Henry Jenkins's Blog, page 9

Self-Dissection Through My Obsession with LEGO

The following post was created as part of the assigned work for Henry Jenkins's PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals. The goal of the class is to help communication and media studies students to develop the skills and conceptual framework necessary to do more public-facing work. They learn how to write op-eds, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and dialogic writing and consider examples of contemporary and historic public intellectuals from around the world. The definition of public intellectuals goes beyond a celebrity-focus approach to think about all of the work which gets done to engage publics -- at all scales -- with scholarship and critiques concerning the media, politics, and everyday life. Our assumption is that most scholars and many nonscholars do work which informs the public sphere, whether it is speaking on national television or to a local PTA meeting. 

I have a clear understanding of myself. I am not someone who has the willpower to persevere in doing something. My endurance is poor: when I was in the 800-meter race in middle school, I was among the front-runners in the first lap but always fell behind from the second. Once I lose interest or enthusiasm in something, I cannot persist through will power.I am interested in many things, but these interests often fade quickly. Therefore, when others ask me what my hobbiesare, I am embarrassed to mention those hobbies that I lose interest in after only a few minutes. I feel that the time andeffort I put into them, as well as my level of proficiency, do not qualify me to claim them as my hobbies. If I keep doing something for years, the only motivation toward it is my passion. Thus, I prefer not to use the word “persist” to describe my behaviors.

Figure 1: My LEGO Collections

As for the question of what my hobbies are, one answer is certain: LEGO. I am very sure that LEGO is my favorite, and my passion for it has never diminished. LEGO is not cheap, but compared to other things with the same price, I would not hesitate to spend the money on LEGO. The time I enjoy most when I’m home alone is when I’m sitting on the floor in front of my sofa with my back leaning on it and assembling LEGO on the tea table. At the same time, random variety shows on TV provide some background noise for this entertainment space. I’m completely immersed in this space and don’t allow anyone or anything else to disturb me. I silence my phone and put it aside. I fully focus on the bricks. They give me a chance to take a break from the chaos and pressure of daily life. I imagine myself as the LEGO Minifigure in that world. I even use “spiritual lego Mini figure” as my nickname in video games.

Figure 2: My Minifigure Factory Set

At first, my love for LEGO was an intuition. Later I started to think about it with rationality. I suspect one of the basic logics behind my love for LEGO is my obsession with miniature versions of common items.

I can’t remember when I started to be obsessed with all kinds of tiny things as a kid. In my sentimental memories, I see myself repeatedly being attracted by the sand table models at real estate sales offices while my parents were having aconversation between adults with the salesmen. My dad always made the joke: “Doudou (my nickname) loved visitinghouses,” implying that I was interested in expensive shopping. I used to believe the joke was right, but then I realized it was only half true.

I loved sand tables: I loved to see the full view of the communities on the sand table when the buildings were being constructed in the real site; I loved to see cars and people standing still on the sand table and moving in my mind; Iloved to turn on and turn off the light button to see the color of warm orange filling up every room in the buildings, imaging the tiny people lived for real. However, the in-person room tour never appealed to me as the sand table did. Atthat time, I was too young to notice that I had no interest in bringing my imagination of the sand table life into real life and too young to figure out why. I believed my interest lay in the desire of buying a house.

figure 3: An Example of Sand Table Model

When I was older, middle and high school age, I didn’t have much time to hang out at the sales office. I gradually forgot my obsession with the sand table model of real estate (I didn’t realize the difference between them at that time), until one day when my high school set up a sand table model of the campus. Looking at the miniature of the surroundings that I knew like the back of my hand, a similar feeling to that as I stood aside at the sand table in a real estate sales office suddenly arose. Overlooking the campus I commuted to and from every day from a high perspective brought me a sense of peace and comfort. I was capable of “walking” through the entire campus in a second with only a glance. At that moment, I could not be more certain of my obsession with miniatures.

Lately, I’ve found that Johan Huizinga’s concept of “free play” could partially explain my obsession with LEGO and miniatures. “Free play” suggests escapism, viewing play as a free activity standing outside ordinary life and serving as an alternative to social life’s serious duties and obligations. As a result of being outside ordinary life, Huizinga also believes that play is connected with no material interest and no profit can be gained from it. “Free play” suggests a rigid distinction between real life and the game, forming a “magic circle” to protect the temporary, limited perfection as an alternative to the imperfect reality. In the LEGO world built with bricks, the sense of weakness in real life is minimized to the greatest extent. Due to the huge difference in volume, I have supreme control and power in the miniature world. For the simplest example, it might take me three hours to clean up my 750 square foot apartment, but cleaning a whole LEGO house only requires me to wipe it with a cloth a few times. In reality, I lack the strength to push my sofa, but in the LEGO world, I can even install it on the roof.

figure 4: Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga

As an alternative to real life, it’s essential for the play world to be separated from reality to protect its fantasy. Similarly, sometimes people are attracted by movie scenes and plots, imagining themselves as the characters, even if the characters are confronting difficulties or experiencing a dramatic life. The reason for this situation is they clearly know that they are not and will not truly be in the scenes.Thus, what they see is only the structural aesthetics of cinematic arts. It is the same logic as why I never bring my imagination of miniature models into real life. Trifles and troubles in reality will ruin the charm of the play world. It is fascinating because it is fictional.

Separation does not mean disconnection. For me, if there was no connection between the play world and reality, the appeal would be located nowhere. This is why I like LEGO and miniature models that imitate real-life scenes. The play world as an alternative to real life has dual meanings. It provides more possibilities than real life; thus, it has to be based on real life to expand upon these possibilities. It can neither be completely detached from reality nor duplicate reality.

figure 5: LEGO Sets by Theme

However, personal freedom, another essential aspect promised by the “magic circle” for unlimited interaction and self-expression, is not applicable to my situation. I only purchase LEGO sets by theme: he Creator Expert collections, which includes sets of the most famous building in the world like the Taj Mahal, Sydney Opera House, Big Ben, etc, and setsbased on franchises like The Simpsons, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, etc. are my favorites. I’ve never purchased the Classic collections which come without instructions to encourage open-ended building play and inspire any imagination. In some cases, freedom means having more control over life. Yet, freedom without a boundary means chaos to me. I need someone else to provide me with a graspable guide—in the LEGO world, it is the handbook of building instructions that provides me with a sense of order. If I were given unlimited freedom, my perfectionism would trigger my anxiety. In the process of organizing random bricks, I cannot control my intention to pursue perfection, but I do not believe I have the ability to achieve it. Under such pressure, I find it difficult to begin the creative process, since I’ve already assumed that I’m unlikely to meet myexpectations. What is even worse is that I don’t know where my expectation lies. I only know it is way too high for me to reach it. In contrast, pre-designed sets give me a sense of security because I’m informed what the final product will be in advance so that I have a certain range to select from.

figure 6: The Simpsons House

By analyzing my obsession with LEGO, I realize that I still lack self-discipline, as usual. It’s hard for me to make any decision at the start-up stage. I may be overwhelmed by too many choices and be too concerned to move forward. Therefore, I need an external force to control the range of choices to guide me forward. Overall, a leader isessential for me to develop my career. I am not suited for self-leadership.

Biography

Jun (Willow) Wang is a 2nd year graduate student in the dual degree program in MA in Global Communication at USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism and MSc in Global Media and Communications at LSE. She earned her dual bachelor’s degree in Communication from China Agricultural University and University of Colorado Denver. Her research interests include gender studies, queer theory, pop culture, subculture, and neoliberalism.

Towards More Just Game Worlds: Conversations with Creative Game Designers

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak in a game and learning course, and I was struck by a question one student asked me: “How do these examples of designers you are talking about here represent reality?” This question was in reference to  six game designers we interviewed during a co-design project aimed at designing a curriculum that engaged middle and high school students in sociopolitical dimensions of artificial intelligence. This project is a part of the NSF-funded National AI Institute for Student-AI Teaming (DRL-2019805) housed at University of Colorado Boulder. Indeed, people with the backgrounds of the six game designers we interviewed are underrepresented and systematically marginalized in the commercial game industry. The goal for interviewing the six game designers during our co-design process of curriculum was to introduce young learners to transformative ways for game design and develop their understanding of game ecology. As part of the unit, students learn from their stories about game design approaches that center justice, equity, culture, human interactions, and nondominant narratives in the writing, development, and design of games. Moreover, we hoped by interviewing them to invite young learners, particularly of historically minoritized and oppressed groups to see in curriculum both a window and a mirror, as education scholar Rochelle Gutiérrez says, a window into possible dream game-worlds that are free of oppression and a mirror of people who are like them engaged in that kind of dreaming (Gutiérrez, 2018, Style, 1996; also see video below).

We invited Zoyander Street, Cooper Sanghyun Yoo, Malik Toms, Liz Fiacco, Tracy Fullerton, and Momo Pixel, to hear from them about their game design process, how they developed these skills, what game features they include in their game design, what stories they tell through games, and how the identities they hold shape narratives and features they design in games. Through our conversation with them, we also aimed to engage young learners in learning activities where they compare game designers’ experiences, including how they make decisions, how they learned how to design games, and how they navigated the world of game design. In this way, young learners also get to see a wide range of ways for creatively telling stories about their own realities and everyday life. 

Game designers we interviewed: Liz Fiacco, Tracy Fullerton, Zoyander Streer, Momo Pixel, Cooper Sanghyun Yoo, Malik Toms

Below are six lessons that summarize what we can learn about game design from our conversation with the designers:

 (1) Use game narrative to tackle power issues in everyday life. Artist-researcher Zoyander Street, described how they tackle systematic injustice and power issues that emerge in everyday life through narrative and game design. As a person who identifies as a neurodivergent, genderqueer trans man and designs indie games for public audiences' engagements, they see narrative as a way to raise awareness about gender or the experience of neurodivergent people through designing interactions with games for public audiences. Through such engagement with games as a medium, Zoynader explains, the game “becomes a social object like another piece of art when it’s in public.”

(2) Learn tools in online communities and use them to build a new world. Game developer Liz Fiacco talked about the possibilities games create for experimenting with the creation of characters, rules, and world-building within game design. She asserted that learning technological tools for game development and modding games can be learned in online communities and in collaboration with various people who can bring their expertise into game design and its development. Liz mentioned that some games come with tools that allow participants in the game ecology (e.g., players, programers) to customize the game for their own needs. Modding games, she described, “is empowering and an expression of yourself.” 

(3) Take game design beyond programming to include aesthetics and visuals as language for storytelling. We also interviewed Momo Pixel, a multidisciplinary artist and a video game designer. Momo Pixel is the creator of Hair Nah Arcade, which she describes as“a video game about a Black woman tired of people touching her hair.” In her work, Momo Pixel uses various techniques that center aesthetics and inspiration from everyday life. For example, she uses pixel art as a storytelling language in game design. 

(4) Consider designing intentional features between players to connect, build relationships, and collaborate. Cooper Sanghyun Yoo is an Assistant Professor and a creative technical director based in Seoul, South Korea. Cooper introduced  us to the idea of designing games intentionally to strengthen interactions and collaborations among players. While he uses technologies like virtual reality for his games, he centers social interactions among players.

(5) Transform game ecology by writing the stories you want to see in games and the design experiences you are hoping to play, for example, centering the experiences of Black creators rather than reinforcing the gaming design space as a white-dominant space. Author and educator Malik Toms, who teaches science fiction, talked to us about his experience as a speculative fiction writer for game design. Malik described his own experience of not finding someone who “looks like him” in the game ecology. It was this lack of narratives with Black protagonists that made him decide to do this kind of work and tell stories that bring different perspectives into games.  

(6) Collaborate with others in the production process and combine storytelling with play, history, and culture. In our conversation with Tracy Fullerton, a game designer, professor, and author we talked about her approach combining storytelling, play, and connecting between art and technology mediums to create games that represent varied human experiences, stories, and cultures. Such an approach is made possible by teamwork that enriches the process of storytelling and building of games. Examples of games she created is Walden, a game that takes a narrative-based gaming approach to explore the life of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau during his experiment in self-reliant living at Walden Pond. 

In summary, these game designers' knowledge, experiences, and work invite us to create gameplay experiences where we consider diversity in storytelling narratives and engage in worldbuilding that is justice-oriented within the game world. They also invite us to use technological media (e.g., virtual reality, pixels) as tools for connecting players, addressing socio-political issues, and paying attention to visuals and aesthetics as fundamental parts of game design. Finally, the game design practices these designers talked about are also an opportunity for educators to create activities where young learners themselves can dream new narratives and design features for games they play. 

 

References:

Gutiérrez, R. (2018). The need to rehumanize mathematics. In I. Goffney, R. Gutiérrez, & M. Boston (Eds.), Rehumanizing mathematics for Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students (pp. 1–10). National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

Style, E. (1996). Curriculum as window and mirror. Social science record, 33(2), 21-28.

Acknowledgement: These materials were developed by the Institute for Student-AI Teaming based at the University of Colorado Boulder, including educators and students from the Denver Public Schools  This material is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DRL-2019805. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. 

 

Dr. Areej Mawasi is a Neubauer Faculty Lecturer (tenure-track) at Technion’s Faculty of Education in Science and Technology. In her research, she focuses on the intersection of learning sciences, technologies and digital media, design-based research, and critical STEM education. She studies learners' engagement and designs learning environments using tools like technologies, games, and hands-on artifacts. @areejmws // http://areejm.com 

Chernobyl Roundtable

PAOLO BRAGA: Complexity tempered with simplicity

Alan Williams as Aleksandr Čarkov

GIORGIO GRIGNAFFINI: The role of the genre

Federico Montanari's post concludes by raising a very stimulating provocation: Does the "platformization" of cultural production (ad well as "Hbo-ization" of media) and, consequently, of cultural memory, such as in the case of Chernobyl, could provoke "the proliferation of the Same" [...]? It is a matter of critically considering the 'fictionalised' rewriting of reality, according to standardised models belonging to the television industry and even to each individual channel (in the case of Chernobyl, HBO). There would therefore exist schematisations in the ways of telling a story, at all levels, from the narrative structure to the way of creating characters, up to the staging, music, design, photography, etc.

We may see a superstructure at work which determines artistic and production choices that can be superimposed on the notion of genre: and this idea seems to be the thread running through many, if not all, of the posts. The relationship between reality and fiction, between documentary material and narrative rewriting (fictionalization), is thus seen as closely interrelated to the question of genres.

In more detail, Ioanna Vovou in her post directly evokes the issue in terms of reception, noting how the audience's first contact with the miniseries is precisely in the attribution of a genre label; Nicola Dusi addresses it from the point of view of the choices regarding audio and iconic representation, identifying an internal coherence within the miniseries that aims to create an effect of reality; in my post I focus on the conventions related to the miniseries' peculiar format, which becomes a genre mark producing significant consequences for film writing; Andrea Bernardelli and Charo Lacalle see how the genre, or more broadly the reference to genre archetypes, is critical in the construction of characters who, beyond their idiosyncratic individuality, must adhere to specific parameters established by the cultural industry but also dating back as far as the Homeric epic; Antonella Mascio sees in the interpretative frame of the docudrama one of the keys to the interpretation of the miniseries, fundamental for tackling the theme of trauma; Paolo Braga reconstructing the narrative texture and the compositional rules of the story, cannot evade the reference to an ideal-typical superstructure concerning the genre to which it belongs.

Therefore, transversally reinterpreting all the contributions, I believe that one of the most interesting evidences is precisely that of the television industry's inevitability of relying on genre structures both to be able to 'make sense' of the magmatic fluidity of an elusive and multidimensional truth, and to be able to present the audience with a recognisable and not too unsettling product. The management of the trauma of the impending catastrophe therefore also passes through a narrative instance that normalises and makes acceptable such a devastating experience.

All the contributors agree on the complexity of the miniseries. Chernobyl rightly deserves a place in Mittells’s category of “complex Tv”. I would like to add a few comments regarding such a sophisticated storytelling by focusing on the mix of emotions the show stirs in the viewers. The issue of emotions is in fact addressed in the posts, sometimes directly (the opposition between emotion and reason considered by Charo Lacalle), sometimes by implication (the value of sacrifice highlighted by Alberto Garcia).

My guess is that, in relation to Chernobyl’s emotional appeal, the complexity is actually “simplicity and complexity” combined. The layered reactions induced in the audience (the unsettling dystopian atmospheres, etc.) count on an underlayer of more basic and plain notes.

A simple emotion is, for example, curiosity. Curiosity – evidently – to know how a global disaster was avoided (the chain of solutions implemented by Legazov). Also, curiosity about what caused the accident (some verbal exchanges between Legazov and Ulana are clearly conceived in order to feed the viewers’ desire to discover why all that happened, and who did it).

The direct emotion the series mostly relies on is the desire for justice. The wish that those who were responsible for the reactor’s explosion could be found and condemned. Their punishment is something the show makes its viewers intensely longing for. How? Well, again, with a move that is very mainstream and unsophisticated: by designing the adversaries of the heroes as clearly evil, unlikable, people you really would like to see deprived of their power. The show, for example, both satisfies and relaunches this expectation in episode two. Ščerbina, just arrived at the plant, belies the irresponsible members of the regime who ran it. The dialogue is particularly tasteful since the politician, with a twist, uses technicalities that he has just learned from Legazov during their flight to Pryp"jat'.

Showrunner Mazin structures a hierarchy of opponents. The levels of complicity progressively revealed in the screenplay increase the antagonism with the bad guys. Scene after scene, the story brings the audience on a further degree of disesteem for the bureaucrats, their officials, their scientists. Fomin’s mediocrity, Brjuchanov’s presumption, Djatlov’s perverse, foolish recklessness – as if refusing to admit what was happening at the plant could change the nature of the events. Finally, on the highest step, Čarkov, the KGB boss, who embodies the archetype of the Big Brother, empowered with a devilish understanding of human frailties.

Precisely the character of Čarkov is an example of how Chernobyl uses simple emotions as a foundation to build complexity. The climax of a classical antagonism, the final attack to the hero, adds shades to the emotional palette of the story. The reference to the mistakes in Legazov’s past – he had previously already admitted having accepted the censorship on a relevant scientific topic – gives depth to the audience’s desire for justice. It makes it less instinctive. As if, after having rooted so much for the protagonist, they were also invited to consider the importance of soul searching.

 

 

NICOLA DUSI: About fiction / non fiction

About fiction / non fiction

I believe that most articles of our discussion show how the “fiction/nonfiction” distinction is problematic because contemporary complex TV series are media products that exhibit graduality and overlap genre boundaries.

In Chernobyl TV series, this happens precisely because external paratexts such as the podcast of the series enable us to observe it critically, but it happens even more explicitly and inside the TV series in the relationship between the fictional ending and the long intermedial and documentary closing sequence.

What I call the “intermedial realism” of the Chernobyl series is thus given not only by the attention paid to the characters' stories, the sets and the costumes, but by the interweaving of media that builds “reality effects”.

It is the intermedial fusion of the fictional and the verisimilar, the invented and the documented, which convince and move the viewer constructing an effective media discourse. Constructing a media experience for the viewer as verisimilar or realistic, means using intermedial fusion and continuous cross-reference between the fictitious and the verisimilar, between invention and remix of documentary sources.

 ALBERTO N. GARCÍA

I only have a little to add because I am overwhelmed by so many stimulating texts analyzing Chernobyl. From Semiotics to History, from paratexts to close readings of particular scenes, from heroism to villainy, from sound design to complex emotion... The approaches are so heterogeneous that every fan of the miniseries will find something valuable in this gigantic aca-fan blog post.

 

ANDREA BERNARDELLI

  I noticed that the miniseries production is sometimes attributed to Sky, but I think it was only distributed by them for the European market (Sky Atlantic for Italy, Sky UK, etc.), originally it was HBO. It seems to me that different perspectives are explored and that the overall picture about the miniseries seems complete and exhaustive.

 

 

RENIRA RAMPAZZO GAMBARATO:

Chernobyl beyond fact and fiction

 

The previous blog posts tackle fundamental aspects aroused by the mini-series Chernobyl, such as the public debate on nuclear power. In the light of the current Russian-Ukrainian war, as highlighted by Dusi and Lacalle, this topic resurges as the trauma of a nuclear disaster gains traction with the dispute over and the weaponization of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Station in southeastern Ukraine. This is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe—and among the 10 largest in the world—which could potentially cause an even bigger catastrophe than Chernobyl. In addition, the Russian-Ukrainian war has already drastically affected the energy market in Europe, intensifying a polarized discussion around the increase of nuclear power capacity in the continent. The premiere of Chernobyl in 2019 reignited the debate, for instance, in Sweden, with a tweet from the Social Democratic minister of social affairs who suggested the proponents of nuclear power to watch the series and reflect about its consequences (Gambarato, Heuman, & Lindberg, 2022). This year, the recently elected right-wing Swedish government already signaled the plan to procure new nuclear power stations as a source of low-carbon, baseload energy supply.

Another relevant aspect discussed in the posts by Dusi and by Vovou is the issue of blurred lines between fact and fiction, which can raise ethical concerns about the fictionalization of history. In our recent article analyzing the Netflix series The Crown (Gambarato & Heuman, 2022), we explore the potential ethical implications of the fictionalization of historical events represented across multiple media platforms to examine the potential impact fictionalization has on what is culturally remembered and what is forgotten. Our purpose was not to determine whether the series represents the past accurately or not, but to expose the ethical dilemma involved in the fictionalization of contemporary history when the series is perceived as an authoritative interpretation of the past, as it is the case of Chernobyl. We departed from the notion of transmedia ethics (Gambarato & Nani, 2016) to address the blurring boundaries between fact and fiction and potential ethical issues of transmedia storytelling through the conceptualization of ethics developed by semioticist Charles Sanders Peirce. A semiotic perspective, also explored in the posts by Dusi, by Montanari, and by Grignaffini, in our case, relates to Peirce conceptualization of ethics, articulating the connection between aesthetics, ethics and logic, which enriches and enlarges the discussion of ethical matters in the realm of transmediality.

Our findings highlighted that the narrow focus on details by commentators, reviewers, and audiences, tends to reduce the content of series such as The Crown and Chernobyl to what is right or wrong in the drama, while essential aspects of the historical narration or storyworld are simply ignored and are not a subject of critical discussions and reflections. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the conventions of the historical fiction genre, as well as the transmedial ramifications of streaming media productions, could potentially mitigate the ethical implications, transcending fact and fiction (Gambarato & Heuman, 2022).

Furthermore, we could trace a parallelism between The Crown and Chernobyl to argue that audiovisual productions of extremely high quality with an extensive outreach are most likely to remain in the collective cultural memory as the truthful reference of historical events despite the more accurate historical texts. Thus, Chernobyl has the potential to influence what is culturally remembered and what is forgotten (Gambarato & Heuman, 2022; Gambarato, Heuman, & Lindberg, 2022).

 

References

Gambarato, R. R., & Heuman, J. (2022). Beyond fact and fiction: Cultural memory and transmedia ethics in Netflix’s The Crown. European Journal of Cultural Studies. Online first.https://doi.org/10.1177/13675494221128332

Gambarato, R. R., Heuman, J., & Lindberg, Y. (2022). Streaming media and the dynamics of remembering and forgetting: The Chernobyl case. Memory Studies, 15(2), 271–286.

Gambarato, R. R., & Nanì, A. (2016). Blurring boundaries, transmedia storytelling and the ethics of C.S. Peirce. In S. Maras (Ed.), Ethics in screenwriting: New perspectives (pp. 147–175). Palgrave Macmillan.

Biography

Renira Rampazzo Gambarato is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Jönköping University, Sweden. Her areas of research revolve around transmedia studies, Peircean semiotics, and streaming media. Her recent books are Theory, development, and strategy in transmedia storytelling (2020), The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies (2019), and Exploring Transmedia Journalism in the Digital Age (2018). 

 

ANTONELLA MASCIO:

Chernobyl: Tv series between past and present

Reading the various contributions that have appeared in this exchange on the Chernobyl mini-series has made me think along several directions, which I will try to summarise in three points: the importance of the quality of the real story for a successful television product; the complex and layered relationship between reality and fiction; and the questioning of the “strict” definition of the genre. These three points are strongly linked to each other, and in my opinion they are contributing to the construction of the narrative complexity making Chernobyl a success story, not only because of the audience's appreciation, but also because of the lines of interpretation it gives access to.

As we all know, the series recounts a real event that happened in 1986, an event that at the time affected the whole world and drew attention to the risks of nuclear power plants. Thus, Chernobyl immediately became part of a shared imagination: the impact it had in the real world was similar to the one produced in the media world. Not only the news, but also the fiction productions of those years had already begun to give space to stories about nuclear disasters (think of The Day After in 1983): Chernobyl fitted perfectly into that frame. The consequences were also relevant on a political level. In Italy, for example, the nascent Green Party gained prominence in the 1987 general election, exactly one year after the Chernobyl tragedy. The event thus had global relevance, with local consequences, creating new political and value-based balances of power.

The Chernobyl event is seen, therefore, as a collective trauma, as Federico Montanari writes, an “anthropological shock” (Beck 1987), a moment of rupture that marks a “before” and an “after”, a cultural symbol capable of referring to different levels of meaning. Chernobyl represents the beginning of the end of a regime and its mythology, and at the same time a new beginning, an opening towards a new phase for the Soviet Union, with Gorbačëv at its head. All this is well portrayed on screen by constant reference to those days in 1986, following the inexorable passage of time that also characterised the enormity of the silent catastrophe. The issue of sound is crucial, as Nicola Dusi recalls: it adds eeriness to the scene and its vision. Apart from the initial roaring, there are no noises to accompany the spread of radiation. The contamination of the spaces is silent - an invisible enemy - which is given voice on screen mainly through the characters representing science. In this narrative framework, each element acquires an importance that we may trace on several levels, not only on the surface of the story. For example, Charo Lacalle, in her analysis of the two female heroines, emphasises the importance of a mythological structure present in the narrative. A complex narrative that includes, therefore, different interpretation perspectives for different target audiences. A product that is therefore also appreciated by different generational cohorts capable of giving back different interpretations of the text, as Ioanna Vovou points out.

Compared to its genre of reference, Chernobyl is described as a “docuseries”, a narrative that combines moments of fiction (e.g. the creation of Ulana's character) with the telling of events that occurred in real life, using data and sometimes period images. The contamination between fiction and reality is a point that runs through all our contributions, through reflections expanding on several perspectives of analysis. I was struck by Giorgio Grignaffini's analysis about the dialectic between “continuity” and “discontinuity” from a semiotic perspective, where “continuity” means a faithful reproduction of reality, while “discontinuity” means a free reproduction of reality. I take up this observation by Giorgio to use the relationship between "continuity" and "discontinuity" from another point of view. I believe that one of the strengths of the Chernobyl Tv series concerns precisely the closeness to - and sometimes the departure from - the documentary form, depending on the moments and characters on screen. Namely, in my opinion, the Tv series fluctuates between the real and the fictional, and I believe that the architecture of this dynamic is one of the reasons for its success. In Chernobyl, documents taken from the archives of the time are shown, so much so that part of the investigative fandom, as Nicola Dusi also writes, has been quite clever in searching for the original audio-visual fragments. The reliability of the sources did not only concern Alexievich's and Legasov's books, but also all the documentation that was reported by the Tv news, newspapers, and media that covered the event in 1986, documentation that appeared - several times - on the screen. This narrative strategy created, in my opinion, a strong continuity with the personal experiences of the audience who lived through that moment. In other words, the Chernobyl Tv series activated a shared, historical memory connected to a disruptive event that had concrete consequences in people's everyday lives.

Changing perspective and considering the present instead, due to the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, collective attention was once again focused towards the Chernobyl power plant and the sarcophagus covering the reactor that exploded in 1986. The current situation resulted in a new connection (continuity?) between the past and the present, placing the Tv series at the centre of other narratives. The Chernobyl Tv series in this case was interpreted as a warning, resulting in a general alert. The series therefore also triggered a glimpse into a possible and avoidable future, becoming the narrated form of that cultural symbol (the 1986 tragedy), acquiring other meanings and values.

Can one then speak of mere docufiction in this case? And here I come to the last point that in my opinion runs through our contribution, and concerns the issue of media genre. The idea of genre travestissement, or  “disguise”, indicated by Ioanna Vovou, is in my opinion very suited to express the additional level of meaning invested by narration. Going back again to the opposition of “continuity” and “discontinuity” expressed by Giorgio, I believe that it is possible to recognise a historical continuity within the story (a “coherent” plot, based on an articulation of historical data and documents with fictional devices) and a “historical discontinuity” (understood as a temporal interval) concerning the moment of production of the TV series and its airing in 2019. We, the audience, have watched Chernobyl reassured by the distance separating us from it, aware of the fact that a symbolic event is being recounted on screen, marking a historical “before” and “after”. However, these two moments - the actual event and its narration as a docudrama - seem to collapse one on top of the other, due to the conflict now taking place between Ukraine and Russia. The collapse resurrects ancient fears (the nuclear disaster, the anthropological shock), relocating them in the present day, amplified by the images we see in the Tv series. And perhaps it is no coincidence that the Chernobyl plant was one of the first sites conquered during the conflict: as Appadurai (1996) writes, mass media imagery has a strong impact on audiences and constitutes repertoires of models that are increasingly taken as references in the real world, with the aim of enhancing their effect based on symbolic value.

FEDERICO MONTANARI

Rereading the different contributions to this discussion, it seems to me that some interesting common lines emerge; and above all, several open questions. On the one hand, as pointed out by several authors, starting with Dusi and Lacalle, or by Mascio, the theme of the relationship between "reality" and "fiction" emerges. But in a rather particular way: some of the authors in fact insist on the form of the construction of this so-called fiction (and to its mode of writing (cf., also Braga): quasi-documentary? docu-fiction hybrid? allusion to a documentary? Or, its inter-textuality or cross-mediality). And this opens to the issue of the relationship between "truth" and "story." But here it seems to me that two other elements come into play (as I was also trying to say in my paper): on the one hand (as also discussed by Giorgio Grignaffini) how high is the level of "filtering" (semiotic, narrative and style, and therefore of "genre"). In other words, how much this very structured dimension of "writing" (visual, narrative and discursive) and "construction" of the series affects the relationship with "reality." More importantly, what reality? It does not seem entirely obvious to remind ourselves that already "historical reality" of Chernobyl disaster is made up of: documents, photos, memoirs (public and private, as in the case of the source-book on Chernobyl, even if it is not, as Nicola Dusi says, among the "official sources" in the credits), newspaper articles, TV news, and so on. It is also given by the opening up (at that time) of a "discursive field", that of "sensitivity" to environmental catastrophes and thus in general to the ecological issue.

But, here, two other elements of discussion come into play: the dimension (and representation) of the relationship between individual and collectivity. It seems to me quite well represented by the structure of heroes, and their ethics, and their passions (cf., Bernardelli, Garcia, et al.). Their collective responsibility. They are not only "paper heroes" but they are also condensations of values, passions, emotions. They can be seen as emerging condensation points (also on the visual, figurative side: with their faces, their looks, their bodies, as mentioned, often wounded, or suffering, their relationships), between "public discourse" and "private discourse." And here there is a final tension and pressure between "stereotype of the serial hero" and "account of the dramatic and historical event."

Finally, in my opinion, the question (as huge as it is) could be: what is the “rebound” and feedback effect between current medial (or would it be better to say, today, “post-medial”) world and historical discourse and events? Or in words, more topical and difficult, borrowed from contemporary physics, what kind of “entanglement effect” (i.e., overlapping and inextricable muddle, see also, Rampazzo Gambarato, about “blurring effects”) occurs between public and historical discourse (the risk of environmental catastrophe, war, etc.) and the serial (medial or post-medial) dimension?

 

CHARO LACALLE: Questions to participants

to Nicola Dusi

I share with you the idea that "the 'intermedial realism' in contemporary television series means that it is the interweaving of media that constructs the veracity or truthful effect linked to historical reality".  But I would like to ask you what relevance do you attribute to these "iconizing details" (Barthes) in relation to aestheticism and the construction of the viewer's passionate itinerary. Are they not even more relevant than the truthful effect itself?

Answer to Charo

I think “iconizing details” are very important, and they often act as a translational bridge between the “real world” and the fictional world. Actually, I would even say that they are two levels of the same problem that need to be considered together: the figurative and iconic construction of the possible world of the TV series and its ability to convince the viewer about its historical accuracy and believability. This also works on an emotional and passionate level: the viewer is always embodied, so the iconic level is crucial to engage him or her (and the same is for what we call “sound iconism”, not just for images).

 

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to Andrea Berardinelli

From my point of view, Legasov's most prominent moral feature (or at least one of the most prominent) is perhaps resignation. If you agree with it, I would like to ask you two questions related with this interpretation:

- How does Chernobyl integrate an anti-heroic characteristic, such as resignation, in the construction of a tragic hero?

- Do you consider that the character of "tragic hero" attributed to Legasov would be modified if viewers would not know about his suicide until the end of the miniseries?

Answer to Charo

I don't think that a characteristic of Legasov is resignation, I would say quite the opposite. Legasov reacts to every challenge with courage, he is resilient. His problem is constraints; the political context in which he lives and acts forces him to make choices that are not always coherent with his heroic characterization because he has to mediate with government choices. Further aspect of unreality in the miniseries; Legasov was part of this same logic given his institutional role, but in the miniseries he is portrayed as a sort of rebel against this same system.

 

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to Antonella Mascio

In your analysis of facts and fiction you say something very inspiring in relation to my own analysis of the female characters in Chernobyl, about the “balance between historical sources on the one hand, and plausible - and partly fictionalized - descriptions, on the other hand".

From this perspective, how much relevance do you give to the narrative construction of opposite yet complementary Lyudmilla (real) and Ulana (fictional) characters?

Answer to Charo:

Your question fascinates me because it forces me to reflect on these two characters and their relationship, from a storytelling perspective. Lyudmilla and Ulana balance each other: the former expresses an emotional perspective, the latter a rational perspective. However, the two characters are opposites in many ways.  On-screen, Lyudmilla represents the real person, but in a narrative way, which is necessary for a docudrama product. The character is similar to the real person, but not at all times in the story.

On the other hand, Ulana is presented as a fictional character, but based on real aspects. As a character, she is a woman who works in a scientific field. She is a character who has a female face and body. Her personality, her behaviour, is based on real information about the catastrophe. In my opinion, both women together represent a narrative strategy with a perfect mix of reality and fantasy.

 

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to Federico Montanari

Do you think that Chernobyl really balances historical sources and plausible - and partly fictionalized - descriptions? Isn't the representation of the latter given much more relevance?

Answer to Charo:

As I have tried to say in my intervention and participation in the discussion, the relationship between “fiction” and “reality”, with its historical sources, in this series, and in general, remains highly to be discussed. So, in my opinion, it is not balanced. It poses problems. But you rightly say “fictionalisation” and “historical sources”, in the sense that you emphasise how already these two fields are composed of highly complex and already layered and constructed discursive forms. And so, yes, I think that the “fictionalised” part is very pronounced, and, although charming and aesthetically appealing and very well constructed, it can pose problems (as mentioned, of “stereotyping” of “blinding”): connected with the exaggeration, for example, of single or isolated hero figures, fighting “alone” as in a tradition, of mythical tale, or “Western’” style (or, today, in Hbo style…).

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to Giorgio Grignaffini

I find very interesting your approach to the concept of "elasticity" in relation to the Chernobyl narrative. Nevertheless, I have the impression that Mazin has abused this procedure, by "fattening" excessively some storylines of selected events “among the many possible paths of meaning present in the historical or biographical data” (for example, the extermination of the animals in chapter 4). Doesn't it produce a certain effect of disintegration of the narrated story? Doesn't it confer to the text a kind of collage effect?

 ANSWER to CHARO :

A historical event, particularly one so extended geographically and temporally

(Chernobyl affected we might say the whole of Europe and developed over many

weeks, with the effects lasting practically until today), presents specific problems

in its transposition on television or film. the latter by its very nature is conducted

in the linear time of audiovisuals, in which events must follow one another

temporally and the effects of simultaneity, anticipation or remembrance can only

be simulated (split screen, flash forward and flashback). In this sense, seriality

certainly offers an advantage over, for example, the classic film structure: the

multistrand narrative, which allows for "side-by-side" different story lines that

can at least partially restore the geographic and chronological complexity of the

event. The multistrand structure can certainly give the impression of fragmenting

the narrative, and the concept of elasticity serves precisely to explain how the

miniseries emphasizes or minimizes its narrative at the local level in order to

restore the spatiotemporal plurality of the event.

—-----------------------------------------

 

to Paolo Braga

In my analysis on Chernobyl I link two models of classical male heroism (Achilles and Hector) to the female characters of Ulana and Lyudmilla. I found the relationship you point out between Legasov and Cassandra very interesting and I would like to ask you the following question: in your opinion, what is the meaning/aim of this juxtaposition between the feminine and the masculine whose traditional atributes Chernobyl somehow subverts?

ANSWER to Charo

I think that the reference to “Cassandra” made by Jarred Harris while explaining his character stresses the fact that the protagonist is facing from the beginning the dilemma of telling an uncomfortable truth for the sake of his people. By the way, some critics have noticed that the actor has been recently playing the role of a “prophet of doom” in different productions (besides Chernobyl, in The Terror, 2018, and Foundation, 2021). Probably, the idea of working on a female archetype wasn’t consciously on the minds of Mazin and of Harris.

But the perspective you are suggesting was not extraneous to them in relation to another aspect. Like Harris has declared in many interviews, some typically masculine personality traits of the real Legasov were actually toned down. The scientist was in reality an “alpha dog” – an assertive prominent figure in his field. Not so different from Ščerbina in this respect. This was a problem the narrative rhetoric of Chernobyl had to solve. The overlapping of the two characterizations would have undermined the taste of the improbable friendship between a bureaucrat and an intellectual. It would have also weakened the sense of Legasov’s drama. That is why a reluctant and more sensitive hero was the final choice.

I would like to add a note on your stimulating thought about two kinds of female heroism. Regarding the axis masculine-feminine, it is probably worth emphasizing that Ulana is, in the last part of the story, a mentor for Legasov. Now, a female mentor of the hero, especially, like in this case, outside a romantic relationship, is not so common in contemporary Tv series. So, another reason to consider Chernobyl innovative.

 —--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Questions to Ioanna Vovou

I find interesting that the viewers you interviewed understand the miniseries "as a fictive -and aspiring to be an authentic- expression not simply of the historical past, of that which preceded the present, but even more, questioning, engaging a relationship with the future".

In your opinion, does it mean that Chernobyl is interpreted as a kind manifest against nuclear energy?

Answer to Charo:

All of our texts and discussions of Chernobyl bring to my mind an Opera Aperta (see Eco), or, in a more precise way, variations sur un thème that could go on and on. That idea does not only apply to our discussion presented here in Pop Junctions but also, to the prosumers and fans. Charo Laccalle and Nicola Dusi in their opening statement and Nicola also in his text on the intermedial realism of the series, both refer to web prosumers engaging profoundly with the series. I am tempted to give some examples of web prosumers’ engagement on a divergent level, such as a ‘bémol’ (♭) in musical tones. That is parodies of the series, as a fandom expression, mixing media products and cultural backgrounds but in a comic intention. See for example the trailer of the faint series “The Plant”, mixing footage and scenes from the series Chernobyl and the theme song of the series “The Office”.

Or, in a more local/national context, the Greek comic video “ehhh, not like that” parodying the moment of the explosion by transposing to the scene the Greek song “today you go bam”, performing a wordplay and meaning ‘you are super beautiful today’ in slang (at 0’8’’), then calling the character of Anatoly Dyatlov by the name of a Greek actor (“Mr Kontogiannides”) due to his physical resemblance with him (at 0’15’’). Or comparing the citizen’s evacuation of Pripyat with scenes from an old Greek movie (at 2’11’’-2’22’’).

We could find innumerous examples of that kind….

 Going back to the question addressed by Charo Lacalle on the potential interpretation of the series as a kind of manifest against nuclear energy, that is an interesting one, referring to the interpretation of the interviewees’ comments and the contextualization that scholars do; it also raises methodological questions. Even in the more explicit and -likely to be- evident situations of performance of an audience such as qualitative interviews, between the expression of comments, words, on the one hand, and the attribution of an intention to this expression, on the other hand, there is a thin line I will try not to cross. So, I would try –as difficult as that might be- not to transpose interviewees / audiences as a persona ficta that talks as I imagine “in virtue of its performative dimension”, as Daniel Dayan (2005) explains. Therefore, I would not cross the line of reading the interviewees comments and claims as the audience’s expression of the idea that the series is understood as an anti-nuclear energy manifest. I think it would be more accurate to say that the series narrative world, that is briefly to say the detailed explanation of how Chernobyl’s nuclear accident happened and of the political context and management of the event, proposes, offers, promises something to the audience. The notion of promise (Jost, 1997), is very different from the idea of a ‘pact’ or of a ‘reading contract’ with the audience - since it would be a little exaggerated to imply that the series, as any fiction, includes a bilateral act signed by both parts, producers and readers/viewers. The idea of a promising act is, therefore, more adequate, questioning severely the notion of contract or pact in regard to media products.

Summing up on Charo’s question, I would say that the audience interviewed in my study, seems to acknowledge the proposition of the series to be used as a kind of ‘manual’ explaining not only ‘what happened then’ but ‘how things work’ now; and adhere to it in various and controversial levels.

In that sense, the series proposes a sort of ‘repair’ of the trauma (pointed out by Antonella Mascio), or of a symbolic resilience, counterbalancing in a certain way “[…] the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced”(Winnicott, 1974).

References

Dayan D. (2005), “Mothers, midwives and abortionists: genealogy, obstetrics, audiences and publics” in Sonia Livingstone (eds) (2005), Audiences and Publics: When cultural engagement matters for the public sphere, Intellect, p. 43-76.

Jost F. (1997), “La promesse des genres”, in Réseaux, v. 15, n°81, p. 11-31.

Winnicott D.W. (1974), “Fear of Breakdown”, International Review of Psycho-Analysis 1, p. 103-107.

 

What Makes Chernobyl Beautiful from a Screenwriting Perspective?

What makes Chernobyl beautiful from a screenwriting perspective?

 Paolo Braga (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan)

 

Chernobyl achieved considerable critical and public acclaim. A result that couldn’t be taken for granted when the project started. The not so fashionable subject matter, its tragic nuances, the risk of addressing historical figures, events, and a society – the Soviet Union of the Eighties – that could appear unappealing, if not even too far from western contemporary culture and tastes. Greenlighting the production meant going against all odds. It ended up being a very good bet, though. What are the reasons for this surprising success?

I am going to consider this from the perspective of screenwriting. I will try to show what in the storytelling of the miniseries contributed to make it a hit. My very essential and short analysis[1] will draw on the principles of drama, character construction, and story architecture developed in the most influential screenwriting books such as Story, by Robert McKee[2], Anatomy of Story, by John Truby[3], Inside Story, by Dara Marks[4].

 

I believe that the first level where the success of Chernobyl should be investigated is the one of narrative structure. The showrunner, Craig Mazin, masterfully crafts the structure of the story so that the series can span the unfolding of numerous events: the accident in the plant; authorities who at first hide, then admit the emergency; the operations to contain the effects of the reactor explosion; the reclamation of an entire region; the detection of the causes; the identification of the responsibilities; the broader political and historical implications of the catastrophe.

All this is narrated through a solid and clear storyline suited to feeding tension and interest towards a satisfying ending. Thanks to this well-conceived “spine”, a complex picture on the Soviet regime and on Russian society can also be painted – with variations in pace and atmosphere, deviations on secondary characters, and moments of sorrowful reflection on the aberrations of power and propaganda. So, how was it done?

Mazin perfectly applies the technique of rising action with escalating complications. It could seem obvious – something you find in every well written script, especially in disaster stories like Chernobyl. Here a special skill was requested, the chain of complications should progressively widen the frame to embrace a cascade of consequences that happened across time, space, and political hierarchies. It should do it smoothly so that along four episodes viewers would have a complete understanding of the facts. From the chronicle of the fateful night into the plant, to its historical repercussions on the regime, which structurally resulted, like Mazin explains[5], in the following timeline: the first episode is one night, almost in real time, showing the accident; the second episode is two days, it is about becoming aware of what is really going on; episode three spans weeks, “chicken have come home to roost, and people start dying”; episode four covers months, it is “a war” with an entire population mobilized; episode five is about the trial and the historical relevance of all we have seen until then.

In other words, it was key to select the right raising points into the real events the series is based on. In practice, once the problem is solved the hero regularly faces a new one of higher scale, with a more branched out impact, requiring more complicated countermeasures. Chernobyl is structured quite simply, but brilliantly, as a sequence of tasks: ascertaining the nature of the accident; smothering the fire in the reactor with sand and boron (which must be found); drain the water from the basement of the plant and avoid a thermonuclear explosion (basically a suicidal mission, thus volunteers are needed); no more water reducing heat creates the risk of a nuclear meltdown, thus a tunnel must be dug and a heat exchanger implanted (a negotiation with coal miners starts).

What makes this recursive mechanism engaging are certainly the rising stakes, but also, and mostly, the pressure on the main character, scientist Valerij Legazov (Jared Harris). Each time he realizes that something else must still be done. The main agent of action, in fact, is him. He is the one who always has to give the bad news that a new level of the game should start. Each time, he has to convince hostile politicians, mostly worried to preserve the image of the regime, that further operations should be undertaken – operations revealing the Soviet Union as vulnerable and unprepared. On production the nickname for the Legazov character was, significantly, “Cassandra”.

Jared Harris as Valerij Legazov

Another appreciable structural move is the progressive change of the “quest” the protagonists are on. From a quest for safety (from radiation – how to handle the accident) to a quest for truth (the search for the causes of the accident and the trial in the final episode). Task after task, the chain of complications finally brings the disaster story into the terrain of the legal genre (which includes elements of detection, also used by the series to offer an intriguing crossover into the spy genre).

Here a first structural choice by the screenwriter is to imagine that the protagonists took part in the trial held by the Soviets to establish a convenient version of facts. This didn’t happen. The second choice is to prepare the ongoing plot evolution by introducing from episode 2 the character of Ulana Jurivna Khomjuk (Emily Watson). The woman, a colleague of Legazov, has no historical correspondence. Mazin created her to represent the scientific community who worked to avoid the worst. She is an investigator, who breaks the rules to interview witnesses and get the proof that will convince Legazov/“Cassandra” to give the worst possible news during the trial. It is the Soviet system itself that must be blamed for Chernobyl.

 

For the success of the miniseries, another level even more important than structure is  character construction. I am talking of the way the three protagonists are conceived in order to function well together – with arcs that generate drama – both if considered separately and in their interactions. The point I am making is based on the general premise – the main principle of screenwriting craft – that the deepest emotions come from the internal change a character undergoes. From his/her arc of transformation.

Now, Chernobyl is basically the story of the friendship between Legazov, the scientific advisor for the politburo, and Boris Ščerbina (Stellan Skarsgård), the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, with the power to find the means and execute Legazov’s ideas.

Stellan Skarsgård as Boris Ščerbina

For almost the entire series the arc of the scientist seems to consist in a challenge to stay faithful to his vocation to honesty – as a researcher and scholar he is someone from whom you expect the truth. Towards the end, with the discovery of past connivances with the regime, his arc suddenly twists. It becomes a redemption plot. Denouncing the system, Legazov regains his conscience, paying the price of home exile.

Accompanying Legazov, Ščerbina’s internal transformation is disillusion: organic to the apparatus, he will be left without ideals to believe in.  So, here we have two powerful arcs that reciprocally resonate. The honesty of Legazov interrogates Ščerbina’s conscience, while Ščerbina’s knowledge and explanations of the mechanisms of Soviet power augments the burden on Legazov. The scientist, in order to help, has in fact to accept a certain degree of collusion (for example, in the first two episodes, keeping the secret about the real entity of the disaster).

Then there is Ulana, who doesn’t change. Again, a definite decision by Mazin. From the beginning to the end, the woman is a hound in search of truth. As such, her function is to be a force of change on the other two – someone who deprives them of easy moral ways out, leading them to the hardest and only ethical path to follow.

Emily Watson as Ulana Jurivna Khomjuk

I pass now to consider a third level where Chernobyl’s storytelling is particularly strong, the thematic one. The series is consistently and organically written as an exploration of the value of truth (“to explore a theme” is screenwriting jargon). This is evidently announced in the opening sequence, with Legazov’s recorded words about the “cost of lies”. The overall meaning of the series could be condensed in the statement: “Truth builds the future, lies make the mistakes of the past come back worsened”.

What is noticeable is how much and how often the value at stake and the opposite idea (the forms of mendacity) find expression thanks to iconic scenes, or symbols, or verbal exchanges. All this, presented in a very natural way – as part of the action, without preachiness nor artificiality. Think for example of the marvellous vertical ray of light projected in the night sky from the exploded reactor. People of Pryp"jat', the town nearby, ignoring that it is caused by radiation, gather to contemplate its beauty – the bewitching appearance of lies, the firing plant like a Medusa. Think of the dosimeters used in the plant that exude alarming levels of radioactivity, but it is because – we will discover – those detectors can’t measure over a certain level – so, a lie hidden in a truth. Think of the dialogue where Legasov by instinct assures a bystander at his hotel that there are no risks (it is not true). Ironically, he will learn a little bit later that the woman was a KGB spy controlling him – the thousand faces of lies. Most of all, there is the final sacrifice of the hero, a moral dilemma: to pay with your life so that truth comes out, preventing other tragedies similar to Chernobyl.

Mazin’s storytelling exalts the potential of the miniseries format: long enough to narratively address the many levels of a complex topic, short enough to design compact character arcs and to stay thematically focused, like a movie.

Paolo Braga is Associate Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan), where he teaches Screenwriting, Semiotics and Journalism. At Università Cattolica he also teaches at the Master in International Screenwriting and Production. He has published extensively on the topics of the construction of empathy with character and of US television series. The rhetorical and persuasive dimensions of storytelling are his general research area, which he has treated in several articles and essays. Among his most recent publications is Words in action. Forms and Techniques of Film Dialogue (Peter Lang, 2015) and Armando Fumagalli, Cassandra Albani, Paolo Braga (Eds), Storia delle serie tv (volumes 1 and 2), Dino Audino, Rome 2021.

[1] This post tackles some of the issues that I discussed in a broader piece called Analisi: Chernobyl published in Armando Fumagalli, Cassandra Albani, Paolo Braga (eds.), Storia delle serie tv. Vol. 2, Dino Audino, Roma 2021, pp. 118-129.

[2] Robert McKee, Story:  Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principle of Screenwriting, Harper Collins, New York 1997.

[3] John Truby, The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, Faber & Faber,

New York 2007

[4] Dara Marks, Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc, Three Mountain Press, Studio City 2006.

[5]See Barbara Morgan, Craig Mazin, “On writing Chernobyl”,On Story.Tv – Radio – Austin Film Festival, April 11, 2020, http://www.onstory.tv/radio?rq=chernobyl.

Biography

Paolo Braga is Associate Professor at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan), where he teaches Screenwriting, Semiotics and Journalism. At Università Cattolica he also teaches at the Master in International Screenwriting and Production. He has published extensively on the topics of the construction of empathy with character and of US television series. The rhetorical and persuasive dimensions of storytelling are his general research area, which he has treated in several articles and essays. Among his most recent publications is Words in action. Forms and Techniques of Film Dialogue (Peter Lang, 2015) and Armando Fumagalli, Cassandra Albani, Paolo Braga (Eds), Storia delle serie tv (volumes 1 and 2), Dino Audino, Rome 2021.

Chernobyl and the Anthropology of Sacrifice

Chernobyl and the anthropology of sacrifice

 

Alberto N. García (Universidad de Navarra)

 

From the very beginning, Chernobyl is packed with scenes of sacrifice. It is no coincidence that the narrative opens with Legasov’s immolation, underlining the centrality of sacrifice in the series. In this sense, the various sacrificial events presented in the story may be broadly grouped into three types: the one voluntarily assumed by multiple characters throughout the series (heroic); the animal sacrifice perpetrated by the authorities or forced by the toxic radioactive situation, where immolation adopts a literal as well as figurative value (symbolic); and finally, the offering of another innocent human being, releasing others from their hardships and adversities (redemptive).

1. “A thousand years of sacrifice in our veins” and the heroic immolation

Chernobyl avoids Manichaeism in its recreation of the nuclear disaster. In its dramatic structure, many characters may be considered heroic, no matter their specific ideological affiliation. Some are brave for confronting Soviet secrecy (Legasov, Ulana Khomyuk), while others are commendable precisely for following orders: firemen, miners, soldiers, or scientists who, in an abrasive way, pay with their lives, trying to mitigate the damage of the explosion. This elasticity of heroism in the face of tragedy runs parallel with the omnipresence of sacrifice in the series. In other words, the heroes in Chernobylare described as such because of their personal sacrifices. As Lankford states, sacrificial heroism is not about mere generosity or good Samaritanism, but “requires the risk of something highly valued; and the attempt to achieve a directly morally positive result”.

Scherbina’s speech explicitly reinforces this notion in a quasi-religious tenor. Faced with Legasov’s inability to find volunteers – although he offers them money and promotions – the Council of Ministers’ deputy chairman resorts to national grandeur by way of immolation for the sake of the political community:

The series, then, acknowledges the price paid by all those brave men who died for others. It does so visually, singling out minor characters who vindicate the sacrificial face using a profusion of close-ups.

2. “Don’t let them suffer” and the symbolic sacrifice

As René Girard states, one of the critical elements of modern sacrifice lies in its vicarious capacity: “Society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a ‘sacrificeable’ victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect.” In Chernobyl, animals adopt this role of vicarious sacrifice. In this sense, unsurprisingly, the first image in the series is of a cat lying on a sofa stamped with drawings of deer wandering peacefully through a meadow. The preponderance of animals becomes recurrent throughout the narrative. From this moment on, a symbolic iteration is set through the on-screen appearance of several creatures, including cows, dogs, crows, and even a caterpillar. In all cases, these animals are associated with the idea of sacrifice, establishing a link with their traditional role in sacrificial rites (originating from a religious or magical substratum, ritual slaughter existed in all ancient cultures).

Beyond the different moral statuses that society attributes to humans and fauna, the subplot of the fourth episode is disturbing because of its symbolism: pets –metonymies of their owners – are slayed. Pavel, Bacho and Garo whistle, and the companions meekly approach to be shot. The pets’ docility ties in with the paternalism expressed by Zharkov in the first episode, possibly referring to the idea that the state elite always knows what is best for its citizens. The analogy is thus definite: the citizens’ obedience to their leaders is similar to the dogs’ submission to the soldiers. It is highlighted by Pavel’s fear before pulling the trigger, Bacho’s warnings about not making the pets suffer, as well as the Soviet motto that Garo sarcastically recites during the meal (“Our goal is the happiness of all mankind”). Beyond regret for killing the animals, the interactions of these three characters with the dogs certify their symbolic relevance. The animals are scapegoats who pay for their masters’ wrongdoings. Pets –domestic creatures – bear the most remarkable resemblance to those forced into exile. As people cannot be purified by annihilation, Chernobyl portrays a substitute victim.

The beginning of the same episode begins with a digression, a sequence characterized by its metaphorical disposition rather than its narrative advance. The protagonists include a young Soviet soldier, an old Ukrainian peasant, and the cow she is milking. The soldier commands the woman to leave her house because they are evacuating the area. She firmly refuses. However, the interpretive key to the sequence is found in the cow. Because of their nutritional capacity to produce milk, cows are traditionally associated with maternity and fertility. Therefore, a parallel may be drawn between this babushka and the motherland, a metaphor often employed in Soviet artistic propaganda. Tellingly, one of the symbolic objects most strongly associated with Russian popular culture is the matryoshka. The opening digression reinforces this popular imagery by employing the cow as a symbol. By showing the babushka milking, the scene serves as a metaphor for the cycle of life: an elderly woman close to death may be seen an emblem of fertility, rebirth and growth (milk). Thus, when she is ordered to evacuate – a new sacrifice for the motherland – the old woman recalls the many detriments her family has already suffered: the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Holodomor famine, the Second World War... When the soldier kills the cow, the audience reads it symbolically: the wasteland holds no future. All the previous sacrifices and suffering seem useless.

3. The redemptive sacrifice: “Children have to die to save their mothers”

The mysterious babushka strongly relates to Vasily Ignatenko’s widow. So, if the fourth episode starts with a metaphorical allusion to motherhood, symbolized by the cow, the producer, Craig Mazin, seems to opt for a circular structure. The installment ends, visually connecting with the beginning, where Lyudmila Ignatenko is shown in hospital after giving birth to a daughter who died to save her.

The mise-en-scène enhances the concept of sacrifice running through the whole episode. A long camera movement shows us a maternity room in the hospital. We hear babies crying and see mothers nursing their newborns. However, the panning concludes with footage of Lyudmila next to an empty crib. This mise-en-scène also highlights the classical notion of the sacrificial lamb. According to Christian symbolism (built on Hebrew tradition), St. John the Baptist established the semantic contiguity between Jesus and one of the usual animals used in religious offerings: “Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” Since then, the concept has been applied to any innocent who accepts death to purge others of their guilt. Thus, Lyudmila’s baby would become a sacrificial lamb which, in this case, has saved her mother’s life. Ulana Khomyuk remarks this in her “someone has to start telling the truth” speech: “She gave birth to the child. The baby survived for four hours. They say the radiation would have killed the mother, but it was absorbed by the baby. Her baby. We live in a country where children die to save their mothers.”

The sacrificial condition of the baby is enhanced by how Lyudmila is presented in her last shot. Sitting on the bed, her hair covered with a scarf, her head turned slightly to the right, and her face expressing quiet grief, Lyudmila clearly resembles the figure of the Pietà.

Popularized by Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Vatican, the Pietà figure is an artistic composition, usually sculptural, depicting the Virgin Mary’s grief after the death of Christ, her son, on the cross. Girard wrote, “We have learned to identify our innocent victims only by putting them in Christ’s place.” By engaging in visual contiguity between Lyudmila’s devastation over her dead daughter and the Virgin’s grief over Christ, the story implicitly assumes a sacrificial reading of biblical resonance – a universal theme in the Girardian sense. The death of Lyudmila’s baby eventually precipitates Legasov’s daring decision to speak the truth. The immolation of the sacrificial lamb spurs on this decisive change in the protagonist, who will offer himself up as a sacrifice that would unveil the truth.

4. Conclusion: Legasov as paradigm

The three types of sacrifice converge in Legasov’s suicide, presented in the first sequence of Chernobyl. These represent both the moral framework of the story and the importance of sacrifice in the narrated story. Firstly, his death has characteristics of a heroic sacrifice: his physical deterioration due to the radiation he received in his professional line of work makes his death imminent. Yet, secondly, Legasov chooses to use his own body as a scapegoat. As Tom Douglas wrote, “Someone has to take the blame to allow the rest of us to continue our normal functions, nominally at least, free of guilt or responsibility for past events.” Thus, instead of blame-shifting, Legasov takes the opposite route: akin to Lyudmila’s baby, he absorbs collective guilt to redeem society. This, thirdly and finally, is what relates Legasov’s figure to that of the sacrificial lamb: figuratively speaking, he dies to remedy the sins of others. Thus, Legasov’s death aspires to repair a crisis within a community through atoning substitution, where loss transforms into regeneration, and the end becomes a new beginning.

Biography

Alberto N. García is an Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the School of Communication, Universidad de Navarra (Spain). During 2018, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland (Australia). He has also been Visiting Scholar at George Washington University (Washington D.C.), and Visiting Professor at the University of Stirling (United Kingdom). He has published his work in journals such as Continuum, , Quarterly Review of Film and Video and Horror Studies. He has edited the books Landscapes of the Self. The Cinema of Ross McElwee (2007) and Emotions in Contemporary TV-Series (Palgrave, 2016). He is currently researching on Television Aesthetics, and is member of the “Bonds, Creativity and Culture” research group. 

Chernobyl a Miniseries Between “Reality” and “Television”

Chernobyl a miniseries between “reality” and “television”

 

Giorgio Grignaffini (University IULM, Milan)

 

Chernobyl (HBO – SKY, 2019) is a miniseries inspired by the real fact (or, rather to say, by the huge amount of historical, journalistic, administrative and scientific documents available on the subject) and also, in part, by the book Prayer for Chernoby by Svetlana Aleksievic.

Miniseries are one of the most popular formats in current television production. They are characterised by a closure at the end of the planned episodes and are therefore also called limited series. Often miniseries have a closed, non-expandable narrative arc due to the origin of the subject on which they are based: when they are inspired by real events (such as Chernobyl) or biographies, the narrative closure is implicit in the very nature of the subject they deal with. The same applies to miniseries derived from novels, although in this case it is possible to produce spin-offs or prequels exploring aspects of the fictional world not developed in the original novel. In the case of miniseries created especially for TV (often called originals) the narrative closure is more easily overcome as there is no 'closed' source of inspiration such as a historical fact or novel.

The relationship between the factual reality - or rather, as we specified above, between the portions of reality known through historical and journalistic sources - and the fictional reconstruction is at the heart of the miniseries and its interpretation by the viewers (see Nicola Dusi's post).

Since Chernobyl is a miniseries belonging to the fictional genre, historical facts are transformed into a storytelling, which must be compelling from the point of view of actions and engaging from the point of view of passions. To achieve these goals, a central function is played by the characters, in particular the protagonist who usually plays a key role in miniseries.

 Valery Legasov, the Soviet scientist on the front line to reduce the consequences of the reactor explosion and later assigned to investigate responsibility for the disaster, is seleceted as the leading role to achieve two purposes:

● He represents a critical perspective towards the Soviet government's handling of the event (ethical focus of the narrative).

● He is presented as a tragic hero: hence the choice to begin with his suicide two years after the reactor explosion (emotional focus of the story).

Chernobyl begins with Legasov's suicide two years after the disaster: this choice puts a tragic dimension at the centre of the whole story, a choice which was not too obvious. Another narrative strategy could have been used: in the  Russian film Chernobyl 1986 (2021) - by placing one of the firemen who fought against the explosion as the leading role, it is presented a euphoric perspective to the story, exalting its dimension of heroism and sacrifice and not that of denunciation (Legasov's suicide is an indictment of the Soviet regime, which did not listen to his request to shed full light on the responsibilities connected with the accident)

In the series TV industry, characters are very often created using the paths codified in the specialised literature (the manuals of Mc Kee[1] , Vogler[2] , Seger[3] , to name but a few), in which narrative and character construction are to a certain extent 'standardised' (see Paolo Braga’s post).

So, Legasov's narrative arc includes some of the classic codified phases such as “the call to adventure” when he is summoned by the authorities to investigate what happened; the “crossing of the threshold” when he arrives at Chernobyl and begins to realise what has happened; the meeting with two figures such as Dr Ulana and government official Boris Scerbina who play the role of “helper” and “mentor”; the challenges he encounters before “the final showdown” in which he tries to proclaim the truth in front of the authorities. Being a tragic hero, the ending does not provide him for a direct reward (Legasov commits suicide in disappointment at having failed to get the truth about the Soviet state's involvement across), but finally, as emerges from the final sequence explaining what happened after his suicide, his courage in exhibiting the truth is rewarded and his figure rehabilitated. 

[1] Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, ReganBooks, New York, 1997

[2] Chris Vogler, Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers, Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, 2007

[3] Linda Seger, And the Best Screenplay Goes to...Learning from the Winners, Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, 2008

Figure 1 Valery Legasov in reality and actor Jared Harris in Chernobyl

This implies searching the biographies of the characters in the miniseries for elements that can be adapted to these narrative schemes; or else historical reality itself is to some extent bent to the needs of serial narration.

The narrative inspired by a historical fact such as Chernobyl is constructed first of all by sequencing a series of events that really occurred, constructing a sequence that is already narrative, even if only as a matter of chronology (post hoc, propter hoc);

This sequence may start from:

●       a narration that already exists in other media (such as a novel)

●       a research work: in this case, the scriptwriter performs an activity very similar to that of the historian.

In the latter case, unlike the derivation from a novel, a storytelling is created through a process that selects among the many possible paths of meaning present in the historical or biographical data, those most functional to give an overall sense of the story.

The negotiation between historical data, with their chronology of events, and their narration work through expansion or compression according to a principle that we can define as “elasticity”, which is thus closely linked to the underlying meaning project. Expanding, compressing, even omitting or, on the contrary, adding facts that did not really happen, is a choice that produces very substantial effects in terms of meaning: the choice of Legasov as the main character is functional in highlighting the contrast between the truth ( supported by Legasov) and the lies (long supported by the Soviet regime).

At the iconic level, the same dynamic occurs between the original sources (the images circulating in the semio-sphere relating to the facts or characters of an event) and the series or films that are produced from them. Chernobyl fully belongs to this second type, as the faces of the characters portrayed in the miniseries are almost unknown to the wider public.

In order to describe what kind of relations can occur between the real source and its adaptation for the screen, it is convenient to use the diagramatisation offered by a typical tool of semiotic analysis, the so called “semiotic square” that opposes continuity and discontinuity of fiction and reality:

 

Based on this, we can subdivide miniseries, series or films in relation to their greater or lesser adherence to real facts or characters

●      Continuity: the film or miniseries tries to reproduce the well-known images of the event or characters as faithfully as possible. For example, in Bohemian Rapsody (2018), Queen's participation in the 1985 Live Aid concert is re-enacted by the film, not only by seeking maximum fidelity in the physiognomy of the protagonists, as throughout the whole film, but by recreating exactly many of the shots broadcast during the live coverage of the event.

Figure 2:  Rami Malek (on the left) as Freddy Mercury in Bohemian Rapsody and the real Freddy Mercury during the Live Aid Concert

In some of the sequences of Chernobyl, an effort is made to faithfully reconstruct some of the few images filmed live during the nuclear accident, but these images are not very well known. The 'philological' reconstruction of these scenes, rather than an activator of shared memory with the viewer, seems to be due to a concern to make the series irreproachable from the point of view of realism. Even the final sequence of the series analysed by Nicola Dusi, by showing the archive images again at the end of the fictionalized series, tries to emphasise their testimonial value even within a narrative genre framework.

Figure 3 . A fireman in HBO miniseries and a real fireman in 1986 at Chernobyl

●      Discontinuity: occurs in those products that freely reinterpret faces, places, even rewriting history to bend it to an autonomous expressive purpose. In Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006) or in the series Versailles (Canal +, 2015), the degree of freedom with respect to historical fact is very high and more important than the acknowledgement of the 'true historian' is the emotional involvement of the audience.

Figure 4 Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in Sofia Coppola’s movie and a Marie Antoinette’s portrait (Joseph Ducreux, 1769)

●      "Non-discontinuity": occurs when one seeks a resemblance to 'real' images (similarity of actors, locations, etc.), but without going so far as to seek a perfect coincidence. In Chernobyl, the protagonists or environments were chosen to achieve a certain closeness to the originals, but since these are mostly not well-known characters, perfect resemblance is clearly not the ultimate goal (also because few viewers would be able to fully grasp the differences)

●      "Non-continuity": occurs when, against a background of similarity underlying the figurative design of a film or series, characters or locations are intentionally rewritten and reinterpreted. In Chernobyl, for example, the several scientists who worked together to reduce the effects of the explosion are 'condensed' into a fictional but very plausible character, Dr Khomyuk.

= 

Biography

Giorgio Grignaffini is Head of Drama at Taodue film (Mediaset Group) with which he produced several TV series and theatrical films, including Made in Italy (HBO Latam & Amazon Prime VIdeo, 2019), Yara (Netflix, 2021), Call Me Francis (2015). He carries out teaching and research activities at the Cattolica University and IULM in Milan. His scientific interests are in the field of semiotics and media theory. His most recent publications include I generi televisivi (Carocci, Rome, 2021 -3rd edition), Che cos'è una serie tv (with Andrea Bernardelli, Carocci, 2017), and Capire le serie tv, (with Nicola Dusi, Carocci, Rome, 2020).

Lessons from Chernobyl... the HBO Series...

“we learn from fiction”
“it brings reality in front of you”

— Quotes of spectators of the series

This is the seventh in a series of perspectives on HBO’s Chernobyl.

Lessons from Chernobyl... the HBO series....

 

Ioanna Vovou

(CIM, Université Paris III- Sorbonne Nouvelle; Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens)

 The above quotes of Greek audiences of the series Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) raise a crucial question regarding the cognitive effects of the interplay between audiovisual genres. One could ask: What if history was teached through watching movies inside classrooms? The question is partially rhetoric since - to various extents - this educational and pedagogical practice, e.g. the use of fiction and movies to support teaching history or other subjects is implemented in all educational levels. Thus, fiction is de facto crafting historical memories and knowledge…

 

‘Playing’ the fiction: Spotting the differences between reality and the series

 

Playing the game of comparing the ‘real’ with the fictional in order to ‘spot the ten differences in the images’, like in children’s games, refers to the playful dimension of fandom culture and of reception attitudes of audiences, that goes beyond watching a series. However, we would be mistaken to consider it only as a “fun”, light, without consistency activity. “To control what is outside one has to do things, not simply to think or to wish, and doing things takes time. Playing is doing” (Winnicott, 1971: 41).

 

Following Huizinga’s (1949: 46) idea that “culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning”, the playful attitude regarding the promise of the genres is discerned even from the trailer of Chernobyl, where the fiction is presented as “an HBO Miniseries Event”. The series aspires to be an event, that is to shape and forge our lifeworld. For media scholars, the reference to the classic book of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992), Media Events, where the authors analyze television rituals when presenting ceremonies, contests, etc..., might bring to mind some analogies regarding the interruption of a routine in media flow and the exceptional character of the program (without, though, the live broadcasting element, as far the series is concerned). 

 

The series event

The paratextual element of The Chernobyl Podcast discussing “the true stories that shaped the scenes, themes and characters behind the episodes”, as described on the official Website of the series can be also registered to this playful attitude of the production.

 

From a reception’s point of view, we cannot occult the playful dimension of audiences’ attitudes when engaging with series and, in our case, with the mini-series Chernobyl. For, even if the series seems to borrow from the narrative mode of documentary or that of docu-drama, it winks, at the same time, at the spectator, communicating that this is in fact agenre travestissement, a playful disguise or a pastiche of one genre into another. These intergeneric oscillations are reflected in the qualitative interviews that I had with seven members of the audience during the summer of 2022, selected on the criterion to have watched the series. In their appreciation, it was about a “testimonial series”, a “docu-drama”, an “historical series”, a “socio-historical film”, a “social movie”, “realistic as a documentary”. This transparency cum opacity of the sign is to be discerned in the playful and constant oscillation between the promises of the genres.

 

Two remarks on the above:

 

Firstly, during the course of the interviews, everyone referred to Chernobyl as a film or a movie, pointing out the confusion regarding the format; nevertheless, this doubt was of a secondary importance, from a reception point of view, for engaging with the series.

Secondly, and more importantly, the question of the genre assigned to the series. In the context of a pragmatic approach, the cognitive frame inside which a media program is placed, as well as the hypothesis and interpretations that are formulated by the viewer depend largely on its genre; the latter is assigned by the producer but is also an element of appreciation and negotiation by the spectator. In our case, the terms used to describe the series, such as ‘testimonials’, ‘historical film’, ‘realistic’, ‘docu-drama’ present a strong link with the state of reality, as perceived by audiences. For François Jost (2010: 21) “reality is a kind of horizon, always present, whose status is changeable”. TV genres respond to permanent negotiation processes, as we consider that genres are not only defined by textual parameters but also historically and culturally, as cultural categories (Mittell 2000 and 2004). From a communicational point of view, “an oeuvre is never a simple text but first an act of interhuman communication” (Lits 2008: 47). Or, as Annette Hill suggests, “[v]iewers are alchemists, transforming factual genres from audiovisual documentation into cultural and social experience” (2007: 84).

 

In the interviews with Greek audiences of Chernobyl the idea that the truth is in the details emerged. The “realistic representation” [“it was not beautified”], with “many details” (for instance on the faces and bodies distorted and decomposed by radiation, the scenes with the animals, etc…), “very demonstrative, showing how the state functions”, was at the heart of their attachment to the series. As one interviewee said: “authentic emotions were coming out”.

 

Roland Barthes explains the reality effect as an expression of realism in modernity, pointing out the fact that details that are supposed denoting directly the real are, in fact, signifying it. This would be the referential illusion, a situation in which elements of the ‘real’ do not denote (represent) the real but refer to the category of ‘real’, i.e. to a sense of reality inside texts that gives way to a state of verisimilitude of the fictive universe. According to Barthes, by this procedure, the traditional notion of ‘representation’ is put in doubt in the texts of the era of modernity (Barthes 1968). From a different epistemological departure, Mepham reaches a similar conclusion when he refers to a “post-modem nightmare – a world overwhelmed by the endless flow of simulacra to such an extent that the distinction between fantasy and reality no longer has any purchase” (1991: 27).

 

As Schaeffer (1999) explains, fiction is not only imitative in the platonic sense of a simulacrum. The imitation of the real world is also to be understood in an Aristotelian sense of creating a model of reality.

 

In the case of Chernobyl, it is precisely that: “the game becomes serious and vice versa” (Huizinga, 1949).

 

 

Media Experiences and the ‘actuality effect’

 

The high informational and educational value of Chernobyl is highlighted by all the spectators interviewed, confirming previous scholar work pointing out the fact that the skills we gain from gaming, from engaging in entertainment with media products, affect the way we learn, the way we work, the way we engage in politics, and the way we socialize with other people (Jenkins, 2006). One can find here the relation with the idea of social and practical learning through reality TV developed by Hill (2005 and 2007). In a large-scale research on the political socialization of young people in the USA, bringing together the findings of a large group of American scholars, it is clearly pointed out that an “updating of previously accepted models of political socialization is particularly needed” given the fact that the “traditional” media environment has dramatically changed over the decades. With an emphasis on televised entertainment and on the diffuse political messages in various entertainment and fictional programs, the authors underline the hybrid co-shaping of our behaviours and activities in a “media-saturated world” (Thorson, Mickinney, Shah, eds, 2016: xiv).

 

Moreover, immediate connections with the current actuality were made, such as:

a) the War in Ukraine and the fear of another nuclear accident

b) Covid 19 and the analogy with the sentiment that some things were hidden from people just as they were from the soviet people on Chernobyl’s nuclear accident back then

c) the feeling of similitude between cancel culture in social media and Soviet State’s power in discrediting and silencing people, pointed out by a 16 year old male interviewee.

 

In addition to theses connections, interviewees in their 50s, recalled their personnal memories of their experience of Chernobyl in 1986; those were retrieved and blended with the information acquired from the series. In that sense, ‘the truth of the fiction’ is to be understood as a perceptive category of crafting the “lifeworld”. In the manner of every “archaeological inquiry” into the past that is shaping our present situation (see Foucault, 1969), the concept of the lifeworld (deriving from a long phenomenological tradition) as a sort of “common sense reality” perceived by ordinary people or as a background inside which our cognitive and affective activities develop, is to be examined in direct link with the crafting of a fictive universe. In what ways the lifeworld, our experience of the real or the historical real is forged through fiction?  Is it to be considered as a major criterion of what makes a ‘good’ series, that is a series not only successful in audience terms but characterised as impact fiction, with a considerable influence on the way reality is perceived? As Grodal (2002: 70) points out: “[i]n order to understand the experience of the real in media representation we must look into the basic mechanisms that constitute our experience of what is real”.

The above thoughts, comments and appreciations made by audiences lead us to think of the series Chernobyl as a fictive -yet aspiring to be an authentic- expression not simply of the historical past, of that which preceded the present, but even more, questioning, engaging a relationship with the future (in the way in which Derrida analyzes it in Archive Fever [Le mal d’archive]).

 

 

“If something deserves to be called ideology, it is the truth”

— Paul Veyne (1983), Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes ? [Did the Greeks believed in their myths?], Paris, Ed. Du Seuil

In our small scale reception study, the quest for truth and the pleasure that follows that quest includes, also, the questioning of the truth of fiction. As it was mentioned by the interviewees: “we only heard one side of the story [in the series]” or “it was a capitalistic production who wants to stigmatize the bad aspects of socialism, [...] a decadent state, [...] a dystopic one…”. In his essay Truth and Truthfulness, Bernard Williams (2002) argues that «[i]n general, in relying on what someone said, one inevitably relies on more than he said», an idea referring to the speaker’s ethos as well.

Chernobyl, the Trailer: ‘Nothing but the truth…’

The promise to tell “the untold true story”, the one that was hidden from us, to reveal it, as a strong ideological common trend of many contemporary TV series circulating in a global media landscape (see Jost, 2011), marks the point of departure of HBO’s Chernobyl.

 

The crafting of multiple regimes of truth (in the foucauldian sense), both in terms of production and of reception, is ‘what makes the -narrative- world go round’.

In this regard, the voice of Legasov, as the voice of the authoring instance of the series (such an intentio auctoris), potentially, also, as the voice of the spectators, carries the real promise of the series:

          “To be a scientist is to be naïve. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth does not care about our needs or wants, it doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl. Where once I fear the cost of truth, now I only ask : what is the cost of lies?”

 

“It will lie in wait for all time”.... There lies, to my mind, the promise of the series, eg. not simply to reveal the truth, but the idea that the truth is always there, lying in wait at all time. Accessible whenever we are willing to find it, we only need to ‘dig for evidence’. This would be a reconforting myth, putting an end to the torturing oscillation of postmodern humanity: not only the truth kept or hidden from us is there in the series, but, also, in the series we can find a certain modus operandi for questing all kind of hidden truths.

 

In that sense, I argue that in Chernobyl, as in any fiction of that kind, the similitude with the historical reality (the iconicity of the sign in peircian terms) and the fact that it holds from a real event -it is somehow a trace, distorted but based on it (it is an index, following Peirce’s categorization)- aren’t enough elements in order to explain the sentiment of veracity proposed by the series. In other words, paradoxically, the unique answer cannot only be realism or the quest of realism by audiences.

What is it then?

I would opt for saying, in a rather playful mood -and we know that not every game is funny-, that fiction has become a kind of manual or a guide for surviving in slippery postmodern societies.

 

 

References

 

Dayan D., Katz E. (1992), Media Events. The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

Derrida J. (1995), Le mal d’archive, Paris, Galilée.Foucault M. (1969), L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard.Hill, A. (2005), Reality TV. Audiences and Popular Factual Television, London/ New York: Routledge.

Hill, A. (2007), Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres,

London & New York: Routledge.

Huizinga J. (1949), Homo ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Routledge, London.

Jost, F. (2010), « Que Signifie Parler de ‘Réalité’ ? », Télévision et Réalité, Télévision, 1, pp. 13-30.

Jost F. (2011), De quoi les séries américaines sont-elles le symptôme ?, Paris, CNRS Editions.

Jost F. (2012), « La promesse des genres. Comment regardons – nous la télévision? », Revista

Rastros Rostros - Volumen 14, N. 27.

Lits, M. (2008), Du Récit au Récit Médiatique, Bruxelles: De Boeck.

Mepham, J. (1991), “Television Fictions Quality and Truth-Telling”, Radical Philosophy, 57,

pp. 20-27.

Mittell, J. (2000), Telegenres: Television Genres as Cultural Categories, Doctoral Dissertation,

University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Mittell, J. (2004), Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture,

London/New York: Routledge.

Schaeffer, J.-M. (1999), Pourquoi la Fiction, Paris: Seuil.

Thorson, E., Mickinney, M.S., Shah, D. (eds), 2016, Political Socialization in a media-saturated world, Peter Lang, New York.

         Veyne P. (1983), Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes ?, Paris, Seuil.

Williams, B. (2002), Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Winnicott D.W. (1971), Playing and Reality, Tavistock/Routledge, London/NEW York.

 

Ioanna Vovou is an Assοciate Professor at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece), in the Department of Communication, Media and Culture. She has also the title of « Maître de Conférences » in the French Public University “Université Sorbonne Paris Nord” where she was teaching for the period 2002-2007. She is a full member of the Research Laboratory « Communication, Information, Media » (CIM, University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle). Her research interests focus on the relation between the media and the society, on media analysis and on Television studies. She is participating in international research projects and is the author of essays dealing with the history of television, the political talk shows on Greek television, social representations in reality TV and TV fiction, gendered representations in the media, fan studies, intermediality and media archeology. From 2020 she is in the editorial board of In Other Words. A Contextualized Dictionary to Problematize Otherness. From 2022 she is joining the editorial team of Henry Jenkins blog, renamed Pop Junctions.

History, Power, and Narrative: Chernobyl is Still There

This is the sixth of a series of perspectives on HBO’s Chernobyl

History, power, and narrative. Chernobyl is still there

 

Federico Montanari

(University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

The title of this contribution is alluding to the relationship between history and fiction, in Chernobyl tv series. On the one hand, the Chernobyl series challenges the so-called connection between fiction and nonfiction. It takes up the narration of the events in a rather precise way; but, at the same time, it works on memory and narrative, on the construction of personal experience and testimony, as well as on perception – and therefore on the plastic (that is, aesthetic-perceptual) and visual/figurative dimension. On the other hand, the question is: how the process of contextualization is staged? Context, today, has resurfaced as a topic of discussion among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in neuroscience and cognitive science (from classical Lotman’s analysis in cultural semiotic studies, to Grusin’s works on “hypermediation”; up to researches on “limited”, or “bounded rationality”, on “decisions” and “choices architecture”: e.g., with neuroscientists such as Albert Moukheiber, as well as in connection with models of “enactment”, “embodied”, “grounded”, “extended” or “ecological” mind, with scholars such as Thomas Fuchs or Andy Clark).

In this sense, we should wonder how the scene, or context, of the Cold War is re-presented, rather translated, with its internal power relations; how it is recalled and evoked, both in the Media, in history, as well as in situations narrated by this tv series. And that is also the case with regard to the external links: to the surrounding political, hence discursive and value-based cultural “semio-sphere”; as well as to the filmic representation of various political and geopolitical actors of that time, such as other States (Germany, Europe), or about the role of the media. But it is also important, given our current situation, either from a “mediascape” point of view, as well as political situation (as regards the current Ukraine war) to reflect on the re-emergence – even in other recent, valuable and successful series, such as Stranger Things, or The Americans – of the issue of the Cold War: as a kind of “Future Past” (cf., Koselleck) that does not seem to pass. A kind of a historical “return of the Repressed” in its relations to conflict. Therefore, Chernobyl must be not only seen as an event, but also as a symbol and condensate: the point of fall and fracture of a political regime, but, at the same time, of a narrative and a mythology. A future/past that rebounds in its various themes and figures: not only concerning the issue of the nuclear accident, but also with the possible global environmental catastrophe, as well as epitome of a world global war.

Concerning the first point (the link between “history and fiction”), as anticipated, Chernobyl series poses some problems regarding the fiction/nonfiction relationship, from a semiotic and socio-cultural point of view. More specifically, it deals not only with “the making of true”, but also with the “making as it seems true” (Or “real”). How does this Hbo mini-series claim to tell a historical truth as dramatic as the Chernobyl catastrophe? Thus, to a second level, it deals with a “modal question”. What does this idea of “modal” mean, from the perspective of sense construction and narrative? By this narrative-semiotic concept of modality we want to emphasise the internal mechanism of this narrative: capable of producing something that convinces us that it must be true. To convince us, as viewers, that the truth is being told, and well narrated, and that is useful and important for us. We are facing a kind of Pedagogic narrativization (cf., Laugier), as well as “fictionalisation” of truth. Let us think, by contrast, to another, very recent, case of an Italian mini TV series, of great quality, made by an important film director like Marco Bellocchio, such as “Esterno notte” (Night Exterior) (2022): in which the story of the 1978 kidnapping, by the revolutionary group of the Red Brigades, of the important italian statesman Aldo Moro, is narrated. Here we will find (admittedly, with great differences from the Chernobyl series), another way of “fictionalising” the history. In his latter case, and in a more radical way, the fictionalisation is constructed through the proposal of “alternative endings”, and a mixing of (hoped-for) dreams and harsh reality. But, again, we will be dealing with different forms of fictionalisation that work on the intensification of events.

So, what is fictionalisation? It’s, first of all, again a narrative-modal procedure. Also, obviously, related to the “putting into perspective” (thus turned in discourse): creating, “from a truth, a new narrative” (Larousse, Webster; see, also, Marion Colas-Blaise, Mode d’existence, modalité et modalisation : les apports de la sémiotique, Signata, 13, 2022, resuming semioticians like Bertrand, Fontanille, Zilberberg, but also philosophers such as Latour, or Souriau). But, again, it needs also, secondly, an intensification (namely, an emotional accentuation (see, about emotions in seriality, also Garcia, in this panel on Chernobyl series) of certain points of a narrative. Fiction should be seen as another “mode of existence”? Thanks to an incessant dynamic between the different modes of existence, fiction could be a “form of modulation or deep modality”. That is to say, a production of a new reality through modal and intensive transformation, to quote again Colas-Blaise (ib., p. 14): “indeed, rather than directing the attention towards the “illusion” and the “false”, the notion of fiction must direct us towards the consideration of the “produced”, the “consistent”, the “real””.

 

Fictional beings populating narrative microcosms.

So, the problem now becomes how to rethink, in a not trivial way, this delicate frontier between “fiction” and “reality” (confronting, for instance, the logical-semantic theories of “possible Worlds”, from Lewis to Goodman, in which possible worlds are part of the “real” world, to Eco, up to Dolezel and the idea of “storyworld”, often taken up by N. Dusi from semiotics of culture and media (Torop)). As said, the main idea consists of moving from the false and illusion, to the “fabricated”, up to the “consistency” of the “real”. Thus, fictionalisation becomes an “over-modalization”. What does this mean? That this over-modalization is not just limited to the establishment of signifying “worlds”. But to enhance them, to reinvent them, to render them “consistent” (in a certain way, and from a certain perspective). In our case, of the Chernobyl series, this process is brought to light: it is exhibited, given to be seen (cf., again, Colas-Blaise, ib.).

More generally, in Chernobyl series (as well as in its whole intermedial dimension), we are dealing with a narration which is presented as true and credible; but, at the same time, it has to maintain itself in a struggle against a background of a non-truth: in this case, the falsity of the Soviet system (we should remember all the literature about it…concerning the “Homo sovieticus”, etc.). Again, in order not to fall into an ingenuous “ontologism”, it could be important to provide a description of these passages “to existence”. In this sense, Chernobyl series takes up the recounting of the events in a seemingly accurate manner; but, at the same time, it reworks memory, starting from the reconstruction of personal experience and testimony; as well as on perception of events. An important example on the visual level is the scene of the “radioactive snow” experience on the bridge near the nuclear power plant, where a crowd gathers, during the night of the explosion; and they will soon all die. But this scene is narrated with a lot of differences and different choices concerning the literary source of the series. In this regard, we should recall that the main source of the writing of the Chernobyl series is the book Chernobyl Prayer. Voices from Chernobyl. (A chronicle of the Future), by Svetlana Alexievich (2006); and in which the accounts – sometimes anonymous and plural, or voices, biographical, testimonial interviews, of victims, relatives, citizens, but also of doctors, scientists, politicians, intellectuals as well as common people – are collected and greatly emphasised.

This translation between book and TV series is also about the description of perceptions and sensations. For instance, it deals with certain smell or taste: what is the smell of a terribly strong radioactivity level, destined to destroy in a few hours the bodies? It’s a sort of Metallic taste in the mouth (and it is the only case reported in the series, taken from the source book: let’s refer to the scene of firemen trying to fight the impossible fire in the reactor core).

Or it deals with environmental transformations from other points of view and perspectives: “The animals can probably see it and hear it, but people can’t. But that’s not true! I saw it. This caesium was lying in my vegetable plot until it got wet in the rain. Sort of inky blue, it was. It lay there shimmering in these little lumps. I’d just run back from the collective-farm field and gone to my vegetable plot. And there it was, this blue lump, and a couple of hundred meters away, there was another, as big as the scarf on my head.” (a testimony, from Chernobyl book).

 

Contextualisation and political discourse of memory.

But let’s come back to the other question: about “contextualization”. (See also Rampazzo Gambarato, Heuman and Lindberg, “Streaming media and the dynamics of remembering and forgetting: The Chernobyl case”, Memory Studies, 2022, 15, (2)). And, more specifically, on the question concerning the link between memory and political discourse. There are, in this regard, a number of main points that can be posed even in a very synthetic way (quoting from Rampazzo, et al.). The main question is: what happens to cultural memory in a post-television age, concerning people’s active and passive memorization (cf., also Assman) and memorial layering? Some resuming points:

-           A) we are facing not a “collapsing of memory”, rather a “retrospective” and reinvention with some “nostalgia effects” (typical of other “Cold-war issue” series, such as Stranger Things or The Americans).

-           B) Importance of Inter-medial dimension (and transmedia effect). From book to the series, from series to tourism, up to other textual, cross and trans-medial  experiences;

-           C) Intra-medial dimension: Hero narrative (classical proppian moments, such as, departure, initiation, return...) and their myths in support of memory (with a general, ambiguous, but, at the same time, stereotypical role of these heroes);

-           D) Pluri-medial dimension: “politicisation” (and, at the same time, de-politicization) of memory: Chernobyl as a “catalyst” (Ukraine, Belarus, Ussr and Russia heritage, e.g., Gorbachev and Putin as political heroes, or anti-heroes and villains).

A final, critical point.

Concerning these analytical layers, there is a final, controversial, critical point that I would like to propose, for a possible discussion. Does the “platformization” of cultural production (as well as “Hbo-ization” of media) and, consequently, of cultural memory, such as in the case of Chernobyl, could provoke “the proliferation of the Same” as denounced by Han (quoted in Rampazzo, ib.)? That is to say, a “stereotypization” of narrative? And of discourses? “To give us the false impression of overall agreement with our own beliefs, due to the lack of exposure to different or conflicting content” (ib.).

In my opinion, even in a high-quality, esthetically excellent product like Chernobyl, we can find this risk. Particularly with regard to the fact that there would be a kind of “reduction” (“ad unum”) of the conflict as well as of collective dimension, often reduced to struggles of “isolated individual heroes.” Where collectives are crushed on this single dimension. (Although, in some moments, they are present, such as protesting mothers or wives, or miners and soldiers, condemned to the risk of radioactive death, but often in an almost caricatured form). This is not an ideological critique, but precisely it deals with the form of narrative values and of discursive organisations: concerning the semio-cultural dimension of the serial product; but also with regard to their ethical (Laugier) and socio-pedagogical dimensions.

References

 

Alexievich, S.  (2006). Chernobyl Prayer. Voices from Chernobyl. (A chronicle of the Future). London: Penguin.

 

Beck, U. (1987). “The Anthropological Shock: Chernobyl And The Contours Of The Risk Society”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 32, pp. 153-165.

 

Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

 

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty. Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Colas-Blaise, M., (2022). “Modes, modalités et modalisations. La conceptualisation des modalités : statut et rôle épistémologique” Mode d’existence, modalité et modalisation : les apports de la sémiotique. Signata. Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics, 13.

 

Dayan D., Katz E. (1992). Media Events. The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.

 

Fontanille, J. (2020). « L’instauration des mondes et la fabrique des vérités »,

Degrés, vol. 43, pp. d 1-d 29.

 

Fontanille, J., Zilberberg, Cl. (1998). Tension et signification, Liège: Pierre Mardaga.

 

Gessen, M. (2019). “What HBO Chernobyl got right, and what it got terribly wrong”.

The New Yorker, 4 June:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-co... (accessed October 2022).

 

Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience.

Harvard: Harvard University Press.

 

Grusin, R. (2015) “Radical Mediation”. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Autumn 2015), pp. 124-148. The University of Chicago Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/682998 (accessed October 2022).

 

Laugier, S. (2019a). Nos vies en séries. Paris: Flammarion.

 

Laugier, S. (2019b). ““Very bad trip” à Tchernobyl”. Libération, 20 June: https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2019... (accessed 2 November 2022).

 

Koselleck, R. (1985). Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

 

Rampazzo Gambarato, R., Heuman, J., Lindberg, Y., “Streaming media and the dynamics of remembering and forgetting: The Chernobyl case”, Memory Studies, 2022, 15, (2)).

 

 

 

Biography

Federico Montanari, PhD Semiotics, is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communication Processes at the University of Modena Reggio Emilia (Italy), Department of Communication and Economics, where he teaches Visual and Media Studies, Theory of Communication, and Sociosemiotics; after having taught in several universities, such as Politecnico di Milano, Bologna, ISIA, Iulm Milano, and as visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego. He works on socio-semiotic analysis of war and conflicts and political discourse; more recently on the study of urban spaces, ecological discourse, and technologies, also in relation to cultural studies, and visual and media representations. He also works on the philosophy of post-structuralism. He is participating in various research projects, and he has written several books and articles on these issues, including: “Contested novel ecosystems: Socio-ecological processes and evidence from Italy” (2021, with Bartoletti, R., Trentanovi, G., Zinzani, A.); La forma seriale e mediale del conflitto (2019); Immagini coinvolte (2016); Morphogenesis and Individuation (2014, with A. Sarti and F. Galofaro); Actants, Actors, and Combat Units, a semiocultural viewpoint (2012); Linguaggi della guerra (2004).

Chernobyl: From Nuclear Disaster to the TV Series, and Beyond – The Importance of Archives in Narrative Construction

This is the fifth in a series of perspectives on HBO’s Chernobyl.

Chernobyl (HBO, Sky Atlantic 2019): From nuclear disaster to the Tv series, and beyond.

The importance of archives in narrative construction.

 

Antonella Mascio

University of Bologna

 

On May 2019, Sky Atlantic aired the TV mini-series Chernobyl, inspired by the events that had really taken place a few decades earlier, in April 1986. The TV series tells the story of the nuclear disaster, retracing its initial stages, up to the trial of people held responsible for the disaster. The attention paid to the historical reconstruction of the events, the use of testimony documents, the reference to names and people who actually made decisions and guided the various operations, together with an excellent script and direction, and an exceptional cast, as in the best Complex TV (Mittell, 2015), have decreed its success at a global level.

The storytelling is based on archive materials to document a social and cultural trauma, which has a significant importance still today. Archive and trauma are therefore two macro references driving the analysis both from a conceptual and theoretical perspective, and for their fundamental role in the narrative, which is necessary in order to achieve the effect of reality found in the TV series. And again, trauma and archive - or rather their viewing and revisiting - do move audience’s groups towards an investigation linked to the places, where the disaster occurred.

 

1.     The event

The event narrated in the TV series is not so too far from our present. This is one of the most staggering disasters in history, still alive in the collective memory. Chernobyl has had such an impact that it has become a sort of universal warning. Ulrich Beck defined it as a moment of anthropological shock, which, like other disasters, produced a “collapse of the everyday” and a “crisis of presence” (Beck, 1987). Chernobyl would seem to coincide with the entry into the “nuclear age (...) and the beginning of a social construction of risk realities” (ib.).

In April 1986, the disaster had a very large coverage on the media of the period, so much so that it could be considered a real journalistic and media event: It produced breaks in television programming and had consequences in the daily routines of the audiences-citizens, creating new frames of meaning for the notion of “danger”. With Chernobyl, the population was invited to turn their attention to an invisible enemy - radioactive material - which in a short time reached most of Europe, as well as North America. Not only did the media images, the news, inform about the events, but also animate the public debate. The tragedy quickly took on the traits of a global threat, resulting in a strong attention being paid to the possible consequences of the use of nuclear power.

Chernobyl was therefore construed as a catastrophe on various levels: certainly in terms of health and the environment, but also at political and cultural level, by activating an active processing of the accident that modified and gave rise to the assignment of new meanings to the event. In the collective memory, Chernobyl corresponds in fact to a sort of a reference model, to an extreme and fearful event, a negative term of comparison (let us think about the more recent accident in Fukushima), and a form of danger that is extremely difficult to manage, capable of triggering large-scale devastating effects. Still, something that continues to be scary, and from which it is better to move away, both in a physical and symbolic sense. Beck even spoke of a double shock: “the loss of sovereignty is added to the threat in itself, over the assessment of the dangers to which one is so directly exposed” (1987, p. 72), therefore a risk awareness accompanied by a lack of abilities in information management, which is precisely what emerges from the testimonies of the people then living in Pripyat, and collected afterwards (I refer in particular to the book “Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl” by Svetlana Alexievich).

2.     Archives and reality effect

A large repository of materials about the disaster was then created in a very short time. From amateur and media images, to audio-videos recorded in the period following April 1986, to written testimonies, or recorded on tapes, all have merged into a sort of archive – more widespread than established - regarding the event. What is the archive and how can it work?

The archive responds to multiple functions: it is configured as a complex tool, a device capable of containing materials that are available to be re-processed and re-designed each time, to give life to new possibilities of reading and interpretation. A device that is also used to generate future stories. How important were the archives in the making of the TV series Chernobyl?  The TV series tells the story of Chernobyl through a treatment of the testimonies of several men and women, specifically highlighting the sacrifice they made to save the whole of Europe from a nuclear disaster. The description of the events comprises a scientific level, presented on the screen via the voice of characters representing that world; a political level, through the party representatives of the then-USSR who took action in their various capacities, and who found themselves having to make immediate and difficult decisions. Finally – last, but not least – an emotional level, devoted to feelings, fears, pains expressed through contextual images and characters involved in the disaster. This is then a storytelling that applies its model of reference to the notion of “complex” logic: the viewers are invited to follow the evolution of events, step by step, according to a timeframe that is anything but simple. Each step is connected with a wide series of variables touching the three levels described above, and producing effects on each of them. A drama that focuses its storytelling on the rush against time in order to curb damage and its related loss of lives by men and women, as well as on the search for accountability.

The story is being told as a docu-drama: its purpose consists in bringing a realistic story to the screen, in which the search for the real - or truth - is part of its poetics. The use of statements made by first-hand witnesses, who felt the brunt of the tragedy on their own skins, is in fact well mixed with the typical devices of the audio-visual storytelling. All of this determines a narrative construction based on a constant balance between historical sources on the one hand, and plausible - and partly fictionalized – descriptions, on the other hand. The presence of different narrative levels contributes to the setting up of an articulated view of what happened, following the stories of different characters. Chernobyl - therefore - is not just the story of the nuclear disaster: it is an in-depth plunge into a specific historical moment, where a series of changes were taking place, both at a geo-political and socio-cultural level. Drawing on sources that tell the experience of the people who participated in those events, the series can only be a choral story, composed of the reconstruction of many voices and different points of view on the events.

The development of the narrative, therefore, rests on two fundamental parallel lines: historical sources, enriched by the reconstruction of locations, buildings, streets, cars that bring back the typical looks of countries in the Soviet Union in those years. Thus, the settings reproduce a scenario similar to the real one, and tell a lot about that event, constantly soliciting collective memory through recollection. With the passing of time, some areas in Chernobyl and Pripyat have become a symbol of a shared tragedy and trauma (for example the Ferris wheel - in addition to the power plant).

The reconstruction of the atmospheres is achieved through an accurate description of the spaces, furnishing and clothes of the characters. A description that in some passages may perhaps appear even excessive in the meticulous research of the details. All of this is certainly part of the poetics of the TV series, and it helps to produce that effect of reality (Barthes 1988) that brings about an additional level of signification. In effect, Chernobyl presents a narrative basing much of its effectiveness on descriptive expedients: This is not a “detective” TV series or science-fiction. Its reference is an event that we are aware of, and has become part of history books. And what is highlighted, precisely to make the storytelling more realistic, are the details taken from reality or based on archival materials.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9GQtvUKtHA

References

Alexievich, S. (2016), Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, Penguin, London.

Alves, E. (2015), “The Specter of Chernobyl: An Ontology of Risk”, in I. Capeloa Gil and C. Wulf, Hazardous Future, Berlin-Munich-Boston, De Gruiter, pp. 127 – 136.

Barthes, R. (1988), “L’effetto di reale”, in Il brusio della lingua, Einaudi, Torino.

Beck, U. (1987), “The Anthropological Shock: Chernobyl And The Contours Of The Risk Society”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Vol. 32, pp. 153-165.

Braithwaite, R. (2019), “Chernobyl: A‘Normal’ Accident?”, in Survival, vol. 61, n. 5, pp.149-158 (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2019.1662152).

Click, M.A., Scott, S. (2018) (edited by), The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, New York – London, Routledge – Taylor & Francis Group.

Demaria, C. (2012), Il trauma, l’archivio e il testimone. La semiotica, il documentario e la rappresentazione del “reale”, Bologna, Bononia University Press.

Eco, U. (1979), Lector in fabula, Bompiani, Milano.

Giannachi, G. (2016), Archive Everything: Mapping the Everyday, MIT Press, Cambridge (USA).

Mills, B. (2021), “Chernobyl, Chornobyl and Anthropocentric Narrative”, in Series, vol. VII, n.1, pp. 5 – 18 (https://series.unibo.it/article/view/12419).

Mittell, J. (2015), Complex Tv. The Poetics od Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York University Press, New York.

Rampazzo Gambarato, R., Heuman, J., Lindberg, Y. (2021), “Streaming media and the dynamics of remembering and forgetting: The Chernobyl case”, in Memory Studies, August, pp. 1-16 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17506980211037287).

Robertson, C. (2011), “Introduction: Thinking about Archives, Writing about History”, in C. Robertson, Media History and the Archive, Routledge.

Schmid, S.D. (2020), “Chernobyl the TV Series: On Suspending the Truth or What's the Benefit of Lies?”, in Technology and Culture, vol. 61, n. 4, pp. 1154-1161.

 

Biography

Antonella Mascio is Associate Professor of Sociology of Cultural and Communication Processes at the University of Bologna (Italy), Department of Political and Social Sciences. She was a visiting scholar at Waseda University, Tokyo, and the University of California, San Diego. Her main research interest is the relationship between TV series and audiences, using a sociological and media perspective, which includes fandom research, fashion and celebrity culture, and nostalgia studies.

She is a member of several Research Centers, including Comedias (https://centri.unibo.it/comedias/it); International Media and Nostalgia Network (https://medianostalgia.org/); Centro di Studi Avanzato Sul Consumo e la Comunicazione (http://www.cescocom.eu/chi-siamo/).

She has published books and many articles in scientific journals and books focused on virtual communities, TV series and their audiences, media, and fashion. She is in numerous editorial boards, including Pop Junctions (Henry Jenkins Project).

Chernobyl Miniseries Polarizations: Good/Bad, Rational/Emotional

This is the fourth in a series of perspectives on HBO’s Chernobyl.

 

Chernobyl miniseries polarizations: good/bad, rational/emotional

 

Andrea Bernardelli (University of Ferrara, Italy)

 

Plots in Television series are often based on polarizations, in other words, on binary oppositions, which are extremely simple to follow.

The miniseries Chernobyl brings into play, a distinct clash between good and evil. The main opposition spectators are faced with is an ethical one, between the good guys, the scientists Valery Legasov and Ulana Khomyuk, who heroically try to limit the damage of the disaster, and the bad guys, the technicians of the nuclear plant Anatoly Dyatlov, Viktor Bryukhanov and Nicolai Fomian, who due to their incompetence and arrogance are the cause of the accident. Amongst the bad guys, various institutions can be placed like the government and the KGB, which have hidden and are still continuing to hide the deplorable mistakes made in the plant construction.

However, the miniseries provides an alternative storyline, revolving around two protagonists Vasily Ignatenko, the firefighter, and his wife Lyudmilla, parallel to the central one. Thanks to these two narrative lines another polarization occurs due to the relationship between rationality and emotionality. Here one will identify contrasts between the rational position of the scientists, engaged in the understanding of the most effective solutions to solve the emergencies they find themselves gradually facing, parallel to this there is the dramatic story of the agony of the fireman due to radiation exposure.

The role of Legasov and Khomyuk is used to give the viewers a clear picture on a relevant series of events, for instance, the explanation of the disaster, its causes, and the protagonist’s effort in trying to find the truth, along with the hidden mistakes made by the institutions while constructing the plant and ignoring previous communication about technical problems.  Here we follow a plot similar to that of a spy story (with the intervention of the KGB) or that of a legal drama (in search of the truth during a trial). This leads the viewer to a better representation of how things went. For a better understanding of the accident’s dynamics, the sequence of scenes dedicated to the plant technicians’ trial is fundamental. Here, Legasov's character is given the opportunity to explain, in fiction representation to the judges, thus providing the viewer with a clear understanding attributed to the dynamics of the physical mechanism resulting in the explosion of the reactor. The narrative functionality correlated to the representation of this detailed explanation of the events by Legasov is made evident by the fact that in historical reality this event truly never happened. In actual fact, the real Valery Legasov never had the opportunity to provide those clarifications to the commission of inquiry.

In relation to the contrast of the two narrative lines, the rational/cognitive and the melodramatic/emotional, it is worth noticing how other elements of historical reality have been manipulated into fiction to increase the effects of polarization on the viewer. For example, the real Valery Legasov had a wife and a daughter, characters that do not appear in the miniseries. Their presence would certainly have added emotionality and melodrama to Legasov's narrative line, which instead had to preserve its own rational characterization. Alternatively, Lyudmilla the firefighter's wife’s narrative story, has been reconstructed in an exasperated and melodramatic way, a functional representation to increase the emotional and dramatical charge of this part of the story.

This contrast is evident in the way Legasov's and Ignatenko's deaths are differently portrayed (see Dusi). The scientist's suicide scene, which is shown at the beginning of the story, almost takes place off screen. We only see Legasov's dangling feet which provide an insight on how he made this extreme gesture, while his cat is eating quietly then licking his paws, ignoring what happened in the same room to his owner. The scene is extremely cold, and even the actions performed by the character in the minutes preceding his gesture do not in any way indicate the dramatic tension of the moment. The death of the firefighter Ignatenko, or rather his excruciating agony, is instead represented in all its drama and physicality. The presence of his wife at his side and the display of her pain are equally emotionally strong for the viewer. The portrayal of these extreme moments has been dramatized to the point of arousing the grievances of the real Lyudmilla who said she did not succumb the pain for the loss of her husband in that way. Therefore, these two scenes portray, on the one hand, a cold representation of the extreme moment of death and on the other, an emotional and highly melodramatic representation.

This element brings to light how the miniseries, often alludes to a strong link with the audio-visual documents of that time, thus, one will find a strong fictional characterization of the story. A fictionality that is useful for screenwriters to maintain its entire narrative functionality. We could say that the characters and their stories in the miniseries are fictional because they are functional, narratively speaking. The characters are represented in this mixed form of fictionality and reality to support those simple and essential polarizations that sustain the deeper ethical meaning of the narrative from the viewer’s point of view. This is the representation of the clash between good and evil, and between truth and lies, for the viewer.

For this reason, the miniseries turns out to be an intertwining of narrative genres (see Grignaffini). Apparently, it seems to be a docu-drama, trying to correspond, even from an iconographic point of view to real situations reported by the media of that time (see Dusi).  It is also an historical drama, in which the fictional aspects in the reconstruction of the characters, are evident. We can also identify references to other typical television series genres, such as legal drama, spy stories, and certainly melodrama, present in the most emotionally driven part of the plot. The intertwining of different genres and audio-visual narrative forms supports the complex relationship that exists in the miniseries between reality and fiction. The construction of the characters and their actions from an ethical point of view is precisely based on the possibilities offered to the screenwriters by referring to different narrative registers. Reality and fiction coexist to allow the characters to express the sense of the story. The way in which the heroization process of the characters is constructed seems to explain the first sentence pronounced by Legasov right at the beginning of the first episode: "What is the cost of lies?". The answer is provided to the viewer through the two keys mentioned above, the rational and the emotional, which aim is to reinforce the overall meaning of the story: the hero's sacrifice (see Garcia).

Biography

Andrea Bernardelli (Bologna, 1962) teaches semiotics and narratology in University of Ferrara. He is a member of the scientific board of the international doctorate in Environmental Sustainability and Wellbeing. He is the author of Che cos’è la narrazione cinematografica (with A. Bellavita, Roma, Carocci, 2021), Che cos’è la narrazione (Roma, Carocci, 2019), Che cos’é una serie televisiva (with G. Grignaffini, Roma, Carocci, 2017), Cattivi seriali. Personaggi atipici nelle produzioni televisive contemporanee (Roma, Carocci, 2016), Semiotica.  Storia,  teorie,  e  metodi (with  E. Grillo,  Roma,  Carocci,  2014), Che cos'è l'intertestualità (Roma, Carocci, 2013), Il  testo  narrativo (with  R. Ceserani,  Bologna, il  Mulino, 2005.