Keywords: pop culture, character, event, television, fact, fiction, illusion, reality, authentic artifact.

David Ulin writes an interesting piece for the editorial page in the November 19th edition of the L.A. Times. The title of the piece is "Lost". Specifically it's about the television program that airs on ABC; the subtext is that we are all lost when it comes to distinguishing illusion from reality-or, at least, we are in danger of becoming lost, of losing the distinction itself between illusion and reality. I have never been a big fan of keeping the two in separate categories. It's problematic how we can maintain this distinction in any absolute sense.
But let's see what Mr. Ulin is afraid of:

1. "Lost" is a television program. As such, it is a representation of things, a fictional one. One of the characters in the story-line dies when the plane itself crashes en route to Los Angeles. The character's name is Gary Troup. He's a victim of the crash and as such is not an actant. However, he did write a spy novel that the characters in "Lost" will find on the same day that the book is published by Disney under the Hyperion label. What troubles Ulin is that an authentic artifact, the novel, will be produced and distributed in the world market: "This is how we live now, in a world where everything is commodified and the bottom line has become the bottom line." (I'm not sure what he's getting at.)

2. From memory he brings forth the book by Ray Bradbury, _Fahrenheit 451_. In that movie one of the characters has been chosen to participate in a television soap opera. She had sent in some box tops and now has been selected to participate through improvisation in the development of the story. According to Ulin, that's "an awful moment, sad and haunting, and in its edge of longing, it evokes contemporary culture's alienation, which has expanded exponentially since Bradbury examined it fifty years ago." (Mr. Ulin is saying that if we connect with media powers and participate in their products we are revealing our sense of alienation? What gives? I thought American capitalism and commodities reduced human alienation; after all, that's why we're in Iraq, to make the world safe for capitalism, among other things.)

3. Referring again to Bradbury, a standard high school English class author, Ulin charges our present condition with further erosion of the reality/illusion distinction: "the ever thinning boundary between reality and illusion, a boundary that grows more tenuous every day."
The "Lost" 'construct' takes place in "our landscape", a fiction that bleeds into fact." So we work with words like thinning, boundary, construct, our landscape. As someone interested in how people deploy topoi to make arguments, this is meaty. Do we want to tighten the border? Isn't that what exclusiveness is all about? "Our landscape": is this where we live now, culturally, socially, and politically?

4. When Ulin evokes a materialist analysis he writes: "Lost" wants us to operate on its terms: we are characters in the drama sponsored by the corporations. We were always already defined as "those who visit Disneyland." But he then abandons the materialst analysis for a moral one: "Of course there is nothing wrong with that; in fact, it illustrates the nature of fanhood, the way our affinities help us find purchase, a sense of identity in the world." (Now isn't this what the Marxists had warned us about? The alienation of the human essence through work and the production of a fantastic celebrity culture that fragments our humanity and then returns it whole through illusion?)

5. Found Object: "there's something creepy about the nudge-nudge, wink-wink insistence that the novel was found rather than manufactured." Back to the materialism. But the ending is what makes us take note: we, the audience, exist not only to be manipulated but to participate in our manipulation by seeing it as cool. "This is the kind of thing literature has traditionally stood against." (In other words, media manipulation that wins our approval as audience is abject, while the reading of literature has always been an act of resistance to such manipulation.)

Conclusion: The strange story of Gary Troup has something to teach us. We're back to moralisms. "Real life is turning into a reverie in three dimensions, a mere template for a larger fiction." Yeah, the levee broke and television has invaded our lives. I say Halliburton is expanding its operations.

MGreer