External Structure:
1. They are
brother and sister.
a. They have a
sibling rivalry, but
b. He is
protective of her, and
c. She has a
history of being abused by partners, hence
d. He feels
the need to protect her from Sayid.
2. He would
use money from his mother’s company to bribe her boyfriends to break up with
her.
a. Theoretically,
personal phobias and desires kept her from reporting the abuses to anyone
except for him.
b. Not one to
overpower the guys by force, he resorted to monetary incentive. In the process,
he was proving himself to care more for her than they did.
3. He wishes
to tell her about the Secret Bunker. John Locke objects. Locke learns the
following:
a. Boone
intends to protect her from Sayid.
b. Boone has
emotional reservations about keeping secrets from her.
c. She and
Boone are not related by blood but by shared parents.
d. Boone
thinks highly of her, in spite of his public antipathy towards her.
4. John Locke ensnares
Boone in the Jungle. Possible motives:
a. To keep hostility
between Boone and Sayid from compromising the Collective Good.
b. To prevent filial
loyalties from compromising the Secrecy and Integrity of the Excavation. This may
be of value because:
i. He wishes
to avail himself of the secrets of the Bunker, and/or
ii. He wishes
to hoard the boar, and he must therefore make it appear as though the Hunt were
waning. (This is Jack’s theory.)
c. To teach
Boone how to defend those he loves out in the Wild, where his usual modus
operandi (Mother’s money) is no good.
5. Shannon is
captured as well. Causal Progression:
a. Boone hears
her screams, interspersed with the sounds of the Mysterious Beast.
b. He finds
the courage and motivation to free himself.
c. He rescues
her from the snares, but
d. She is
snatched up by the Beast and killed.
e. He finds her.
She dies in his arms.
6. Revelation
One: Shannon is a con artist.
a. After the
death of her father, his mother stole a substantial sum of money from Shannon’s
side of the family.
b. By
pretending to be a Damsel in Distress, she is able to extort large sums of
money from him without his knowledge, conspiring with various boyfriends who
pretend to be abusive towards her.
c. This backfires
in Sydney, shortly prior to their fateful flight back home to Los Angeles. This
time around, the boyfriend made off with the money alone.
7. Revelation
Two: Boone is in love with Shannon romantically and sexually.
a. John Locke
intuits this, corroborated by the revelation that there is no blood relation
between them.
b. Shannon
figures this out as well, early on, and she uses this to extort Boone.
c. They have
sexual relations shortly prior to flying home.
d. They cannot
maintain their relationship, because:
i. They are
technically siblings,
ii. Their
relationship is founded on manipulation, and
iii. She does
not reciprocate his feelings.
e. This
explains the hostility between them, which amounts to more than merely sibling
rivalry.
f. This also
explains his aggression towards Sayid.
8. Revelation
Three: John Locke never captured Shannon.
a. Instead,
John Locke gave Boone a dose of psychedelic, disguised as a salve for the wound
on the back of Boone’s head which was incurred when Locke incapacitated him.
b. The entire sequence
wherein Boone rescues Shannon was simply a manifestation of Boone’s sexual/romantic
feelings for her, manifested as the archetype of Hero rescuing the Damsel in
Distress. Be that as it may,
c. When he
believes Shannon to be dead, he feels relieved, since she no longer has
influence over him.
d. John Locke’s
motives are the Moral of the Story:
i. Boone must
liberate himself of his attachment to Shannon.
ii. Her budding
romance with Sayid ought to be permitted to persist.
Internal Structure:
1. The Family:
a. Stage One: Rivalry
between siblings.
i. Competition
to adapt to the Wild, following a Life of Luxury and Comfort.
ii. Differences
in personality.
iii. Most presumably:
latent competition for the love of the parents.
b. Stage Two: The
Brother’s Burden.
i. Family ties
require him to protect his sister.
ii. Early
manifestations of the Damsel in Distress.
2. The
Community:
a. She is frequently
a helpless victim, owing, again, to her comfortable upbringing and general
superficiality.
i. She has a
history of abuse by romantic partners.
ii. Sayid,
known for using violence to solve problems*, represents the latest installment
in this ever-present threat.
b. Boone acts
as her protector, though he is reliant on money to do so. At first, Locke’s
test seems to be to turn Boone into a more skilled protector, one who can compete
with Sayid. However, this is not so…
3. The
Inversion:
a. The Family:
i. In the absence
of a bond of blood, there is no biological incest between the two siblings,
however: a devious sexual game is in play, one perpetuated by the social strictures
which cause Boone to repress these feelings.
ii. The Rivalry
is a hoax, a coverup for this game. The competition is not between siblings for
the parents’ love, but rather between potential partners for the woman’s love.
iii. The Brother’s
Burden is devoid of the filial purity it ordinarily carries. Ergo, it is not
only self-interested but harmful to Boone as an individual.
b. The
Community: men like Sayid and Bryan (from Sydney) are not the ogres whom Boone
must overcome in order to rescue his little princess of a sister. Nor is Boone
the ogre. Rather, his princess of a sister is a sort of enchantress, using her
own sex appeal to manipulate men for money. This we know from her very brief flirtation
with Charlie.
*Subtext: ironically, he only ever
uses violence on her behalf, and he abstains (in flashbacks) from using it
against those whom he loves.
The Critical Complaint:
1.
By dissolving the filial bond, the show’s writers
remove one avenue of relationship from serious consideration. This reduces a
family drama, as well as the only sibling drama, to a sexual drama, one to be
added to the growing list:
a. Jack and
Kate.
b. Sawyer and
Kate.
c. Sun and
Jin.
d. Sun and
Michael.
e. Charlie and
Kate.
f. Charlie and
Shannon.
g. Charlie and
Claire.
h.Sayid and
Shannon.
i. (Possibly
but unlikely) Rousseau and Sayid.
j. (Far more
probably) Hurley and Food.**
**While this is formally “mean”, a
substantial portion of this episode’s subplot revolves around this crippling infatuation,
enough to portend that John Locke will soon find another guinea pig for his
social experiments.
2.
By casting Shannon as the villain of the story, the
plot deconstructs the Damsel in Distress, to the benefit of modern feminism but
to the detriment of the show’s Dionysian, mythological themes. John Locke’s
experiments, usually aimed at reconnecting civilized individuals with the Wild,
this time only produce the same effect as the most banal and bourgeois clinical
psychology. This is disappointing, considering that not only is Boone his most “civilized”
patient yet, but the methods employed on Boone are by far the most extreme and
experimental. To go all that way, only to overcome jealousy and to “move on”, is
hardly flattering to the Wild Human Spirit, reducing Boone’s most primal moments
to the sort of ending one might expect in a soap opera with a happy ending.
Furthermore:
3.
Sayid is the Alpha Male. In spite of everything that
Boone experiences, he cannot come between Shannon and Sayid, or rather he
chooses not to. At once, three female fantasies are fulfilled:
a. The Woman
has Agency, though only by virtue of her sexuality and “feminine intuition”.
The one-sided nature of her relationship to Boone reinforces this, as does that
social order which forbids them to be lovers in Civilization, as well as Locke’s
Moral Order in the proverbial Wild.
b. Boone backs
down. Resolving himself stoically to his fate, he corroborates her agency in
the most diplomatic manner, “for his own good”. Be that as it may…
c. She is
nonetheless dependent upon Sayid. Sayid represents exactly the sort of man that
she has come to rely upon to do her bidding. Whatever sensitivity he has she
will have cause to exploit; all the while, he lords his superior agency over
Boone, thus revealing again the boorish side of his own character. (“What if I
don’t?” is an all-too-frequent piece of macho rhetoric that Boone encounters,
and it is also utterly barbaric.)
d. All too conveniently,
it is Sayid’s superior agency which Locke, the Wise Old Man, now doubling as a
father figure for Shannon, (in the wake of her biological father’s death) deems
to be essential to the Success of the Colony. Locke does not train Boone to be
a fighter, but to be a monk. Boone’s own agency as a sexual candidate is
reduced to a depraving fantasy, to make room for an even more depraving
feminine fantasy: continued codependency. Boone may be free from Shannon, but
Shannon is not free yet; she has simply transferred her feelings to Sayid. Want
proof? It was Boone’s own recrimination that incentivized her to agree to Sayid’s
advances, in spite of her laziness.
Archetypes have a place. The Wise
Old Man, the Warrior, the Temptress, the Healer, the Other, the Lovers, and the
Shadow, et cetera, all come into play in Lost’s cast of characters, and
they find their poetic exaltation in their setting, their backstories, and
their subject matter. The Damsel in Distress, theoretically, should have her
place as well, and to recontextualize her outside of sexuality can help to
purify the idea. This is not achieved, in part because this episode yields to a
Freudian psychoanalytic form of “unmasking”, instead of the Jungian trend of “Reintegrating”.
The Ethical Domain of the Hero is reduced to the private domain of the
forbidden lust, one which is in turn a sublimation of “incest fantasy”. (One of
Freud’s most often disproven theories, so farfetched that even young Friedrich
Nietzsche would not go so far.) Thus the archetype of the Damsel is lost, the
archetype of the Hero loses agency, and Shannon is in more danger than she ever
was, at least until Sayid finds cause to use his “communications” skills again on
her behalf.
[({Dm.R.G.)}]
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