tape. Yay, Enos jokes. Yay, Juliet-Sawyer. (A lot of the episode consisted of trying to get the audience to just say 'yay'-- 'Yay, it's Vincent/ Rose & Bernard/ Juliet/ Frank/ Penny/ pianist Daniel/ Charlotte!' That's OK, in this kind of thing, and they got a few 'yay's out of me. But a 'yay' moment is narrative popcorn, not protein.) The cliffside fight was pretty great.

And after that... I'm kind of out of positive things to say.

The idea is emerging that the finale emphasized Character over Plot or Mythology, and therefore that we who disliked it failed to appreciate that Lost was a character-driven show. This idea is also incorrect.

No episode in which Christ symbolism was slathered on like cake frosting can be accused of being light on myth. And the finale laid it on even thicker than the season premiere. The island plotline was all about the Rules and the glowy soul-magic electromagnetism. The widely-reviled final Jack-Christian scene and church scene were mythology. But a) they were new mythology, unconnected with anything we've seen before, and b) they were bad mythology. We'll return to why.

And conversely: 'shipper fanfic is not the same as characterization. The only moments of real character resolution were on the island. Jack accepted both that he can be wrong and that he can be right, accepted that his responsibility to help others is compatible with a limit on his ability to do so and that he needs to be willing to pass responsibility to others. Kate ran to instead of running away, and in so doing saved the day; and came to terms with her connection to Jack. And Hurley grew up-- understanding that he can help others without being subordinate to them.

But nothing in the Sideways-verse offered any character resolution-- and indeed it undermined the resolutions those three characters reached on the island. The Jack-Christian touchy-feely was entirely unearned, and untrue to Jack's complicated relationship to his father. Sayid's One True Love being declared to be fricking Shannon was wildly untrue to his character as it's developed through the show. Sun and Jin's beatific bliss at discovering that they were already dead (which means, for Jin, that he has never seen and will never see his daughter) doesn't make a lick of sense. And the same problem repeats. Indeed, much of the problem is the sameness. The lovey flashbacks could have substituted any couple for any other couple. Everyone had precisely the same reaction to their remembrance of the island and of their death-- regardless of what they'd lost in either the real world or in their Sideways hallucination. Those of you who think you're "character" fans-- do you approve of Jack showing not an instant of a flicker of regret at discovering that he didn't really have a son, and never would?

And what about Locke, who in an instant goes from a world in which he's with the woman he loves, has come to terms with his father's accident, and in which he's just regained his legs, to a world in which he has just a moment ago died a lonely and pathetic failure, murdered after an abandoned suicide attempt, having re-lost his legs and been exiled from the Island where he'd found purpose, meaning, respect, and faith? Shouldn't there be some slightly complex emotion registering on Terry O'Quinn's talented face, instead of that dude-do-you-want-a-hit-of-this? nirvana?

And the fact that everyone ends up dying happily ever after in a big group hug really seems to cheapen the arcs that the characters did have. It turns out not to matter who lived and who died, who faced what struggles or-- crucially-- what issues with non-Oceanic-815 people. The characterization of these characters, such as it was, always involved the interaction of their off-island and on-island lives. The failure to give Locke in particular any real resolution bothers me.

The awakenings were neither moments of emotional resolution in Sidewaysland-- it's not as though Sideways-Sayid or Sideways-Sawyer had emotional issues that centered on the absence of a hot blonde from their lives-- nor moments of resolution of issues from the real world. They were just magical moments, overwriting any given character's story with the blissed-out realization of having found twue wuv and being dead.

The only awakening that tugged at my heartstrings at the time was Sawyer-Juliet. But even that's a little creepy in retrospect, once you know that Juliet has just found out her son was a hallucination. (Even in retrospect that bothers me less than Jack's lack of reaction-- because father-son issues were central to Jack's whole story, and because his son was central to his Sideways arc.)

All of that said about the characterization issue, I'm still a mytharc kind of geek. And I'm as dissatisfied with the answers we got as with those we didn't.

It turns out that every mystery about the island comes down to three things:

1) The glowy soul-magic electromagnetism has various funky effects.

2) Jacob made up lots of (as far as we know) entirely arbitrary rules for his arbitrary game with Smokey, a game that had the aims of protecting the glowy soul-magic electromagnetism, protecting the world from Smokey, and (Trading Places-like) winning an argument with his brother about human nature by experimenting on people.

3) The various peoples brought to the Island each left stuff behind.

Category 1 never got any further explanation. In the final few episodes we saw the glowiness of the source of the soul-magic-electromagnetism, but we already knew that there was magical life-and-health-connected electromagnetism. What we didn't know was why or what it meant. We still don't.

And categories 2 and 3 are boring. Polar bear? Just a Dharma leftover. The Numbers? Just the arbitrary stipulative system Jacob used to list out the candidates to replace himself. The complexities of coming to and leaving the island? Jacob's made-up rules. The need for the Oceanic Six to return (without apparently needing Aaron or Walt to return)? Well, Jacob wanted some of them to show up for a job interview.

But much remains unexplained-- and in need of explanation. In particular, the history between 1977 and 2004 of Ben, Widmore, Eloise, Richard, and Jacob that led to the Purge, Widmore's exile, the Others becoming sociopathic by the time of Oceanic 815, and Widmore's, Ben's, and Eloise's off-island activities-- in other words, the plot of seasons 3-5-- doesn't make sense.

Allegedly Jacob was talking to Richard, and not to Ben, throughout these years. What was Richard saying to Ben? Did Jacob approve of the Others' new moral code? How did Widmore, Eloise, and Ben gain the mysterious knowledge that they lorded over the survivors, especially off-island in Seasons 4-5? Did Jacob tell them?

For an example of what this kind of thing looks like done right, look at the Locke-Richard-Smokey interactions as Locke timejumps. Eventually we understand who knew what when, and how they knew it, and why they said what they said, and how neatly it all fits together. I suspect that there's no such coherent storyline for the Ben-Eloise-Widmore plots; if there is, we certainly haven't been told about it.

"But those are secondary characters!" you say. Well, maybe, expect for Ben. But their conflicts and agendas were primary-- they were central for more than half of the show's length. And they were left a chaotic and unresolved mess. I'm not looking for an in-depth character study of Widmore's psychology. I just want to know that the basic moving parts of the plot were.

It's tempting to try a variant on the following:

"Smokey was manipulating Ben, either directly or indirectly through Richard, by pretending to be Jacob. Ben got corrupted by Smokey early on, leading him to think he was connected to the island's fundamental purpose when really he was working for its destruction. He was led into some conflict with Widmore and Eloise in which he was wrong and they were right, but he won. Eloise and Widmore, knowing that Jacob's will was being thwarted, spent all the intervening years trying to get back and fight for good, albeit becoming corrupted by their ruthless dedication to that cause. In the meantime, Ben led the Others into paranoia and malice, under Smokey's direction. By the time Ben met Smokey Locke, Smokey already knew Ben from years of manipulation and only had a little more work to do to finish the job." That could get us a lot of the way there.

Except...

Except that Ben never talked to anyone who he thought was Jacob before the Season 5 finale; Richard knows what Jacob looks like; and Smokey couldn't appear to Richard using Jacob's face, because Jacob wasn't dead. So we're left with the thought that Ben acted autonomously. That's a lot more interesting in terms of Ben's character; but it leaves us without a solution as to what the heck was going on.

To be continued...

Lost thoughts

Spoilers, naturally.

It was deliberately conspicuous that MIB gave Ricardo instructions on how to kill Jacob that mirrored Dogen's instructions to Sayid on how to kill MIB.

But nota bene that Ben did not get the same instructions before actually killing Jacob. Specifically, Ben heard Jacob talk, and killed him anyways, whereas both Sayid and Ricardo are told that if they let their target speak, it'll be too late.

I think this supports seeing Ben as exceptionally free-willed, outside the direct control of either side. He may well have a Gollum-like role to play in the final denouement. He's the only character we've seen who was ever under MIB's sway and then came back to the other side-- this could set up a Gollum-like re-fall from grace (with unpredictable consequences). But my guess is rather that Ben's real proof of the ability to go on choosing.

Ben chose darkness a long time ago, in arranging for the Purge. He lied to the Others for years, claiming to speak for Jacob but never actually meeting the guy. He visited the cabin in the woods that was probably holding MIB prisoner, but on his own telling he never saw anyone in it, so he never spoke with MIB either. (We don't yet know whether Richard knew Ben was lying and let him get away with it, or for some reason was kept in the dark.)

Ben's spent decades nursing nasty grudges-- killing dozens to get even with his father, overthrowing Widmore and starting a bitter long-term war on that front. He resented Locke for being chosen leader and for getting to talk with Jacob. And he killed Locke out of petty envy-- then was easily manipulated by Flocke into killing Jacob with petty resentments. We'll find out that much of the Survivors-Others conflict of the first few seasons was just what it first appeared to be: Ben's own nastiness, with Jacob just serving as a religious pretext.

But after all that, even Ben could repent-- on his own, with neither Jacob nor any of Jacob's representatives leading him there.

Lostblogging

A few thoughts, to be expanded upon as time permits. Spoilers.

I was nervous about the premiere beforehand and very enthusiastic afterward. I don't know why I didn't see the alternate timelines coming-- it's very Abrams, and we've always had parallel narrative tracks on the show. But I didn't, and it perfectly solves the problem I was most nervous about--that neither post-Jughead option could be satisfying.

I was really, really right to think that this season theology would take center stage, crowding out political theory, philosophy of time, free will and causality, and so on. (For that reason, I didn't reprise my "Lost and political theory" talk last night; I have little to say about the theology.) And that's OK. But still...

There were a lot of Jesuses-- Jessuses? Jesi?-- running around last night.

-Sayid, who came out of the baptismal pool in a groan-inducingly-Godspell-like crucification pose, telegraphing the final moment of the episode (which was further telegraphed by Miles' listening to Sayid a few minutes later)

-Christian (ahem) Shepherd (ahem), whose body went missing sometime before they rolled the stone away opened the cargo bay doors.

-Jack Shepherd, who hasn't really done much Christ-standing-in to justify his name up until now, but now seems set to make the crippled walk

-and Jacob, already an established healer, whose power raises Sayid from the dead, who is sacrificed by someone who knew not what he did, who appears to one follower after his death, and whose body (again) disappears.

This isn't really a complaint, but it's a new worry, since all of these seem to be in for long-term Jesussy plotlines. Part of what was so interesting about the political theory and time/ causality references was that different characters and different viewpoints and different symbols were in play for each. I hope they figure out a way to do something similar for this season's theology.

Remember, remember...

one of the most-read posts ever on this blog: Guy Fawkes Day, V for Vendetta, and American politics.

Coming soon...

Lost University.

See especially the Philosophy 101 class on major thinkers. I'm not sure what it means to be one of the faculty for the class, but am bitterly disappointed not to be among them.

Gaiman on Colbert

I gave Paul Gowder a hard time for his little rant about the Geek Culture takeover of the world.

But it is a little weird to live in a world in which I can just happen to turn on the TV and see one of the most popular comedians around interviewing one of the all-time great comic book writers, and singing one of Tom Bombadil's songs. I'm not sure precisely when we came to live in that world...

For what it's worth...

I think both Battlestar Galactica and Lost are back in good form.

The two bits of my pre-premiere talk on "Lost" last night that I'll now cherry-pcik to make myself look smart:

1) Hume's philosophy includes a funny combination of apparent determinism with skepticism about [what we can know about] causation. Desmond [David Hume's] unique status with respect to the timeslip parts of the story-- he was the first character to get knocked loose from the timestream, the first whose consciousness went time-traveling, the first to experience the impossibility of changing history, and the first to nonetheless make use of timeslips in non-paradox-inducing ways-- and his unique status off the island [he's not one of the Oceanic Six and so far there haven't been any indications that he's included in the mandate to return, but he's still an island escapee and therefore tied to it-- in a way that seems more important than, say, Walt]-- will be centrally important as the story becomes more and more about time.

2) One of the three possibilities I laid out for why Locke becomes Bentham is that, in between then and now, he learned that he had to sacrifice his life to maximize the well-being of the greatest number of Islanders for whom he now had responsibility. Locke (philosopher) not only supports individual rights but also insists on the moral priority of life and condemns suicide. An act of utility-maximizing self-sacrifice is commemorated by his ceasing to be Locke at all and becoming Bentham. (But I admit that this was not my *preferred* possibility.)

A thought about Lost that doesn't have anything to do with political theory: Hurley always seems like he's in a slightly different show, and somehow the actor and the writers make that work very effectively. It's not just that he's comic relief, or that he's the one to stand in (very obviously) for the viewers ("I was never too clear on that part"). More generally he seems like his world only occasionally intersects with the dark, grim, meaningful, trumpet-heavy world of the rest of the characters, and that he's only intermittently interested in that world.

This has always been true of him, though he didn't always seem quite so on his own. The grimmest characters from the first season have tended to have the highest survival rate into later seasons; Rose and Bernard excepted, the major surviving Survivors are people with pretty heavy baggage and major Issues. Charlie, Boone, and Shannon had all of that too-- but they often featured in lighter scenes and exchanges. Now: well, everyone else's world has Alan Dale as a glowering presence in it, whereas Hurley's has Cheech. And Linus seemed not to understand this; he showed up in Hurley's kitchen making the kind of grim, opaque, meaningful speech that works on someone like Locke, Jack, or Sayiid. And Hurley responded appropriately-- which meant that he responded like a character from a different show. I got a kick out of it.

Hither and Yon, local edition: "Lost in the state of nature"

I'll be giving a talk called "Lost in the state of nature: the political theory of the Island," Wednesday, January 21, 7 pm, in the Shatner Building cafe at McGill; the talk will of course be followed immediately by the season premiere of Lost.

Sponsored by the McGill Political Science Students' Association.

RSVP on facebook if you like.

Theories about the conversion of Locke into Bentham may be ventured in comments below...

Elsewhere: The Life of Levy

My old friend Todd Seavey has an inimitable style of storytelling-as-biography. Every person named in a story is given an appositive description linking them, in every way Todd knows, to other persons named in the story, to intellectual themes or cultural trends he finds of interest, or to noteworthy events. This is so regardless of whether every person listening has already heard the footnoted stories already and knows how they connect or even already knows the person in question. He makes it work; it's highly entertaining, and although he was speaking that way before the advent of html it strikes me that it's the conversational equivalent of hypertext.

In any event, he's now posted a highly idiosyncratic origin story-cum-intellectual-biography-cum-narration-of-shared-cultural-interests of, well, me. It's roughly his standard format turned inside-out-- biography-as-storytelling, in which I'm the framing device for some reflections all his own.

Remember, remember...

when, a year ago, Ron Paul raised a whole lotta money on Guy Fawkes Day? It's forever ago in political time, and hard to remember that it seemed particularly interesting interesting. But my post about Ron Paul, Guy Fawkes, and V for Vendetta was one of the most-read things I've ever written, oddly enough. And I still think that the migration from the defense of the British state through Alan Moore's anti-Thatcherism to Ron Paul, the fact that a traditional British celebration of the defeat of the enemies of the state could end up animating an agenda of radical anti-statism, is one of the stranger things I've ever seen in political symbolism. So, for this year's Guy Fawkes Day, a link to look backward at.

Dynamic Amazon ads...

sometimes freak me out.

If I'm at Chris' Invincible Super-blog, it's just weird to see a sidebar ad trying to get me to buy:

Is Democracy Possible Here?
Ronald Dworkin

Roman Law: an Historical Introduction
Hans Julius Wolff

Roman Law in European History
Peter Stein

The Constitution of Equality
Thomas Christiano

I go there for a few minutes of escapism, not to be reminded of my to-do list-- but Amazon doesn't know that, it just reads the Amazon cookies in my cache and responds appropriately.

San Diego Comic Con

My old friend Ali Kokmen, in San Diego for Comic Con, offered up this rousing rally to soldier on through the end of the convention. Go check it out-- really.

Best line of the day

re the X-Files:

Either way, with six years' distance, the whole syndicate concept seems hopelessly naive. The old white guys in the military-industrial complex can't handle state-building in Afghanistan—we're supposed to believe they can coordinate an alien invasion?

The end of the golden age

A. O. Scott writes (via Christopher Orr) that the super-hero movie may have peaked this summer. I'm inclined to agree, though not quite for Scott's reasons. I've said to several people over the past week that, not only does Dark Knight seem to leave the Batman franchise with nowhere to go but down, but it may also kill off the golden age of comic-book-adaptation movies we've been enjoying for the past several years (clunkers like Catwoman and LXG notwithstanding). With Iron Man, they seem to have just about figured out how to perfect the genre... and then along comes Dark Knight to move out of the genre, and make the prospect of seeing a movie about, say, Green Lantern seem dreary, no matter how well it's done. (Dark Knight busted out of its genre and became other things like "psychological thriller," with one of the best villains that genre's ever had. Green Lantern can only bust out by becoming space opera-- and moving under the shadow of Battlestar Galactica.)

I saw Hellboy II just a few days before DK, and it was great fun-- visually stunning, and a lot more entertaining than the first one. But if I'd seen it a few days after, I think I would have wondered, "what's the point?" And Hellboy's not even a superhero adaptation. For the costumed crowd, I think what we've just seen is as good as it gets.

Friday fun links

1) "Why Batman could exist-- but not for long," at Scientific American (HT: Tyler.

2) I've been an absolutely resolute skeptic of the Watchmen movie. Yes, it's a masterpiece, but it's an incredibly formal (that is, form-al, of and within and about the form of the comic book) masterpiece. Frank Miller puts movies onto the comic book page, and when you put the comics onto the movie screen, it works great. (And indeed works better the more you just treat the comics as a shot-for-shot storyboard.) That's not what Alan Moore does, and is not what Watchmen is like, and I've said to all who asked that I thought this movie was a terrible mistake-- something like making a ballet of an e.e. cummings poem, or a comic book of the Ode To Joy.

But reliable geek-taste friend Aeon Skoble sends an e-mail that says, simply, This. Looks. Awesome. and... uh... he's right. Very right. Right enough that I'm officially shutting up in my skepticism for now. (Update: I see that Julian Sanchez, who knows a thing or two about Rorschach, had a similar reaction.)

3) As of yet, there is no... Act 3. But if you haven't caught up yet, now's the time.