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"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.
...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.
'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
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.
Umm... I remember reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" books when I was 7. Circa 1987.
I hate printers.
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
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.
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 ]
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.
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
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 . . . "
They started in 1979, at least under that term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_your_own_adventure