The End of Lost: The Paradox of Serialized Television and the Experience of Loss (original) (raw)
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Intuition, Evidence, and Carroll's Theory of Narrative
Projections, 2020
Over the last thirty years, Noël Carroll has elaborated his theory of erotetic narration, which holds that most films have a narrative structure in which early scenes raise questions and later scenes answer them. Carroll's prolific publishing about this theory and his expansion of the theory to issues such as audience engagement, narrative closure, and film genre have bolstered its profile, but, despite its high visibility in the field, virtually no other scholars have either criticized or built upon the theory. This article uses Carroll's own criteria for evaluating film theories--evidentiary support, falsifiability, and explanatory power--to argue that erotetic theory's strange position in the field is due to its intuitive examples and equivocal descriptions, which make the theory appear highly plausible even though it is ultimately indefensible.
Hors séries 1 | 2016
That the viewers of the Lost TV series were so disappointed by its last episode has something to do with the philosophical problem of narrative closure. To resolve this conceptual difficulty, Noel Carroll has conceived an ‘erotetic’ model in which the impression of finality someone usually feels at the end of most films and TV episodes is due to the fact that the questions the viewers ask themselves in the course of following the plot finally get an answer. This theory thus seeks to explain not only the enthusiasm which the TV series succeeds in eliciting by intriguing viewers with accumulating mysteries, but also how the viewers feel let down in the end when they realize they have not been given all the keys to solve these mysteries. This erotetic model surely has at least a formal interest. One, however, has reasons to prefer, and reasons that can be found in Lost, a teleological model where the relations between questions and answers are better understood when we see them as a question of the relation between means and ends. Yet this teleological model presupposes that we can somehow know the goals of the characters and of the narrative. If that were not the case, nothing would make sense, indeed. Still we can only acknowledge our separateness from the characters and from the projected world and admit that we have no choice but to understand without being certain that we are not simply projecting goals that do not exist outside of our minds. TV series allow us to live a skeptical experience, which originates in what can be called the ‘series-following paradox’ which is that we could always choose to follow a numerical series or a TV series and to retrospectively modify the meaning of the numbers or past events which constitute it. This skeptical truth not only threatens the TV experience we undergo while watching our favorite shows, but it also affects our perception of the meaning of our own personal lives. It also gives us a chance to change and to reach a better self. In order to surmount this skeptical trial, the Lost TV series teaches us to contemplate the form of a finality which seems to design life, without being able to get a representation of its goal, a lesson which actually enables us to see the ending of Lost as a success. RESUME La question de savoir pourquoi tant de spectateurs furent si déçus par la fin de Lost pose le problème de la clôture narrative. Pour le résoudre, Noël Carroll a proposé un modèle « érotétique », qui soutient que l’impression de finalité que l’on ressent à la fin de la plupart des films et des épisodes est provoquée par le fait que les questions que se pose le spectateur trouvent finalement une réponse. Cette théorie expliquerait l’enthousiasme suscité par une série qui accumule les mystères, mais aussi la déception finale de ne pas avoir reçu toutes les clés pour les comprendre. Si ce modèle érotétique présente incontestablement un intérêt au moins formel, on peut montrer, à partir de Lost, qu’il est néanmoins préférable de penser les choses selon un modèle téléologique où la subordination de certaines questions et réponses à d’autres renvoie en fait à un rapport entre moyens et fins. Cependant, on présuppose alors qu’il doit être possible de connaître les fins des personnages et du récit, sans quoi rien n’aurait de sens, alors que nous ne pouvons que reconnaître le caractère séparé des personnages et du monde projeté, et admettre que nous sommes condamnés à comprendre sans jamais être certains que nous ne fassions pas que projeter des fins qui ne s’y trouvent pas. Or, les séries télévisées permettent de vivre une expérience sceptique, créée par ce que l’on peut appeler le « paradoxe des séries », c’est-à-dire l’idée qu’il est toujours possible de poursuivre une série autrement et de modifier ainsi rétrospectivement le sens des nombres ou des événements passés qui la constituent, une vérité sceptique qui menace aussi l’histoire personnelle du spectateur, tout en lui offrant la possibilité de changer et d’atteindre un meilleur état du moi. Pour surmonter cette épreuve sceptique, la série nous apprend à contempler la forme d’une finalité qui semble se dessiner dans toute vie, sans qu’on puisse se former une représentation de sa fin, une leçon qui justifie que l’on puisse trouver la fin de Lost réussie.
LOST exemplifies a contemporary American prime-time series that exhibits both serial and episodic traits and, thanks to technological developments, has proliferated across many different platforms allowing for a deepening of its hyperdiegetic world. This paper will examine how Lost’s non-linear narrative structure, using flashbacks and flash forwards, serves to provide a linear development of story and character while also creating an implicit promise of narrative resolution and final closure. However, as I will argue using a close study of Lost’s fifth season finale, recent developments have extended and problematised the non-linear framework that has structured the show’s development from the beginning. Instead of the promise of a story that can, despite a complex non-linear narrative, be reconstituted in linear terms, the increasing complexity of Lost’s narrative has opened up the possibility of a radical act of de-narration that threatens to erase an entire five seasons’ worth of story.
Narrative Understanding and Understanding Narrative
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2004
In this paper I deal with the question of how it is that we have emotional responses to things that we do not believe in the reality of, specifically things like characters and events in literature and film (the paradox of fiction). The direction in which I wish to take this query is not the traditional philosophical approach to this question, however. There has been much written on this particular approach, and because of this I think that it is becoming, in philosophical effect, stuck. What I wish to do in what follows is to approach this question from a different set of assumptions and from a different paradigm, with the hope that I will be able to produce a more constructive and perhaps even more accurate resolution to the problem.
Towards a General Theory of Narrative
prehistoric initiations, peasant folk tales, medieval romances and the modern fantasy novel all have this in common, that they are used to make us want to be civilised. If we lose our initiations in this sense, there is much that can go wrong.