‘This jungle will rumble’: ‘Lost’ gave us the funniest sexist promo of all time
KATE. VERSUS. JULIET.
By the time ABC’s Lost—which celebrates its 20th anniversary this month—was marketing season 3, it was so popular it could promote an upcoming storyline as though it was a boxing match. One hilarious, unhinged, and misogynistic commercial for Lost season 3, episode 15, “Left Behind,” lives rent-free in my head.
In the episode, Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell) tricks Kate (Evangeline Lilly) into helping her escape The Others by handcuffing them together. The episode also includes a flashback in which Kate teams up with fellow Sawyer (Josh Holloway) love interest Cassidy (Kim Dickens), a harrowing Smoke Monster attack on the island, and a hilarious subplot where Hurley (Jorge Garcia) cons Sawyer into being “nice.” It’s complicated and a little convoluted but undeniably good television, like all the best Lost episodes.
The promo for the episode, however, places all of the emphasis on Kate and Juliet rolling around in the mud and rain handcuffed to each other. It makes their brief scrap look like the fight of the century and makes the undefined romantic drama between Juliet, Sawyer, Kate, and Jack (Matthew Fox) seem like a soap opera. Check it out below:
The trailer is funny firstly because the romantic tension they’re trying to emphasize is not at all how things ultimately shake out between these four characters. Juliet shames Kate for breaking Jack’s heart by sleeping with Sawyer, presumably out of jealousy. But Lost fans know that Juliet ends up with Sawyer and Kate ends up with Jack. In retrospect, this is much ado about nothing. The show did not toy with the prospect of a relationship between Jack and Juliet for very long.
Second of all, it’s funny because it’s so melodramatic. The “This jungle will rumble” line is an obvious reference to Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s famous 1974 heavyweight boxing match. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a 42-minute episode of television. You could tell that ABC was getting pretty confident in the show if they likened a fight between two characters who just met to something as historically epic as that boxing match. They knew they didn’t need much more than “Kate versus Juliet” to get people hooked. I remember making fun of this promo with my fellow Lost enjoyers when it first aired, but it still did its job. We were hyped for the entire week.
Thirdly, it’s funny because it’s sexist in a patently ridiculous way. The problematic “girl-on-girl chick fight over a boy” vibes are off the charts. The commercial pits Kate and Juliet against each other way more than the actual episode does. Why can’t we let these two queens maximize their joint slay? Do they have to fight each other? Yes, ultimately, because it was 2007. It truly was a different time. The homoeroticism is played up in a male gaze-y voyeuristic way, not a celebratory sapphic way. (Not like, for example, the more recent fight between Rio and Agatha in Agatha All Along.)
The flashback in this episode, is, as I mentioned, about female solidarity and friendship. “Left Behind” was co-written by a woman and directed by a woman. As far as Lost’s representation failures go, the episode is pretty innocuous. It’s just this dang commercial! Why was it so … like that?!
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