The Meaning of Meaning in Lost

[As the final season has just begun, this post is not about theories about Lost as a whole, but rather some ideas I’ve been having about the nature of meaning itself told through some scenes in Lost.]

It seems that as we go through the world we find meaning in all sorts of things. We seek out “truth” and “beauty” to find meaning in the world, in the way we live, in living itself. Perhaps nowhere in the realm of popular culture is this truer than as it pertains to the TV series Lost. For 5 seasons, going on 6, the shows producers have sent its audience down a path ridden with enigmas, seeking, it seems, to confuse rather than elucidate. But if we look at Lost from a meta-point of view, it seems to discuss our need to find meaning in potentially meaningless things.

One of the primary mysteries of the show is the Numbers: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. We first see them as Hurley’s winning lottery numbers, which he believes are cursed. Shortly thereafter we begin noticing them in everything: Oceanic 815 left from Gate 23, Kate’s ransom was 23,000 dollars, Lost was paralyzed for 4 years, the vaccine is identified by a serial number 48-15162-342. All of these things crop up and an alarm goes off in our head because we know they are significant. But I wonder about all the other numbers that show up. When the return flight is Ajira 316, no one bats an eye; when the time is 11:45, we dismiss it. The thing is that even though the producers of the show are knowingly inserting the numbers everywhere, they cannot have any inherent meaning.

In the last several episodes we have been introduced to a new concept of the Numbers. Sawyer was taken to a cave by the Man in Black, and Jack and Hurley were taken to a Lighthouse by Jacob, both to discover “the meaning” of the numbers. Jacob purportedly assigned numbers to each of the candidates for replacing him. It appears that each of these numbers applies to a particular candidate of note. Locke was 4, before he died, Hurley is 8, Sawyer and Sayid are 15 and 16, Jack is 23, and Kwon is 42, though no one knows which Kwon it is. Here then is a potential explanation for our numbers. However what everyone has failed to mention is that there is another candidate whose name hasn’t been crossed out: number 51 is Kate Austen. So we brush it off, we forget about this number because it doesn’t quite mesh with our schema.

See, the Numbers are like anything else we use to find meaning in the world. They highlight certain moments; they open our eyes at specific times and allow us to see something deeper about the fabric of life, or at least to make us think so. We will never know what the numbers mean, not because the producers hate us and want us to suffer, but because they have no inherent meaning. We find meaning in them when we notice them in other places. When the shift in the swan station lasts 108 minutes, and we realize that this is the sum of the Numbers, we get excited because there is a new example. But if the shift lasted 90 minutes we would think nothing of it.

The Numbers, and perhaps by extension the show, or life is meaningless. But this is not something over which we should despair. The meaninglessness of life is not so much an abyss of darkness as a blank canvas upon which we can ascribe whatever meaning suits us. We have an immense freedom in life from this meaninglessness because anything can be meaningful. I will always find certain themes to be prevalent in films and literature; I will always interpret them from my own point of view, whether it is on masculinity, rebellion, sexuality or what have you. In the same way, we all interpret the world around us; imprint on it our own meanings as diverse as there are people. All of this can be summed in Robert Brown’s analysis on Ikiru: “It consists of a restrained affirmation within the context of a giant negation. What it says in starkly lucid terms is that ‘life’ is meaningless when everything is said and done; at the same time one man’s life can acquire meaning when he undertakes to perform some task that to him is meaningful. What everyone else thinks about that man’s life is utterly beside the point, even ludicrous. The meaning of his life is what he commits the meaning of his life to be. There is nothing else.”