Looking for Lost: Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series by Randy Laist, ed. (review)

ABC’s ground-breaking television series Lost (US 2004–10) has already become a legend, one indication being the massive number of books and articles written on the show. So far Lost has been studied in an astounding number of ways, varying from the analysis of the complex narrative structure to the postmodern, religious and spiritual allusions. Its recurrent themes of survival, nature and time travel, and inquiry about the nature of fate, freewill, determinism and truth have become the subject of many essays. Despite all the efforts, Lost mysteriously invites many more analyses and investigations to come. In this sense, it defies self-containment and becomes a text that, in Barthes’s sense, no more belongs to and is restricted by an originator. It is a text living on its own growing with every scholarly contribution.

Looking for Lost: Critical Essays on the Enigmatic Series, edited by Randy Laist, represents this potential of Lost. Different than other Lost-related books on the market, Looking for Lost is published after the show’s completion in 2010, making it possible to present a study that views the show as a whole. The writers offer a wide array of perspectives on the show’s frequently debated aspects as well as on its forgotten facets, demonstrating the inexhaustibility of the show as a text. Some writers bring a new light to familiar topics such as the motif of paternal failure (Holly Hassel and Nancy L. Chick in their essay ‘“It Always Ends the Same”: Paternal Failures’) or the complexity of narrative structure (Erika Johnson-Lewis in her essay ‘“We Have to Go Back”: Temporal and Spatial Narrative Strategies’) while others address unusual topics such as the use of material objects in the show (Elizabeth Lundberg in her essay ‘Lost in Capitalism: or, “Down Here Possession’s Nine-Tenths”’) or the parallels to Shakespeare (Ryan Howe in his essay ‘New Space, New Time, and Newly Told Tales: Lost and The Tempest’). The essays are diverse, yet are bound by a common concern: nearly all deal with textual aspects of the show by close readings of its content, narrative structure, characters, names and literary references. Randy Laist writes in the introduction, ‘while the contributors of this volume have much to say about the relevance of the program to the contemporary television industry, our primary objective has been to read the show thematically’ (2). This does not mean, of course, that the essays are tightly enclosed in the textual frames of the series, as they occasionally make references to the extra-diegetic world of Lost.

The book is divided into four sections: ‘Lost in Time’, ‘Lost Philosophy’, ‘Lost Men and Lost Women’ and ‘Lost in the Twenty-First Century’, which explore the temporal, philosophical, gender and globalisation aspects of the show respectively. Under these headings, essays deal with ideas ranging from seeing Lost as representative of post-network TV to reading it as a utopian fiction that engages in a Marxist critique of late capitalism. There are also theoretical examinations of Lost informed by thinkers such as Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Lukács, Jameson and Kierkegaard. Jason M. Peck, in his innovative essay ‘Lost and Becoming: Reconceptualising Philosophy’, explores the Deleuzian concepts of ‘becoming’ and ‘repetition’ within the series’ temporal narrative. This essay neither oversimplifies a complex theory nor simply ‘applies’ the general contours of the theory to Lost (a limited practice of cultural theory we have grown so accustomed to in other Lost and philosophy books), but enquires into Lost as itself a philosophical text. He writes, ‘it is not enough to ask what philosophical issues are addressed, as if one were making a laundry list’ (79). Rather, philosophical concepts should be used to understand how Lost reconceptualises and redefines philosophy: ‘Lost moves beyond being a mere storehouse of cultural references or a type of educated parlour game and offers a working-through of philosophy on the conceptual level’ (87–8...