Deleuze's Wikipedia PageZach, still cannot follow this. Despite my first class education, I got no idea who Deluze or Guattari are, and (I truly mean no offense) the rest of your analysis is totally incomprehensible to me. Totally.
Forget I said Guattari: he wrote a few famous books with Deleuze, and the concept of 'territorialization' is from their Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
No! This is not at all what I mean. But it's interesting that you say this because it's very much Benjamin's point of view (and that of the post-Marxist critical perspective): for them, the same way the dumber aspects of Freud make the analysand necessarily link up slips to some pre-symbolic 'lack' in the subject, the camera provides an environmental perspective that isn't really there.The only part I can sort of de-code is your comment "In LOST, the montage, the close-up and the pathetic moment that serves as a story's climax sensitizes the viewer to things about characters and events that would otherwise go unnoticed." Your point seems to be that through the magic of savvy editing, the writers and producers manipulate otherwise insignificant events to create emotion in viewers that, in hindsight is false. You also seem to be saying that the reason the re-uniting scenes are effective is because they don't demand that the viewer draw on prior developments in the series to feel an emotional impact that seems more genuine and hard hitting than (at least for me) the final scene. (I think the re-uniting between Juliet and Sawyer is truly up there with the great devastating romantic scenes of all time. No joke - its Casablanca-worthy).
What I'm arguing is the opposite. The Deleuzian (check out The Movement-Image and The Time-Image; they are two of the best books ever written on cinema) posits that the camera consciousness re-orients viewer consciousness and forces a rupture in pre-conceived structures like linear time and relational positioning. This isn't about fooling people, it's about pure creation: "And if from the point of view of the human eye, montage is undoubtedly a construction, from the point of view of another eye, it ceases to be one; it is the purest vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things."
As for your second point, it's not as simple as distinguishing between stuff that relies on past developments and stuff that doesn't. Of course caring about characters requires time and history. But how is that characters can even have a history? They have histories because they move through space and alter their dispositions by 'overhearing themselves', which drives change through desire (toward a limit). They desire each other and develop tastes and distastes toward themselves.
But to honor whatever reality we pay for in 'getting to know' these characters, we should in turn desire the desiring-machines to continue desiring. This means confounding expectations (ours and theirs), not meeting them. It means not writing characters to fulfill some telos or the Hegelian Idea of what a good character should be. It means, paradoxically, doing the impossible: having people that fold back upon themselves only, that create the way we all create as we move through a world.
