Lost as the Neo-Baroque
Introduction
Definitions and (Art) History
Gesamtkunstwerk and the Edge of the Frame
Mortality and Transience
Divine Light
Naturalism and Artifice
In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Angela Ndalianis evaluates the transhistorical, metamorphic and enfolded spatial formation that is the postmodern Neo-Baroque. In doing so she describes the forms that are characteristic of this contemporary incarnation of what was once called a style, but is more precisely and comprehensively presented in her text as a mode, a poetic, and a logic. Ndalianis is primarily concerned with contemporary cinema and its associated media, but this Neo-Baroque aesthetic can also be located in the medium of television, for example, in the series Lost. Lost uses all of the major Neo-Baroque elements defined by Ndalianis: the persistent, if partial, violation of the frame that contains the artistic illusion; the emphasis on intertextuality, complexity and virtuosity; and “the active engagement of audience members, who are invited to participate in a self-reflexive game involving the work's artifice.”1 But the Neo-Baroque in Lost is no mere referencing of a popular creative mode; rather, Lost engages with that foundational element of the Baroque - the fidelity to nature - with an ambivalent complexity seen in the most vivid examples of the original style.
Definitions and (Art) History
Madonna of the Long Neck, Parmigianino (1534-40)
The term Baroque derives from the Portuguese barrocco which refers to a deformed pearl;2 it also was used in late sixteenth-century French speech to denote something unusual or bizarre, and may relate to baroco, a type of syllogism described by scholastic philosophers.3 Although popular in its own time, by the later eighteenth century - an era dominated by the Neo-Classical style - Baroque was widely criticized on both aesthetic and moral grounds. Diderot (1758) described ‘baroque’ architecture as “the ridiculous taken to excess."4 Compared to the clean lines, local colors and idealized forms of the Renaissance and Neo-Classical art to which it was being compared, Baroque art was seen as too extravagant and intense. But there was also recognition that after the more extreme distortions of Mannerism - seen in such works as Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck (1534-40) - the Baroque was at least a return to Renaissance principles of unity and the observation of nature. Writing in 1855, Jacob Burckhardt conceded that the principal methods of the new ‘Baroque’ style were “naturalism in form as well as the whole conception of what had happened (reality) and the display of emotion at any cost.”5 Although overstated here, the core of Burkhardt’s observation about the Baroque - the increased veracity in the representation of both the natural and human worlds - is now understood to be a typical component of the style.
Baptism of Christ, Andrea del Verrocchio (1470s)
It was Heinrich Wölfflin, however, who achieved the most important, early critical rehabilitation of the Baroque.6 Wölfflin contrasted the Renaissance and Baroque styles using five opposing pairs of elements: linear versus painterly, plane versus recession, closed versus open form, unity versus multiplicity, and absolute versus relative clarity.7 The typical Renaissance form Wölfflin describes is illustrated by Andrea del Verrocchio’s Renaissance Baptism of Christ (1470s), a Renaissance painting, a reproduction of which was displayed on the wall of Charlie's childhood home and recreated in his dream in ‘Fire + Water’. This painting has the multiplicity of elements, absolute colors, even lighting and parallel planes, all contained within the frame, that are typical of this style. By contrast, Rembrandt's Nightwatch (1642), a Baroque example, is more unified, with more relative color, naturalistic and dramatic lighting, and recession into space.
Nightwatch, Rembrandt van Rijn (1642)
Wölfflin’s system has since been criticized for being reductive and deterministic, but his description of the essential qualities of the Baroque style remains influential.8 Subsequent art historical scholarship has refined, rejected and now it seems, largely resigned itself to the continued use of the term 'Baroque' to characterize the constellation of formal and thematic elements that dominated seventeenth-century Western European art. For painting and architecture, these may include: a commitment to naturalism (which in the seventeenth century meant that nature was still idealized, but to a lesser degree than the Renaissance); an increased interest in human character and emotion; a penchant for allegorical and symbolic meaning, especially with reference to transience and mortality; quasi-theatrical staging and lighting; the representation of intense often violent, scenes designed to capture attention and, in the case of religious art, inspire devotion; the projection of the artistic and thematic space into the realm of the viewer; and the use of multiple media to engulf said viewer in a Gesamtkunstwerk - a total work of art.9
Matrix reloaded, Image courtesy Warner Home Entertainment.
The Baroque can also be conceived in more philosophical terms, useful for bridging the historical distance between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. As an aesthetic, it uses technologically sophisticated forms and complex themes to first attract the viewer, and then suspend them in an uneasy, yet pleasurable, state of apprehension. This emphasis on the moment just before the event - a device essential to horror films - "actually has the effect of suturing [the viewer] into the image and its emotions."10 The philosophy of the Neo-Baroque is intertwined with postmodernism, where 'truth' and 'reality' have no absolute definition and rigid, static boundaries exist to be transgressed. In both the Baroque and Neo-Baroque, time and space can be elements of form and content, emotion and perception can be both process and theme. The contemporary film Matrix reloaded, for example, is Neo-Baroque in its use of intense visual spectacle intended to overwhelm the viewer and foreground the process of vision itself - a theme supported by the multiple levels of reality in the narrative and the explicit references to the spiritual and the sacred (including Christianity).11
Gesamtkunstwerk and the Edge of the Frame
Ecstasy of St. Theresa, Bernini (1652)
The Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk was intended to surround the viewer with visual spectacle. Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa - a statue group depicting an angel piercing the medieval saint with a golden arrow, igniting her with a burning love for God - captures the viewer’s attention on its own, with its astonishing naturalism and presentation of rapture as both physical and spiritual. The work of art extends beyond this sculpture however, to include actual and sculpted rays of light from above, an image of a skeleton on the floor below, exquisitely patterned marble columns and an elaborate, quasi-architectural structure, and to the sides, sculpted portraits of the Cornaro family who commissioned this chapel. Here there has been no attempt to confine the artwork, either physically or thematically, to a narrow frame. Instead, the space of the image is thrust forward to include the spectator, just as in Rembrandt’s Nightwatch Captain Banning Cocq’s arm seems to gesture out from the picture plane, into the realm of the viewer.
One of the primary themes of Ndalianis' text is that the Neo-Baroque, like the Baroque, is defined by its seriality and polycentrism - its refusal to be contained by the traditional edges of the frame, particularly with respect to narrative and genre. Beginning and endings may be hidden, stories continued across many installments (and not necessarily in temporal order) and hybrid media employed as vehicles for expression.12 Lost is widely recognized for its each of these Neo-Baroque elements. Lost has quickly expanded beyond the confines of a television series. On the internet alone there has been an explosion of fan-based, related content - websites, forums, unofficial transcripts, fan fiction, detailed documentation of shooting locations, and more.13 On the corporate side, ABC has orchestrated the production of tie-ins through both traditional and new media: novelizations, including Bad Twin, podcasts, an online alternate reality game, and coming soon, action figures, mobisodes and the Lost video game.14 Lost television series also periodically embraces the concept of the spectacle. The pilot, the most expensive in history, was a visual and narrative tour de force that has been matched on a narrative level by a large cast, numerous reoccurring guest roles, and a storyline with both synchronic and diachronic complexity. The complementary content available on other media is designed to draw viewers further into this slowly unfolding storyline and increasingly Baroque mythology. So far at least, these efforts at blurring the line between marketplace of reception and the economics of production have not impinged on the core of the Lost experience - the television series itself. The Baroque illusion of naturalism remains intact within the experience economy, which follows the current best practice marketing model by including both revenue and non-revenue activities so as not to alienate viewers.15
Mortality and Transience
Wölfflin's statement that "the Baroque never offers us perfection or fulfillment, or the static calm of 'being', only the unrest of change and the tension of transience" is an apt description of Lost, at least as it stands at the beginning of Season Three.16 The dramatic shift to the survivors of the tail section of Oceanic Flight 815 in Season Two has been followed by yet another spatial and narrative re-location, to the perspective of the 'Others'. Indeed, time and space have never followed the rules on Lost. As J.M. Berger has noted, the Dharma Initiative's logo has its roots in Eastern tradition of time as a cyclical phenomenon, where repetitions are never exactly the same and there are "consistent relationships between cause and effect (and past, present and future) that are not strictly logical-linear outcomes" - with the seemingly miraculous appearance and reappearance of people and objects from the past into the present, and back.17 When, in Season 3, Ben plays a tape of the Red Sox winning the World Series for Jack, it is a jarring insertion of the outside world into a narrative that has hitherto existed apart from normal and space. By this point the viewer has gradually become acclimatized to castaways’ singular, often baffling, and gradually increasing, increasing inteconnections in the present and the past. Hurley’s boss at Mr. Cluck’s Chicken Shack is John’s superior at the box company, which it seems Hurley now owns; Kate’s father is seen in Sayid’s flashback; Shannon’s father injures Sarah, Jack’s future wife - to name just a few examples. Actual time - the mundane act of taping a baseball game (however odd that it is available) - seems pedestrian by comparison. The island seems to be caught in a relativistic matrix, where cause and effect are gradually becoming non-linear, and where the theoretical conception of time as a function of space, still so far ahead of popular understanding that it typically appears only in science fiction (and then with copious amounts of physics for dummies-style exposition), has been allowed free reign. On the island, time doesn't work the way it is supposed to at the speed of everyday life; events and memories unfold in a realistic manner, but they are framed by a time and space that appears strange and irrational to the outside observer, giving the appearance that "the Island's 'present' [is] resonating into the past."18
This foregrounding of time links directly back to the Baroque. The pendulum clock was invented in the seventeenth century and the discoveries of Kepler, and then Galileo, brought a new awareness of an infinite universe where humanity, once thought to be the center of biblical time and history, was relegated to an every diminishing role. Erwin Panofsky, the pioneering art historian, went so far as to state: “No period has been so obsessed with the depth and width, the horror and sublimity of the concept of time as the Baroque, the period in which man found himself confronted with the infinite as a quality of the universe instead as a prerogative of God."19 While the Christian faith still offered salvation, there was, for the prosperous Netherlands in particular, a sense that one must not forget that human accomplishments were insignificant compared to one's eternal soul. Neo-Baroque works that present symbols of both mortality - human skulls, hourglasses, rotting fruit, dying flowers are most common - and the ultimately futile human accomplishments, are in the tradition of the Baroque vanitas, which has its source in Ecclesiastes (1:2): "Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity."
On the island, most of the castaways have lost that which gave them status in the outside world. As the only doctor on the island, Jack's medical skills are essential to survival, and this places him above the other castaways. But we soon learn that Jack has mixed feelings about accepting this responsibility, and he continues to be involved in dangerous situations that would be prohibited to a leader in a more structured chain of command. In stark contrast to contemporary Western society, money, even the promise of future gain, has no value on the island (so far at least). It does not matter that Sun is from a wealthy, powerful family, or Hurley won the lottery. Instead, before the crash both characters had already begun to realize the extent to which their wealth was ruining their lives. Goods are bartered, most ruthlessly by Sawyer, who seems to have had the greatest need to acquire wealth in his previous life. But under physical and moral pressure, Sawyer's loyalty to this system weakens, and it has been suggested that his hoarding may have its roots not in greed, but in his traumatic and insecure childhood. Of all the characters, Shannon was the most committed to maintaining the vanities of her previous life: dieting, tanning, willful ignorance and ineptitude. This did not survive in the face of increasing demands that she shed her frivolity for emotional authenticity, an inner journey which continued into the realm of mysticism, as she began to have visions of Walt. In the Baroque era, such soul work could expect reward in the next life; in a more secular, Neo-Baroque context, there is no such certainty. But there is still the message that inner quality - the person each castaway is gradually revealed to be, in both the past and present - is more important than status, passions, or fleeting pleasures once enjoyed.
Divine Light
The Blinding of Samson, Rembrandt (1636)
Unlike twenty-first century Western society, the culture of the Baroque was deeply entwined with Christianity. The Protestant reformers in the North of Europe who embraced the Word and rejected visual traditions they considered inappropriately non-biblical, but did not spurn all art out outright, influenced the establishment of the first open art market in Europe. Here paintings and prints of subjects not previously considered 'art' - landscapes, still lifes, genre scenes - were available for purchase. Catholic Reformers pursued the opposite strategy at the Council of Trent (1545-63), where they reaffirmed the power and utility of the visual arts for proclaiming the new, purified Counter-Reformation faith. By the seventeenth century Catholic clergy began to patronage artists who used the vivid and naturalistic Baroque style to inspire devotion in the faithful. Baroque artists were particularly effective in conveying both the naturalistic and more traditional, symbolic, aspects of light. Depending on the narrative context, light could allude to Jesus ('I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the light of life' - John 8:12), refer to the Holy Spirit, or suggest the general presence of the divine. Actual light could also imply inner light, or enlightenment, as in Rembrandt's rendition of The Blinding of Samson. In this narrative the biblical hero, in a moment particularly devoid of insight, has revealed the source of his strength to the treacherous Delilah. Rembrandt represents the moment the Philistine soldiers literally blind Samson as a physical and spiritual fall from the spotlight area of the canvas into the darker area to the right.
In the contemporary, secular context of mainstream television, Christian content, if present at all, usually exists only in relation to other, primary themes. Lost’s multiple references to religion and spirituality follow this norm. As a self-proclaimed priest, Eko exists at the margins of established religion; his faith is strong but unpredictable, with an as yet ambiguous relationship to his violent past. Charlie's religious leanings are balanced, perhaps even negated, by his history as a dissolute rock star and heroin addict. This is conveyed visually by the kitsch statues of the Virgin Mary that have been turned from their original purpose as devotional objects, and whose generic blandness - a visual sign of the post-Baroque split between mainstream Christian theology and art - makes them ideal drug mules. Each character has been presented as seeking some sort of redemption, whether they know it yet or not. In the Baroque this would be understood in terms of the sin that ultimately resulted from Adam and Eve having eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and being thus expelled from the Garden of Eden. In Lost, Christian references are more implicit. In ‘The Moth’ Charlie may state the words, 'Bless me Father, for I have sinned', but he does not relive and overcome his failings - weakness, fear, insecurity - within an explicitly Judeo-Christian framework. There are numerous allusions to this rich tradition of visual imagery, however. When Charlie crawls into a cave to rescue the trapped Jack, he literally moves into darkness - without his flashlight it would be pitch black. The flashback accompanying this segment is, appropriately enough, to the beginning of his drug addiction. When Charlie reaches Jack he provides physical illumination, by way of his flashlight; he also soon broaches the subject of enlightenment.
Charlie: "This place reminds me of confession - those little claustrophobic booths."
Jack: "I wouldn't have taken you for a religious man."
Charlie: "I used to be."
Here it doesn't matter that Charlie isn't feeling religious - his experience will still be one of atonement and redemption. With their dirty, unidealized faces, illuminated by the unseen flashlight, Charlie and Jack form a tableau that in both form and content has direct roots in the Baroque, specifically in the innovative, theatrically lit (tenebrist) works of Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio used real people as models, and he often set them in shallow pictorial spaces with almost black backgrounds. Often we are not shown the source of the light which shines in this darkness - instead it seems to either emanate from divinity, either within or outside the figures (for example in Caravaggio’s The Inspiration of St. Matthew, 1602). The similarity to Caravaggio in the placement and lighting of Charlie and Jack in this scene is striking. Although we know it’s actual source, the light seems to emanate from the two men themselves, mirroring a moment of emotional, if not spiritual, illumination. Later, Charlie literally sees the light from above that leads them to safety (a light denied to the viewer), and thus moves from the darkness of the cave, and the envy, bitterness and fear that is the shadow within, to personal enlightenment.
The Inspiration of St. Matthew, Caravaggio (1602)
John, the character most directly aligned with, or against, faith, also sees a light at a moment of a crisis in belief when he pounds on the hatch in frustration at the end of ‘Deus ex Machina’. That this is later revealed to be Desmond does not deter from the metaphysical significance of the event: grace (only by accident does John save Desmond) working through human means, a primary theme for Christianity, based as it is on a concept of God as incarnate in the world.
Naturalism and Artifice
While the Baroque was primarily concerned with naturalism, it also was deeply imbued with allegory and personification. Lost often presents complex ideas in simpler forms. John compares Charlie's journey to that of the moth, Sun breaks something inside herself when she lies about the shattered glass ballerina. Symbols abound, but many remain to be decoded: Kate’s horse, the polar bear, the numbers. Without the seventeenth century’s strictly defined and recognizable emblematic tradition, the island’s physical and social structure, particularly the ominous but still largely unknown 'Others', implies an allegory that is not easily interpreted.
Lost may be overdetermined with signs but they have not yet been allowed to overtake the naturalistic core of the show. Situations are bizarre but reactions to them - what Descartes (1649) termed 'the passions of the soul' - are not. Jack, Kate and John all weep for their fathers - appropriate reactions under their circumstances. Or so it seems; without the full story of each of their lives we cannot be sure. Lost makes clear the ultimate futility of such a narrative, while nonetheless pursuing a strategy of increasing information over time. Multiple perspectives on a single event - such as Jack’s check-in at the Oceanic counter - dramatically increase the emotional veracity of a scene, but at the same time this broadening of our view to include many perspectives does not mimic reality. We rarely know another person’s experience of the world so directly. But while this narrative structure demonstrates that ‘truth’ can never be completely known, this abstract concept is marginal to Lost’s gradual unfolding of present and past events and the characters’ resulting moments of personal revelation. This consideration of the constructed natures of time, meaning and art is embedded in a commitment to verisimilitude and emotional authenticity - a particularly Baroque quality. Lost does not spin its illusions without providing some truths to ground them. In this world at least, sometimes things are what they seem, and people say what they mean.
Indeed, unlike the postmodern aesthetic, Lost is rooted in sincerity, not irony. Other texts are referenced, but without the ‘hyperawareness on the part of the text itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the conditions of its circulation and reception” that characterizes postmodern popular culture.20 Sawyer's nicknames for Hurley alone read as a catalogue of pop culture references but his cleverness is not self-conscious, and wit does not become parody.21 Locke and Rousseau and Hume do not comment on their namesakes or their corresponding philosophical doctrines. The viewer is presented with the visual information to connect the four-toed statue to the remains of the colossal statue of the Emperor Constantine, and to the fact that all empires collapse in time, but the cleverness of this allusion is not allowed to contaminate the text. Lost is its own world - the characters may joke about their surroundings but they are entirely real to them, and therefore to us. Lost may be Neo-Baroque in its violation of frames, active integration into media dominated consumer society and complex, reflexive narrative strategies, but in a twist on the postmodern denial of the integrated subject, the core of the series remains the integrity of human agency. Outside forces may be revealed to be pivotal - Fate is certainly is playing a strong hand - but the modernist grand narratives of heroic human agency and the gradual unfolding of truth prevail.22 When these themes - heroism and the search for understanding in the face of constant change - are presented as constituents of the intelligible world rather than myths, Lost deviates from the tenets of postmodernism. Instead, Lost belongs to the Neo-Baroque.
Michelle A. Lang
Notes
All fine art reproductions courtesy Wikimedia commons from The Yorck Project.
1 Angela Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004, 25. back
2 On the term 'baroque' and its history see Greg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, London and New York: Continuum, 2004, 1-14. back
3 Germain Bazin, The Baroque: Principles, Styles, Modes, Themes, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1968, 15. back
4 Cited in Kerry Downes, “Baroque”, The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, Vol. 3. New York: Grove, 1996, 262. back
5 Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy for Travellers and Students, trans. Mrs. A.H. Clough, London: T. Werner Laurie, 1908, 220. back
6 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966. back
7 Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger, New York: Dover, 1950/1932. back
8 On Wölfflin’s continued importance for art history, see Vernon Hyde Minor, Art History's History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994, 113-115. back
9 For a comprehensive discussion of the Baroque style within the context of the seventeenth century see John Rupert Martin, Baroque, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977. back
10 Patrick Fuery and Kelli Fuery, Visual Cultures and Critical Theory, London: Arnold, 2003, 24-25. back
11 Angela Ndalianis, "Caravaggio reloaded: neo-baroque poetics," Caravaggio and his World: Darkness and Light, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales; Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003, 72-76. back
12 Ndalianis, 23-25, 97. back
13 www.lostvirtualtour.com back
14 For a list of Lost-related multimedia see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_(TV_series). back
15 knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1514 - 39k - Oct 13, 2006. back
16 Renaissance and Baroque, iv. back
17 J. M. Berger, "Flashbacks, Memory and Non-Linear Time," Lost Online Studies 1.2 back
18 Berger, 2. back
19 Studies in Iconology, New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 92. back
20 Jim Collins, "Television and Postmodernism," Film and Theory: An Anthology, Robert Stam and Toby Miller eds., Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000, 763. back
21 For example, Pillsbury, Jabba, Babar, from the episodes 'The Hunting Party', 'Fire + Water', and 'One of Them', respectively. back
22 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso, 1998, 25.
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