The title says it all… and it’s an homage to one of Alfred Hitchcock’s lesser known films: The Trouble with Harry where several people living in a small town find a dead guy and they simply not know what to do with it. Finally, after weeks of dragging the body around left and right, they decide to reenact the day they found him dead and call the cops as if they had just found it. All is well that ends well.

Why do I remember this movie when I am having a casual conversation about Lost in a cook-off during memorial day weekend? Well, like the dead body of Harry, people don’t know what to do with the show. While some people like me, and those who have played its ARG, The Lost Experience, swear by it, others like the friends that I was talking to at the cook-off had watched an episode or two, perhaps even four or five, but they didn’t see the point in it: “It is confusing, no plot to speak of, the actors were all groomed, their hair are done, how unrealistic is that???” While I agree that the actors are unusually well-groomed and I see why that has to be that way, the rest of the objections brought to mind my own experience with some of the fiction that I read with inordinate amount of difficulty. It was awfully hard for me to read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (which truly did not have a plot to speak of), or Nabokov’s Pale Fire or even James Joyce’s Ulysses. I have to confess, that while I managed to get through the first two novels on numerous occasions and even wrote about them in my dissertation, I failed to finish Ulysses even though I attempted it three times and purchased several reading guides. My point being that, there we were, two new freshly minted Ph.D.’s and one faculty member, unable to penetrate some of the works that we were exposed to, not because we lacked the capacity to truly understand and/or appreciate, but somehow we weren’t invested in it and the works required more effort than we were willing to invest.

Jose Fermoso of NewTeeWee explains this confusion in Why Lost’s Web-based ARGs Have Made us Go Argh! as the result of mismanaged ARGs. Fermoso states that as the show is nearing its final season, its many mysteries are yet to be resolved. This comes as no surprise if you have read the May issue of Wired where, as the guest editor, J.J. Abram trenched the issue in puzzles and mysteries. What Fermoso sees as the problem, however, is that “if you played 2006’s The Lost Experience, one of the show’s related alternate reality games (ARGs), you would have found a big part of the answer to that mystery years ago.” He claims that this discrepancy is the result of the mismanagement of the show’s ARGs which have created canonical problems and led people to focus on wrong elements of the main story. He explains that “according to ARG experts, the creators of Lost aren’t all to blame. Instead, the timing between scripted TV drama and the live, fluid nature of ARGs, as well as apprehension on the part of show creators, often lead to unfulfilled resolutions.” He ultimately states that because Lost explained its backstory through The Lost Experience ARG, canonical problems were created. He continues to explain which details were explained in the ARG and not revealed in the show. But I wonder… if this indeed was a problem that came about a result of a mismanagement issue or the that we have different types of audiences who are willing to penetrate works in various degrees depending on their interests, availability, and resources.

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, explains that in franchises that heavily rely on transmedial storytelling, audiences can enter the story through various venues and come out of it with different experiences as a result. But the collective intelligence of these audiences allows for the assembling of the story into a cohesive unit. He states: “To truly appreciate what we are watching, we have to do our homework.” In relation to Matrix franchise, he argues that “Filmmakers plant clues that won’t make sense until we play the computer game. They draw on the back story revealed through a series of animated short, which need to be downloaded off the Web or watched off a separate DVD” (94). So one wonders, should we blame Lost for not being motivated enough to do our homework? Granted, I would be the first person to admit that Lost is one heck of a confusing story… and its producers know that all too well. Otherwise, why would they make detailed recaps compiling the story in a coherent fashion before each season finale, add extras in the Web sites, provide information about the back story in ARG blogs? The question is, are you up for the Lost challenge?