writing, computing, media, thoughts on what it all means…

HBO recently aired a ten part miniseries – The Pacific. It was made by the same guys who did Band of Brothers (Tom hanks, Spielberg), in that same gritty handheld cinematography that made Saving Private Ryan so revolutionary.

But this series lacked the crumbling architecture of blitzkrieged Paris, or even the beautiful grassy hilltops of Terrence Malick’s Guadalcanal. This was all mud and black sand, sopping trenches that held the piled and maggoty remains of corpses. It was nightmarish not only in the violence but also the aesthetic: suicidal banzai rushes, flamethrowers in mountain bunkers, meaninglessness death in a struggle for little desert isles in the middle of the ocean.

That same nihilism informs a reading of Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Although much of the book focuses on the mundane non-adventures of our modern day narrator Toru, the crux of the book’s theme – and the best passages – are in the dark depths of Japan’s imperialistic conquests during the World War.

Wind Up is an odd book. Set in the mid 1980s, Toru has recently quit his job as a lowly salaryman to rethink his life. He sits at home and listens to music, reads books, counts the number of times the telephone rings, cooks spaghetti, while his wife goes off to work. Every day he wakes to the sound of a strange bird – dubbed the Wind Up bird – which greets the morning with a strange creaking call, like the winding of a spring.

Toru’s cat goes missing, and he has some squabbles with his wife, but in the first few hundred pages of the novel very little happens. It’s a study in passivity. Toru really doesn’t *do* anything. He’s pushed around by external forces and the people around him. This can be somewhat frustrating – an odd sensation, reading something with so little drive to *advance* the plot.

The mundane is broken up by exotic and visceral episodes that feel completely out of place in their stark contrast. Sex and Violence. The first in the form of obscene phone calls from strange women. The second in the retelling of horrific events from the war by an ancient veteran.

Toru’s wife disappears. He meets a number of other women who act as doppelgangers for his wife, engaging in conversations both spiritual and mundane, providing physical comfort and sexual release. But most of the plot points feel like filler around the excellent episodes from the 1940s.

By the end of the book (as it resolves a sort of half-boiled thriller regarding his wife’s disappearance), he gets letters from a young girl named May Kashara. She’s probably the most compelling of the book’s characters, with childlike curiosity and mischief underlain by a deep fascination with mortality and human evil. She writes:

“Anyway, it seems to me that the way most people go on living…, they think that the world or life (or whatever) is this place where everything (or is supposed to be) basically logical and consistent. Talking with my neighbors here often makes me think that. Like, when something happens, whether it’s a big event that affects the whole society or something small and personal, people talk about it like, “Oh, well, of course, that happened because such and such,” and most of the time people with agree and say, like , “Oh, sure, I see,” but I just don’t get it. “A is like this, so that’s why B happened.” I mean, that doesn’t explain anything.”

Is the surface of the book nonsensical on purpose? Are these random characters and Toru’s passive reaction merely an illustration of that absurdist tenet?

There’s a lot to think about and digest in Wind Up. It’s easy to write the whole thing off as poorly organized, half-complete, or lost in translation. But it’s a book that requires multiple passes. On the surface, Toru is a passive robot, a blank everyman, a zombie of modern consumer culture. But he does possess a deeper spirituality, a hidden meaning, that’s only revealed when he climbs down and contemplates what lives in the darkness underground.

NOTE: This post is about the end of LOST. It contains SPOILERS

Like any good series finale, it was polarizing. A few writer’s I read even went so far as to say it ruined the entire series.

Most of the complaints stem from the finale itself – not that ends weren’t tied up, but they were fixed in a way inconsistent with the show as a whole. We were obsessed with the trinkets in the rabbit hole: how far did Dharma and Charles Widmore and Egyptian hieroglyphics really go? What were the numbers? Was the smoke monster some sort of nano-bot guardian of the island’s secrets?

And the show answered by saying: none of that’s important. What was important were Jack, Hurley, Kate, Sawyer, Sayid, Sun and Jin, and of course Locke (nevermind that he went rogue for the last two seasons…)

It’s taken me some time to digest. But I remembered back to what hooked me on the show in the first place. It was first in season one, when Locke went out in the rain with his knives and found freedom in the mystery of the island, only to become obsessed with the hatch. That first extended metaphor of the button was for us, the viewer. Did the button really matter, or was it just an illusion to draw us along, a psychological experiment? Those science vs. faith conversations between Locke and Jack were some of the best in the show.

And then in season two, conflicts with the Others – Lost perfectly captured and demonstrated the paranoia of conflict, terrorism, torture that were unavoidable in those early years post 9/11.

That’s what these island dramas are always about – a microcosm of human society. The sci-fi elements were window dressing to attract the modern obsessive fan with high def TVs, frame capture TIVOs and internet forums. The core was always that same story in Lord of the Flies or Robinson Crusoe – man vs nature; man vs man; man vs self.

The problem with any serial drama stretched over hundreds of hours is that it’s tough to show character growth without turned off the audience. We want to see Jack Shephard work through his demons, but we don’t want him to give up his guilty-savior complex, which can be at times obnoxious, but what makes Jack…Jack. It was obvious he’d be a sacrificial lamb in the finale. It was pretty bold to show his purgatorial redemption as well. That last conversation between Jack and Locke brings the entire thing full circle, when Jack realizes his purpose.

Faith won out. Science (represented by Dharma, Widmore, even the original Man in Black) got the proverbial (and literal) gunshot to the chest.

So now that it’s over, why be disappointed? It was an hour of entertainment on a weeknight filled with adventure, mystery, and deep questions, for six years. What more could you ask for? It’s time to let go. Now I just need to wait for the DVD box set. Apparently, there’s a secret revealed at 23:42 and 15:16 on episode 8 of the 4th disc!