LIMBO; the other a multimillion dollar television epic, LOST. In the first a young boy, in haunting silhouette, moves across a shadowy two-dimensional plane solving a series of perilous puzzles in order to progress; in the second a character named Jack awakens on a mysterious island after a plane crash, soon finds himself the leader of a makeshift band of survivors, and likewise fights to survive in an environment that appears to defy all conventional reason. Both texts invite their audiences to invest in their respective journeys into the inexplicable: LOST asks its audience to keep watching, promising that eventually all of its seemingly random narrative threads will link together into a cohesive whole; LIMBO meanwhile is propelled by the possibility that, perhaps, by continuing through its stages, the player will eventually be able to conceive of where exactly this small boy is located, what this nebulous 'limbo' state actually is. And yet ultimately both texts knowingly thwart this desire for resolution, disabusing their audience of the hope that any of these mysteries will ever resolve into meaning. For the six seasons that it ran (2004-10), LOST proved itself to be a recursive Russian Doll of ambiguity. As the showcontinued from week-to-week viewers were left to hunt for clues to make sense of the narrative's overarching mythology, sifting through a pastiche of sci-fi, horror, mystery, philosophical and spiritualist tropes for evidence from which they might glean answers to the riddle of what was actually going on in the tale. Smoke monsters; electromagnetic Rube Goldberg machines; Egyptian hieroglyphs; ubiquitous recurring number chains; time travel; mysterious caverns with magical properties; every new puzzle piece seemed to tempt revelation, and yet each led only to more obscurity and confusion. Indeed, often it seemed that the writers were just free-associating imagery (something that appears to have been true for the first three seasons at least, as show-runner and writer Damon Lindelof has since indicated in an interview with The Verge*). Eventually, the viewer is compelled to realise that all hope of ultimate explanation is fraught with disappointment. Just as the central characters find their questioning met with only more queries, so too does the audience find that every avenue of reasoning fails to offer absolutes to the experience of this island. Instead we repeatedly watch as characters flushed with surety that they can penetrate the meaning of the island are stripped of their hubris and forced to realise that they too are but unknowing cogs in a larger, incomprehensible metaphysical machine. The physicist Daniel Faraday who claims that the answers lie in science; industrialist Charles Widmore who believes the island can be possessed and exploited for profit; John Locke who experiences a transformative epiphany and comes to see the island as a spiritual oasis; the calculating Ben Linus, political leader of the Others, who, using his mastery of behavioural manipulation schemes his way into power; each figure represents one of numerous diverse fields of human endeavour, each purporting to know the answers to the island, all of whom fail profoundly, robbed of their misapprehensions, and often killed for their presumption. Even the immortal figures like Richard Alpert and Jacob, who appear to themselves be products of these irrational elements, are themselves exposed to be little more than victims of circumstance. Life is mystery, the work wants to suggest, and the grand metaphysical questions of what motivates us all cannot ever satisfactorily be answered, locked as we are behind our subjective vision and singular beliefs. Indeed, the structure of the program itself embraces this notion of an individual's fundamentally limited perspective: each episode is bound to a loose first-person viewpoint as we watch events unfold from one character's angle, even dipping back into personal history that seems comparable to their current circumstance. And in every instance, though they may yearn for comprehension, they consistently fail to see their place in the larger unfolding of events. Curiously (for a narrative that fuels itself utterly with mystery), the final message of the show seems to be that no one can ever know all the answers, can ever escape their bewildered ignorance. There is no key that will unlock meaning, and the pursuit of such answers are merely breadcrumbs leading us down several forking paths of aberrant misinformation, hubristic confusions, and mystic irresolvable vagary. Instead of celebrating the pursuit of ultimately unattainable truth, the narrative instead acts as a cautionary tale: life is mysterious, so don't try to figure it out or you'll just go nuts, be slaughtered, abandoned, or get attacked by a polar bear. And so the endpoint (as much as there is one) comes as our central character descends into a cave to move a gigantic plug in a pool of illuminated water (...honestly, I haven't a clue). Somehow he restores order, and eventually is mortally wounded, left unknowingly wandering, bleeding, back to the exact spot in which his journey began. Jack slumps to the ground, prostrate, his consciousness fading to rest in the same position in which his adventure on this island, long ago, began. He becomes the last in a long line of believers succumbing to death, his eyes now closing, his wandering fugue state now at an end. The game LIMBO likewise ends where it started: the character lying back on the same patch of grass, his eyes sliding shut as a seeming death overwhelms him. The journey to this point has been similarly been fraught with peril, laced with conundrums and complexities that must be overcome. Antigravity machines that require precision and poise to utilise; spidery beasts that must be outpaced or outwitted; mind-controlling bugs; vicious children with elaborate snares; electricity; cavernous drops; decaying suburban ruins; having seen his way through them all, the nameless boy undertakes the final puzzle, and in the course of its solution is propelled, weightless, through a glass pane (much like the monitor/screen through which we are viewing his journey), time slowing as his body flips gracefully through the glistening shards, tumbling to rest in precisely the same position that the game began. Just as in LOST, we struggle onward in LIMBO invited to believe that the truth of where we are and what's going on might at last be revealed, only to realise in the end that we are literally right back where we started... But then something masterful happens: the boy wakes back up. In LIMBO death has not been the end: the boy rises again and sets out once more upon his ceaseless quest. Although nothing substantive in the narrative has been addressed indeed, we have been left in no doubt that this is a literal state of limbo our whole perception of his journey, and its meaning, is fundamentally altered. Here the revelation of the endpoint invites us to embrace the indeterminate state within which we too have existed for a time. Rather than watch a quest for meaning flicker and die we realise that there is no escape from this pattern of repetition and action; we end up right back where we began, having now realised that it was in the doing of things that our actions most mattered. There was no magic endpoint, no final resolve, just action: what you did and how you did it. We are instead invited to lose ourselves in the accomplishment of the game itself; like the unnamed, faceless protagonist, compelled to appreciate our place in this loop of programming and gameplay, we too are ensnared in the unceasing repetition of a platforming purgatory. In its absence of narrative conclusion LIMBO therefore celebrates the momentary, embracing the ephemeral nature of agency. We are presented with the definition of a Sisyphean task, not tasked with rolling a rock up a hill for eternity, but locked in a similarly experiential web without end. And just as Camus described in 'The Myth of Sisyphus', we, like the absurd hero, must struggle on, perpetually rolling the rock up the hill, knowing that there will be no end to his labour, because by embracing this inevitability, by welcoming the truth of it, we claim ownership of the task, folding the noble absurdity of our circumstance back into ourselves. If we are not blindly struggling for an imagined metaphysical enlightenment we become masters of our own action, empowered by the knowledge that it is our actions that define our identity, our morality, ourselves. Thus, when we play through the game again, the ease, the grace with which each dilemma is confronted and conquered delights us with the thrill of a task embraced and elegantly resolved. Both texts, LIMBO and LOST, seem to embrace the structure of a dream. Both begin and conclude with the actions of fading or waking from sleep, a sleep that is emblematic of death; indeed, both texts seem to articulate the Shakespearean adage that 'Our little lives are rounded with a sleep.' The line is taken from his extraordinary play The Tempest, a narrative itself concerned with a mysterious, magical island, removed from the real world.* More specifically the line comes from a scene in which Shakespeare, in a wonderfully self-reflexive acknowledgement of his own practice, is directly advocating the capacity for plays to express the profound truths of human experience. In the scene, the all-powerful Prospero has been presenting a masque for the entertainment of his daughter and her prospective lover Ferdinand (it's also a none-too-subtle warning not to get up to any pre-marital nookie). As he scatters the performers to the wind, mid-performance, he offers a speech about the nature of art, likewise dissipating all the traditional delineations between fiction and lived experience, pretence and reality, dream and the waking world:
These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air, And, like the baseless fabric of vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with sleep. (Act 4, Sc 1, lines 148-58)
I showed you merely a vision, he says, but this vision speaks to our own experience of existence. We too are merely the stuff of dreams, beginning and ending in an immortal sleep our brief span on Earth but the flicker of a transitory illumination, soon reclaimed by the dark. His exquisite, meta-textual play folding our mortal existence, our fantasies, his own theatrical history altogether celebrates humanity's capacity for self-expression and imagination, a means of capturing, even in fragment, the exquisite vibrancy and expressive potential of exploratory play. (He also throws in a magnificent reference to the 'Globe' a literalised world of potential that shimmers with imagination that I have to believe was an acknowledgement of his own Globe Theatre.) For Prospero, as for Shakespeare, the fantastical dream of the theatre was an artful enactment of the most fundamental defining attribute of human experience: our brief, grasping efforts to define our own existence before fading to the transom of death. In their respective articulations of this same vision in television and videogame, LOST and LIMBO too both seek to articulate the span of all human life, and our efforts to comprehend ourselves. Both texts therefore operate as an elaborate form of imagistic ouroboros: the ending immediately reinitiating the beginning, returning us to point of deathly status quo. In LOST this moment presents a conclusion: the eyes close rather than open. Jack is warmed by the sight of the plane full of his friends rising from the island, presumably to a newfound freedom far from the island's strange purgatory. But this seemingly conclusive image merely reinstates the arbitrary nature of the journey that has been undertaken. Jack is back where he began, and despite the text's allusions to an awakening knowledge, or a peace that transcends reason, he has learned nothing of his place in the universe. He has fought for what he believed was right and given all that he could, but is no wiser, and has watched people die arbitrarily at his command, sacrificing themselves for his leadership in wholly unjustified ways; and by extension, we the audience have learned that only frustration, disappointment and death await those who bother to pursue the most fundamental human desires to understand our place in the universe. In LIMBO one is likewise right back where they started, but the world they now view is utterly reborn. By embracing the absurdity of our circumstance, the unknowability of the grand metaphysical truths, we can instead refocus upon the present, and our engagement with ourselves and others. In our exploration of the dream we come to see the value in our every movement and interaction. Gameplay becomes the expression of selfhood, and we illuminate ourselves, validating our own worth to the uncaring void. And so, as all three texts conclude, The Tempest, LOST and LIMBO,the lights dim and we are left to ponder our own place amongst the fantasy. The pair of eyes shut. The dream is over. And we have learned all or nothing as the darkness seeps over us all. * http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/21/3030913/damon-lindelof-on-lost-on-the-verge ** LOST even makes a number of thematic and explicit references to the play: the character of Ben, who appears to be in control of the island like Prospero, has a (adopted) daughter whose romance becomes central to her story, much like Miranda; characters vie for control of the island much as the shipwrecked stewards of the King did; each of the characters brings with them baggage from their previous lives that must be resolved in their time upon the island; and one of Dharma stations on the island is even called 'The Tempest'.
