Slashdot Mirror
"Lost" and the Emergence of Hypertext Storytelling
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."
Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
This so-called hyptertext story telling isn't new. A number of authors have used flashback, story-in-story etc. for ages. There were a number of 40's and 50's war films that used the technique. However, I think that its use on TV in a maxi (as opposed to mini) series, is innovative.
That said, I'm hoping that it doesn't become the defacto method of story telling for television. It can be over done.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
...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.
Indeed. Could cite Odyssey as an example of classical non-linear story telling to your argument.
The fact is that most of the current TV shows tend to be dumbed down idiotic stuff. Only in a few situation, the producers happen to be less coward and green-light something a little bit more intellectual and hope that the eyeballs won't be bored aways from the advertisers to which they attempt to sell them.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
'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.
In other news: current generation also think they invented sex, drugs & rock and roll.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As said above, this is not new at all. What might be new is:
1) Interpreting flashbacks as Hypertext
2) Doing that^^^ to get attention
What a load or rubbish, this sounds like a one of those "fad" lines of thought emerging due to ignorance of what exists in the past. The old becomes new again.
Watchmen is a perfect example of this, written in 1986. As someone else mentioned, the practice of excessive flashbacks showing character interactions over time (and related side stories) dates back to ancient Greece.
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?
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.
New? Seriously? One Thousand and One Nights has stories in stories in stories (in stories, ...), with flashbacks and story-level spanning references and all.
It's roughly a thousand years old.
...hypertext means what you think it means :)
'Lost' requires the viewers to *infer* what is a flashback, flashforward, or alternative universe. Typically, these things are labeled in other movies or fiction. For example, they'll say "Twenty Years ago..." or in a movie, making the screen go all wavy or something similar. 'Lost' just jumps in and hopes the fans figure it out. About the only earlier example that I can think of is Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" , which obviously the scriptwriters of 'Lost' have read
I remember having stopped watching Lost sometime during the first season (HOW many years ago?), when Michelle Rodriguez' character was killed. I think it was the only character I had liked.
That thing was flashback city.
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.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
"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."
Plus, it's just plain awful.
Although they are written in a random order to avoid spoiling the plot, while playing "Choose Your Own Adventure" books you still have a story starting with its beginning, finishing with its end, and in between told chronologically. The story happens in-order of the reading order (even if the reading order itself is a little bit complex).
Whereas with Lost, most of what would be an introduction and put into the beginning of the show, is told during the show in flashbacks. What is chronologically the beginning is spread all over the season. In turn what is the first episode happens only later in the story (the crash and following events).
To go back to my classical example, the Odyssey begins telling the end of the story (the gods deciding to let Odysseus go home) and the biggest part of the story is told through flashbacks and characters telling what happened to them before, sometime with several such layers of indirection. (Imagine flashback-in-a-flashback). The begging of the story (War against Troy) is told in a such several-layered indirection somewhere in the middle of the text. This leads to a great complexity in story telling. The story doesn't happen in the same order as one reads the chapters.
Probably other even older epic poem feature similar out-of-order telling. But Odyssey is the oldest I've studied. As the top-parent sarcastically said, it's nothing new and it's not something specific of Lost or of Hypertext. Human mind works in non linear manner, so out-of-order story telling is probably as old as story telling around a fire in some cave.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... was conveying the true nature of the show in the very first or second episodes.
That has saved a lot of time for me...
(^_^)
In Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five the main character travels through time the entire story, finding himself living and/or re-living different parts of his life. Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle actually talks about teams of people, called karass, that do God's Will without ever knowing it. Obviously, my statements do terrible injustice to the books, which IMO are a must-read. :)
In any case, it's damn clear Lost didn't bring anything new. Also, it's damn clear that I found a good reason to bring Vonnegut to the discussion, which makes me happy
I wonder if the independent scholar Amelia Beamer reads once in a while or just watches recent TV series. Nowadays one can become a scholar way too easy.
Hypertext storytelling? I thought the article was going to be about a choose-your-own-adventure story using HTML webpages.
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.
Scholarly attribution of cultural shifts often use cotemporal shifts in alternate media to describe anything sufficiently novel that it can be distinguished from the previous generation. People make labels and associations out of stuff in order to categorize and examine and study, and it isn't necessarily a literal equivalence. In this case it is merely the codification of an emerging trend using an easily understandable metaphor borrowed from something most people are at least familiar with.
In other words, this has exceeded the nominal number of flashbacks for a television show, now someone is looking around for a relevant explanation and nomenclature so that people studying this can use a common understanding. "The storytelling works a lot like hypertext" is a metaphor. If it really were hypertext, it would be a choose your own adventure book.
In art, Impressionism started in painting around 1850 or so, named because a critic latched on to the painting "Impression, soleil" by Monet to describe the new style. A similar movement in music happened, probably due to the same need to break accepted rules in order to make more use of the medium. This lagged behind painting by maybe 30 years, and when music appeared they called it Impressionism too. Music had already by that time evolved through Romanticism, which broke the established Classical rules enough that it was distinguishable from the previous generation. Painting did not have that Romantic period so much, since the emphasis was on realism, and Impressionism was the rule-breaking group.
Musical Romanticism had already begun the "impression" style by introducing the tone poem and other works meant to simply evoke and emotion - not to tell a story or be enjoyed intrinsically. This started around 1830 with Mendelssohn and Franck, and Liszt. That was the musical equivalent to artistic Impressionism. The equivalent to musical Impressionism was really more like Cubism.
The best way to describe Lost is in the words of one of its main actors, Terry O'Quinn. He called it The Mysterious Gilligan's Island of Dr. Moreau. (An allusion to The Mysterious Island, Gilligan's Island, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.) Flashbacks and flashforwards in story telling is not new. The Mahabharata and Arabian Nights used it.
Lost has been probably one of the most influential television shows in the past 10-20 years, easily. Especially with the cult following it's created by its story-telling has been pretty niche so far in this era of TV-movie-saga-shows.
Lost, for me, has equated to reading 'The Hobbit' + 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy as a young kid: Everything from that point on has extreme potential to copy-cat, suck and lose my interest very quickly because there's such strong intention to try and top the topper.
Large cast of characters with no single protagonist, non linear storytelling, several parallel story lines which cross in interesting ways - it was all there in Pulp fiction. And it's not like pulp fiction was unique in any of this - multiple storylines exist in almost every Robert Altman film, and non-linear storytelling with flashbacks goes at least as far back as 1941 and Citizen Kane. And that's just in film! In literature these things had been done literally centuries ago.
About the only earlier example that I can think of is Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" , which obviously the scriptwriters of 'Lost' have read
You aren't very well-read, are you?
My academic work in semiotics pays off; finally, I'm the one with the credentials in a Slashdot thread! Basically: no. A long, winding story with many characters, capable of self-reference, does not qualify as hypertext. Hypertext is the use of the written text itself as an interface for accessing other files of text. The ability to abstract a particular meaningful concept with another (like, say, compare character A to character B) is a factor of human consciousness, not a feature of the narrative. Basically, what Lost does is introduce a wide-variety of (granted, typically unexpected) characters and and narrative elements, and just keep adding them, not always resolving them in the way we're used to. Because of all this excess narrative (read: crap) it's easy enough for a creative audience to make all of these concept abstractions themselves. Takeaway: the technology the narrative (the media, the story, and the concepts) don't enable any "hypertexting", just our good old fashioned human capacity for abstraction.
There I was reading about a TV show I've never seen, yet know way too much about.
Flash back 4 years ago and there I am stuck in seat B on a runway in Chicago. A and C excitedly talking about the "new season". Imagine my surprise when C asked if we could set the laptop on my table so everybody in our row could enjoy Season 2 on DVD. I finagle the aisle seat out of the deal. GOAL!!!!!!!
Fast forward to last year, and a radio program comes on talking about a TV show, and how they split the fabric of time by triggering a nuclear bomb, while stranded on an island. I recall my four hour flight in the aisle seat and thank my stars we did not crash on a deserted island, carrying nukes.
Fast forward once again to this moment in time, and beyond, and I'm hoping those crazy bastards never get off that island. If they do they'll pollute the others in the chain and eventually kill a tourist in a drunken UTV crash.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Lost Jumped the Shark so long ago, I don't think the writers could even keep up and just made up plot devices as they went on, "hypertexting" as they pleased to fit those "devices" in.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
This is a good point; the problem is that the hypertext metaphor is a poor one. Academics are fixated on hypertext lately. I remember one Medieval Lit lecture I attended last semester where the speaker compared hypertext to, of all things, the marginalia of Middle English manuscripts. There's this tendency to use hypertext as a stand-in for all the various innovations in information presentation that have occurred over the last couple decades; it's a worn metaphor, and a boring one.
That aside, there's nothing particularly innovative in Lost's storytelling. People's tastes in art are so conservative that people forget that most of these "new" ideas date back decades if not longer. You can look back to the 1960s and the work of Ballard to find novels told in a form far more experimental than any television series has absorbed.
I made it about halfway through the first season. Bass player wants his drugs. Pregnant woman is pregnant. Something about a smoke monster. *click*
The original text assumes that his reader has some background in narrative and comparative literature. I don't know what it's doing here on slashdot.
...Frankly, this thread sounds no different from a bunch of philosophy undergraduates rambling about the meaning of "infinity" in calculus.
That aside, there's nothing particularly innovative in Lost's storytelling. People's tastes in art are so conservative that people forget that most of these "new" ideas date back decades if not longer. You can look back to the 1960s and the work of Ballard to find novels told in a form far more experimental than any television series has absorbed.
Some experimental novels does not equal a TV show watched by 12 million people. Of course a massively popular TV show didn't invent what it was doing. That doesn't change the fact that a rating topper is doing it, which changes everything.
There's a valid objection to calling it 'hypertext', which is just a stupid name. But television has gotten amazingly complex over the last decade or two, especially since producers can start assuming that you've watched every episode of the show, in order.
Seriously, compare the plot of a random House episode with the plot of a random 1980 medical drama. They have to have all sorts of added twists and whatnot.
Hell, compare an episode of I Love Lucy to an average sitcom. Even the modern dumbest sitcom has to provide two plotlines.
With Lost, it was demonstrated that audience will follow convoluted tons of characters and time-travel plots and out-of-order flashbacks and slow multi-season reveals. Even if the audience itself doesn't think this, and has to be tricked into watching at the start.
This is well past, like three times as much, what even the most complicated TV mainstream show did before it. (Yes, yes, I'm sure someone's going to point to some obscure anime that maybe 200,000 people have ever seen. That's not really the same thing.) It's raised the bar of what the television networks think the audience will put up with.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
In other words, this has exceeded the nominal number of flashbacks for a television show, now someone is looking around for a relevant explanation and nomenclature so that people studying this can use a common understanding. "The storytelling works a lot like hypertext" is a metaphor. If it really were hypertext, it would be a choose your own adventure book.
It's not a very good metaphor, as you point out. Hypertext is the equivalent of "see also" at the end of (paper) encyclopedia articles, combined with "see X" in the midst of the article when reference is made to another major topic. The important point here is that one doesn't need to follow those links in order to read the article, just like one doesn't need to click on a linked word in a Wikipedia article.
But the present example in Lost is about narrative, which implicitly requires a continuous forward flow through a story. The story may be told "out of order," but you're supposed to read it through from beginning to end, just like you're supposed to watch Lost episode-by-episode.
If this really were anything like "hypertext," the order wouldn't matter. You could watch the series of Lost flashbacks in the chronological order they actually happened, and you should be able to get as much out of it. But you wouldn't -- because the actual placement of the flashbacks within the narrative creates a specific experience that is predicated on the linear continuation of the series from episode to episode.
Musical Romanticism had already begun the "impression" style by introducing the tone poem and other works meant to simply evoke and emotion - not to tell a story or be enjoyed intrinsically.
I can't believe you're comparing some crap metaphor about a single TV series to a major artistic movement that altered the trajectory of the history of art.
This started around 1830 with Mendelssohn and Franck, and Liszt. That was the musical equivalent to artistic Impressionism. The equivalent to musical Impressionism was really more like Cubism.
Bah. Tone poems and such were actually some of the first purely instrumental works in music history to attempt to represent anything specific, so if anything these composers were actually doing the exact opposite of Impressionism. They were trying to take a type of music (instrumental music) which had previously been considered unable to convey specific meaning (cf. Kant, who compared instrumental music to wallpaper), and trying to give it a shape that explicitly represented something. (There were, of course, some previous attempts -- like Vivaldi's Four Seasons, to give one well-known example -- but the Romantic movement had a greater legacy.)
By the time people like Wagner had built onto the structure of the composers you mention, he believed that he could represent specific ideas and their relationships to each other through instrumental music -- which combined with vocal meaning, staging, etc. to produce a greater artwork.
Another tradition then started cropping up in France relating to the Symbolists and other such movements, and musically that led to greater blurring of meaning, though still an attempt to represent general emotions or qualities. Is it an exact metaphor to "Impressionism" in painting? No. But it's a heck of a lot closer both in the general conception and the historical context than the music you bring up, which was actually trying to go the other way and create more definite meaning and in some instances "to tell a story."
Oh, and I forgot to say that your comparison to Cubism seems strange as well. I've heard Cubism compared to various musical trends -- usually free-atonal works of the early 20th century (which often relied on distortions or extreme versions of tonal gestures), and sometimes 12-tone music (which deconstructed the pieces of music and put them back together in a way that allowed a new order -- the tone row -- to be viewed from various perspectives) -- but what we usually think of musical "Impressionism" wasn't very much like Cubism. And of course, there were the composers who were actually influenced by Cubism, but that's a whole other story. (They certainly wouldn't be called "Impressionist.")
Lost may have created a new genre in storytelling in Western culture but in Japanese culture, this is fairly common with anime and games. For example with FF7, Cloud has a huge past storyline and all the other characters had a past storyline too. Trigun, Naruto, DBZ, other FF's, FMA, etc. all have characters with a unique past and unspoken past events that influence the rest of the story.
As for Lost though, I haven't been looking forward to a series final since the Sopranos and am prepared for a disappointing ending this time round.
If "Lost" was in fact a hypertext narrative, it would have something akin to a home page, with organized links to characters, plots and subplots, instead of requiring the viewer to watch every d@mn episode and figure out what the links are for themselves.
*boring*
(Don't say its popular, its less than 5 percent of the US population who can be bothered to watch)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The footnote "1" is missing, so this text appears to have been lifted from somewhere else. And I'm pretty sure that there is no definition of "hypertext" nor "narrative" which is universally agreed upon.
This way of storytelling does not seem to be particularly new, either. Gravity's Rainbow was published nearly 40 years ago.
When I was at Beloit College I had a writing teacher who used the "red thread" in a Band Aid wrapper as a metaphor for the idea that ties an essay or story together. I had not heard that metaphor before, nor since. Where did you hear of it? Thanks.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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 . . . "
... I mean, whenever the episode was dedicated to a flashback or the insight on a character... Well, it sucked to high heavens....
Actually, S06-E09 was most probably my favourite episode ever. :-)
Try the Metamorphoses some time.
A novel by Charles Dickens has every element mentioned in the definition of so-called hypertext storytelling. And there are so many other authors and books that could be used as examples to prove this wrong.
That is what Lost is. Nothing more to see.
That would be more thee marketing then the storytelling.
That's thine marketing.
p.s. Sorry to be a Grammar Jesuit.
Put identity in the browser.
I want someone to try to cut all of Lost into chronological order, so I can watch it and see if it makes any sense. I'm certain it won't. Every minor mistake will be very apparent.
I did watch part of the first season, before it jumped the shark jumper (The whole series jumped the shark from about five minutes in).
Put identity in the browser.
I expected to see lost html stories
.. just to mention one.
I have noticed that many people expect publicity when they combine words together that had not been widely combined before (like 'hypertext' and 'storytelling'). Personally, I think this is a lame practice, but I am not surprised as I've seen over and over again marketing and media people engaging (and competing) in it.
Personally, I so far enjoy the LOST story- I think it got its considerable publicity because back on when it premiered, all these 'survivor'-like big brother reality shows were under the spotlight, and not because it featured 'hypertext storytelling' (tm). People just saw a plane crash, surviors, pretty ladies, a set of interesting flashbacks, and no sign of soap opera & scifi and/or supernatural (those were introduced later).
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
She says in her article that "as of writing this" (paraphrased) they are airing season 3. That was 3 years ago!
When I use too many words, you miss the point. When I use too few you think I missed the point. I didn't compare a show to an unrelated movement in an unrelated medium. People put names on things, and they don't always choose good names. That's the point.
I used the difficulties and lack of sense in art movement naming bacause it's fairly well known, but not many people know the background. Were I writing my master's thesis I'd write it differently, but none of that even matters. I even put the important part in bold so it would be easier to find. A large number of comments missed the point that when art does something new, people try to put names on it. Even more important, the names don't always make sense. It doesn't make it any less valid - "like hypertext in the sense that the story is interrupted to bring relevant data, like a person clicking links in a hypertext document" is a good metaphor, which was the subject of the post.
Now we have a name, and we can categorize things under that name, and we can talk about related things using that name. Previously, we didn't have one. Memento was telling a story backwards, but it wasn't backwards - the scenes were backwards, but they ran forward because I could understand what they were saying. It was a reverse reveal. I often read that way, especially blogs which take a while to get to the point. That way I read the point, and read the rest of it in the perspective of the author. It prevents me picking someone's point apart and then at the end thinking "hmm, they sort of have a point, but it's just supported poorly." It's a lot better than "out of order" storytelling like Memento, where you learn things in an order determined by the plot or characters. Instead, the authors/writers choose when to click on something, and even more interestingly choose when to show you a link, but *not* click on it, as if to say you'll find out more later, or else it's not relevant. That requires additional consideration above the normal parallel development.
Who cares what the name is, it works well enough that we can start talking about storytelling. If it's slightly metaphorical, so much the better.