I raised in my review last week of Lost's Season Five two-hour opener the question of whether Ben is ultimately good or bad...
One point that occurs to me that would prove - to my standards, at least - what Ben is ultimately made of is what he does if and when he finally gets to Penny. If he kills her, or really tries to, then he's morally corrupt, because a daughter (or son) does not deserve to die for her father's sins. If he lets her live - well, then, that would show he isn't all that bad...
6 comments:
It's a good point with which I kind of agree, though Benry is an interesting character primarily because standard rules of morality don't seem to apply.
Actually, one of the interesting themes in Lost, that I wouldn't have thought much of if it hadn't been for your post, is the struggle by the characters - and by extension the audience - to apply morality to parse through situations and actions that often aren't compatible with that kind of assessment, by which I mean the situations and actions weren't prompted by a bad or good impulse, so much as they just needed to be done.
In some ways, revenge would seem to be the most human and understandable thing Benry ever does, even if the target of that revenge is wrong.
When the show is all done, I think we'll look back and see that conflict between amorality and morality and traditional morality is a really quite astonishing thing - and though shows like BSG and Sarah Connor ask similar questions at times, but Lost is the only show approaching "The Wire" in how deeply it examines this area.
Lost has no moral compass.
Kate = murderer
Sawyer = murderer
Sayid = murderer
Locke = murderer
Hurley = murderer
Desmond = murderer
Michael = murderer
And those are just the good guys.
Excellent analysis, Nick - and I agree completely about your placement of The Wire ...
Kevin - two arguments I would make against your observation: 1. Murdering a monster is moral - murdering Hitler, or anyone who is about to kill innocent people, if that is the only way you can stop the murder, is not immoral. 2. Your list is incomplete: Vincent never hurt anyone...
There are so many themes in the show and they're all great. Has anyone heard of Al Trautwig - the knicks/Rangers commentator? He started a weekly video blog about LOST since he is a big fan and he shares some really interesting concepts and theories about the show and the whole time loop thing and he actually thinks Miles is Dr. Marvin's son...check it out:
Lost
Thanks, Sam - and, yeah, we were talking about Miles being Marvin's son here last week - I'd say he definitely is ... see comments to this post...
Thanks, Paul... Am really struggling over on my site at the moment - only caught up on Lost ready for the new season last week, and still haven't written my weekly TV piece about it, because there's too much to say about it.
And I'd agree your comments about murder: I'd say that the word "murder" immediately has a moral, religious or legal cachet - though those are important systems, at a critical or objective level we can only say that someone has or hasn't killed, or is or isn't a killer.
In Kate's case, the killing she did would have seemed a matter of survival, and because in her head she was protecting her mother, you can almost see how it would balance out to the character.
Sawyer's key moment as a killer was premeditated, but again, as he saw it it was straight-up justice. Though I appreciate that that's difficult to parse, because he was totally wrong.
Desmond felt the guilt of the death he caused, but it was pretty much an accident.
And I don't actually remember Hurley killing anyone, but I may be being dumb - we're a lot of episodes down, now.
I'm not numb to the moral questions, here, just saying that there are plenty of ways in which society forgives a killing if it can work out a way to excuse it, and "murder" would seem to be a tag that we apply when forgiveness or excuses seem impossible by any metric we can consider.
(And yes, it's clear that I'm task-avoiding right now, hence the over-wordy and philosophical comment! Sorry!)
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