Lost?
The world awaits the new series of The West Wing (apparently). Nowhere better is there evidence of the duplicity of television in our vacuous alienation, but this is at the high-quality, cerebral end of things. Not like ‘bad TV’ that’s responsible for ‘dumbing down’ like Big Brother, the News, anything on Saturday etc etc.
In the same way ‘24’ which successfully entertained the pretence that the American security services are full of heroic loners out to save the free world at the same time they were publically torturing people across that self-same globe, the West Wing replaces a faux-Texan halfwit with a clever Eastern hero. Hurrah.
Lost, Channel 4’s addictive if implausible high-quality drama series has a subtler if no less corrosive effect on the viewer.
Like Swiss Family Robinson with better tits, the show follows a familiar pattern: ‘random community struggles for survival’ but – back down to earth for a sec - has anyone else noticed planes seem to be falling out of the sky a lot recently?
On the 16th near La Cucharita, Venezuela 160 fell out of the sky. On the same day in Afghanistan a helicopter of Spanish peacekeepers crashed. Two days before that by Grammatikos, Greece 121 died. Four days before that a helicopter crashed at sea about 3 miles off the coast near the island of Naissaar, Estonia killing 14. On the 6th of August approximately 19 miles north of Palermo 16 died when a plane came down.
Anyone picking up a pattern here?
Like Henry, the protagonist in ‘Saturday’ says:
"Like most passengers, outwardly subdued by the monotony of air travel, he often lets his thoughts range across the possibilities while sitting, strapped down and docile, in front of a packaged meal. Outside, beyond a wall of thin steel and cheerful creaking plastic, it’s minus sixty degrees and forty thousand feet to the ground. Flung across the Atlantic at five hundred feet a second, you submit to the folly because everyone else does. Your fellow passengers are reassured because you and everyone else appears calm. Looked at a certain way – deaths per passenger mile – the statistics are consoling…seen another way – deaths per journey – the figures aren’t so good.”
Then theres's the small problem of warming(of the global kind). Thinking about this, I think I’ll need to skip my eco-conference in New Orleans.
Everyone agrees, airlines look different in the skys these days, predatory or doomed.
It’s not surprise that Lost is this ‘seasons’ big hit, as the adult comforter of telly moves into overdrive. Henry again: “Plastic fork in mind, he often wonders how it might go – the screaming in the cabin partly muffled by that deafening acoustic, the fumbling in bags for phones and last words, the airline staff in their terror clinging to remembered fragments of procedure, the levelling smell of shit.”
1 comment
Feeling kinda upbeat today huh Gus?
left by Kwarski on 25 August 2005
