Uqbar Calling

Recently Wandering Coyote posted the TV shows she's addicted to, and I realized that aside from Dr. Phil and Dateline, I'm not really deeply into any new shows. I watch House when I remember it's on, and CSI: Miami is pretty good, but I'm not fanatical about them. I like How Clean is Your House? (even though it makes me gag), and You Are What You Eat, but W keeps switching the times on me. I've never been a Trekkie or a soaps junkie or anything like that. The only classic cult TV show I like is The Prisoner. I've come to abhor the singing reality shows (Supernova, Idol), and I've always hated Survivor and Fear Factor with a passion. I'm not into sitcoms, though Two and a Half Men isn't bad.
So what's left for a person like me?
It was the last thing I expected.
A year ago, I made fun of Lost. I watched about 5 minutes of it one night and summarily decided it was too lame for words. Survivor with a fourth wall. An excuse for bikini catfights. A soap opera with coconuts.
I was so wrong.
A few days ago, I happened across a description of the show. Can't remember where, but it mentioned that there are polar bears on the island. Out of place animals! Cool! This is a seldom-used concept. There was a talking aardvark in Stephen King's version of The Kingdom, but aside from that I can't recall ever seeing out-of-place animals in a TV drama.
So I looked into Lost, and discovered that there's this whole Fortean thing going on with that island. It's real, but it's not real real. There's an invisible force that sucked the pilot out of the crashed plane and left him in a treetop; underground bunkers that were part of some kind of psychological (?) experiment called The DHARMA Initiative ; a mysterious numbers station that is broadcasting a distress signal from somewhere on the island; the aforementioned polar bears; and a whole whack of bizarre coincidences that link the survivors. It seems some of them were lured to the island by the appearance of those numbers in their lives, and that many of the survivors unwittingly played key roles in each others' pre-island lives (according to their memories, anyway). Previous island-dwellers have been struck down by something known only as The Sickness, which seems to involve insanity. And if all this isn't weird enough, the survivors have been led to believe they are responsible for the fate of the entire world.
I ran out and rented the first season and the second half of the second season, and today I bought the tie-in novel Bad Twin.

There are a lot of theories about what the DHARMA Initiative and the island's anomalies could mean, and some of them have been debunked by the writers of Lost. They say the island isn't purgatory, nor a dream, nor anything to do with time travel. But they did hint in one episode that Flann O'Brien's novel The Third Policemen could offer up clues. O'Brien's novels are absurd comic fantasies inspired somewhat by Joyce, and both The Third Policemen and The Dalkey Archives (which I'm reading now) deal with time warps/time travel and people who are supposed to be dead. So it seems that Lost is a story in the style of Adolfo Casares's 1924 novel The Invention of Morel, which also involves an impossible island full of strange people and a mysterious disease. Since the island apparently has electromagnetic anomalies, aural and visual hallucinations and perhaps even wormholes and tesseracts, are a strong possibility. This puts Lost in the class of many of my favorite novels and films, as well as some of my own story ideas ("Copenhagen" and "Pitt's Pickup")...

• The Invention of Morel, a fascinating novel and allegedly the inspiration for the bizarre film Last Year at Marienbad. Is everything an illusion? "No aye banda"?
• Pynchon. The shadowy megacorporation known as Yoyodyne has some similarities to the interconnected Oceanic Airlines, the Hanso Foundation, etc. Gravity's Rainbow revolves around strange psychological experiments.
• A Wrinkle in Time, which a Lost survivor is reading in one episode. The idea that the survivors are stuck in a time loop of some sort is intriguing. Will seemingly random strings of events begin to repeat themselves over and over? This is what happens in The Third Policeman. Things start to go wonky when a character reaches for a black box, much like things begin to go strange in Mulholland Drive when Rita reaches for the blue box. (David Lynch's work frequently delves into solipsism, overlapping time sequences, and such. In Twin Peaks, the Black Lodge seemed to exist in a parallel universe, and Robert Blake's Mystery Man in Lost Highway was able to be in two places at once). Explains why the fat guy is still fat.
• The idea of a "time overlap", in which different periods of time are superimposed over each other, could explain the anomalous animals and the group of savages known as The Others. There have been people who claimed to actually experience such time warps, like the two Victorian schoolteachers who were convinced they saw Marie Antoinette and her cronies at Versailles. Ivan Sanderson claimed he and his wife walked into a 17th-century village one evening. Renowned scientist Kary Mullis reported a talking raccoon, a shrinking neighbor, and apparitions of the dead at his cabin retreat. Then there are locations where "doors" into other realities seem to be ajar, allowing us glimpses into another world that isn't quite right, like the "Skinwalker" Ranch, or Scotland's Ben McDhui.
• The gorgeous Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock (the "secret chapter" of the novel, published 20 years after it first appeared, hinted that the missing young women may have entered a rip in space-time).
• The online mystery/horror story Dionaea House, told through emails and blogs, which involves hypercubes/tesseracts. This allows the house to appear larger inside than out. The concept of tesseracts is so surreal that it's often linked to black magic and/or mad scientists, and Joyce used it in Finnegan's Wake.
• Groundhog Day. Are the survivors stuck in a time loop for the purpose of working out karmic issues? This could explain why Locke is able to walk and other characters have been given new leases on life.
• Is there a "man behind the curtain"? Are members of the Dharma Iniative, the Hanso Foundation, or the elusive Whidmore family manipulating events via electromagnetism, or the "vaccines" The Others administer?
• Or are the survivors subconsciously creating their own reality? In Borges's short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", the narrator's friend (Adolfo Cassares, author of The Invention of Morel!) makes stuff up off the top of his head, and it all ends up in an encyclopedia. Whatever he imagines becomes real, kinda like Wikipedia.