"Lost" Last Night

I've been critical of "Lost" this season, but last night's episode was a series best - right up there with "Walkabout" and "Flashes Before Your Eyes" for pure breadth and depth of feelings (despair, excitement, shock, awe) squeezed into one hour with commercials. At the end of last season, nothing seemed more obvious than the need to get the Oceanic Six back to the island. Am I the only one who, last night, thought that that was maybe the worst idea ever? How did Jack, who is supposed to be a hero, end up sitting on a plane with dozens of innocent people, praying for a crash? How did his whole purpose change so radically, from getting his friends off the island to getting them back on the island? How did he allow John Locke to so completely take the place of his father - for that matter, how did he convince himself that he needed another father, at all? None of his fellow island escapees can even stand to look at him anymore - except maybe Sun, who's putting her trust in the same bad people. It fell to a random passerby to offer him any kind of comfort. "Sorry about your friend," said Kind-Eyed Passenger #1, and Jack could just stutter a response, perhaps realizing that the Kindness of Strangers is all he has left in the world.

Maybe we'll find out that that guy is one of Ben's people. Maybe not. The actor's name is, suggestively, Saïd Taghmaoui. He is roughly more Middle Eastern than the fictional Sayid (who is played by an Indian, though both actors were born in a different Western European Globalized Metropolis.) Taghmaoui practically hasn't aged a day since his supporting role in "Three Kings," where he played an Iraqi torturer (Lindelof/Cuse must've geekgasmed) who taunted Mark Wahlberg about American hypocrisy. His scenes added gravitas to a film that could've been a Mel Brooks comedy, and "Three Kings" remains the only film besides maybe "Salvador" to portray history effectively as a violent hilarious tragic farce (shudder over "1941," and pray for "Inglourious Basterds.")

Taghmaoui, born of parents from Morocco, has spent the last decade playing variations on Islamic terrorism. On "The West Wing," he was the Ambassador from Qumar, a Middle Eastern Ruritania which was Aaron Sorkin's post-9/11 personification of American anxieties regarding the Islamic world (see Robert Baer's description of Syriana). He played a Symbolic Historical Arab in "O, Jerusalem," unseen in America, which appears to have been the "Gone with the Wind" for the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict. (His character's name in that film was Saïd.) He was in Showtime's miniseries "Splinter Cell." He was in "Vantage Point," a movielength distillation of a season of "24," in which Taghmaoui's character leads a terrorist group which plots and subplots so extensively that they actually manage to execute the President of the Unites States and then, later, kidnap him, which is the terrorist version of having your cake and eating it, too. He was an arms dealer in "Traitor." Lest we miss the point, he was on HBO recently as Barzan Ibrahim, half brother of Saddam Hussein and leader of the Republican Guard.

This list is a travesty of topical typecasting, considering that Taghmaoui has a hard-soft concrete burn in his eyes that make him look like Montgomery Clift or like Jean-Paul Belmondo, another French actor. I'm tempted to say that his casting on "Lost" is almost a conscious mea culpa by the writers - I have at least one Iraqi friend who never quite got over the fact that Sayid, probably the most famous Iraqi character in American TV history, was played by an Indian (more dispiriting, I think, was the fact that so few Americans could even notice the difference.)

Yet even more interesting is that the character Taghmaoui was playing was actually the only character sitting in first class who didn't think that the plane was going to crash. "Lost" has always traded, very subtly, in post-9/11 themes and visual reference points - plane wreckage and torture, sure, but also the weird clash of tribalist primitivism and high-tech modernism which makes all Westerners freak their shit, like nomads on camels holding machine guns, or old dirty nukes controlled by people who live in tents.

Last night, we saw a few conspirators board a plane and sit in First Class, all of them pretending not to know each other, all suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, most of them onboard because some power that may as well be divine had informed them that the plane would be their last journey ever, that it would take them to a much better place than this. "Stop asking why it's so ridiculous, and start asking if it's going to work!" Mrs. Hawking screamed. And Christ Alive if Jack didn't buy that totally utterly, learning maybe the wrong lesson from the old Sunday School tale of Doubting Thomas, (you have to admire Thomas just a little bit for holding on to a basic belief in reality, at least until Christ presented his zombie scars.)

All of Jack's guilty looks around the airport lobby at the other people boarding the plane - did anyone else think of the terrorists in "United 93," briefly considering the people around them as real living breathing entities and not just as extras on the outskirts of one's own divine journey? How guilty did everyone look - Hurley purchased several dozen tickets, and still looked uncomfortable (here's someone who seeks nothing in life but personal connection - not even money matters to him - and who feels most comfortable in a padded room talking to ghosts.) The Lost creators have always been admirably multicultural, even if the primary narrative thrust of the series centers on three fatherless white men, but the reverse racial profiling last night was a thing to behold: the Terrorist Guy was the kindly bystander, and our heroes, our gang, couldn't wait for the plane to crash.

The Colors of "Breaking Bad"

"Breaking Bad" is the scuzzy little suburban black comedy with lame commercials that bugged the hell out of you last summer if you couldn't wait to watch "Mad Men" online. The last time I spent so much time watching AMC, it was the late 90s, there were barely any commercials, and practically everything was a three-hour western. "Breaking Bad" looked like a one-note premise with a talented actor seeking career rehab - "Malcolm in the Middle" Dad does cable drug dramedy, a slightly higher-brow version of Bob Saget talking nonstop over fucking and shitting and doing all the above in empty eye sockets in "The Aristocrats."

Jesus, though, was I wrong. "Breaking Bad" is good TV. I'm not quite done with the first season, but one thing that pops out at me is just how clever and classically stylish the show's cinematography is. Although "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" are very different shows, they share a certain formal aesthetic (kind of like how Showtime series feature lots of flashy wide-angle shots, or how all the colors on the USA network look bright neon.)

Take, as an example, a wordless little pre-cred scene from the BB's fifth episode. The show's second banana, Jesse, has just come out of an unsuccessful job interview - he thought he was applying for a sales job, but actually they wanted him to work sidewalk marketing as one of those way-too-joy-juiced sign-spinners. He walks out, and runs into an old friend and fellow drug aficionado, currently working as a sign-spinner. They share a quick smoke in an alleyway. The friend asks Jesse for some crystal meth. Jesse says he doesn't cook anymore. The friend says he could help Jesse out, if he's looking for a partner. The friend walks off, leaving Jesse behind. Watch what happens:

Jesse is left behind to ponder the possibility of getting back into the criminal trade. His shirt is dark red, and the tie he holds in his hands is yellow - bright colors, which are matched in the strange graffiti on the wall behind him. Note all of the parallel lines up and down - the gate on the left, Jesse's slightly tilted stance, the blue lines and the red totem. Those lines are criss-crossed by perpendicular lines that run across the building.

There's a quick cut to the interior of Jesse's car - the sound of the door opening actually begins milliseconds before the cut. Note the red dice on the side of the car, poking out of the total jet black of the car interior, just like Jesse's shirt pokes out of his black suit. (I should note that it's a bit surreal seeing Jesse so well put together - up to this point, he's favored baggy clothes and weed beanies.)

The camera lowers just a little bit as he enters the car (it's hard to capture this subtle movement in still frames, but if you watch the dice, you can get a rough idea.)

Something catches his eye.

We cut to his POV - it's his friend, the stoner sign-spinner. Note the sharp red of the sign (the arrow says "This Way To Savings.") Note, also, the preponderance of parallel lines - besides all the light posts and street signs, you have several buildings and the sidewalk all going towards an offscreen vanishing point. "Breaking Bad" is set in New Mexico, and one of the most unsettling things about the show is how the desert landscape seems to show through even in city scenes like this - it's something in the angle, how you can see both the ground and the sky, which gives everything a slightly more trapped feeling.

We're back to Jesse in the car, and yet a third red element is introduced: he's been circling jobs on the classified page. The red-pen circle completes a visual triangle - the red dice on the left, Jesse's red shirt, the red ink.

Now, the showstopper - the shot which, to me, lifts this whole sequence into something totally unexpected, something Hitchcockian. We've established the two separate plains of action - Jesse in the car, his friend out on the street. Now, we get those two planes unified. We're still looking at Jesse, but we're also looking with Jesse at his friend, and looking with him at the Classified page.
In classical filmspeak, the right side of the screen is positive and the left side is negative. Roughly speaking, on the right side of the screen lie all of Jesse's various possibilities. Does he try another shitty job, at a company so awful as to actually purchase Classified ads? Does he work with his failout friend on the creation of lucrative illegal drugs? Or does he bite the bullet and become a sign-spinner?
This shot is so clever, but it takes a second to notice some of its charm - like how there's a big red arrow strongly recommending that Jesse keep at the job search. The fact that so much of this shot is in darkness, right in the middle of a sunny New Mexico day, speaks volumes about the noirish nature of BB.

Now, watch what happens:








Jesse, exhausted just by thinking about everything, leans back against his seat, and again the camera just barely moves following him - it's almost like the camera is breathing with him, sighing with him, we're in so close. He looks offscreen, takes a breath, and then makes a hasty move forward, upsetting the red dice as he slams the paper down on his dashboard (notice how the string holding them form two straight lines suddenly jostled back and forth across the screen.) The camera leaves Jesse behind and moves down to the newspaper - the bright red taunting him, and us.





We cut from the disorder of the previous shot to the most straight-ahead shot in the whole sequence - literally poised on the x-y axis of a building, staring directly out of a car window from a clearly non-human POV.

So what's going on here, with all the red and the visual geometry? Earlier on I mentioned how the show can create a trapped feeling, but I don't think the show's metaphor is as simple as saying, "These characters are trapped by their existence." That's the sort of easy answer that results in a work like "American Beauty" or the newspaper plotline in season 5 of "The Wire." I'm not so sure that the Red is meant to stand for anything in particular, but the show's color palette is so marvelously subtle, yet striking - it pulls you in like a luscious hidden melodrama. The more you watch "Breaking Bad," the more everything seems to build up. This is a work of sustained fascination and genius. At its best, in a scene likes this, it feels like something Orson Welles would have done, if he'd been born one decade later into the TV age instead of making his name in radio.

BSG vs Lost: Pace

Bizarrely for a show in its fifth season, "Lost" came on strong and fast at the start of this season, as if all of last season's acclaim led to a desperate yearning for instant love, rather than hoped-for narrative confidence (which the show will desperately need in these final hours). The first few episodes moved quick but scattershot, with a couple of key fumbles in the first hour. Little things were off (how many times did Sawyer say "Frogurt?"), and big things were messy (the time travel mechanism was two steps from good but felt desperately off, more like a clip show you watch the characters watch.) The cumulative effect felt like cocaine masturbation - it feels good, but pretty soon you're tired and alone and you've got a nosebleed. Just like the time travel sickness.

On a deeper level, I'm beginning to suspect that Lindelof/Cuse et al aren't being nearly as fearless - with their storytelling and with their characters - as they should be. Vengeful Sun isn't a big enough plotline to hide how ossified the characters' relationships feel at this point. Death isn't necessarily the answer, but it couldn't hurt. The Death Twist has been employed judiciously by "Lost" in the past - it simultaneously adds energy to lagging plotlines, while also trimming the fat out of a show that always has at least two characters too many. First there was Boone, whose death crystallized the Locke/Jack antagonism and pushed the Hatch plotline towards its inevitable conclusion. Then, Ana Lucia and Libby's double sacrifice bunt rescued season 2 and gave the show what remains (for me, at least) its most darkly hilarious image - Michael, shaking after his first murder, with fear and shock and excitement.

What I'm saying is that someone needs to die, or something needs to change, because things are getting far to comfortable. On the island, the characters are more of a stereotypical TV "gang" than ever before - all essentially united in a common goal, jumping through time in a story that resembles nothing so much as Jerry O'Connell's fondly-remembered-when-not-watched "Sliders." Off the island, what could have been a dark riff on getting the band together turned into a quick jaunt around Los Angeles that made you pine for the city of mystery and suspense and tragic farce in vintage "24" (the show that pioneered the Death Twist and kickstarted its best season by cutting its supporting cast in half.) Oh look, Sayid's in LA! Oh look, Sun's in LA! Oh look, Desmond's coming to LA right now!

The little details were nice - the gas prices were period-accurate, and suggested a whole world in 2008 that our characters seem resolutely incapable of interacting with. The show's little details are always a saving grace in difficult TV hours - bulletholes in a canoe paddle, mysterious wreckage with French writing, the moment before mines explode. Nothing else on broadcast TV comes close to this show's aesthetic sensibility.

But the story is a mess right now. The choice to lose the focal-character structure must have seemed like a no-brainer – some of the show's finest hours have departed from the one-character flash-episode, to great effect. But this new structure just feels like a mess. Things happen on the island, and things happen off the island. That feeling you used to get at the end of the episode, of a minor triumph or a terrible moral failure, is gone now. I suppose that the last few episodes have had a kind of thesis: "Hurley Feels Bad About Lying," "Kate Really Feels Kinship With Aaron." We could have guessed that already! There's too much overexplanation in the Oceanic Six, and not nearly enough focus on the mindfucking business back on the island.

The last episode crystallized the feeling of this mini-saga; you get the sense that the writers are trying to answer as many random questions from the past as possible, and that they felt like it would be more exciting to have their characters interact with the past. It's worked out okay maybe a quarter of the time. The creators aren't giving themselves enough credit. Part of the thrill of, say, Ben's flashback episode was how immersive the flashbacks felt - you were being thrown into a whole strange culture, and you had to tease answers out of the atmosphere. With time travel, you just have awkward conversations between our people and Past People. It feels like a conversation between the Lost writers and their secret confidantes, and not in a good way.

I maybe wouldn't be ragging on "Lost" so hard if "BSG" weren't so on point this season - if, in these last four episodes, it's delivered on all the promise of a ponderous '08 half season and delivered some deep thrills. Somehow, BSG has managed to thread the needle - it has all the gravitas you expect of a great TV show in its final days, but it still has all the excitement of youth, the willingness to shake up everything combined with the wisdom that knows exactly how far things can shake. This past two-parter, a genuine Revolution, had all the energy of recent "Lost," but it never forgot the exact particulars of how its characters should interact.

Hell, some of the best moments in the episode came from the disgraced Captain Kelly, a face in the crowd for four seasons now (he was the somber officer walking past corpses in the miniseries, and the XO during Adama's recuperation, and a terrorist bomber during Baltar's trial.) I'm not even sure that we've ever seen Kelly and the Chief interact before, but their one scene together had all the improvisation of old friends on the job, combined with the real danger that one of those old friends might shoot the other one.

How many of those moments are there on "Lost" lately? That show now feels simultaneously too written and not written enough. Rarely have we the viewers been so conscious of the actors as chess pieces that must be moved to a proper place; even rarer has the game seemed more like checkers. The Revolution on BSG was a massive fuck-up by everyone onscreen, but it felt alive and sure-footed to watch it. Tiny details accumulated - an itchy amputee stump, the way Richard Hatch's grin shifts ever so slightly between knowing he's victorious and knowing he's fucked, how the makeup and hair artists somehow make every Six look just a little bit different. "BSG" is setting its own pace; "Lost" is trying to match ours, and the writers', and the characters'. Maybe things will get better when they find the island. Maybe not.