Matt Brown

Remember that time Werner Herzog rescued Joaquin Phoenix from a car accident?

Elevator movie. Re-storyboard. (Taken with instagram)

Harry Potter in 60 seconds. Greatness.

Meanwhile, here’s a little girl beating up Darth Vader.

In honour of the imminent return of The Phantom Menace, here’s Qui-Gon: Worst Jedi Ever.

Elevator movie. Actual, physical, mo-fuckin’ FLAT. (Taken with instagram)

The pretense of handymanability? The desire to buff up my dude-cred and spend some time in the pine-fumed canyons of Home Depot? Nope, building flats is just that easy. Team ‘Stream had me out to the workshop last week to build some flats for the (yet un-re-titled) elevator movie, and we rolled our efforts into the Film Lab’s ongoing desire to teach you how to do everything on a film ever.

I love making these. I would make these full time, as my job, for ever. It’s uncannily reminiscent of making the Infinitely Brown movies with Mark and Adam when I was a teenager - a concept, a camera, and gettin’ shit done. Beautiful.

Babylegs. Babyless, lonely, and disconcertingly rubbery. Just the way I like ‘em. (Taken with instagram)

Babies. Limbless, dead-eyed, and eerily anatomically accurate. Just the way I like ‘em. (Taken with instagram)

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE

Elevator movie. Studio. (Taken with instagram)

Liam Neeson. Patrick Stewart. Action figures. STAR TREK vs STAR WARS: The Next Generation.

Drunk Max Landis explains why killing Superman was a bad idea.

Elevator movie. Nails. (Taken with instagram)

It is still very much on my mind, or can be; that show, my favourite show of the decade, the one that has been reduced down, in its two-year absence, from a resonant cultural touchstone and gobble-me-up water cooler addiction, to our current popular shorthand for - yes, pace George R.R. Martin - “fucking up the ending.” I think Damon Lindelof’s therapist is going to be in good money and clean piss for a long, long time. Imagine having seven years’ work that you fully committed to and fully believed in, and whose major successes can’t be counted on two hands, and whose impact on popular culture remains, and shall probably remain for years to come, blatant and far-reaching… imagine all that being cast away (get it?) in favour of being the finest standing example of how to completely fail to satisfy your audience, after tickling and teasing them so delightfully through all the good days and long nights. Imagine that.

I’ve been one of them, as you know; I’ve expressed my own peculiar dissatisfactions with that final episode; I’ve exalted Emily Nussbaum’s clear-headed read on how things ended up: the show, itself, a metaphor for how all theist doctrines (even the one within the show) operate, a variation on Mother’s “shut up, don’t ask questions” dumb-headedness that rewards blind faith, discourages rationalist thought, and wants to believe in a life that is a dress-rehearsal for an afterlife.

And that should have been the end of it, except that with unerring regularity, one of Michael Giacchino’s six Lost scores (and you really should buy them) would pop up on my iTunes, and the Problem of Lost would start to tick back and forth in my head once again. Part of it was simple vanity - one never wants one’s favourite show to come out swinging for the wrong team, as Lost had seemed to do with its overtly religious, even Christian, final act - but part of it was that other thing, which I call “the A.I. factor.” No, I don’t think A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a very good movie, but I’ve professed for a long time that it’s a uniquely interesting one, and it has given me more to think and puzzle about after the fact than anything else Steven Spielberg, or pretty much anyone, has ever done. So, now, it seemed to be with Lost.

Back when the show was on the air, I found Doc Jensen’s weekly column on the Entertainment Weekly site pretty useful. I didn’t always agree with where Doc was going with his analysis of the show on an episode-by-episode basis - especially as I was trying to conduct my own, with each successive show - but I admired the depth to which he was willing to dive into the text of the series. To Jensen, nothing was there accidentally, and anything placed within the show - a book title, a painting, a piece of music (particularly the music) - could be a shorthand code-key to unlock a wider frame of understanding of the intentions of the series as a whole. He got a lot farther with it than I ever did, even if he did (as did we all) come up with, probably, better Final Solutions for Lost (before “The End”) than “The End” could have ever hoped to be. This was another part of the weird, magical alchemy of Lost: by so insistently inviting us to conjure theories of what in the hell was going on on that island, the series was setting the bar for its ultimate success at no less a height than the limits of its entire audience’s imagination. Heady stakes, indeed.

When the show ended, Jensen had a few things left to say about it, a “final column” that he promised was coming, for so long that I eventually forgot all about it. I just assumed it was one of those back-of-the-mind things that writers mention too early in their creative process and never get around to teasing into a fully-formed idea. I guess he finally got around to it, though, because a little over a year after the final episode of the show, Jensen published his final column: and it is a full, viable, atheist alternate read on the final episode of Lost.

I wish I’d read it then. I’m glad I’ve read it now. Even Doc doesn’t say he considers this a definitive read on the series, just an alternate take, a response to one of the most prevalent complaints about “The End” - that the series, which had flirted with both science and magic throughout its run, had decided to throw in whole-hog for religious thinking in its final moments. It was an argument supported in the Nussbaum piece; and also in the rather unerring fashion, in the last few episodes of the series, in which most of the principal characters went the full Crimson Jihad and killed themselves as foot soldiers in Jacob’s Holy War, only to pop up in (what seemed like) heaven. I called it a despicable, life-hating ideology - and taken at face value, it is - and I embraced the actions of Kate Austen, the sole character in “The End” who took one look at that potential afterlife, and instead immediately jumped off a fucking cliff, out of her far greater preference to stay alive. Skinny, annoying, heroic Kate: Lost’s defining atheist.

What the Jensen piece makes clear to me, though, is the number of things in Lost’s final season that I took at face value when, arguably, the final season is, by default, operating at the highest level of complexity in terms of defining character motivations and worldviews. (Doubly ironic, in that I pretty much took nothing at face value for seasons 1-5.) Take the Jacob / Man in Black / Mother triptych. I’ve wondered at length about whether I, as a His Dark Materials-toting free-thinker, should not by rights be behind the Man in Black, the character from the Island’s infancy who was not content to accept force-fed notions of sin and complacency. I certainly could not get behind Mother, or even Jacob, though Jacob turned out to be a (fairly) righteous dude in the end. It never occurred to me at any point in Season Six, however, that I should be behind none of them.

Jensen comes up with the notion of a Jacob who set into motion a set of rules - a very religious set of rules - for life on the Island, which thrived for a couple thousand years but eventually ended up at a kind of moral stalemate. The likely outcome of this stalemate was the conversation we see between Jacob and Smokey in the last episode of Season Five, where Smokey complains that “it always ends the same.” Jensen also lays out the idea that Jacob, being a (fairly) righteous dude, might have, himself, come to realize the limits of his own imprint on the Island, and set about wiping the board  clean via the arrival of the survivors of Oceanic 815. Again, not something I ever considered myself, the idea of Jacob refuting his own belief system, but it’s a fairly stable theory. It’s actually one of the few theories that genuinely explains everything Jacob does from the crash of 815 to the end of the show. It also, as Jensen ably points out, explains Desmond and Jack and their final moral conflict, and by extension, offers a smarter read on the meaning of the Sideways world.

I guess I’m a sucker for certain writerly tricks above others, parallelism among them, which is why - with a season’s worth of expectation that electromagnetic Desmond was going to walk between the real world and the Sideways world - I so completely believed, after “Happily Ever After,” that Desmond was doing just that, and that the two Desmonds in the remainder of the series are essentially the same person. This is ironic only in that I spend a healthy amount of time considering the mortal lives of the characters who finally escaped the Island, of which Desmond is one - and yet apparently never considered Desmond, himself. Of course the Desmond who lived out the rest of his life off-island, and died, and is represented in the Sideways, is a different person from the suicidal zealot who tells Jack that none of what is happening matters! So is the Sideways world’s version of Kate, in what I still consider one of the most touching moments of the whole series: “I’ve missed you so much.” The difference between the Jack who died at the age of forty, and the Kate who might well have lived to be a hundred and ten, is never more apparent than in that moment when they re-encounter one another in the Sideways - and it’s a difference that one can only come to know through a full, post-series contemplation of who both of those characters actually are at that moment, vs. who they appear to be when first watching the episode. This post-view unlocking has always been one of Lost’s strategies, and finest pleasures; yet it seems to have often eluded me in the final hour.

If the take on death in “The End” was much clearer and less spiritual than I’d initially believed - death’s coming, you have to deal with it, and only you can attach the meaning to life and death that will guide your actions - then I’m guilty of that ancient atheistic foible of over-reacting to the perception of religiousity. Not the first time. I’ve no problem dealing with cosmologies that posit the existence of an afterlife or a heavenly creator (how could I? Even His Dark Materials affirms that the universe was, in fact, created by a long-ago departed super-angel, who was subsequently usurped by the “god” that everyone in that book is trying to kill), but I need my stories to play honestly on these scores. Even here though, with Lost, I wasn’t being clear-headed. Look at the title of the second-season premiere, my persistent bellwether episode for the degree to which any show is “great”: for Lost, it was “Man of Science, Man of Faith.” Naturally, I chose to ignore the second part; and then at “The End,” reacted to the perception of strongly spiritual content (the very end of “The End” does take place in that weirdly poly-ornamented church) like an abuse victim in an unruly crowd. Enough already, Matthew. Wrestle your own demons.

At the core of all this is the fact that to understand a story, you need to understand the motivations of the characters in the story at any given moment. In this regard, Lost’s sixth season is muddy, unclear, and requires a great deal of after-the-fact thought - not just after-the-episode thought, mind you, but after-the-whole-thing-and-a-year-later thought. I said above that it was the most complex season of the show from this perspective, and this fact should not have remained unnoticed for so long. The final season of this particular show - a series which had dealt in flashbacks, flash-forwards, actual time travel, death and resurrection, astral projection, telepathy, secret societies, string theory and nuclear bombs - now gave us a string of characters who had been through all that and still had their real-world motivations and goals to get through; plus variations of all those characters who were in a kind of post-mortal waiting room, working through refracted meta-realities of their past, real-life experiences as a way to get their ya-ya’s out. Of course it was muddy. And it will never be perfectly clear, nor perfectly perfect, either, because it was a television series, not a book, and it was made over seven years, via hundreds and hundreds of people, impacted by storms and writer’s strikes and actors who would or wouldn’t come back to the Island, depending on how they felt about their Lost experiences on any given Monday. “Clear?” Under those terms, it’s a miracle that anything this ambitious was even mildly coherent.

But I’ll tell ya one thing: they didn’t fuck up the ending.

Bourbon tasting (Taken with instagram)

Because sometimes my regular fucknuttery isn’t enough.

2012 is starting out surprisingly strong, isn’t it? We look at the just-released Chronicle, and the notion of “found footage” movies in general, and then step back by a week and examine the reborn career of Liam Neeson, c/o The Grey.