The Lights Are Much Brighter There

"The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles
Forget all your cares, and go
Downtown -- things 'll be great when you're
Downtown -- no finer place for sure
Downtown -- everything's waiting for you."
~"Downtown," lyrics by Tony Hatch

This entry isn't a fully fleshed out blog post, just a short post that I wrote up on the Fuselage and was afraid I might lose. In Under Alien Control's "Cosmic Banditos, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb" thread on the Fuselage, fan Jane Eire suggests that Hurley sank the island.

I would like to suggest that the reason we must see the island underwater is due to an old theory--the island is Atlantis. The island is both real and a legend, and as such, it is can represent the Platonic ideal of Island. Through its connections, it can be all islands. Although often Atlantis is merely a highly beautiful, technologically advanced island, in some books Atlantis has been described as a paradise. Like the Garden of Eden, Atlantis is often portrayed as a Utopia. Atlantis famously had a series of earthquakes and sunk underwater mysteriously, perhaps due to random happenstance or perhaps as a "punishment" due to the "wickedness" of its inhabitants (again, echoes of the Garden of Eden). In many legends (and comic books, and television shows) the society of Atlantis continued to flourish under the cover of the waves.

In fact, I would like to throw out an idea that maybe the real island was underwater all along--the illusion could have been that it ever truly existed up on the surface in the course of us watching the show. We have light that scatters oddly, people who need to be drugged to leave and wake up away from the island, multiple clues surrounding water, Desmond saying that they were in a snow globe, and Ben unconcerned that anyone could get out without his help. Some who leave(?) see a version of the island that disappears without a trace, like a mirage. It's the metaphor of the iceberg. We only see the tip of the island, and there is so much underneath the surface. Or are we even fooled by thinking that we were ever even able to see the surface to begin with? Maybe we thought we were staring at an island, but it was really something else.

Of course, even in the scenario that I suggest--that the island was always undercover/underwater for as long as we have known it--one could still postulate an origin story for the island pre-submersion, and maybe part of that memory is embodied in the mythology of the show.