Did you get up at 5am to watch the final episode of Lost? I didn’t. I fell out of love with Lost some time in the middle of series 3, like many people, when we all realised we’d have to hang in for another three series to understand the point of the magic numbers, the hatch, the polar bears and the flipping Smoke Monster/Man In Black/eh?. I wasn’t sure I could cope with three more series of Jack’s earnest heavy breathing, so I gave it up.
However, lots of people stuck with it, and there’s been a lot of talk this weekend about the personalities of die-hard Lost fans, as their faith was about to be rewarded in telly heaven. Are they all internet geeks? Lonely obsessives? Mad conspiracy theorists?
There’s no doubt Lost attracted a certain kind of core viewer, and all the hints of a sinister higher power at work on the island played into our conspiracy fantasies. But here’s a thought — would a series like Lost have been as popular 30 years ago, or are we developing certain personality traits that make us more interested in shows that play on our paranoia?
The US psychologist Jean Twenge has reviewed hundreds of studies going back to the 1960s, and she reports that there has been a marked increase in the number of children and adults experiencing anxiety or neuroticism in recent years. In addition, more people report an increasingly strong feeling of an ‘external locus of control’ — the feeling that our lives are governed by forces outside our own individual power. Timothy Melley, author of Empire Of Conspiracy, explains that we’re more likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories when we feel we lack control, and when we hold strong individualist values. Both the UK and the US are strongly individualistic cultures (see the Hofstede index), and likely to become even more so. All these traits make us long for certainty, even if it’s only the answers to riddles we have created ourselves.
The original 1960s series of The Prisoner, another show full of mystery that fed on panic and paranoia, lasted only 17 episodes. Lost has lasted for 121 episodes. Proof, perhaps, that not only has television become more epic, but that we’re all just a little bit more paranoid.
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