Prepare to get LOST in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

As LOST winds to a close, I have found myself seeking comparisons with my favorite show in every movie that I watch. When it comes to Tim Burton’s vision of Alice in Wonderland, I hardly need to look. Indeed, it’s one of the reasons I was so interested in the movie, though I’ve always found various incarnations to be trippy to the point of being rather terrifying. Lewis Carroll’s classic story is indisputably one of LOST‘s key texts, having been referenced explicitly in two episode titles (White Rabbit and Through the Looking Glass) and multiple times within the show.

The very first image in the series is of heroic doctor Jack Shephard opening his eyes in the middle of the jungle. There exists the possibility that the series could end this way, with the implication that all six seasons have been a dream. While I will feel extremely cheated if this is the case, the heavy influence of Alice in Wonderland makes me nervous, especially when coupled with another key text, The Wizard of Oz, which happens to be the next movie Tim Burton is thinking of helming. While in the books, Oz is a real place, the iconic 1939 film implies that it’s just as much a dream as Wonderland is in the book.

In Burton’s film, it’s never entirely clear whether Wonderland is, in fact, a dream. We never see Alice fall asleep or wake up. But as in The Wizard of Oz, connections are drawn between several people from her everyday life and various characters she meets in Wonderland. Moreover, throughout her adventure, she repeatedly insists that she is in a dream. At one point, she and the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), who in this version is her most cherished Wonderland companion, share a conversation about the subject. She informs him that he is a figment of her imagination, and that only someone half-mad like her could have dreamed him up, which is strikingly similar to what Hurley tells Libby in Dave, the season two episode that either debunks an unpalatable theory or explains the series. “In real life,” Hurley says, “no girl like you would ever like me. Remember when I said I knew you from somewhere? Well, maybe it's because I made you up.”

Hurley is the character most associated with childlike innocence but also with mental instability. In season four, he theorizes that only he, Ben and John are able to see the elusive cabin in the jungle because they are the craziest. Could all of the bizarre happenings on the Island be the product of a deranged mind? The same question applies to Wonderland. Mia Wasikowska is luminous as Alice, a confused young woman who is overwhelmed by the world around her and the responsibilities being forced upon her. Easily distracted by her daydreams, she possesses an independent spirit unwelcome in her stuffy society.

Burton does his best to make the Wonderland to which she escapes look and sound as disorienting as possible. Depp, who is so adept at portraying vividly eccentric characters, embodies the insanity of this world as a man prone to lapsing into strings of incoherent psychobabble. And even when his tongue doesn’t run away with his mind, everything he says is as off-kilter as his voice, which is sometimes a guttural Scottish growl, sometimes a lisping whisper. Meanwhile, he repeatedly poses the query, “Have you any idea why a raven is like a writing desk?”, a riddle which, like many of the mysteries on LOST, seems to have no solution.

On LOST, the first explicit reference to Alice in Wonderland comes when Jack pursues his deceased father through the jungle and John compares the specter to the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen). Alice, too, has lost her father, the one person in her life who understood her and regarded her “madness” as a mark of a superior mind. As she chases this strange creature, one might say that she, too, is seeking her father, or at least a connection with their shared sense of the fantastic.

Alice finds herself in a world ruled over by two queens of opposing dispositions. The Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter, one of four Harry Potter alums in the film) is an unstable tyrant prone to doling out violent punishments. Meanwhile the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), all grace and benevolence, resides in a kingdom reminiscent of Tolkien’s Elven haven Rivendell. She strives against her sister but is incapable of harming another, nor will she force anyone else to do so, although her desires are usually fairly evident. These white and red monarchs are much like the white and black figures controlling so many of the events on the Island, and when Alice explodes in frustration that ever since her arrival in Wonderland she has been told what to do and who to be, it sounds an awful lot like LOST‘s driving Fate vs Free Will debate.

Another recurring theme on the show has to do with characters on the Island crossing paths back in the everyday world. There’s a sense that even if there is a multiplicity of worlds, these particular people are destined to always be a part of one another’s lives. The first character to state this explicitly is conflicted torturer Sayid’s star-crossed love Nadia, but starting with the second season, the sentiment becomes the catchphrase of unanchored Scotsman Desmond. “See you in another life,” he says, time and again. In the movie, Absolem the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), a creature inextricably linked with the notion of transformation, repeats this very phrase after explaining to Alice that she arrived as the “wrong Alice” but is now her proper self. Another driving theme in LOST involves flawed characters embracing the best of themselves as a result of many trials.

Of course, though I recommend it particularly to fans of the show, you don’t have to watch LOST to appreciate this movie. It offers a new twist on an old tale and does so with plenty of eye-popping spectacle. Though the 3-D elements seem less organic than in Avatar, they add to the fun, particularly whenever the March Hare (Paul Whitehouse) takes it into his head to lob a piece of dinnerware in the audience’s direction. The film often feels freakish, but as I remarked to my parents, any worthwhile adaptation of Alice in Wonderland is going to wind up looking a lot like an acid trip. It’s a strange, strange journey, but it’s one worth making, especially if you, like Alice and her father, have ever had the inclination to believe six impossible things before breakfast.