Sinema7

(Other Sinema7 blog posts about Lost are available at http://sinema7.net/tag/lost/)

The Smoke Monster, the Man in Black, and Fake Locke are, we now know, all the same and I will call that being, Smokey. The conversation between Jacob and Smokey (Man in Black currently inhabiting Locke’s body) is reminiscent to the conversation between God and Satan at the beginning of the biblical Book of Job. There seems to be a long history between the two. Jacob describes Smokey to Hurley as “an old friend who became tired of my company.”  In Jacob and Smokey there seems to be a representation of good and evil.

Jacob keeps bringing people to the Island to prove that humans are not innately corruptible.  Smokey works to prove him wrong.  Jacob tells Richard that he doesn’t help the people he brings to the island because he wants them to do the right thing without being told what it is.  In his conversation with Hurley in the cab he emphasizes that returning to the Island is a choice.

According to Smokey, Jacob is the protector of the Island. Smokey seems to be trying to escape the Island but Jacob seems to have been able to come and go. He visits various Flight 815 survivors prior to their arrival. We now know that these people are candidates to replace Jacob. In earlier episodes we are led to believe that Jacob speaks only through Ben but later we find out that Ben has never seen Jacob, but Richard has. We don’t actually see Jacob until the final episode of season 5. Some of the things the Others claim he directed them to do caused me to spend at least 5 seasons thinking the Others are the bad guys and that Jacob might be a force for evil. As the story unfolds we find out Jacob is Smokey’s adversary. Continue reading

A Serious Man poses some questions of Biblical proportion: What does God want from me? Are the bad things that happen some sort of a sign? Am I righteous? What have I done to deserve this agony?

Larry, a physics professor who teaches the theory of uncertainty, begins to live it. According to Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox, which appears among the physics equations on the board in Larry’s classroom, a cat is placed in a box with a flask which may or may not break and emit radioactive poison. According to quantum physics as long as we don’t check to see what happened to the cat there is a superposition of states in which the cat exists in every possible state simultaneously. In other words, until you open the box and look the cat is both alive and dead – a quantum system that is a mixture of states.

The simultaneous car accidents in which one man lives and one man dies sort of echo this theme of alive and dead, as does the story of the Dybbuk at the beginning of the film. The two scenes in the synagogue juxtapose a funeral followed by a bar mitzvah. Larry does seem a bit like the cat in the box being acted upon rather than acting, uncertain whether he is spiritually dead or alive. Larry has no context for answers, only questions, confusion, and pain. Continue reading