"Lost" and the Emergence of Hypertext Storytelling 170
Hugh Pickens writes "The TV series 'Lost' involves a large cast of characters marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash, with episodes that thread lengthy flashbacks of characters' backstories with immediate plots of day-to-day survival and interpersonal relationships, and a larger 'mythos' involving the strange and apparently supernatural (or science-fictional) happenings on the island. Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative. 'In Lost, the connections between characters form the essential hypertext content, which is emphasized by the structure of flashbacks that give the viewer privileged information about characters,' writes Beamer. 'Paramount are the connections unfolding between characters, ranging from mundane, apparently coincidental meetings in the airport, to more unlikely and in-depth meetings, reaching back through their entire lives and the lives of their families.' Beamer writes that the series also pays tribute to video games, another relatively recent interactive means of storytelling."
I'd rather attribute it to poor writing... (Score:5, Insightful)
...and problems holding on to the "red thread", not really knowing what direction to go with it all. The writing started showing escalating signs of "crackelation" and inconsistency somewhere in the middle of the 3rd season - and by this I don't mean the "hypertext narrative" that was obvious already from the first few episodes. I tried to watch the current season recently, and I was truly more lost than ever.
I wonder what she means (Score:5, Insightful)
'Coz it seems as if she can't, or refuses to look backwards in history - the "flashback" occurance in story-telling is older than the pen and paper. Is she really implying that this is something new that popped up after the web? :D To me, her writing appears to be just vacuous bollox in fancy phrasing making it appear bigger than it is.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote: Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
To emphasise this: what exactly does the author in the article that couldn't be applied to a story that clearly was not influenced by hypertext storytelling because it hadn't been invented, e.g. Joseph Heller's Catch 22: a highly nonlinear story which switches attention between numerous different points in its protagonist's career as the reader needs to learn more about the character's history in order to understand what comes next (or before). What the author describes as "levelling up" is generally called "raising the stakes" by most writers and is a widely used trick to keep readers/viewers interested in a long story. See, for example, Lord of the Rings, where it occurs several times: when Frodo et al reach Rivendell, in Moria, when the Fellowship splits. Allusion is a very widely used technique, and has a very long history in filmmaking. A good example of a pre-hypertext film with a lot of allusion is Blade Runner.
What is perhaps interesting is that Lost has a lot more popular appeal than the examples I quote above, so maybe this type of storytelling is becoming more appealing to the average TV viewer?
Re:Right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
But if you tie it to a fancy buzzword, it's all new and exciting!
Film at 11 (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news: current generation also think they invented sex, drugs & rock and roll.
What might be new is... (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Interpreting flashbacks as Hypertext
2) Doing that^^^ to get attention
Do not want (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm actually, as they put it, a fan of the series but I strongly disagree that this "hypertext" narrative based on flashbacks and other similar constructs brings any value to the story. I mean, whenever the episode was dedicated to a flashback or the insight on a character... Well, it sucked to high heavens. To me, the flashback abuse and the over-reliance on episodes dedicated to carve a profile on a character or even to sum what the hell was going on seemed as clear signals the writers didn't knew what they were doing and were scrambling to fill the gaps they left in the story. I mean, they had a great story to tell (the island and all the mysteries, natural and man-made, associated with it) but they opted to waste time showing how Jack had a bad relationship with his father. That sort of stuff constituted a major anticlimax.
The angle on the multiple mysteries popping around was, on the other hand, quite appealing. That's exactly what made the show great. We had a cast of downtrodden people who found themselves on the lowest points of their lives facing multiple unexplainable dangers on a strange, foreign land that they knew nothing about. That's what made the entire series interesting. The rest was just poorly tailored cruft that was only used to filibuster the story-telling while the writers managed to figure out what the hell were they doing. And the consequence of that is that in the final season they are scrambling to explain some crap they added to the story as some sort of zig-zag and they are sucking at it. I mean, the island is hell and jacob Vs smoke is good Vs evil? WTF?
This is silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but this is your typical over-analyzed and pretentious lit crit type nonsense. Tribute to video games... because it heavily foreshadows stuff? "Hypertext?" A heavy focus on characters and their relationships is nothing new, that's done in soap operas even. That was also one of the main focuses of Battlestar Galactica up until the end when suddenly it was just some John Zerzan fantasy instead.
There's no tribute to foreshadowing going on. Sure, while there are a lot of flashbacks in LOST, more than many other shows, but that doesn't mean LOST provides a revolutionary new way of storytelling.
Again, this is all just your standard humanities-inspired blahblahblah affair. Throw a bunch of shit out there, see what the readers buy, and use jargon and hope that enough people buy it that you get credited with created a new concept that is actually only marginally different from other concepts already out there. Give me a fucking break.
Oh come on - new? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's roughly a thousand years old.
I don't think... (Score:3, Insightful)
...hypertext means what you think it means :)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
A loss, not a gain (Score:4, Insightful)
Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative.
I disagree. It is the loss of the ability for people to write the narrative form. Hypertext-like writing is a convenient crutch for writers who cannot integrate ideas into the normal flow of their work.
Triple unity (Score:1, Insightful)
It's even worse than that. For a long time stories and books were written like russian dolls a character of the main story would tell another story that would span entire chapters and inside this story another character would then tell another story that would also span entire chapters. So it's nothing new, it went so out of hand that it lead to the adoption by many writers of the triple unity: unity of time, unity of space and unity of plot. A story should all happen in 24 hours at a single place and have only one main A plot. So not only has it been done before but it has been done to such excesses than hundreds of years ago, writers chose to avoid this kind of storytelling technique by adopting some very stringent rules.
TLDR: Writers don't use this kind of storytelling because they're good. They use it to hide that the plot sucks.
Re:Right. (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you're doing Lost a disservice. Sure, it's not the first to do non-linear storytelling, and the article is daft to suggest it does.
But I think Lost is a fascinating form. An epic story told over the course of 121 hours (OK, ~90 hours + ad breaks), with an overall structure, a proper beginning, middle and end, and a kind of fractal-ness, in that each series also has a story arc, and to some extent so does each episode.
I have trouble thinking of anything else that's achieved this. Other TV series and comics tend to have an open ended structure, so it's beginning followed by endless "middle", and maybe a tacked on "end" when it gets cancelled (e.g. The Sopranos). Things like the X Factor, Prison Break, Heroes tease us with some kind of big potential denouement, but in reality the writers don't know what it is, and will churn out episodes until they're told to wrap it up. Novels are usually much shorter. Even the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy has less plot than Lost.
It's especially not fair to compare Lost with Heroes. Lost's writers claim to have always known how the overall story would work out -- and that appears to be true. With Heroes, it's pretty clear that they make it up as they go along.
Comics *usually* have the same open-endedness that TV series do. I'm sure some comic geek will tell me of a great comic with 200 issues in which the writer clearly knew how it would end, as he was writing the first issue -- but I don't know of one off the top of my head.
Oh, I would say The Shield pulled it off. So Lost is not quite unique.
Re:I'd rather attribute it to poor writing... (Score:2, Insightful)
They haven't made any effort to constrain their point of view. God mode is on. So god should know what those people were up to the rest of the time. If they are introduced at the end in order to resolve the story, it smacks of hand of god.
(I suppose they might be drawing some very careful lines about what characters they show, but my viewing doesn't make it seem like that is the case)
Re:Right. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have trouble thinking of anything else that's achieved this.
Babylon 5's Michael Straczynsky also had everything planned from the beginning. And it had quite a lot of plot. And humor.
Except they then told him not to wrap it up, thus the somewhat arbitrary fifth season.
More like ad-hoc story telling (Score:4, Insightful)
That's how it seems to me anyway. Practically every episode means more characters, more mysteries, more loose ends created, and none of the 150 other major loose ends resolvedeven, and more incoherency. It seems like the writers just make things up as they go along.
It reminds of the way a small child might make up a story: "and then, the invisible guy is no longer invisible, and then the dead guy is no longer dead, and then a nuclear bomb explodes, and then they find a hidden Chinese temple, and then a smoke monster kills everybody in the temple, and then they find a secret lighthouse, and then they find a secret cave, and then this little kid keeps appearing and disappearing, and then . . . "
Re:Bad exemple - we're speaking about out-of-order (Score:5, Insightful)