PopMatters Best of TV on DVD |

PopMatters DVDs | Part 5 - Beyond the Envelope

"Lost has become nothing less than one of the defining works of art of our time, a complex allegory for the confusion of living in our hyper-accelerated, media-saturated culture. While on the surface it’s about a group of plane crash survivors exploring the bizarre island they’ve been stranded on, the show is really about the experience of being bombarded with sensory information at all times and the way our personal biases distort our attempts to process all of these clues, with the end result that everyone has a fragment of the truth but not the whole deal. It’s the perfect metaphor for an age of Wikipedia, Fox News vs. the “liberal media,” and the power of the internet to turn the voices of the people into a screaming cacophony. A decade ago The X-Files captured the paranoid zeitgeist of the ‘90s with the catchphrase “The Truth is Out There,” insisting that we were living in a web of lies and needed to break free. Lost posits a more complicated scenario: we’re surrounded by truth and lies all the time, but who can tell which is which?"