UNWANTED CHILDREN

One of the issues I had with LOST is how it treated children like Aaron, Emma and Zach. At times, the portrayal of children were mere props. This includes Walt, who was supposed to be a major character into the series until a large growth spurt wrote him out of the series.

But as adults, we did not view the series through the eyes of a child. How one reacts to an entertainment show is based upon one's own life experiences. That is why writers try to use universal themes and events to give commonality to the characters so we can glean familiar traits and conflicts to be resolved in the story.

The show could be viewed now as a series of unwanted children stories.

Locke was probably the earliest example. He was the consequence of a smooth talking con man taking advantage of a naive country girl. After his miraculous birth, his mother refused to hold him. Locke was abandoned by his parents within minutes of being born. That scar was burned deep into Locke. He called his mother "crazy." He did not fit into his foster homes. He had no relationship with his father, until he came back into his life to steal a kidney.  No wonder Locke rebelled against his own nature and authority. He wanted to be in charge of his own life. He wanted to find a normal home life. It is telling that at an early age Locke transposed his feelings into artwork which included a dangerous smoke monster.

Kate also had bad childhood issues. She was raised by an army officer father, Sam Austen, and her mother. But Kate felt deeply betrayed when she found out that the man who raised her was not her "real" father. And once that secret was out, her "real" father  - - - an abusive drunk - - - came back to the house, Kate lashed out. She felt abandoned by the man he thought was her father. She felt abandoned by her mother who took more time and effort to please Wayne than maintain her relationship with Kate. As such, Kate began to act up in order to regain her mother's attention.  As a child,  a store clerk caught Kate and her friend, Tom, stealing a lunchbox from a small convenience store. Jacob intervened and paid for the lunchbox, tapping her nose, and telling her to "be good." Later,  Kate and Tom recorded a message and put it and a toy airplane and a baseball into the lunchbox and buried it under a tree as a time capsule. It is telling that Kate transposed her feelings into becoming a trouble maker to get attention. One way to do so was to runaway from home. Make her mother miss her. The toy airplane became of symbol of Kate's desire to runaway from her parents.

 Jack had different childhood issues. He was raised by an upper middle class professional couple. His father was a brilliant but boastful surgeon. He was never around when Jack was growing up. And when he talked to Jack, it was usually to correct him or knock him down a peg. Jack felt isolated from his parents. And as an only child, he had the desire to succeed in order to re-gain the perceived lost affection from his parents. So he tried very hard to match his father's accomplishments. And when he succeeded and began a successful surgeon, his father did not change. He was still critical of his son. The lack of respect was crippling to Jack's ego.

James Ford a/k/a Sawyer had a traumatic childhood that scarred his psyche. He carried with him the story of how a con man came into his rural town and seduced his mother and stole all his family's money.  He said that the man, Anthony Cooper or "Sawyer," claimed that he loved his mother and promised to take her out of Alabama. Sawyer realized that her mother had betrayed his father. His mother chose a stranger over the family. Sawyer's father found out and became a deranged person.  He shot his wife then turned the gun on himself, while young James hid under the bed and watched. At the funeral, James began a letter to the con man, vowing to find him one day and kill him. Jacob  gave him a pen when his dried out, and he finished the letter, though he promised his uncle that he would not complete it.  In his bitterness and the traumatic emotional scar of a broken family, Sawyer's quest for revenge turned him into the man he hated since he was a boy.

Hurley also had abandonment issues. He was close with his mother and father. Everything seemed to be great. He was helping his dad rebuild a car, when suddenly one day, he left. All he gave him was a candy bar. That candy bar became a crutch to stay off depression. Hurley gained weight, became introverted, and began to fantasize about a better things. Hurley became a loner. As a result, he never thought that he would amount to much. He would go from dead end job to dead end job. Even his closest friend would take off and leave him alone.  He blamed his loneliness on the fact that it must have been his fault that his father left the family. He had to be punished for breaking up the family. And when he suddenly found wealth and the family was reunited, Hurley was ashamed by the superficial love shown by the people around him. He felt that the money was a curse, but he really believed deep down that he was the one that was cursed so that bad things would happen to people close to him.

In these examples, we find small children trying to deal with serious adult issues: abandonment, betrayal, harsh criticism to belittlement, traumatic emotional scars and cursed loneliness. And in these early years, the characters made certain choices that appear to haunt them for the rest of their lives. Locke pushing hard to find a family but as a result pushes away the good people. Kate only knows how to run away from her problems rather than directly dealing with them. Jack gives up all aspects of his life to make sure his father would one day be proud of Jack's accomplishments. Hurley learns to blame himself for the troubles of the people around him. At some early point in time, each of the main characters felt that someone they cared about did not want them.

It is a universal fact that babies and young children cling and bond to their parents. They need the close attachment for nourishment and safety. They get upset if they think a parent is abandoning them ("don't leave me alone!") or not paying attention. They cannot care for themselves. It is the care and affection they receive as a young child which molds how they will grow up.  Kate felt this deep pain of her childhood scars coming to the forefront when she took Aaron home to be raised by her. This was the same lie which she lived in her own childhood. Kate beat herself up so much that her solution was again to run away from the responsibility of caring for Aaron to find Claire in a apparent suicide mission to get back to the island. Kate abandoned Aaron much like her step-father abandoned her.  Kate knew that her actions would cause Aaron deep pain later in life. But her own history repeated itself when she left Aaron.

We saw the main characters as adults with childlike issues. And perhaps, that is how the main characters saw themselves. The characters had similar traits of being sentimental, emotional, bitter and feeling unwanted by their parents. Where do unwanted children wind up? An orphanage.

One small pebble of doubt in a young child's mind can snow ball into a huge emotional problem as an adult. How does a young child perceive his or her being put in an orphanage? A prison to punish them for something they did wrong to break up their family? A place where useless people are thrown away? 

The seeds of the entire LOST island story could have been established in the imaginations of the orphans who dreamed of what their lives would become if they could control them. Each of the children could bring an element to their group storybook tale of woe to the schoolyard: Locke the dangerous island monster; Kate the airplane to run away from their problems; Hurley the curse of crashing the plane; Sawyer the lies that turn matters into life and death actions; and Jack trying to prove that he is worthy of a parent's praise.

What if the basis of LOST is the group imagination of orphans acting out their psychological issues in their own Wizard of Oz fantasy play time. Children have vivid imaginations. They can recreate battles in the back yard; Star Wars space fights in the basement with paper towel tubes as light sabers; they can dream of tropical paradises; they can create monsters in the closet or boogie men under the bed; they can transform themselves into doctors, pilots, hunters, assassins, soldiers, beauty queens, witches and kings, and  all with the lack of moral right or wrong since to them it is all mere "play."

As normal adults, we have forgotten more childhood memories than we realize. It may be the clutter of the modern day multitasking, but at some time in the future the mental clouds will part and those forgotten memories will resurface like they happened just yesterday. An example of this is in elderly patients with various forms of dementia: they may not know the names of their family members, but they can tell vivid stories from the childhood. How or why people suddenly "awaken" or focus in on lost childhood memories is unknown. But that same mystery is apparent in the sideways world when the characters have to remember in order to move on. In LOST, it may have been to remember the fantasy stories of abandoned orphans in order to obtain peace of mind.