Rob Allen: First presented at International Conference on Narrative, University of Birmingham, 4 June 2009.
Lost in Serialisation: Non-Linear Narrative Goes Prime Time
Blending narrative complexity, fiendishly plotted cliffhangers and an episodic structure that remains remarkably consistent across each installment, the prime time American television show Lost (2004-2010) provides an interesting example of contemporary narrative strategies. Moving from the more conventional episodic and serial forms that have structured most American television
narratives, Lost exemplifies a turn to an increasingly complicated narrative format. This format can be seen as a direct consequence of market influences, such as an increasingly fragmented media landscape, and technological developments such as DVD, DVR and web-based formats. These drivers, together with increasing audience sophistication and the influence of transmedia narrative strategies, have enabled a level of narrative complexity that was previously unfeasible in prime-time network television. Instead of catering to an audience who demand simple, accessible and linear plot lines, Lost demonstrates the existence of a market for narratively complex shows.
Starting with a brief summary of its narrative structure, this paper will argue that the success of Lost’s narrative, and its proliferation across a host of transmedia incarnations, obliges us to reconsider traditional approaches to serialisation. I want to stress the importance of the shift from an audience who merely view installments of a serial to an audience that more actively participate in the ludic environment generated by the serial’s key narrative mysteries. As this paper will demonstrate, such active participation has interesting consequences for the ways we conceptualise traditional borders between technology and narrative, text and paratext, and producer and consumer. At the same time, it can help to explain the success of Lost’s complex narrative by situating it as part of a media product the prime characteristic of which is the creation of a space for speculative play.
At first glance, Lost seems to conform rather neatly to Michael Newman’s definition of the structure common to American prime-time narratives. Merging Newman’s two categories of the serial and the episodic (Newman 2006: 20), Lost exemplifies the former in its “long-form” story arcs extending across multiple weekly installments in which established mysteries and questions are resolved only to be replaced with deeper mysteries and more complex questions. At the same time, Lost’s narrative structure is similar to episodic shows, such as Law & Order and other procedural-based narratives, in that the specific questions raised at the beginning of each episode are generally resolved by the end (Newman 2006: 16) In order to understand how Lost can simultaneously exemplify serial and episodic forms of narrative, it is necessary to identify the narrative units of prime-time storytelling.
introduces a specific problem and ends with a dramatic surprise; in the second act characters respond to complications caused by the surprise and attempt to deal with the problem; in the third act the stakes are raised; and in the fourth act the problem introduced in the first act is resolved (Newman 2006: 20).
This fits very neatly as a structural analysis of an episode of Lost if we add a fifth act which I will label as “the cliffhanger”. It also serves to remind us that television narratives are based on the economics of prime time network broadcasting, and that these revolve around advertising (Duncan 2006: 207; Newman, 2006: 21). At the micro level of the episode, the show has to sustain sufficient narrative suspense so that it carries the audience across into each of the breaks. Thus the narrative climax in the beat at the end of each act works as a hook to keep the audience engaged with the story and to tempt them to sit through the advertisements in order to see how the story will play out. At the macro level of the series, the cliffhanger functions in much the same way, generating enough narrative suspense and provoking sufficient speculation to bring the viewer back next week.
But while Newman seems to downplay the impact of recent technological developments on the narrative structure of prime-time television, I’d like to suggest, along with critics like Jason Mittell, that the current media landscape, and particularly the technology that drives it, has a notable impact on serialised narratives such as Lost. I will suggest that the specific nature of Lost’s engagement with serialisation is profoundly influenced by certain market features. With the proliferation of DVD and web-based platforms, network television has moved from an ephemeral form of
entertainment to one based on “multiple viewings” (Mittell 2006:31). Repeating the business model of Victorian serialised novels, where the ephemeral productions of the periodical press were re-issued in a range of later volume editions, Lost’s narrative is designed to appeal to two markets: the audience for each weekly installment, and a later audience for the various web, DVD and blu-ray re-issues.
This has been made explicit by Lost’s executive producers and lead writers, who have explained in a podcast that each episode has been designed for repeat viewing. As a consequence, the subsequent DVDs are definitely “part and parcel of the show”. The official trailer for the DVD collection of Lost’s first season offers not only every episode, together with six hours of bonus features, but the chance to “see the clues you missed on TV.” While such collections create surplus-value for the producers by repackaging already produced content, they are predicated on an audience of
obsessive fans dedicated to a close reading of the show. This is the key to the way that Lost presents itself as a serial narrative. In the main text of the narrative, together with the paratext of recaps, podcasts and DVD advertisements, Lost characterizes itself as a locus for speculation in which every detail is a potentially meaningful clue. Much of the audience’s interaction with the show, whether it takes place in front of the television, online, or through spin off games or books, is based on an impulse to process narrative content in such a way that significant clues are located and interpreted correctly.
“Number Six” is imprisoned (Hills 2002:134). The same focus works for Lost, where the questions are: what and where is the island; and who or what is in control of the mysterious events that take place there. Hills, following Roger Hagedorn, situates such endlessly deferred narrative as part of a historical progression from episodic to serial television, which has been enabled by a greater “media memory” (e.g. DVDs and frequent recaps), increasing audience sophistication and the need to secure loyal audiences in a fragmented media environment (Hills 2002:195).
Fostering a kind of obsessive hermeneutics that opens up every detail to examination and potential remediation, the story world of Lost has extended well beyond the borders marked by the show’s opening and closing credits and provides an example of the various hyperdiegetic extensions possible in today’s cross-platform media ecology. Such extensions include: a video game enabling players to move around an accurately rendered version of Lost’s world; two Alternate Reality Games that have allowed fans to continue their engagement with the show between seasons; a spin-off novel, supposedly written by one of the minor characters; and a weekly podcast from Lost’s producers and writers which deals with issues from the show and responds to viewers questions, theories and concerns (Askwith 2007: 122-41).
Matt Hills provides a useful insight into the function of such hyperdiegesis, which he sees as stimulating “creative speculation” and providing “a trusted environment for affective play.” (Hills 2002: 138) The idea of Lost’s fans acting more like gamers than viewers was central to the show’s genesis. As the official companion book to the show’s first season acknowledged:
The writer-producers of the show have said they are engaged in an experiment in “nonlinear” storytelling, which they define in game-like terms as starting with a well-stocked fictional world containing potentially meaningful objects, tools, codes, hints and clues. (Jones 2007: 72).
At the same time, producers and network executives have reassured fans that all of the show’s mysteries will be concluded, and that the series finale in May 2010 will satisfactorily resolve the key questions which the narrative has continually deferred answering. On the one hand, then, we have a non-linear narrative; on the other, a promise of teleological progression and conclusion. How can we resolve this apparent paradox?
In order to answer this question, I would like to focus the following argument on the narrative structure of individual installments as well as on the overall structure of the show as a complete, six season series. Each installment of Lost uses a non-linear narrative framework involving frequent time shifts between flashbacks, flash forwards and the narrative “present” of events taking place on the island. These time shifts are used primarily to show how experiences affecting a character in the “present” of a particular installment resonate with, and are causally connected to, certain traumatic events that are depicted in the flashback or flash forward scenes involving the same character. So, far from serving to disorientate the audience, the non-linear framework (combined with the episodic structure I have previously described) actually proves to be a reliable source of narrative
Yet, such notions of causality become problematised over the course of the fifth season of the show, which introduces the intriguing suggestion that a certain, catastrophic plot development, favoured by some characters and opposed by others, will prevent the chain of events which caused the plane crash upon which the entire series has been predicated. Far from deferring the delivery of key story events, this narrative development threatens to banish an entire five seasons’ worth of story in an act of radical de-narration. Whereas previous narrative complexity, involving temporal shifts and non-linear narrative, provided a mechanism for telling a story that could, in theory, be reconstituted in purely linear terms, the fifth season finale problematises the relationship between narrative and story, forcing viewers to deal with the complicated implications of a narrative that serves to erase previous story lines instead of revealing their subsequent developments. As Brian Richardson points out, de-narrated events pose “an intriguing problem for narrative theory” in so far as they break down “the usual separation between story and discourse.” (Richardson 2001:173). In this example from Lost, we can see how the fifth season finale sets up the possibility that the entire five seasons’ worth of the show, although already narrated, will actually cease to exist at the level of Lost’s diegetic world. If the plane crash which began Lost’s pilot episode never happens, neither will the subsequent events the characters have been shown to experience. The cliffhanger ending from this fifth season finale presents not only the characters, but also the entire diegetic world of the series itself, as potentially under erasure. This is nicely suggested by a paratextual detail specific to the end of this finale episode where, in contrast to the usual end title card showing Lost in white letters against a black background, the title of the show is presented in black lettering against a blinding white background: a paratextual detail emphasising the possible textual erasure of the entire diegetic world by the catastrophic “incident” which provides the focus, and the title, to the final double episode of the season.
During the fifth season, when the idea of time-travel was introduced, the show included repeated references to the idea that even given the possibilities of time-travel, characters were unable to change events that had happened in the past. A constant refrain, explained most lucidly by the eccentric physicist, the aptly-named Daniel Faraday, insisted that “whatever happened, happened.”1
Irrespective of the actions of the characters and the possibility of time-travel, the logic of the show seemed to insist that previously narrated events in the Lost story world were inviolable. Any attempt to change these events, the show seemed to suggest, would fail. However the fifth season finale challenges this idea leaving the audience in a curious position of uncertainty about the show’s “operational aesthetics” (Mittell 2006: 38; Harris 1973: Passim). For much of its first three seasons, Lost used a non-linear, complex narrative in a fairly consistent way. Once attuned to this approach, viewers could expect a similar narrative structure in every episode which would provide regular temporal shifts that could, nevertheless, be easily reconstituted by a seasoned viewer into a clear story line for that episode. The fourth season played on the audience’s acceptance of such an operational aesthetic by shifting from flashbacks, the normal temporal shift used in the first three seasons, to flash forwards. But it is only with the “incident” which closes out the fifth season that the operational aesthetic of the show, one based on non-linear, complex narrative, threatens to overwhelm the story to the extent that the latter becomes “inherently indeterminable.” (Richardson 2001:173).
Jason Mittell suggests that since the 1990s the formal properties of television serial narrative have become more complex. He has argued that these narratives, embracing experimental strategies and temporal shifts, force us to re-assess our conceptualisation of serial continuity (Mittell 2006: 38-9;
Mittell 2009). As this example from Lost makes evident, an important part of such a re-assessment must focus on the operational aesthetics of television serial narratives and the possibility for these narratives to reach such levels of complexity that they threaten to de-narrate the story world they are supposed to reveal. For Mittell, the prime characteristic of the narrative complexity specific to recent television shows is that audiences are able to appreciate both the diegetic world of the show and the way this is unfolded through ever more complex narrative structures. According to Mittell, audiences are becoming increasingly attuned to, and interested in, the operational aesthetic which reveals story at the same time as it structures narrative. If enjoying the story and trying to
understand, second guess and predict how the storytelling works has become a key element in the success of such complex, serial narratives, the potential de-narration in the fifth season finale of Lost becomes not so much an exception as the logical development of a trend for serial narratives to become increasingly complex. At the same time I would suggest that in the case of Lost, the
operational aesthetic that produces such complexity is central not only to the formal concerns of the show but also to its central, “textual” content. At the level of form, Lost’s non-linear narrative is presented in serialised installments which depend, for their continued production and success, on deferring final closure. This means that the narrative holds story lines, together with an overarching mythology, in a perpetual state of indeterminacy; at the level of content, the show’s moral, aesthetic and philosophical core is founded on the ontological uncertainty about the determinate
consequences of actions and whether, and to what extent, such consequences can be undone by other actions.
In this respect, one of the most interesting features of Lost as a serial narrative is the fact that its formal concerns of determinacy versus indeterminacy are echoed at the level of content. This is most evident in different characters’ attitudes to the causal properties of their own actions. While some characterise the plane crash, and their subsequent actions on the island, as governed by a transcendent, mysterious force directing their lives, others agree with the more down to earth declaration of Sawyer who declares in the fifth season finale “I don’t do destiny.” Such difference of opinion embraces not only a variety of views about fate, chance and free will but also, crucially for serial narrative, about the nature of time itself. Discussing de-narration in the work of Beckett, Brian Richardson quotes Steven Connor’s observation about textual negation in Molloy: “Time, and the present moments or states of which it is made up, is endlessly re-imagined, so that the present moment not only repeats another moment belonging to the past, but reconstitutes that
moment.” (Richardson 2001:174). The non-linear framework of Lost, particularly the potential de-narration discussed above, provides a clear example of how such reconstitution of the past can take place at a narrative level. However, we must acknowledge that this sits in dramatic tension with the obsessive hermeneutic cultivated by the show’s operational aesthetic which encourages the
audience to believe in patterned resolutions and a final revelation that will allow them to
reconstitute the entire six seasons of the show into a perfectly comprehensible story with a clear beginning and end.
problematised the non-linear framework that has structured its development from the beginning. If American network television has recently shifted from a model based on “Least Objectionable Programming” to one which could be described as “Most Repeatable Programming” (Askwith 2007: 117), the narrative complexity embodied in Lost’s potential act of de-narration places the show at the centre of such a transition. It shows us that, like it’s Victorian predecessors,
contemporary serial narratives are affected at the levels of form and content by the economic, technological and market-based environments from which they emerge. And that, while the logic of repeated cliffhangers and perpetual deferment of narrative secrets is an important feature of
serialisation, contemporary serials such as Lost engage in a fascinating exploration of the
possibilities of narrative complexity. This complexity has the potential, if taken far enough, to de-narrate the story disassembling the diegetic world that has been put together over the course of the series and disorientating the audience through dizzying, metaphysical reversals which interrogate the kind of links between narrative and story that are usually only discussed in academic journals.
However, like the turn to a more complex approach to plot exemplified in the career of Dickens as a serial author, the increasing complexity of contemporary serials must always accommodate the concerns of the market: narrative complexity, when pitched at the right level, ensures a continued, contemporary audience and a healthy future audience after the serial has run its course. This means that any consideration of the operational aesthetic of popular serial narratives needs to balance what may be called a serial, against a box-set, approach (Mittell 2009). If the serial succeeds by the constant succession of beats, cliffhangers and narrative reversals which retain the audience’s
interest, the final box set of a season (and a series as a whole) succeeds by the promise of satisfying conclusions in which all investment (of time, money and speculative energy) is paid off
appropriately. In other words, the narrative needs to function in a way that hooks viewers from week to week but that also makes sense when viewed retrospectively from a point of final closure offered by the box set of the final series. These tensions, which we can broadly categorise as indeterminacy and determinacy respectively, are not only generated by market concerns and technological developments but also by the very nature of serial narrative itself. From Dickens in the nineteenth century to a show like Lost today, serial narrative exhibits the dual impulse of perpetual deferment of key story elements and the progression towards final, determinate closure. That the “incident” in the fifth season finale of Lost threatens such determinacy represents nothing more than a logical development of the serial form, which proves to increase in narrative
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