SolitaryGiven the title of this episode, we'd think it would be all about solitude, the experience of being alone. We're given all kinds of examples of the solitary life, that's for sure. We could certainly point to Sayid's solitary trek along the beach, in shame for the torture he's just committed, an offense that he'd promised before never to perform again. We might take a look at Danielle, the Frenchwoman who's been living alone on the Island for 16 years now. That's a long time to be living without anyone to talk to. Certainly the time that Nadia, the woman Sayid knows from Iraq, spent in solitary confinement might support our notions of singleness. We even got another reference to bears, and a bear is certainly not an animal known for its sociability.We have to consider the game of golf, the nice diversion in this story. Golf is well known as a solitary sort of game. It's rarely played in teams. Every stroke in golf is made by one person, and one person alone. But a strange thing happens in the odd little golf game that evolves on our Island.We see Hurley's giddy excitement upon "building" his 2-hole, 3-par golf course. Frankly, it's about time these people did something fun during their ordeal, and Hurley is most definitely the man we'd expect to see bring some entertainment to the dismal caves and the flea-infested beach. He ties a bright red Hawaiian shirt to a pointy stick, and voila! Instant golf hole.It doesn't take very long for most of the population to make their way to Hurley's verdant fields. And isn't that a bit peculiar? For a solitary game, golf on the Island turns out to be a rather communal venture. Jack and Michael square off against Charlie and Hurley, and even loners like Kate and Sawyer make appearances. We'd expect Jack to be a decent golfer - he is, after all, a doctor - and of course Charlie and Hurley make it quite clear that they want "mulligans" - a word they repeat three times.The United States Golf Association cites three different stories that the term "Mulligan" comes from a Canadian golfer, David Mulligan. Either his "correction shot" after a poor shot off the tee was renamed in his honor by his friends, or perhaps it was given to him after a difficult drive to the course left him shaking, possibly due to oversleeping."Mulligan" may also refer to Mister Mulligan, a single-prop plane designed in 1934 to win the Bendix Trophy, a cross-country race. Mister Mulligan won both the Bendix and Thompson trophies in 1935, but crashed in 1936 in New Mexico, where pilot Ben Howard lost a leg. The plane was found in 1970 by racing enthusiast Bob Reichardt, who salvaged most of the parts and gave Mister Mulligan a second life. Reichardt died shortly thereafter during a timed run in Nevada.A third possible meaning of "mulligan" may come from the fictional character of Malachi "Buck" Mulligan James Joyce's novel Ulysses. At once callous and complex, Mulligan is a Falstaffian student of medicine, portrayed as both offensive and heroic, having saved a man from drowning. He is the subject of the novel's first sentence: "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."Anyways, it's nice to see the marvelously wonderful if solitary game of golf bringing everyone together, a nice bit of mirroring. Which should come as no surprise, since everything in this episode ends up on one side of a mirror or the other. This is a penultimate episode of mirror-twinning.
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(Date Posted:06/24/2007 21:51:01)
The Mirror-Box
DANIELLE: It's a music box, but it's broken. It has been for a long time. It was a gift from my love for our anniversary.
By now you must realize I have a thing for mirrors in Lost. Take a good, close look at that music box. Yes, yes, it's a music box, it plays music. Yes, yes, it has a couple of dancers on it, dancers who will move once Sayid fixes the box. But what is that underneath the hinged lid? Behind the dancers? It's not very clear, but it's still recognizably a mirror, and it is on this mirror that the whole episode hinges.
Danielle asks Sayid to fix the music box, the symbol of love from her husband, Robert. Sayid opens up the music-box, the mirror to Danielle's heart, and lo and behold, Danielle begins to sing. Notice that Sayid doesn't actually start working on the box. Instead, he starts asking Danielle questions, and we start hearing some answers.
We find out that Danielle was part of a science team that crashed on the Island 16 years ago. They were three days out of Tahiti when the instruments on their ship failed, at night, and slammed into the rocks. They made camp and dug out the "temporary shelter" in which Danielle still lives, alone. (And did you happen to notice that they dug out their shelter amidst what looks like some banyan trees?) Anyways, Danielle goes on to say that they were coming back from "The Black Rock" when something happened, something which Sayid interrupts.
Before we go any further, though, let's back up. Before we get to Danielle's music box, which Sayid opens up (prompting Danielle to "open up"), let's go back a few scenes. Sayid is strapped down to the bed, and he's been both electrocuted and knocked out by the butt of a rifle, all because he doesn't know who "Alex" is. When he awakens, Danielle is pawing through his backpack. She finds the envelope with his pictures of Nadia inside, and asks about her. Sayid starts talking. He answers every one of Danielle's questions. And as we find out, Nadia really meant something to Sayid. Sayid says he thinks she may be dead.
To really understand what's going on here, we need to go back - this time to Sayid's flashbacks. This is where we meet Nadia and see the tale that's on Sayid's mind. Nadia has been captured, and it's believed that she knows something of a recent bombing at the Ba'athist headquarters in Iraq. Sayid is assigned to extract information.
SAYID: Noor Abed-Jazeem, I'm going to ask you some questions. If you refuse to cooperate I'm going to hurt you. You understand?
NADIA: Nobody calls me Noor, Sayid. You of all people should know that. What? You don't remember me? Am I so different from the little girl in the school yard who used to push you in the mud?
SAYID: Nadia?
NADIA: And your mother would tell my mother, "why must you pick on little Sayid." And I'd answer, because he ignores me.
SAYID: You had enough attention with your family's wealth and your charm.
NADIA: Such things matter little to children. But then you always were older than your years, weren't you Sayid?
By now you must realize that names matter in Lost, and Nadia's name certainly does matter. But it's not the familiar name "Nadia" that concerns us, but her formal name: "Noor". It's not a name we'd be familiar with, for it comes from the Middle East, and specifically from a non-canonical offshoot of Islam. Much as the Gnostics are to Christianity, the Sufis are to the Muslim world. In Sufi thought, the essence of Being/Truth/God is devoid of every form and quality - it is not "manifest", yet it is inseparable from every form, every phenomenon, material or spiritual. It is often understood to imply that every phenomenon is an aspect of Truth, while recognizing that attributing existence itself to Truth is false. The chief aim of all Sufis then is to let go of all notions of duality, therefore the individual self also, and realize the divine unity.
"Noor" is a Sufi word. It means "light", but not any kind of light, but a particular kind of light. "Noor" means, specifically and metaphorically, the light reflected off "the mirror of the heart."
Nadia - Noor - is Sayid's "heart mirror". When the envelope with the "mirror" inside opens up, Sayid opens up. When the music box with a mirror inside opens up, Danielle (who lives alone) opens up. Sayid, who walks alone, blames himself for the "death" of Nadia, but he may well have saved her life based on what we've seen in the flashbacks. More than anything, she seems lost to Sayid. Maybe he should heed what she wrote on the back of the photograph: "You'll find me in the next life if not in this one." Danielle's responsibility for losing her love is anything but metaphorical, though: she admits that she shot Robert.
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(Date Posted:06/24/2007 21:52:23)
Names
SAYID: Rousseau.
DANIELLE: How do you know my name?
SAYID: I read it. There, on the jacket. What is this place? Those batteries -- they wouldn't be able to produce enough power to transmit your distress call all these years.
DANIELLE: I broadcast from somewhere else. But they control it now.
SAYID: They?
DANIELLE: You. And the others like you.
SAYID: I don't know who you think I am, I've already told you I'm not...
DANIELLE: Sayid?
SAYID: How do you know my name?
DANIELLE: My name was on a jacket, yours is on the envelope you carry.
Like I said, names are important in Lost, and we have some very important names to cover in this episode. We've already uncovered an obscure name from the Sufis, so let's move on the recognizably French one - Rousseau.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) was born in Geneva, Switzerland, and his mother died nine days later due to complications from the childbirth. His personal life was, frankly, a mess. With his a semi-literate seamstress, Thérèse Levasseur, he sired five children, all of whom were deposited at a foundling hospital soon after birth. His early writings on music were published in an early Encyclopedia, and he even invented a new system of musical notation based on numbers, but those works were never considered very important. He alienated every colleague he ever worked with, from Diderot to Hume, and his antagonistic writings against religion forced him to flee arrest in both France and Geneva. Later in life he became paranoid with delusions of plots conspired against him, as detailed in his Confessions of a Solitary Walker. He died a recluse, prohibited from publishing any books.
Rousseau's writings as part of the Enlightenment have had a tremendous impact on Western culture. To him the idea of the "noble savage" is usually attributed; Rousseau imagined that man in his "natural state" - before society - was naturally good, in that such a self-sufficient man was not subject to the vices of politics and government. In his Discourse on Inequality, he argues that as people were forced to associate together due to the pressures of population growth, they came to value the opinions of others as much as their own sense of self-worth, and that the "golden age" of human flourishing which led to the development of agriculture, metallurgy, private property and a division of labor also increased mutual dependence and exacerbated natural inequalities. According to Rousseau, by joining together through the "social contract" individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free - through submission to the authority of the general will of the people, all authors of "law", in essence guaranteeing against being subordinated to the wills of others.
Rousseau would probably have considered Danielle a "noble savage." She has been completely self-sufficient for sixteen years, she answer to nobody, and exercises her free will without constraint. We might also take her as a bit of a comment on the philosopher - she certainly comes across as solitary and quite possibly delusional. Yet she understands reason, and in the end lets Sayid go. On the other side of the Island, we might discover another "noble savage" amidst the castaways - none other than Jack Shepherd. Jack is certainly noble - he's the de facto leader of the group, he's a doctor, and he's saved many lives. But he's also a savage, for he was the one to make the decision to employ torture on Sawyer. Jack is the one who complains that they're "not savages... not yet" in that episode.
Danielle's full-blown mirror-twin is Sayid, so can we expect Sayid's name to yield something relevant to the episode? It might be a stretch, but it is rather apt, for part of this episode deals with "the others" - which we'll get to shortly. But, Sayid's name. There is a Middle-Eastern scholar whose name sounds like Sayid, and who does have something to say on the subject of "other". That man is Edward Said, a Palestinian-American literary theorist and outspoken activist.
Edward Wadie Said is best known for his 1978 book, Orientalism. In that volume Said describes how Western writings on the Orient (that is, the Middle East and parts of Asia) are suspect and cannot be taken at face value, due to the history of European colonial rule and political domination in that area. He writes, "I doubt if it is controversial, for example, to say that an Englishman in India or Egypt in the later nineteenth century took an interest in those countries which was never far from their status in his mind as British colonies. To say this may seem quite different from saying that all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact - and yet that is what I am saying in this study of Orientalism." Said concludes that Western writings about the Orient depict it as an irrational, weak, feminised "Other", contrasted with the rational, strong, masculine West, a contrast he suggests derives from the need to create "difference" between West and East that can be attributed to immutable "essences" in the Oriental make-up.
The idea that the colonial powers "othered" the East in order to subjugate them is only part of the general philosophy of "othering." Hegel was one of the first to express the idea that "the other" is in fact defines or constitutes "the self." In sensing a separateness between the Self and Other, feelings of alienation are created, and one's perspective of the world necessarily changes. Other is the necessary complement to Self, which fits in nicely with the themes we've seen running through Lost.
We've already seen some reference to "other" in the text of Lost, though it may have gone unnoticed until now. In the Pilot episode, Jin speaks with Sun: "You must not leave my sight. You must follow me wherever I go. Do you understand? Don't worry about the others. We need to stay together." As Jin and Sun seem "other" to us and the rest of the castaways due to race and more importantly language, so too are we "other" to them. Jack's process of separation from the group he's come to lead is reflected in White Rabbit, when he speaks with Locke: "How are they, the others?"
In Part 2, Shannon translates the French transmission: "I'm alone now, on... on the island alone. Please someone come. The others, they're... they're dead. It killed them. It killed them all." So we've already known that "others" have been on this Island, and now we hear all about it from Danielle:
DANIELLE: We were coming back from the Black Rock. It was them. They were the carriers.
SAYID: Who were the carriers?
DANIELLE: The others.
SAYID: What others? What is the Black Rock? Have you seen other people on this island?
DANIELLE: No, but I hear them. Out there, in the jungle. They whisper.
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(Date Posted:06/24/2007 21:54:46)
Mirrored Authors
Now, you may be wondering, just how much are the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edward Said mirrors of each other? Rousseau is an Enlightenment philosopher, concerned with establishing proper government; Said is a contemporary philosopher, more concerned with colonialism and "otherness." As it turns out, though their names come from mirrored references, their works are mirrored elsewhere in the show.
On the other side of the mirror from Rousseau we have the works of John Locke. Locke was a significant influence on Rousseau, but they led very different lives - differences which we can see in their philosophies. Rousseau very much believes that solitude is preferential to society, and he most certainly preferred to live alone. Locke, on the other hand, was well-acquainted and had many friends, and his philosophy is much more kind to social institutions, even the church. Of course, Locke has already been well-represented in Lost.
Hidden beneath the text of Solitary, we can find a contemporary philosopher who comments on "Other", who might possibly be the "mirror philosopher" to the Middle-Eastern man. Lets go back to the golf course. Kate makes an interesting comment when she comes upon the game at Hurley's Links. She asks if there's a ladies tee on the course! Most golf courses today have separate teeing grounds for men and women, since men tend to hit the ball fifty yards further than women on the average. But there's also a fine history of discrimination against women, primarily from private golf clubs, and even today women struggle to receive the same benefits and privileges enjoyed by men at such institutions. Augusta National, home of The Masters, is still exclusively a men's club.
On the subject of gender, we also get a strange little comment from Sawyer, who calls Jack "Dr. Quinn" while accusing him of trying to ease his conscience by treating Sawyer's wounds. Dr. Quinn is a reference to "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," a television show which ran from 1993 to 1998 on CBS. The show features a proper female physician who sets out the Wild West in 1867 to set up her own practice, and slowly adjusts to life in Colorado with the aid of a rugged outdoorsman. The show was a great success, and was noted for using its semi-historical setting to as a vehicle to address contemporary social issues on gender, race, religion and even homophobia.
The third gendered reference that pops up in this episode occurs when we first see Sayid waking up in Danielle's dugout. Disoriented and blinded by a bright light, he hears a voice asking in several different languages, "Where is Alex?" To highlight Sayid's distressed situation and his confusion, we hear the voice played at different pitches. When we first hear it, it sounds more like a man's voice than a woman's voice. As it turns out, the voice belongs to Danielle, a woman whose last name comes from a male French philosopher.
It was staring us in the face the whole time. We need to find a female French philosopher, one who comments on "other" - and the best candidate can only be Simone de Beauvoir. Simone De Beauvoir adopted the Hegelian notion of the Other in her description of how male-dominated culture treats woman as the Other in relation to man. The Other has thus become an important concept for studies of the sex-gender system. De Beauvoir calls the Other the minority, the least favored one and often a woman, when compared to a man because, "for a man represents both the positive and the neutral, as indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity."
Simone de Beauvoir is perhaps best know for coining the phrase, "A woman is not born, but made. Which is really quite in contrast with Rousseau, who decrying the unnaturalness of slavery, says: "Jurists, who have gravely determined that the child of a slave comes into the world a slave, have decided, in other words, that a man shall come into the world not a man."
On the subject of feminism and colonial "othering" in Lost, we would do well to note that Sayid may be more the feminist than some of the other men we've seen on the Island. He's respectful to everyone, regardless of gender, within reason. He's never tried to shoot down Kate's participation in his "away missions," and unlike Jack or Sawyer, he doesn't treat Kate as a possible sex-object. He certainly doesn't represent the image we have in America of Middle-Eastern sexism. With all things being mirrored in this episode of Lost, it should come as no surprise that Sayid is the one who's ultimately imprisoned by Danielle.
Many of the castaways have in fact experienced some kind of "othering" that's highlighted their differences from the group at large. Kate is "othered" by Hurley when he discovers she's a felon. Sawyer has been "othered" for his "every man for himself" philosophy. Sayid is "othered" for being Iraqi, Hurley for being obese, Walt for being the only child, Claire for being pregnant, and Jin when he was handcuffed. Even Locke has an "otherness" to him, just for being odd. Jack is "other" for being a leader.
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(Date Posted:06/24/2007 21:56:05)
Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Woolf?
So Sayid fixes the music box, and from it we hear a strain of Bizet's Intermezzo, from his opera Carmen. From its debut in 1875, it was considered a failure, immoral and superficial; today it is one of the world's most popular operas. The story is centered on a fiery gypsy, a woman whose beauty leads many men to lose themselves in her, especially as she never shortchanges her own liberty and freedom of personal expression. The Intermezzo comes at the halfway point of the four-act opera, serving as a bridge and a mirror between the two halves.
Sayid fixes the music box, and asks Danielle to let him go. She refuses, she says it's not safe, and is if on cue, we hear loud noises outside. Danielle picks up a rifle and makes to leave.
SAYID: Where are you going?
DANIELLE: If we're lucky, it's one of the bears.
SAYID: If we're lucky? It might be that thing out there -- the monster.
DANIELLE: There's no such thing as monsters.
If it weren't for this line, we'd be tempted to think that Danielle is crazy. After all, she's been alone for 16 years. Not only that, but some "others" kidnapped her child, Alex! Even Sayid, one of the more rational people we've met from the plane crash, agrees that she's been alone for much too long. And then we discover she ended up shooting her team because they were "sick".
SAYID: Sick?
DANIELLE: It took them, one after the other. I had no choice. They were already lost.
SAYID: You killed them.
DANIELLE: What would have happened if we were rescued? I couldn't let that happen. I won't.
We'd think Danielle has gone off her rocker, except for what must be the most rational thing we've heard from any of our characters: "There's no such thing as monsters." Danielle may not be completely there, but she's not insane. She doesn't believe in monsters, but she knows that something worse than a bear lurks on the Island.
Our Lostaways are already scared half to death by whatever it is that's stalking the jungles, monster or no, and now they have something else to be afraid of, and they don't even know it yet: "the sickness." Before Jack and the rest of the camp get "the golf bug", Jack's dealing with a survivor who he claims is a hypochondriac, a man who complains of a rash spreading across his back. Funny how the game of golf seems to cure this malady.
Don't forget, this episode originally aired in the fall of 2004. People were up in arms about the Abu Ghraib torture pictures, and the great bird flu scare. Torture and strange diseases are definitely scary things, on the public radar, and were deftly incorporated into Lost. While it's too early to say what Lost's take on "sickness" is, I think we can safely conclude that the Lost writers don't think torture yields useful information.
We'd be tempted to think of "sickness" when we see Danielle pull out that needle and syringe with which she jabs Sayid, but this actually occurs within the context of a depiction of torture, a different but still sick practice. Torture gets mirror-twinned in two ways in this episode. In the previous episode, Confidence Man, we see Sayid commit torture on the Island. So it seems most apt and just that he gets a taste of his own medicine. His eye isn't threatened, but he does get a jolt of electricity, a beating from the end of a rifle, and he's tied up to a rather unpleasant-looking bed, without a mattress no less.
We also see Sayid playing the role of torturer in his flashbacks. Rather than being the man tortured by a woman, he's the man who's supposed to torture a woman. But unlike the scenes in Danielle's hidey-hole, we never see Sayid torture Nadia. I'm not so sure that he ever does that to her. She goes on about how she enjoys his visits, how they can discuss books and the weather (books and weather haven't been insignificant on Lost), and eventually Sayid helps Nadia to escape.
The escape is mirror-twinned by the face-off between Sayid and Danielle. Sayid let Nadia go; Danielle eventually lets Sayid go. Nadia asked Sayid, her captor, to come with her, but he refuses; Sayid asks Danielle, his captor, to come with him; she refuses. Sayid and Danielle point their rifles at each other in the same way. Sayid's rifle turns out to be missing its firing pin, which Danielle remembers Robert missing when she shot him. But Danielle doesn't shoot Sayid, and he limps away.
Sayid was injured, don't forget, at the beginning of the episode. He was walking along the shoreline, alone, for a couple of days by Kate's reckoning. He was taking his time, remembering what he had done so long ago and whom he'd lost - the young woman in the photographs, Nadia. He discovered a cable buried in the sand, a very strange and unexpected artifact. It ran out into the ocean and up into the jungle.
It being daylight, Sayid followed the wire into the jungle, and then he realized that he was not alone. Spotting a tripwire, he gingerly stepped over it. But he wasn't clever enough, and ended up snared like a poor rabbit, and worse to boot, stabbed in his free left leg, near the bullet-wound he gave himself when he engineered Nadia's escape.
Norse Mythology! And the end of the world.
From his right foot he hung aboveground for hours, alone, a Hanged Man. The Hanged Man is a rather well known image from the Tarot. Tarot decks have been used for a couple hundred years as a tool of Western occultism. The bright pictures are easily interpreted symbolically, and in several different ways. It is a symbol of sacrifice, devotion and inversion, a moment of suspension between the physical and spiritual worlds, a time of trial and reflection. Just before Sayid is cut down, we can hear him praying to Allah.
But Sayid's position wasn't the same position as the one depicted on the Tarot card. In the Tarot card, the man's free leg is tucked behind the snared one, and his hands are crossed behind his head. This is not the position that Sayid assumes. Sayid (whose lost love gave him writing) is instead pierced by a pointy stick. That more closely corresponds to a tale from ancient mythology, a tale of the Norse god, Odin.
In the Poetic Edda, an Icelandic repository of Norse legends, we find the story of Odin hanging from a tree. Not just any tree, either, but the World Tree "Yggdrasil". Yggdrasil is the tree that runs through the world, connecting the mortal planes with heaven and hell - indeed, all nine "worlds" of Norse cosmology. It is under the branches of Yggdrasil that the last two human escape Ragnarok, the end of the world. From Yggdrasil hangs Odin, for nine days, a sacrifice of himself to himself, and at the end of his ordeal he learns the Runes - writing which brings Dawn to humanity. Odin, if you recall, is the god who also sacrificed his right eye to learn all of the past, present and future.
I said everything in Solitary was mirrored, and Odin is no exception. One of his more famous appearances comes in Wagner's Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen. The opera takes over 15 hours to perform, usually over the course of 4 nights. In that story, Odin is known as Wotan. He covets the Rheingold, a powerful magic ring, and schemes over generations for it to end up in the possession of Siegfried, his chosen one. But Siegfried is betrayed and the Ring ends up in the hands of Brunhilda, Wotan's estranged daughter. She returns the Ring to the Rheinmaidens, triggering the end of the gods in the final chapter of the opera, Gotterdammerung (Twilight of the Gods.)
Wagner's opera is well known for its employment of leitmotifs - musical strains which are repeated to indicate particular characters, events or places. The Ride of the Valkyries is perhaps the best known leitmotif and except of the opera, but another one has to be mentioned. After Siegfried kills the dragon, he gains one of Odin's powers: the power to understand the language of the birds and the forest. The musical excerpt and leitmotif which highlights this is called "Forest Murmurs." If you've been listening to the score of Lost, you may have picked up on the use of leitmotifs. We've heard different melodies to indicate mystery, sadness, and many of the characters.
At the end of Solitary, Sayid wanders through the woods, at dusk, when suddenly he hears something. He hears the Whispers - murmurs in the forest - that Danielle (whose lost love gave her music) had spoken of from within her shelter, an underground dug-out with a Banyan tree running through it.
And so a mirror runs through Solitary - beginning and ending mirrored with daylight and twilight, Odin and Wotan, Yggdrasil and Banyan, above and below, writing and music, male and female, Sayid and Danielle, an envelope and a music box.
