Lost 6/15: Jacob

Okay, I'm back! What'd I miss? Ten episodes? And the show ends forever in a week? Aw crap. That plan of mine for illustrating an episode a week didn't really pan out did it. I must have driven myself a little batshit trying to do the first four of these, because I haven't had the stomach to attempt another for the last two months.

And speaking of batshit: by way of commentary on the most recent episode, "Across the Sea", I'd like to copy and paste verbatim what I posted on Nikki Stafford's "Lost" blog late last night. I don't pretend that it makes any rational goddamn sense whatsoever, I merely offer it as evidence that this show is melting my brain out my ears and really does need to come to an end as swiftly as possible:

The two brothers seem to be representative of duality. The simple read is that Jacob is good and Brother is bad. But I'm starting to sense a more complex thing going on: The simple white and black represents how Jacob sees things, while MiB's outlook is more... complicated. Jacob represents dualism--the tendency to classify phenomena into "good" and "bad". Exemplified by the frantic impulse in monotheistic religions to categorize everything in the world either as holy/good/Godlike, and unholy/evil/Demonic. MiB represents non-dualism, the idea found more often in Eastern religions that everything in the world exists on an axis between the sacred and the profane, but all originating from the same source. MiB sees everything in shades of grey. He chooses to be with his Roman people, but he's not blind to the flaws in their character. He believes his "mother" to be hopelessly insane, but when she's right, she's right. Mother appreciates the mix of light and dark that burns so strong in MiB; it makes him special. It makes him the ideal candidate to stand astride this twilight realm between heaven and hell, taking on the souls of those who can't let go of this life, adding them to his strength to protect the source of all life. Jacob--poor, simple Jacob--played his part because accepted and continues to accept his mother's cover story. He sees himself as the good one and MiB as the bad one because he is incapable of seeing complexity. I guess he plays his part still in some way, as he endlessly scours the human race for "good" candidates. Meanwhile MiB rages helplessly, just fucking stop it. He's enraged at Jacob and enraged at himself for having unwittingly played into his mother's scheme.

There, I defy you to make sense out of that.

Lost 6/4: Locke

An illustration based on "Lost" Season 6, Episode 4, "The Substitute".

I loved everything about this episode. Particularly that scene at the dining room table that I pulled the quote from. Such a quiet scene, but in its way it was the payoff to everything Locke has struggled with throughout his life. The dude has continually been used, duped, blindsided, and ultimately threw his life away. And he was vulnerable to it all because he could never let go of his grandiose fantasies of the life that could have been, if only this or that had gone differently. In that one moment with Helen he bravely chose to let life be as it is, and thus opened the door for happiness to finally come to him.


Here's my thumbnail for the next illustration, based on Episode 5, "The Lighthouse." Ah, the breaking-glass montage composition, beloved of hack comic book artists since time immemorial.

Lost 6/3: Kate

An illustration based on "Lost" Season 6, Episode 3, "What Kate Did".

I liked this episode a lot. I don't share the antithapy to Kate episodes that many fans seem to have. Not to be some kind of Kate-apologist, I'm just saying that I think her stories tend to be as well-done as those of any of the other characters. It's not as if I'm harboring some kind of ridiculous schoolboy crush on the woman. Well maybe I am saying that. The second thing.

...and my rough sketch for the next illustration, based on Episode 4, "The Substitute." Seeing as how Episode 8 is going to air in a couple days, I'm already getting hopelessly behind.

Lost 6/1: Sawyer

Welcome to my Lost Season 6 project.

I'm trying once again to produce artwork corresponding to each new episode of this show that I'm so hopelessly obsessed with. Instead of a bunch of head sketches like I did last season, I thought it might be interesting to do full illustrations. It gives me a chance to continue to practice drawing likenesses, while also integrating type and experimenting with various other montage effects.

One thing that hasn't changed since last season is that I'm still running several weeks behind each episode! Partially that's due to my laziness, partly to my desire to let each story percolate in my mind until I settle on a single image that best represents it.

If you're a Lost fan, I hope you take this journey with me, and please take the time to leave a comment. Thanks.

Lost 6/2: Locke

Kate With Gun

LOST: Kate

All these drawings are based on scenes from the most recent Kate-centric episode, “Whatever Happened, Happened”. Drawing Kate turned out to be a colossal pain in the butt, with many more ‘misses’ than ‘hits’. Attractive women are always a problem to draw, and trying to express Evangeline Lilly’s unique pixie quality without distorting her horrifically, proved to be a huge challenge. I’m anxious to publish the results I finally arrived at, good or bad, and move the hell on.

There’s been a lot of development in the longtime characters this season. Many of them have come to personal turning points, and it usually feels well-earned, it’s not cheap catharsis. We humans have to go to difficult places to confront the delusions we’ve spent our lives laboring under, and we have to get humbled and defeated many, many times before we start to get the message. Therefore it’s gratifying to see characters who have made the same mistakes throughout the series (and throughout their lives, via the flashback structure) actually make some progress.



I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how meaty the character-focused episodes have been. It was apparent that we were in for several episodes detailing how the O6 all wound up on the Ajira plane, but I wasn’t sure they’d really deliver the goods when the time came. The writers really had their work cut out for them this episode. They had to plausibly motivate Kate to leave her adopted child behind and get on the plane with the hated Jack, for no readily apparent reason. Not only did they do so, but they did it in a way that got to the heart of the character’s fundamental issues.



Kate’s fundamental flaw is emotional selfishness, and her tendency to justify selfish actions as altruistic. This episode beautifully orchestrated a series of events that led her to that crucial understanding of herself. Her love for Aaron—and consequent guilt about lying--was such that she had to stare her own weakness right in the face and be changed by it.



It seems to me that once she had to honestly face her less-than-noble motives for adopting Aaron, she might start to acknowledge her pattern of doing whatever is emotionally convenient for her. She might look back over the rest of her life and see that she’s behaved selfishly in other important moments. For starters, the act that changed her life, the killing of her stepfather. She preferred to believe that she did it for the sake of her mother, but most likely she wanted revenge for her own reasons. She also might be inclined to look at her history with Jack and Sawyer: She kept them both on the hook because it suited her, and now she has to live with having lost both.



It also seems to me that this episode throws a new light on Jack’s abandonment of Kate and Aaron, similar to the Sun/Jin episodes that made Jin’s behavior more sympathetic. Jack basically went crazy and walked out on Kate and Aaron, boo hiss. But consider the fact that Kate’s motivation for adopting Aaron was to fill the emotional void left by Sawyer. Jack had to have realized on some level that he wasn’t who Kate wanted to be with. He was Kate’s partner in raising Aaron because, once again, it was convenient for her to have him around.



Evangeline Lilly was called upon to really sell the heartbreaker of a climax to this episode, and she did. I wanted to try to do a picture from the scene with Aaron, but when it came time to watch it again I had to turn the sound off, I didn’t want to revisit the place that scene took me. It was a hell of a painful scene, requiring some serious acting, and she killed it.



Next in the barrel: Ben Linus.

Mahalo at'cha boy!

LOST: Sayid

The drawings in this post are from the most recent Sayid-centric episode, "He's Our You".



Sayid sure is a dashing fellow. Not to continue to dwell on the good looks of certain male cast members, but I think of Naveen Andrews as one of Saddam's enforcers in the same way I think of Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist: It's nice to imagine that people in that line of work could be so photogenic, but I kind of doubt it.



Sayid is in many ways more evolved than many of his fellow survivors. Unlike Kate, Jack, Locke and Sawyer, Sayid is perfectly capable of getting out of bed in the morning and putting on his socks without suffering a crisis of identity. Unfortunately this leads him to get sidelined a bit by the writers because he offers less dramatic potential. He's generally a can-do, helpful fellow to have around. He doesn't add complication to the plot by making ten baffling, self-sabotaging decisions before breakfast.



Sayid's identity problem revolves around one thing: the fact that this sensitive, cultured, and compassionate person happens to be a brutal thug by trade. He's understandably uncomfortable with the fact that he used to torture and kill people for a living. It's not a deeply-held neurosis, it's more like a sizeable black mark on his employment history. Or so it seemed. This episode's function, character-wise, was to show that Sayid has struggled all his life with the question of whether he's a lover or a killer.



Appropriate to this season when many of the characters are learning giant, soul-searing things about themselves, this episode gets to the heart of the question he is asking about himself: Is he a brutal thug by circumstance or by nature. Ben maintains that killing is Sayid's nature, however much he pretends to shun it. This could be Ben saying whatever's convenient to get Sayid to do what he wants. But I think that the Others are very much concerned with the acknowledgement and integration of the shadow parts of the personality.



In terms of acting, I was struck by the "war face" that Sayid wears when he's carrying out an execution. His eyes get several degrees colder as he does what he's best at, and he seems to show no remorse. I tried to capture that chilling look in these last two sketches, but I seem to have failed because everybody who looks at it thinks it looks like he's Jesus, or he's stoned, or both.



Next up: Kate. Mahalo at ya boy!

LOST: Sawyer

I've been meaning to draw some studies of Sawyer (Josh Holloway) for awhile. Okay, let's just get this out of the way right up front: I could go on about the structure of his face or whatever, but the fact is that Sawyer's fun to draw because he's a sexy motherfucker. I'm not afraid to say that. It's an impartial observation, It's not like I want to have his children or anything. Since Lost also boasts the likes of Kate, Juliet, and Charlotte, it's never given me occasion to question myself. I'm pretty sure anyway.



This is the second in my series of character studies from Lost. I'm lucky that the episode from a couple weeks ago ("La Fleur") was Sawyer-centric, because he's an ideal subject with which to argue my theory of the show: that the true battle of good and evil is waged one's own psyche. Sawyer was the first character that caused me to make note of his heaving, manly pectorals... uh, I mean his true self/ false self division.



Remember the last scene of the "Long Con" episode? We've witnessed him being a perfect heartless bastard both on the island and in the flashbacks, yet it's impossible not to read the conflict in him. He explains his behavior with "I'm not a good person; never did a good thing in my life" , which sounds a little too insistent. This is not self-analysis, it's something he's trying to convince himself of. He's behaving in the way he thinks he has to.



Sawyer's life was ruined by a bad man when he was a kid. In a kid's logic, the way to not be hurt again is to become the bad person. Even on the island where survival depends on cooperation, he compulsively acts out that role. And that's the kicker: Most of us spend our adult lives desperately clinging to defense mechanisms that have outlived their usefulness. Sawyer evolves, but it's a slow, earned evolution, requiring him to get his nose rubbed in his own shit a time or two.



"La Fleur" is basically a showcase for his character having blossomed into who he really is. The self-centered jackass has been replaced by someone who constantly thinks of the good of the group. As I frame-stepped through the episode doing sketches, I noticed that there's barely a shot where Holloway doesn't look like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. His sweaty, often-shirtless shoulders... sorry, forgot where I was. Having finally jettisoned the past he develops naturally into a leader and caretaker. His selfishness was never who he actually was, it was something to mask pain, like any other addiction.



The centerpiece of the episode is the encounter at the park bench. Sawyer enters into the conversation fully intending to lie his head off, and that's the only moment where the old smirking con man emerges:



But by the time he opens his mouth he's realized that there's no percentage in lying and he owns his actions without apology. The other party is duly impressed. I'm of the opinion that the Others' ideas of "good" and "bad" are based less on moral behavior than on having an integrated personality. Someone like Juliet may not be terribly happy and may be capable of evil acts, but she knows who she is. The castaways were mostly walking basket cases and therefore unworthy, but the Sawyer that is encountered at the park bench is someone who might be readily welcomed into the Others' fold.

LOST: Locke

I'm so glad this show is back on the air. My wife and I have never watched an episode twice, and after season 5 is over it's going to be our great pleasure to spend the hiatus working our way through the whole series in anticipation of the last season.

These images of John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) are all drawn from the latest episode, "The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham". (I won't be spoiling any plot points, btw.)



Everybody who watches "Lost" has their own theory on what it's all about, right? Well here's mine: I think that the idea of good guys and bad guys is a cover for a deeper theme. Locke in particular is someone who's always being pulled in two directions at once, trying to decide what side to take, who to listen to, what to believe. (It was Locke himself who cryptically introduced the good vs. evil theme with a pair of chess pieces in the pilot episode.)



As the series approaches its conclusion, the sides in the larger conflict are coming into sharper focus. But this episode contains some strong hints that no one is completely good, neither side worthy of trust. Perhaps the two sides in the war are offering Locke a false choice. Perhaps the real struggle is within himself.



One thing that struck me early on in the stories is the way that most of the castaways were people at war with their own nature, caught between what psychoanalysis calls the "true self" and the "false self". People who often say "no" to their better instincts because they're trapped in a neurotic idea of themselves. Locke's dichotomy, I would think, is that for all his babble about being a "man of faith", he's terribly lacking in faith in himself. He wants to be saved by taking on the external role of a leader, but that makes him vulnerable to being manipulated. When he can get his answers from inside and stop being pulled this way and that, then he will have made progress.




As I was cycling through the episode looking for scenes to draw, I was really struck by Terry O'Quinn's work in the following scene. I think it demonstrates what I'm saying nicely:



In this scene Locke is trying to convince Kate of something, but she ends up putting the spotlight on him, and he's not happy with what's on display there. The first shot is earlier in the exchange, where he's trying to project the image of the wise, serene leader that he'd like to be seen as. As the camera tracks in and she grills him about his own life, the mask crumbles and O'Quinn makes his wonderfully expressive face cycle through pain, regret, heartbreak and flashes of rage. He's still very much in the grip of his demons. Poor Locke, so desperate to escape into a larger persona, but the small scared man is always right below the surface.

I'll try to expand upon this theory in future posts, looking at different characters in the series.