Plot Twist
Submitted by retroactiveman on March 29, 2009 - 12:45am.
Lost
You know what that old expression, when given chicken make chicken salad?
This episode features a twist.
Double Murder
Opening, we look into Sayid's past. We catch a glimpse of who he was and who he is. Accentuated by the camera's lens, Tikrit looks very hot. Under this spotlight, a young boy is asked by his father to "Act like a man", to imitate the actions of a man, and "kill one", a chicken trapped in a coop. http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/He%27s_ ... transcript. The boy resists. But his father asks him to "Listen" to the language that he, his father, is speaking. The father reminds him that the boy has no choice, he "will stay outside" in the heat, in the yard, outside of manhood, until he executes. Dinner, to the family, must be served. They must eat and, in order to eat, this chicken must die.
Maybe the killing is too painful. The boy will not do it.
Sayid must have been watching. Having no patience for the boys pitiable contemplations, Sayid approaches without saying a word, calmly lures the bird into his arms and twists its neck, snapping it. Sayid has killed the bird, murdered it. By doing this, he speaks the fathers language, Sayid "will be a man." The father says so.
However, in so doing, has Sayid murdered the man, the other man, the future man, of the boy that one day would be? Sayid has prevented the boy from joining the people to which he inevitably belongs: men. Now, the boy, even while inside the walls of his father's house, will always be outside: his father wont look at him as a man, he will be a boy in his father's eye and he will grow up abject in this withering heat.
But does Sayid, in return, murder the child within himself? The father says the Sayid "will be" a man, but through this first step toward his, the father's world, the past seals behind him.
Cooped Up
Moving forward, Sayid is cooped up in a cell. A teenage boy brings him chicken salad sandwiches and talks to Sayid about Sayid's and his future. The boy will help Sayid get out of the cell he has locked himself in, set him free, if Sayid is "patient". In return, Sayid will (re)unite him with the people to whom he belongs, with whom the ghost of his mother resides. Abject in his father's house, the boy longs to be free, but can't seem to do it on his own. That will come later, after cooking a little longer. Sayid does not talk to this chicken, but in silence lures the bird into his arms, gaining its trust. The boy's been beaten with such regularity by the hands of his father, he's willing to place is faith in the hands of strangers. Maybe this stranger will do what needs to be done for him?
Home Free
Twisted 180º from the heat of the murderer's incubation, the scene of the first murder, we are shown the scene of one Sayid the Murderer's final murders. After doing the job almost gleefully, Sayid reports back to his master. The master is the man who, in "The Economist" bandaged his wounds while disciplining him in the basement of a Berlin veterinarian. While the master had him locked into his role of murderer, now he opens the cage and sets him free.
Liberated we find Sayid in the Dominican Republic building homes for others. The master arrives to collect his animal, his chicken if you will. But the chicken resists. So, playing on the animal's desire, the master offers the animal food. Ilana, the bait, lures the chicken into the masters arms, and the master turns him back to the island.
Double Murder
The DI, unable to properly dispose of Sayid, Sayid does the job for them.
Jin, wearing the logo of the DI, meets Ben and Sayid in the Jungle. Sayid convinces Jin, using a Jedi mind trick, that Sawyer approves of the escape. With one final twist, Jin is flipped. First the chicken's neck is twisted, if not snapped. Then Sayid shoots the boy.
We don't know whether the boy is alive or dead. But either way, the boy is dead. Either the shot prevents the boy from joining the others, return him to the fold of the DI, into the house of his father where he will be supervised by his father's withering abject gaze. Or the boy is dead.
Where does this leave Sayid? Sayid is severed from his group and he is left to go off into the jungle and join the symbolic community of others. Turning 360º from the opening scene of the episode, through his transgression, Sayid accepts the "'Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication: 'It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law'. Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you are able to enter into a community of others. The symbolic, through language, is 'the pact which links ... subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts." From http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl ... cture.html, internal quotes from Lacan.
Through this symbolic murder, Sayid accepts his symbolic role as murderer: "You were right about me. I am a killer." While his narcissistic ego leads him to the Dominican Republic to build houses and construct an imaginary role for himself in this world, Ben, the psychoanalyst coaxes Sayid the analysand to the symbolic order of his psyche. Sawyer offers Sayid one last chance to return to the imaginary order of the DI, built on top of the reality of the civilization which will always elude them, but Sayid refuses. Through Ben, Sayid has found his purpose for returning to the island. And the ego which with all its strength restrained the symbolic fails. Sayid murders an image of himself, and he allows himself to join his desire, join the island.
This episode features a twist.
Double Murder
Opening, we look into Sayid's past. We catch a glimpse of who he was and who he is. Accentuated by the camera's lens, Tikrit looks very hot. Under this spotlight, a young boy is asked by his father to "Act like a man", to imitate the actions of a man, and "kill one", a chicken trapped in a coop. http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/He%27s_ ... transcript. The boy resists. But his father asks him to "Listen" to the language that he, his father, is speaking. The father reminds him that the boy has no choice, he "will stay outside" in the heat, in the yard, outside of manhood, until he executes. Dinner, to the family, must be served. They must eat and, in order to eat, this chicken must die.
Maybe the killing is too painful. The boy will not do it.
Sayid must have been watching. Having no patience for the boys pitiable contemplations, Sayid approaches without saying a word, calmly lures the bird into his arms and twists its neck, snapping it. Sayid has killed the bird, murdered it. By doing this, he speaks the fathers language, Sayid "will be a man." The father says so.
However, in so doing, has Sayid murdered the man, the other man, the future man, of the boy that one day would be? Sayid has prevented the boy from joining the people to which he inevitably belongs: men. Now, the boy, even while inside the walls of his father's house, will always be outside: his father wont look at him as a man, he will be a boy in his father's eye and he will grow up abject in this withering heat.
But does Sayid, in return, murder the child within himself? The father says the Sayid "will be" a man, but through this first step toward his, the father's world, the past seals behind him.
Cooped Up
Moving forward, Sayid is cooped up in a cell. A teenage boy brings him chicken salad sandwiches and talks to Sayid about Sayid's and his future. The boy will help Sayid get out of the cell he has locked himself in, set him free, if Sayid is "patient". In return, Sayid will (re)unite him with the people to whom he belongs, with whom the ghost of his mother resides. Abject in his father's house, the boy longs to be free, but can't seem to do it on his own. That will come later, after cooking a little longer. Sayid does not talk to this chicken, but in silence lures the bird into his arms, gaining its trust. The boy's been beaten with such regularity by the hands of his father, he's willing to place is faith in the hands of strangers. Maybe this stranger will do what needs to be done for him?
Home Free
Twisted 180º from the heat of the murderer's incubation, the scene of the first murder, we are shown the scene of one Sayid the Murderer's final murders. After doing the job almost gleefully, Sayid reports back to his master. The master is the man who, in "The Economist" bandaged his wounds while disciplining him in the basement of a Berlin veterinarian. While the master had him locked into his role of murderer, now he opens the cage and sets him free.
Liberated we find Sayid in the Dominican Republic building homes for others. The master arrives to collect his animal, his chicken if you will. But the chicken resists. So, playing on the animal's desire, the master offers the animal food. Ilana, the bait, lures the chicken into the masters arms, and the master turns him back to the island.
Double Murder
The DI, unable to properly dispose of Sayid, Sayid does the job for them.
Jin, wearing the logo of the DI, meets Ben and Sayid in the Jungle. Sayid convinces Jin, using a Jedi mind trick, that Sawyer approves of the escape. With one final twist, Jin is flipped. First the chicken's neck is twisted, if not snapped. Then Sayid shoots the boy.
We don't know whether the boy is alive or dead. But either way, the boy is dead. Either the shot prevents the boy from joining the others, return him to the fold of the DI, into the house of his father where he will be supervised by his father's withering abject gaze. Or the boy is dead.
Where does this leave Sayid? Sayid is severed from his group and he is left to go off into the jungle and join the symbolic community of others. Turning 360º from the opening scene of the episode, through his transgression, Sayid accepts the "'Name-of-the-Father, those laws and restrictions that control both your desire and the rules of communication: 'It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law'. Through recognition of the Name-of-the-Father, you are able to enter into a community of others. The symbolic, through language, is 'the pact which links ... subjects together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts." From http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl ... cture.html, internal quotes from Lacan.
Through this symbolic murder, Sayid accepts his symbolic role as murderer: "You were right about me. I am a killer." While his narcissistic ego leads him to the Dominican Republic to build houses and construct an imaginary role for himself in this world, Ben, the psychoanalyst coaxes Sayid the analysand to the symbolic order of his psyche. Sawyer offers Sayid one last chance to return to the imaginary order of the DI, built on top of the reality of the civilization which will always elude them, but Sayid refuses. Through Ben, Sayid has found his purpose for returning to the island. And the ego which with all its strength restrained the symbolic fails. Sayid murders an image of himself, and he allows himself to join his desire, join the island.
» add new comment | 75 reads
Death of the child/Death of the father
That was brilliant, retro. Really you brought out the central meaning of the episode so well while continuing the theme of why they are in Hell. I especially loved your reading of what happened when Sayid the boy became a killer as the move into the Symbolic--the Name of the Father--the Law. And then that childhood is lost, for his brother, for himself, and for Ben. And again--that whether Ben lives or not--litte Ben is dead. That may be the crux of the entire series right there to me. Made me realize how important Ben is as having been both DI and Other. I think what the Others are changes under Ben's leadership and changes because of Ben's dual position in both the Imaginary and Symbolic.
I do have some disagreements with you though which I think might center on both a reading of Lacan and what the DI and the Hostiles/Others are standing for in that framework.
I'm reading what you said above as seeing a kind of opposition between the Symbolic and the Imaginary in which the Imaginary represents constructing an ego ideal which denies one's Symbolic role--for Sayid this would be what you describe as the narcissistic ego leading him to try to build houses in the Dominican Republic. And then Sawyer as the DI attempting to offer him a return to the Imaginary (just remembering that in an old theory I opposed Sawyer and Sayid as the two men most strongly identified as the polarities of fiction/truth).
First, I don't think I quite read Lacan that way--I don't read the Symbolic and the Imaginary as in an opposition in which the Imaginary involves denial and the Symbolic accepetance. To me both Imaginary and Real are structured or seen through the Symbolic. So it's more like the Imaginary is the signified and the Symbolic is the signifier and what is imaginary about the Imaginary is that we fool ourselves into thinking that what we are signifiying is the Real. And then each time we realize this (and so here I would agree that the Imaginary always involves denial) we move on in the chain of signifiers. Desire=realization that we haven't achieved the Real in our labelling or naming. So Lacan's reading of the Oedipal killing of the father means killing the Real--killing the notion that the Name names something actual, absolute and unchanging (inescapable). In that way I think you are perhaps misreading Sayid's move into the Symbolic--accepting his symbolic role as murderer. To accept the role does not mean to accept the reality. This is not his "being" but his role (emphasis there on the role as an act). So it is just as much a construction as his attempt to create a new role for himself in the Dominican Republic. I'm reminded of what I thought when I wrote up that description of the way Sayid uses language--that he, along with all the characters, contains his own contradiction. So to say that he has now joined his desire seems to imply that desire has come to an end in the Real--he really is a killer--but I don't see this as the end of the chain.
While I agree with your identification of the DI with the Imaginary then, I don't see the Imaginary as a kind of ego ideal which denies the dark reality of who they are. Instead I see Sayid's acceptance of his role as killer as just as much a patch as Sawyer's role as sherrif or Jack's as Mr. Fix-It. It's a denial of the fragmentation of the subject.
What the Others/Hostiles might be instead is an acknowledgement of fragmentation--of the Otherness inherent in our identities--our selves. This is how I read the highlighting of artifice in their practice. But then I wonder what has happened under the guidance of Ben--especially in light of the death of the child Ben. Has Ben brought some of the DI (death instinct) into the narrative of the Others. That would make sense in a Lacanian reading as Ben's story revolves around the loss of the Mother--and the death drive is about that longing to return to unity or fusion with the mother--a unity which denies the separateness of the subject. So the death of the child Ben (a repetition of what happened to Sayid at the beginning of the story) returns Ben to his father instead of taking him to the Other(s). He enters the Symbolic--but not the symbolic acknowledged as the Symbolic (which to me is what the Others stand for--a realization of Otherness) but the Symbolic as a structure for the Imaginary--for accepting that the Law is absolute, unchangeable (fate)--it confuses the "Nom" and the "Non." Ben is stuck in a narcissistic loop in that way (as is Sayid--and they are repeating each other--the Imaginary always being about a mirroring, repetition, duplication).
So perhaps Ben's dual role as having been both DI and Other means that the Imaginary Father has come to dominate the Hostiles--that is imagining that the law of the Father is real (in this way Ben as Pharisee), rather than the more playful and childlike vision of language/law as always unfixed in meaning--that it contains it's own contradiction--it's own Otherness.