Locke and the "other who really believes"
I
The island will show us
We know a great deal about John Locke by the time he has surreptitiously tracked Kate and Sawyer to a private campfire in Episode 16,
Outlaws. We have been witness to the abuse he received in his prior job, the trauma he suffered when his Walkabout dream was denied, and the disability that disappeared when he deplaned from that fateful flight 815, not to mention the newfound prowess he shows in hunting and woodcraft. Yet Locke remains perhaps the most mysterious character on the island (with the possible exception of Kate), an enigmatic loner who seems to vacillate from spiritual guide and healer to lost child and doubting Thomas by turns.
As a forceful rival to Jack for moral leadership of the island clan, writers and fans have identified him as a representative for
faith as opposed to
science, the latter exemplified by Jack's ostensibly more rational approach to the mystery of the island and the task of surviving on it. But this conflict is rarely unambiguous; Locke often seems to take a rational course of action directly opposed to Jack's, whose decisions are overtly emotional and contingent on his inner struggles. By contrast, Locke's actions imply a deeper and less mercurial motivating principle than Jack's: a faith in something beyond himself that can be challenged but never fully extinguished. Those points at which Locke has expressed shock and anguish occur in the context of that belief, but paradoxically, that belief is never located in a particular person, place or creed, other than "the island." Indeed Locke's references to the Island do not refer to the island as an object in which one has faith, but as an object that
secures faith for the willing believer.
In
White Rabbit Locke first discusses the island as a character onto itself with Jack:
Episode 5,
White Rabbit
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Locke: I'm an ordinary man Jack, meat and potatoes, I live in the real world. I'm not a big believer in magic. But this place is different. It's special. The others don't want to talk about it because it scares them. But we all know it. We all feel it. . . . I've looked into the eye of this island. And what I saw was beautiful.
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Locke is largely silent on the "specialness" of the island until he secures an acolyte in Boone, and becomes obsessed with opening the hatch by any means necessary.
Episode 19,
Deus ex Machina
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Boone: So, we're just going to build another one of your inventions, hope it works this time.
Locke: That's right.
Boone: What if it doesn't?
Locke: Then the island will tell us what to do.
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Later in Locke's dream the debate with Boone grows heated, as the image of Boone challenges Locke directly, mocking the latter's seemingly baseless faith in providence:
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Boone: Oh, we're supposed to. We're supposed to find this, right? We're supposed to open it, right? Then tell me something, John, if we're supposed to open it, then why the hell haven't we opened it yet?
Locke: The island will send us a sign.
Boone [sarcastically]: The island will send us a sign.
Locke: All that's happening now is our faith is being tested - our commitment. But we will open it. The island will show us how.
Boone: What kind of kind of sign will the island send us? Huh, John?
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The dark sign the island sends implies Boone's death which, when it eventually comes, elicits naught but a strange light that floods from the still-sealed hatch.
After Boone's loss Locke might be expected to waver, but such is not the case. Despite the attacks and kidnapping by Ethan, internal conflict amongst the castaways, threats from the "others" and the violent death of Arzt, Locke remains steadfast even when challenged directly, in the "real" world, by Jack:
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Locke: Me, well, I'm a man of faith. Do you really think all this is an accident - that we, a group of strangers survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence - especially, this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason.
Jack: Brought here? And who brought us here, John?
Locke: The island. The island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you've seen that, I know you have. But the island chose you, too, Jack. It's destiny.
Jack: Did you talk with Boone about destiny, John?
Locke: Boone was a sacrifice that island demanded. What happened to him at that plane was a part of a chain of events that led us here - that led us down a path, that led you and me to this day, to right now.
Jack: And where does that path end, John?
Locke: The path ends at the hatch. The hatch, Jack - all of it - all of it happened so that we could open the hatch.
Jack: No, no, we're opening the hatch so that we can survive.
Locke: Survival is all relative, Jack.
Jack: I don't believe in destiny.
Locke: Yes, you do. You just don't know it yet.
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At this point the confused viewer may well confront Locke herself, asking how, given the dreadful "chain of events" that constituted Locke's life to date, could he place so much value on the idea of destiny, much less on faith that there is some overriding plan or beneficent guide that directs the castaways' progress?
Certainly, for Locke, a miracle has occurred, for once he was paralyzed and now he can walk. Even if this "gift" somehow redeems Locke's life to date, as a series of disappointments, betrayals and traumas, it can hardly compensate for the horror of the plane crash, and the terrors the castaways confront on a daily basis. From whence springs Locke's overpowering belief, and why is he so very certain that there exists something worth believing
in?
That would be silly
To answer that question I return to the scene I came in on, which occurs in the middle of season 1 but includes the earliest known information regarding Locke's past. It is significant that we do not
see this reminiscence played out as a flashback. The individuals involved do not become additional players in the drama of Lost, as do the characters that populate the stories we witness every week. The people in Locke's memory exist from his point of view only, and the enigmatic parable he tells depends on this point.
We hear this story after Locke has tracked . When Locke confronts Kate and Sawyer he brings with him two welcome gifts: a peace offering of precious coffee, and a preacher's humble wisdom with which to counsel the distraught Sawyer. Sawyer has feverishly and quite ineptly tracked an antagonistic boar miles from camp, with the aid of Kate who has, as usual, ulterior motives. With no prompting and little apparent reason, Locke begins the tale of an orphan, who, once upon a time lost both parents and a sister, then, as if that weren't traumatic enough, almost lost his only caregiver: a foster parent who suffered unbearable guilt and grief over his sister's Jeannie's death.
Episode 16,
Outlaws
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Locke: Anyway, about 6 months after Jeannie's funeral this golden retriever comes padding up our driveway, walks right into our house, sits down on the floor, and looks right at my mother, there on the couch. And my mother looks back at the dog. After about a minute of this, of them both staring at each other like that, my mother burst into tears. Beautiful dog, no tags, no collar, healthy, and sweet. The dog slept in Jeanie's old room, on Jeanie's old bed and stayed with us until my mother passed 5 years later. Then, disappeared back to wherever it was she came from in the first place.
Kate: So, you're saying the dog was your sister?
Locke: Well, that would be silly. But my mother thought it was, thought that Jeanie had come back to tell her the accident wasn't her fault, let her off the hook.
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Locke's little parable gives way to a flashback to Sawyer's darkest hour, and we are left to ponder the obvious connection between a dog that may house the spirit of Locke's lost sister and a cantankerous boar that may contain the spirit of Frank Duckett, or perhaps Sawyer's lost father, who suffered, as did Jeannie, an untimely death. But, typical of the fine character writing in Lost, we have subtly received a quite different message entirely.
The morality tale on the surface of Outlaws has Sawyer come to realize that he is projecting his guilt and rage onto the boar; this guilt and rage stems from having been manipulated into the murder by Hibbs, as well as being abandoned as a boy by a similar murderous rage that led his father to suicide and murder. All well and believably portrayed. But are we to believe that Locke's simple "that would be silly" existed so for the sole purpose of this Hallmark revelation?
For Sawyer, a man who has found little evidence for belief of any sort, rage and vengeance were a religion in themselves. Sawyer's view of himself in the world will likely change only through a slow and uncomfortable process of regaining trust in his fellows. I believe that Locke's little parable has quite a different aim. The story of Jeannie's death and her foster mother's belief crystallizes Locke's faith in a nutshell. How could a man not only cruelly abandoned by his parents but conned by them, a man who has suffered a number of indignities we've seen, an many more we haven't, find support for a faith so strong, so total?
Locke doesn't need to place his belief directly in the island, in guardian angels, or in a higher power. John Locke is insulated from the scars and pitfalls of direct faith, but retains all the benefits. For in the island, in Helen, and in his foster mother years before, Locke found an other who really believes, someone to believe in his stead, for him, as the laugh track in a sitcom spots the jokes so we needn't be bothered, as Tibetan prayer flags "pray" for us in the wind while we go about our day.
"the other who really believes"
From his earliest works to the recent book
On Belief and a volley of articles on 9/11, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina, philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek has described many current political and social dilemmas as an outgrowth of the need we have to find another to believe in our stead. The communist members of the former Soviet Socialist Republic often scorned the Party and it's officials in private, yet went to extraordinary public lengths to show in public that they supposedly had complete faith in the system, to please those in power who needed to believe that they were acting in the common man's stead. Closer to home, our children pretend to believe in Santa Claus so as not to disappoint their parents, who need to believe that their children believe (and thus engage in a complex game of faux belief themselves that both party tacitly acknowledges). "Furthermore," claims Zizek,
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this need to find another who "really believes" is also what propels us to stigmatize the Other as a (religious or ethnic) "fundamentalist."
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In other words, belief sometimes functions at a distance, as though it were embodied somewhere else, in some thing or person that does not share the same space or time as ourselves. In fact, "this other subject who directly believes" need not even exist: it's enough that we reference it as a possibility; some people believe . . .they think . . . it's been said.. . .
As a young boy embedded in the foster care system, Locke already lost parents and likely, before his foster mother, previous guardians. Now his last living relative is violently taken from him, and he looses yet another mother figure to despair and depression. When his foster mother meets the lab, however, everything changes. The dog restores the balance of the household, the dog seems to offer forgiveness and dignity. And the dog rekindles the foster mother's faith in God and man, and in her own fitness as Locke's guardian. Locke's foster mother believes for him; he can find the whole notion of an animal spirit ludicrous because a woman he loves and respects believes for him, for them both. Her belief becomes his by proxy. In the same way, when Helen comes into Locke's life, he certainly doesn't believe he can get beyond his need to have his father's attention, much less get beyond the anger he still holds. He cannot find it in himself to see beyond that moment, but Helen believes for him. Her faith in the power of anyone, and particularly Locke, to move forward in life despite his scars, is enough. Because he has faith in Helen, he may believe through her.
Finally there is Locke on the island, the Locke who experienced a miracle that cannot be explained, but has also witnessed death, destruction and extraordinary hardship since the crash. Even if he continues to believe in the miracle that is his renewed mobility, Locke has no idea to what or whom he may attribute it. Despite looking into the "eye" of the island in "Walkabout," he seems to have no more idea than do we, the viewers, regarding the monster, the Nigerian drug plane, the rising plume of smoke, or the Dharma Initiative. But Locke, as he tells Jack, is a man of faith and he believes they were all brought there for a reason. Locke does not have to see the connection or reason it out. The island, the ultimate "Other" of all others encountered in Lost, has shown patterned, goal-oriented activity that Locke recognizes and pays obeisance to. Locke believes that the island will show us how, the island demanded a sacrifice. Locke believes in destiny because the island believes for him. Twice he breaks down and implores the island for a sign, and twice a sign is forthcoming. A sign that shows Locke not what to believe, but that there exists belief, above and beyond himself, his past, and the lives and histories of other castaway. Locke believes, quite simply because the island believes for him.
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