Lost = TV

Going into the hatches on Lost is almost like going behind the reality of the show itself. Fitting then that Locke and Eko discover televisions within the television show. To Locke, the discovery that pushing the button is merely a psychological experiment renders the action of pushing the button meaningless -- it is unreal, like a TV show. For Eko, the fictionality of the work seems to make it even more real.

The first hatch (the Swan) held a flickering filmstrip, and the second holds a warbly old video tape; eventually a hatch will be discovered with HDTV and Lost DVDs on the shelf.

The main philosophical (and, as it relates to how we live, practical) question of our time is: how does one live in a world where God is dead? Ivan, a fictional character in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov once noted, "If God is dead, everything is permitted." Later on the character Zarathustra, a fictional mouth-piece for the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, noted (famously) that God is dead.

All, therfore, is permitted, and everywhere is the center; the relative perspective is also the absolute. ...theories...

I wonder if we'll look back one day at the moment Eko took solace in the notion of pushing the button as a test as the moment we as a people started figuring out how to live in a world where God is dead?

Related posts: Lost in 'Lost', Getting Lost, Thus Spake Shrek: Elitism, Underwear, & Master Narratives in Shrek II