Confidence-Man: His Masquerade.
“Confidence-Man” is a novel by Herman Melville that “follows a succession of confidence men who, as suggested by the book's title, may be the same man in disguise”. Interestingly, in LOST something very similar happens since we have at least two main characters, Sawyer and Ben, who are con-men deeply connected, although in different ways, to the Original Confidence Man, aka Anthony Cooper.
Grant you, as I’ve explained here, Anthony Cooper is not a “real” character. He’s a fiction other people, notably John and Sawyer, have created to make sense of their respective parental traumas. In a way, Anthony is nothing but a mask we’re not interested in, but that nevertheless conditions the actions and the lives of some of our main characters. Therefore, we’re interested in Anthony in so far as he tells us something about other characters.
I want to continue to parallel John and Sawyer but today I want to focus on the latter. You see, there’s something about Sawyer that I can’t stop thinking about and that I need to get out in the open. This something pertains to how sex and sexuality play a central role in Sawyer’s story while the narrative itself doesn’t really want to explicitly tell us what role they play exactly. And it doesn’t want to tell us because it doesn’t want to reveal the extent to which sex is a fundamental component in Sawyer’s job. A job that he has “learnt”, so to speak, from Anthony Cooper. It’s not that Sawyer can be considered a sex worker per se but he does “willingly” use his own body to advance in his “line of work”, so to speak. But there’s something more to that because even on a meta level Sawyer-as-character is used by the narrative in a highly sexualized way.
I want to see if there is a narrative link connecting the “I never kissed a man” scene to the Botticelli’s Venus scene. In other words, I want to discover how LOST sexualized Sawyer and did its best to cover it because god forbid we question virility in this house. Cowboys are only used to represent daddy issues, not queer issues. “Midnight Cowboy” is a movie that doesn’t exist in the LOST universe. And yet, it does in our universe. And in our universe the cowboys imagery has been claimed by queer media. So let’s find out.
