Why we watch
"A series can be said to have jumped the shark only if it had never previously done more than get its narrative feet wet. “Lost’’ dove in headfirst and has yet to reach for a towel. Jumping the shark? “Lost’’ swims with sharks - narratively speaking."
There was a great analysis in the paper today on the appeal of Lost which, to me, had far reaching implications having to do with meaning and belief. Mark Feeny's central idea is his definition of pornography as not specifically about sex, but about the separationg of action and emotion (pornography divorcing sex from love). Using this definition he briefly cites a scene in the Matrix as a divorce of violence from anger. It seems to me that this separation does a lot to explain the dysfunctional effect of some forms of story-telling. In Lost he sees "implausibility porn"--which he does not specify as to the action and emotion, but from his examples I assume he means between coincidence (action) and belief (emotion). But here, I think, his definition may break down in an interesting way--that is, while in his description of the scene in the Matrix, the action is cooly detached from the emotion (thus making violence a beautifully rendered image without personal responsibility), coincidence and belief are more and more fully attached to each other in what he's describing. And as he also goes on to say--this is dependent on strength of character development. It's when narrative (which might be another word for coincidence) and character start to detach that we get a mechanistic universe--not narrative and belief. In fact, I think the reason why implausibility and character have worked together to make the show so appealing has to do with a real longing for meaning in our culture--and the show has failed when the character development has fallen apart.
Very interesting...