In Which We Hate The Way We're Speaking To Each Other

Post Mortem

by DICK CHENEY

It's not polite to say who died on Downton Abbey. Most people don't even know. Their lives haven't changed as a result. We love people, especially wealthy individuals, in the specifics, since we sense we may become them. In the abstract, they disappoint us.

this guy

My other favorite show is Sons of Anarchy. Except for the Exorcist-like horror involved in watching Gemma Teller (Katey Segal) have sex scenes with Jimmy Smits, who plays a pimp on the show, it's fantastic. I spent the entire hour flexing my knuckles and lamenting that I'm too old to get on a bike. It would probably end more like this:

The first rule about Fight Club is that you never get on a motorcycle with someone wearing a Duke t-shirt. But we were talking about the death of Opie.

It's impossible to connect the phenomenon of a maudlin young motorcyclist (Ryan Hurst) dying in prison to save his boyfriend with the economy, except to say that watching the members of the MC mourn their large, closeted friend, all I could think of was how much money they saved on the funeral by having it themselves.

basically, your father is an idiot Lady Mary

I was gchatting with someone the other day who was telling me how boring they find scripted television. I explained that was probably because they couldn't see the sychronicity between Branson putting his wife between himself and the British government, and the president doing the exact same thing with Hillary Clinton.

She signed off in a huff and e-mailed me the entire Supreme Court opinion on Roe v. Wade. Having friends on the other side of the aisle is like being married to Lady Mary (tell me when you tire of these comparisons). Everything they think of is completely without regard for the economic realities of the world.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to gchat with Matthew Crawley, probably like sucking on a tootsie roll pop that has asparagus at its center.

branson, you disgust me

No one has done more to diminish the cause of Irish independence than Julian Fellowes. I haven't been this mad since South Park eclipsed the boundaries of bad taste and did a storyline making fun of how Bane sounded in The Dark Knight Rises.

Sorry, my mind is wandering a lot lately. It's a function of old age, and the relentless attacks on Mormonism in the mainstream media. I really don't understand this. One group of people believes in a supernatural human being who is supposed to return to Earth and save the world, and another believes a slightly different version of this myth, but is absolutely crazy for thinking this way.

The only thing worse than that is how many times I'll be writing, "The only thing worse than that" in this essai. The only thing worse than that, though, is how every single joke on Mike & Molly is still about how fat the male in the relationship is. It's bullying, and I find it disgusting. That's his natural build.

buy a large bed please

Doesn't it feel like they're making the bed look especially tiny? My only real problem with scripted television is that every single person on it is completely caucausian. Last night I found myself rewinding the trailer for Alex Cross just to interject a little diversity in my existence. The idea of Tyler Perry as a hardboiled cop hunting Jack Shephard from Lost is beyond my dreams. It makes me think of a Jhumpa Lahiri short story, that's how completely amazing it is.

the answer to Lost was a bright light coming out of a cave. Never forget.

Once I was in a country club where the hazing ritual involved watching all of the Madea movies in chronological sequence while you kept getting messages on your phone saying, "They passed another tax on capital gains!" The fact that no one finds it the least bit strange that Matthew Fox could convincingly play a serial killer should tell us something.

"Brickleberry"

The mere idea of Lost usually reduces me to tears. To cheer myself up I watch this show Brickleberry, which takes place in a national park. The point of Brickleberry is to be offensive, and make jokes about subjects that other shows won't touch. In theory this is an interesting concept but (1) Family Guy has been on the air for over two decades and (2) 90 percent of the jokes are simple racism. (The black character is named Denzel. Haha. Get it? If you don't, you're a fucking square.) (The other ten percent of the jokes are about women and gays.)

You start to understand why my liberal gchat friend hates scripted television. That is, until you watch the finest show airing on any network, The Thick Of It.

Malcolm Tucker and Rebecca Front on "The Thick Of It"

You know how Parks & Recreation pretends to be a show about politics, but is really just a larger forum for the writers of the show to copy down all the funny jokes they read on the internet and have comedians act them out? I can't believe they did an entire election storyline with Leslie Knope, and then occupied her time with solving the obesity problem in Pawnee and feuding over a bathroom. Not even I have that little faith in government.

Ben and December

Here is what all the punchlines on Parks & Recreation revolve around: Leslie is energetic, Ron eats free-range meat, Chris is depressed, Andy is stupid, April is a bitch, Adam Scott has a large head for his body.

You know, it's okay to have a person who has more than one aspect to his personality. It's called a fully-fleshed out character; the show's writers might have seen it in passing during the ninety seconds a day they peel their heads away from their iPhones. The only thing more embarrassing than this season of Parks & Recreation is having to read pathetic Emily Nussbaum essais about how much she worships Amy Poehler or how she doesn't want Parenthood to get canceled. Grow up.

Peter Mannion's aides on 'The Thick Of It'

I guess now that I am "retired", politics just bores me. Art lasts for a substantial duration, blog posts slightly less long. Does anyone remember the Whigs? Or what a dick Andrew Jackson was? I can't muster the energy. It's easier to just look to television for escape. That's why there is no better place to rest your head than the considerable problems of the British.

Unfortunately, most of middle America can't understand a single word said in Malcolm Tucker's Scottish accent, so they watch The Walking Dead instead.
 

The only thing worse than that is. There are people everywhere, when I wake. I have no right to judge them. Wake me up after the election.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about intercourse between Lady Mary and Matthew Crawley.

"Fear Is A Man's Best Friend" - Field Music (mp3)

"Heart" - Field Music (mp3)

In Which The End of Lost Is The Beginning of Something Greater

No Exit

by DICK CHENEY

Lost: The End

creators Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams

I tried to watch the season finale of Modern Family with my wife yesterday, and I didn't understand a word of it. I had to watch the season finale of 30 Rock with the closed captioning on to understand any of the jokes or Julianne Moore's dialogue, although it didn't help that I was forced to cover my eyes whenever Matt Damon appeared because he looks like a creature I invented in Spore.

i'd still take jon hamm without hands Television is doing an incredible job of replicating the real lives of people. The camerawork makes me feel like I'm tagging along in their suitcase. When Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant brought the format of their multi-camera comedy The Office to U.S. shores, I didn't think the new show would be as impossible to understand as the first, especially considering I grew up in this country. It was, and I haven't understood a single word Kathy Bates has said since she joined the show.

TV writers have one set of experiences; the rest of us have a completely different set of experiences. Every day of my life, I talk to Mexican-Americans and Pakistani-Americans and African-Americans and Daniel Faraday. Sure, I'm usually saying, "Could you put that in a plastic bag?" or "U r my constant", but I'm somehow able to communicate with them. Yet everyone on TV is white and I can't understand a single thing they say.

I have not been able to laugh at a single joke Phil has made all season without considerable research except his lol with Kobe. As the final moments of Lost rolled across television screens around the world last night, the disconnect between television writers and the general public grows more distant. People don't like being told that 20 hours of their life was wasted because the writers of Lost read too many messageboards and decided that the show's fans would find it really hilarious if they all met again in heaven.

there's little in the way of postpregnancy care in heavenIf you believe in heaven, this is an insulting, heretical idea. If you don't believe in heaven, why on earth did you elect a president who spends more time advising LeBron James and telling his wife her shoulders look too big in that dress than running this country?

giving birth in heaven takes about two minutes, it's where brooke shields gives birth What happened to Carlton Cuse, Damon Lindelof, and all the other brainaics behind Lost was that they started reading their own press, and feeling bad for what Jeff Jensen's life is going to be like now. They are hardly alone in being corrupted by this development, because Jesse James is doing a television interview in which he'll have to provide a convincing explanation for both infidelity and his passion for the Third Reich.

matthew fox's quips are so much more endearing when you know he's dead Never read what people say about you. The only person who could read his own reviews and not be affected was Donald Rumsfeld and he's now playing a long term-ish game of backgammon with Walt on another undisclosed island. Never cross me, Lambert.

Speaking of which, it did seem fairly unconventional that black people weren't allowed in Lost's version of heaven. All the audience really wanted was more Walt. What kind of show creates a young black kid with magical powers and never has him use them? That's worse than casting Ben Affleck as Daredevil, or anyone. Of course, this is same show that turned Jack Shephard and Hurley into gods but wasn't smart enough to have them part the sea. Even Jesus had to prove he wasn't just a regular bro.

Unlike most of the shows I mentioned earlier, ninety percent of which were written by Mindy Kaling, Lost at least became simpler to understand over time. This is hardly a point in its favor. While much of television has abandoned the cinematic techniques of film presumably because the guy who invented steadicam has naked pictures of Jeff Zucker doing E from Entourage, Lost still believes it can achieve a kind of visual transcendance.

kind of a metaphor for the whole show there lefleuerAt times it has been successful at that, but not in last night's finale, and not since ABC slashed the big budget effects for an endless series of jungle sets that all look identical. We learned, mainly, that the entire sideways world in which Oceanic Flight 815 didn't crash was just everybody being really dead. Some have questioned why Ben Linus would continue hanging around in purgatory to pursue a romantic relationship with the actress who played his daughter, but that's sort of self-explanatory.

ted turner faces a similar sophie's choice every day Since Lost came out of thin air and J.J. Abrams lost interest in the show once he started having regular sex, there was no guiding overlord to say, this is where a 100+ part drama has to go to stay compelling. The three most annoying and clichéd dramatic techniques in the world, all of which Lost used with equal aplomb, are as follows.

1. Everyone is always constantly debating what to call each other. "Can I call you John?" "Call me John." "I'm not Mr. Locke. I'm Mr. John." "Call me Jack." "Blah blah blah." "I'm gay." "I'm bald."

2. Having the end be a take on the beginning. Not even James Patterson does this anymore it's such a joke.

3. Having a character apparently die and reappear again, especially when he is the only pilot on the fucking island.

you're a pilot? i thought you were a doorman Tragically, when it most counted, Lost underestimated its audience. Instead of coming up with a deep mythology to explain the island's supernatural powers, they just got high and read too many Philip Pullman books. In the weirdest "action" scene in recent television memory, before Jack turned Hurley into Jacob he attacked the smoke monster like Morpheus, and Kate killed the the poor guy by shooting him in the back and pushing him off the cliff.

If the writers had just listened to the messageboards (just as Matthew Weiner draws sustenance from these recaps), they would have realized that "satisfying" your audience never works. Surprising your audience always does. Answering a burning question might feel good for the brief seconds it no longer burns, but compelling human drama requires more than plaudits and a really weird concert that presented the unlikely combination of master pianist Daniel Faraday and Driveshaft.

you know you have problems when you're a musician and you can't laid in heaven It would be a shame if the last moments of Lost soured our memories from the artful beginning, when the show's unique form, content and characters provided frights, laughs and drunken driving arrests on Oahu in equal measure. What a show! There are more moments in Lost's brilliant run that will stay with me longer than all of Truffaut or Sartre. Somewhere, someplace, there is a living record of Evangeline Lilly's life before she became the centerpiece of an urban legend about a lost census worker.

The first stories about these characters were compelling and somewhat fresh, by the fifth or sixth story the situations became somewhat familiar. Writers get tricked into repeating their finest moments. It's kind of like how an evening with an ex-girlfriend usually ends in a lot of disagreement about whether or not Matt Damon is now a candidate for assisted suicide and impotency in the bedroom.

shannon was just a huge fan of the republican guard What will happen to all the friends I made during these six seasons? Some will move on to other places, others will reappear on ABC shows because their contracts aren't up yet. I don't know for sure. When I first began reviewing Lost on this site, I was so immature I thought they would tell us what the numbers were. Now I know that's no longer possible. The numbers don't mean anything, Alison Janney was a throwaway guest appearance for an Emmy nomination, and Juliet really did die in that explosion.

Lost showed us the possibilities for the medium of television - how it can undertake themes more complex and sophisticated than the abbreviated length of feature films. It can show us really changing, instead of simply portraying the illusion of change. Being separated from it feels like missing an arm, or a penis. I don't want all my friends to go away, but I'll try to make new ones.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his previous recaps of Lost here.

In Which All of Lost Is Local

You Had Me Several Years Ago When I Was Still Quite Naive

by DICK CHENEY

In political life, it's always more fun to characterize yourself as the opposition, unless you're Rahm Emanuel and you do most of your work in showers. Of course this is only one of the trillion political maxims that exist, most of which Tom Delay whiplashes on the backs of his slaves. Why is politics full of clichés? Mainly because the people involved in it are also clichés.

don't trust anyone shorter than 5'0"
Liberal imaginings of government's highest office are always patently off base. I keep waiting for Robert Reich's lame memoir to be adapted into a feature starring Peter Dinklage. Ivan Reitman's Dave turned the presidency into a joke, The American President was basically about the commander-in-chief having an online dating presence, which was totally inappropropriate. (It is also unknown why he listed 'ginger hair, cropped short' on his list of preferences.)

stay out of the oval office lebowski Despite the fact that the First Lady had perished in office, it is proper to wait at least until you're reelected or propositioned by Joslyn James. I can't even imagine how Laura Bush dying and George W. Bush roadraging Rachel Uchitel and Helen Mirren would have gone over with the general public, although considering our popularity at the end, it might have been an option worth trying.

The West Wing was supposed to be a snappy and exciting drama; instead it turned into a depressing soap that paralled its creator's decline into paranoia and psychosis. Its target audience was composed of sideburned chaps who think short novels reimagining FDR's arrival at Malta are fun for weekend reading. By the time The West Wing was over, most of the liberal enthusiasm and idealism was confined to California, where it raised the marginal tax rate and bankrupted the state.

Only the most naïve and silly people in our culture think politics are important, but if Glenn Greenwald and Alex Pareene didn't exist to parrot liberal dogma, actual parrots would have to work for a living. I can think of no better way to hammer this point home than by explaining that I was freely elected the vice president of the United States. Me.

Have you already perceived where I am going with this line of air-tight reasoning? Because I had to explain to both my wife and my concubine that last night's Evangeline Lilly flashback was from eight years ago, and the only people who look as good as they did ten years ago are Vladimir Putin and Jenna Fischer above the waist. To take Lost seriously is making a great error. This once-great show prefers to be a parody of itself.

hate u guys

If I ever came face to face with Carlton Cuse, I'd cut him. If I ever saw Damon Lindelof, I'd french kiss his wife for the eight years that her husband stole from me. Last week's shocking main character death quadrilogy rivaled the end of Mr. Eko for sheer stupidity. If you weren't going to do anything with these characters after six seasons, at least give us a decapitation or two. I want to see Lapidus' head on a platter.

This week's lazy storytelling exercise reimagined the parable of Jacob and Esau, or something. I was never really too hot on the Bible, or the Cider House Rules, or any proscribed behavior other than horseback riding. Several conclusions can be drawn from this exercise, and since I am so filled with rage, I can barely compose paragraphs:

The Mother, in the same fashion as Esau did afterwards, was able to reconstitute herself in smoke. How else could she have filled the hole above the Orchid station and murdered all of Esau's friends?

'was josiah bartlett as kewl as he seems IRL?' Perhaps she even assumed the form of Jacob and Esau's real mother, Claudia, to Esau. She also might have been one (or all) of men Jacob and Esau observed in the woods.

When confronted with the truth, she did not deny this to her sons, and they both made their own decisions.

It is reasonable to assume, as the Mother says at one point, that there really were no other people on the island than the three of them.

'jacob, why did the character of Walt exist?'
Jacob and Esau can't kill one another. If you kill a god by stabbing it in the heart before it speaks to you, it dies. Going for the post-mortem reacharound is largely frowned upon.

If you take the life of a producer of Lost in this fashion, the rewards may be some kind of production deal or a chance to ghostwrite the next Mission: Impossible.

Young boys on the island bear a striking resemblance to a certain teenage pop star, while men unconsciously imitate a drunk Fred Armisen.

from this day forward you will be known as Justin Bieber People who pretend to be too holier-than-thou to watch all of Lost are probably incredibly self-involved to begin with.

If you're eating a bunch of chicken surrounded by lettuce, don't call it a salad.

Sometimes at night I think about Fred Armisen having sex with Peggy from Mad Men and I sob.

come on peggy, he's old enough to be your advertising mentor/father figure Wasn't the answer to Lost just Dust from The Golden Compass? Not coincidentally I hate The Golden Compass and Philip Pullman seems like a real asshole, like the kind of person who always come up to you at the senior center and wants to pick your brain about some grey spot on his balls.

this was the answer to Lost. take a good look. The smoke monster's master plan to kill the castaways involved going to the Ajira plane Widmore had rigged with explosives, stealing those explosives, goading everyone into taking the submarine, and hoping it all worked out. Genius! Why didn't Allison Janney think of doing this to her kids?

Now with only three and half hours remaining on Lost's ticking clock, what can we really expect? This episode's flashback to the show's magical first season was an attempt to prove that Lost's writers knew what they were doing all along. We know this isn't true because most of the show's writers work for V and Flashforward now.

Hitchcock, as we all know, explained that the MacGuffin described what was in the briefcase, which we could never see. As he famously put it to Truffaut:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?", and the other answers "Oh that's a MacGuffin."

The first one asks "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "It's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers "Well, then that's no MacGuffin!" So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.

When we were introduced to the idea of Jacob, he seemed salty and mysterious, like dating Russell Brand. Now it turns out he's just a guy who liked to beat the shit out of his younger brother while Josiah Bartlett's press secretary looks on approvingly. There are no fucking lions in the Scottish highlands.

What was so great about Lost was the feeling of discovery, that another 'what if' lay around the corner. We don't want answers to our questions; we never really want to know what's in the briefcase. Who cares what's in there? If you know that it's a bunch of diamonds, does it make Pulp Fiction any better? Is The Golden Compass less tedious if you believe the reason magic exists in the world is because of something definable and concrete?

Cursed by the notion that they needed to 'resolve' all of the questions the show has posed, Cuse and Lindelof wandered away from the central point. The answer to your question might make you feel better, but it also might lead you to a much less entertaining question.

We care about the characters of Lost in the present, not in the past. Despite the fact that the lives of Jack, Kate, Hurley, Jin, Sun, Michael, and Henry Gale are meaningless constructs, we want to believe that their purpose, and the purpose of the entire show, was greater than the sum of meaningless parts. We don't care about where we come from so much as where we're going.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find his past reviews of Lost here.

"Legend In Your Own Time" - Carly Simon (mp3)

"Mockingbird" - Carly Simon (mp3)

"Why" - Carly Simon (mp3)

"The Right Thing To Do" - Carly Simon (mp3)