Social media is full of awkward moments. There was the George Allen “macaca” incident, the “Key Influencer’s” denigration of Memphis, these not so great moments from Facebook, and too many more to possibly catalog. That’s the thing I love about social media. It really affords you possibilities to interact with others that you would never otherwise have.
I couldn’t agree more. I have been a fan of Tomei since My Cousin Vinny. She’s way to good an actress to be shilling frozen Italian food in webisode format. But look at the rest of the cast and you will see the star of the short lived MTV Sports – none other than Mr. Dan Cortese. So I added some commentary on my retweet.
RT @lowbrowkate: Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://bit.ly/aFCSJF | Dan Cortese makes sense, though. He needs the work.
Well last night I got a reply from Mr. Cortese (which has since been removed). Here’s the screen grab from Tweetdeck.
I couldn’t help but have some fun with Cortese. My reply back?
@dancortese1 No offense, dude. You were great in Veronica’s Closet.
Where else but social media can a two-bit political hack and a D-list TV star interact so freely?
God bless the Internet.
(For the record, I had to Google Cortese to find something he was in other than MTV Sports. I don’t recall ever having seen Veronica’s Closet. He has apparently done more stuff recently. Frankly I am jealous that he got to travel through Italy with Marisa Tomei. Back in the early 90s, many a guy I know would have traded a left testicle for that opportunity. Way to go, Dan!)
My initial thoughts on the season finale of Lost I summed up in a tweet last night.
After six years of great foreplay, #Lost becomes an inconsiderate lover – rolls over, turns off the lights, leaves me unfulfilled.
What has been so great about the show, and the reason I have been such a dedicated fan, is the fact that the show often left me feeling… off. It often wasn’t until I had spent some time discussing it (usually with my friends Paul and Anne), that I found deeper meaning in the show. Sometimes I was introduced to someone else’s theories, which forced me to reconsider my perspective and brought me to a new way to see each episode and each story.
It’s fitting, then, that last night was the same. Immediately after the show, I sent Paul and Anne a message about my overwhelming sense of disappointment in the show. My take was that those who found love or peace on the island made out fine, but everyone else got screwed. Further, I wanted more answers than the show was willing to provide.
But like almost every other episode, it was the discussion with friends that changed my reality.
Paul pointed me to a post by Doc Jensen. It contained a simple throwaway sentence that began to refocus my thinking.
Some people think [the sideways world is] an illusion like The Matrix, or a group delusion, or even ersatz pocket universe created by The Monster’s magic designed to give himself a happily ever after — a twist on Joseph’s theory. This theory differs from the more conventional and commonly held theory that the Sideways world is the next life epilogue for all the Island world castaways — that after their death, the castaways will be reincarnated into the Sideways world.
The post was actually put up before the show aired, and it turned out to be quite prescient. What struck me, however, is that they were both right. It was a next life epilogue, but at the same time it was also a group delusion. A next life born from the shared connections of the castaways. Still it seemed out of place.
I have seen some on Twitter, and I made this point to Paul, that they all were dead all along, and the sideways world was all that mattered. But then I realized that’s not quite the point. Everything that happened on the island was the real story, and the sideways world matters hardly at all.
Climbing Jacob’s Ladder
In retrospect, there are two movies I believe Lost has drawn heavily from for inspiration. The first is Heaven Can Wait (the Warren Beatty version, not that Chris Rock aberation.)
In Heaven Can Wait, Beatty “dies” and is brought to a weigh station. His escort explains that the weigh station isn’t the final destination, but a gateway to the final destination. The rules of the weigh station are a collective vision based on Beatty’s idea of the afterlife, and those who share his idea of the afterlife. In this was, the sideways world is exactly the same. It is a world the castaways created through their shared experience, and where they meet to move on. It is “their” weigh station – the implication being different groups of people share different visions, and create different worlds.
The sideways world, is the weigh station for this particular group of friends.
The second movie is Jacob’s Ladder (which Jensen mentions in his post.) If you have never seen the movie, I highly recommend it. I also recommend you do so before finishing this post because the rest of it deals with similarities between Lost and Jacob’s Ladder.
In the movie, Tim Robbins plays a soldier who underwent medical testing during his tour. His platoon were hopped up on drugs to make they hyper-aggressive. The film deals with the mystery of those drugs, Robbins discovering the nature of the drugs, and finally coming to the realization that his fellows turned on each other.
The movie jumps back and forth in time between Vietnam and modern day. As it does, it follows multiple different story lines in which different lives seem to be coalescing. In the end, however, it turns out that Jacob died in Vietnam, and the entire mixed up world of the modern day was simply his mind trying to come to terms with how he died.
Lost is, if nothing else, the story of how Jack died. It is his journey.
You Were An Awesome Number Two
If you assume that the entire story, from beginning to end, has been Jack’s story, in much the way Jacob’s Ladder was not a story about Vietnam or the drugs, but Jacob’s death, things begin to fall into place. A few scenes in the finale provide great clarity.
The two scenes that stand out the most to me were:
Hurley, seeing Ben outside the church, tells him “You were an awesome #2.” And Ben replies that Hugo was an awesome number one.
Christian comments that some died before Jack and some died years later.
We saw Hurley ask Ben to be his second. The line at the church conveyed a sense that is exactly what happened, and the two worked well together. That clearly has to have happened after Jack’s death.
The appearance of Boone and Shannon indicates that Christian was correct that some died before Jack. The presence of half of the Ajira Six – Claire, Kate, and Sawyer – loop in those who died much later.
Jack’s last view was the Ajira flight carrying the six off the island. Reunited with him at the party, Kate tells Jack she has missed him, implying it has been some time since they saw each other. It has, because she lived well past him.
As for why Kate doesn’t look 80, or 90, or however old she was when she died, that simply doesn’t fit with the way the rest remembered her. This was, after all, a collective vision, and they saw each other as they knew each other on the island.
The Unanswered Questions
For three years now, Paul and I, like many others, have discussed and debated which questions Lost needed to answer. Today there are countless people who really want to know where the four-toed statue came from. Who built it? When?
I have come to accept that questions like these are only questions for rabid fans. The questions that were going to be answered were the questions important to Jack’s story.
While that may irritate some, it makes perfect sense from a storyteller’s perspective. In any story, there will be things that are important and things that aren’t. When telling the story, you want to paint a picture. You may mention that someone is wearing a red shirt. Unless the story you’re telling is Star Trek, that detail is likely irrelevant. To ask why a red shirt and not a blue shirt is to miss the point – it’s not about the shirt, it’s about the man wearing it.
It occurred to me today that you really don’t hear much about Beelzebub in a political context anymore. I was thinking about my childhood (and gaming in particular – and by gaming I don’t mean video) and remembered all of the dire warnings hurled at me regarding the dark lord.
Dungeons & Dragons was a tool of Satan. Heavy metal music was a tool of Satan. Alcohol was the Devil’s elixir. It seemed like just about everything you might enjoy doing was a tool of corruption placed on Earth by Satan.
You just don’t get that much anymore. I mean, in some pockets, I’m sure those charges are still leveled. They just don’t enter the mainstream consciousness the way they used to. Video games are allegedly bad, but not because they’re a tool of Lucifer, they’re bad for much more concrete reasons. People rage against video games because they claim they rot the minds of our youth or they lead to school shootings, or they’re a gateway drug to heroine. They are no longer simply written off as a tool of the dark arts.
In some ways, that makes me kind of sad. Satan is no longer the guilty party in any activity today’s youth engage in. I actually miss a world where every issue was discussed and debated in terms of Satan’s presence. Even if you partook of the devil’s playthings, there was a certain comfort in knowing it was all part of a great cosmic Yin & Yang. Now we have scientific studies of kids who go on to commit crimes and whether too many hours spent playing Sonic the Hedgehog was to blame. It has become all too sterile, and it’s just not the same.
I originally found Toy Soldiers because Microsoft featured it in their booth at CES. I swung by to look at their games and was seriously impressed by this one. It’s a war game that features planes, tanks, blimps, foot soldiers, bullet cam views, and countless forms of merriment in blowing things up.
It will be sold via the Xbox Live Marketplace for about $15. They hadn’t given out a release date, but yesterday they said March 3rd. So don’t call me that day, I’ll be shelling some krauts.
I joked on Facebook the other day that telecom and tech companies are like your boy/girlfriend – you love what they bring to your life, but on some level you are always kind of annoyed by them.
It may be interesting to draw that analogy out a bit further. It occurs to me that your ISP (and most other companies, frankly) are very much like your significant other. And on a certain level, that has serious implications for consumer satisfaction.
When you are dating, most of your friends will never hear about how great your bf is on a daily basis. When he screw ups, however, you’ll tell all your friends. You’ll tell just about anyone who asks.
That’s actually very similar to your ISP. Typically, most ISPs have tremendously reliable service. When that service fails – on the voice, video, or data side – you’ll tell everyone. If the repair guy is late or doesn’t show, you’ll tell everyone you were stood up. If he tracks mud on the floor, you’ll tell everyone he was a slob. If it isn’t resolved when he leaves, you will tell everyone he left you unsatisfied.
Since everyone has similar experiences, they’ll commiserate, tell you that guy is just no good for you, you deserve better, it’s just a shame that there are no decent guys is no competition in the ISP marketplace.
A week later when you are browsing freely, cuddled up watching TV, or talking to your mom back home, will you mention that they’re taking care of you today? Will you talk about all the great things they do for you? All the great places they take you? Probably not.
Most of your friends will eventually grow to think your boyfriend is a big douche who’s always running around and never makes you happy. How many of them have ever heard you say anything good about your ISP?
The fact is, like relationships, telecom can be messy. You may not always get what you want. You may feel you just can’t count on them. You might think you’re putting a lot of yourself your money into the relationship, and they just take you for granted.
But like relationships, we’ll get through this together. Let’s just get a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, browse the web, or just settle down to watch Sleepless in Seattle OnDemand.
A psuedo-reformed political hack takes stock of his life, family, community, and living in our nation's capitol. If a good writer writes about what he knows, expect me to cover politics, technology, telecommunications, consumer gadgets, pop culture, the constant struggle that is parenting, the two best kids in the known world, the wife that makes me crazy, the odd moments I get to enjoy my hobbies, and a big goofy mutt named Kobi.
The thoughts expressed here are mine and mine alone and do not represent the views of anyone else. If your offended by anything you read here, then stop reading and don't return. It's not likely to get any better.
