This is the first in a multipart series offering transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives on the 2019 HBO series, Chernobyl.

Remembering (and refiguring) Chernobyl:

what can be learned from the HBO (2019) series?

Nicola Dusi (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

Charo Lacalle (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)

The premiere of Chernobyl (HBO-SKY, 2019) recalled the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history and the enormous damage on both living beings and the environment. This "historical drama" —as the critics labelled the miniseries— made nuclear disasters once again the focus of public attention, after being overshadowed in the last two decades by the increasing dramatization of other risks (such as climate change).

Created by the experienced director and screenwriter Craig Mazin, Chernobyl asserts the role of media in the recovery and dissemination of historical and cultural memory (Rampazzo Gambarato, Heuman and Lindberg, 2022). The miniseries also corroborates the intermediality of television fiction and its capacity to touch the deepest and most complex dimensions of our existence (Pallarés-Piquer, Hernández, Castañeda y Osorio, 2020). In this sense, it can be said that its value lies not so much in evoking a past that can no longer be changed, “in a risk society, where history offers no guarantees” (Giddens & Pierson, 1998: 157), but in appealing to human responsibility so that this type of catastrophe will never happen again.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant —the largest in the world— makes Chernobyl a wake-up call for the fear of another explosion. Such a concern was expressed by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, after his visit to the installations at the end of August 2022. "It could be a bigger disaster than Chernobyl," warns Carlos Umaña, co-chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). As it is, Mazin’s miniseries makes us feel skeptical about the European Union's February 2022 proposal to grant "green" status to nuclear power at least until 2025 on the premise that it is consistent with the EU’s climate and environmental objectives.

The risk society

Sociologists of Modernity Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens use the concept of risk society to express the anthropogenic manipulation of nature and the concern for the future of humanity, at a time when it is no longer possible to attribute catastrophes to, “an external intervention of hazards” because risks depend on decisions (Beck, 1992[1986]:183). The risk society theory also expresses the way contemporary society organizes itself in order to manage the consequences of human agency in what is referred to as the Anthropocene: the new stage of the current Quaternary period shaped by the actions of humankind thought to have succeeded the Holocene or post-glacial period (Boyd, 2009; Crutzen, 2002).

As the Australian philosopher Toby Ord points out in his influential book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2019), the certainty that we are at a crucial turning point in the history of the human species, whose greatest challenge is to safeguard the future of humanity, clashes head-on with the lack of maturity, coordination, and perspective needed to avoid ecological disasters. In keeping with the stories about the effects of the Anthropocene, the Chernobyl series’ mixture of fiction and facts and narrative strategies illustrates the horror of a nightmare from which we can never entirely escape, because it is something that could possibly happen again. After all, “Russia effectively is using the plant at Zaporizhzhia as a pre-positioned nuclear weapon to threaten and intimidate not only Ukrainians but millions of Europeans across a dozen countries,” writes Mary Glantz (2022), Senior Advisor for Russia and Europe Center of US Institute of Peace (USIP).

Complex TV, Intermediality and Transmediality

The Chernobyl TV series opens many possible issues, and in this thematic section of the blog, we will address some of those issues that are part of our research topics. Like many new contemporary TV series, Chernobyl can be considered a case of what Jason Mittell (2015) calls "complex TV." It is no longer a matter of analyzing a TV series as an isolated and autonomous media product. It is important to understand the miniseries' choice of discursive genre and format (Giorgio Grignaffini); to examine the narrative structure of the script (Paolo Braga), and the construction of male (Andrea Bernardelli) and female characters (Charo Lacalle), as well as to analyze the collision or interplay in the series between its fictional capacity and its documentary aspirations (Nicola Dusi), as is evident in the miniseries' finale (images of the fictional narrative are replaced by those of iconographic and historical sources). While analyzing the TV series, we will talk about the Chernobyl disaster as a social and cultural trauma (Antonella Mascio), about the TV series and the elements of modern sacrifice (Alberto Garcia), and about the representation of the Cold War and the manipulation of information (Federico Montanari). All this without forgetting "traditional" viewers and their reactions, for example in a particular local setting such as Greece (in Europe), verifying with qualitative sociological analysis (interviews) the reception and understanding of the TV series’ narrative (Ioanna Vovou).

TV seriality, as Chernobyl teaches us, thrives on the intermedial and transmedia relations that are created through the paratexts, the commentaries, the reinterpretations, and interpretations that circulate on the web in the transmedia storytelling of the Western semiosphere (to limit ourselves to this part of the world).

Therefore, the discussion we open in these pages faces the intermedial interweaving of footage, allusions, quotations, and translations, which the Chernobyl series activates from the writing of the script to the shooting and the postproduction editing. Think, for example, of iconographic sources, literary sources, and historical sources, including written (investigative literature, journalistic reports, historical documents), visual (photographs, drawings) and audio-visual (footage from the period, interviews, television reports). The comparison and discussion also becomes a transmedia problem, as the series is reopened and discussed weekly (during its airing) through some detailed podcasts by HBO with interviews with the showrunner Craig Mazin and other members of the production team. As Jenkins (2006) claims, this kind of transmedia storytelling features the TV series narration and story world on other platforms, where each medium retells them in the way that suits it best.

The transmedia and crossmedia products are a swarm of new interpretations, controversies, and discussions about the truthfulness and the accuracy of the choices of the Chernobyl serial’s narrative, which produce new videos, remixes, articles and statements in which a close scrutiny and exchange of views is conducted about the sources and testimonies used in the TV series. Lots of reinterpretations, often critical and highly polemical, are given by web prosumers intent on discussing (even with fairly obvious tendentious purposes) a serial narrative that casts a cold and negative light on the Soviet regime and its manipulative and falsifying handling of the nuclear disaster through the information provided about the catastrophe both as it occurred in 1986 and in the following years.

For these reasons, some contributions to the discussion we are presenting will take into account intermedial intersections with other media products (other series, films, documentaries, but also novels and documentary photographs, etc.) on the one hand, and on the other, transmedia and crossmedia overlaps and reinterpretations (through production podcasts, but also through the autonomous and grassroot productions of web users).

Our proposal stems from a panel discussion that took place at the University of Thessaloniki during the World Semiotics Conference (IASS/AIS) in August-September 2022, but has been extended (for this blog) to other scholars and researchers interested in the analysis of contemporary television seriality and its psychological, social, and semiotic implications and constructions.

References

Beck, Ulrich (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Sage Publications.

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

Crutzen, P. J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature 415(23).doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a

Giddens, Anthony; Pierson, Christopher (1998). Making sense of Modernity. Polity Press.

russias-new-nuclear-threat-power-plants-weapons

Jenkins, Henry (2006). Converge Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press.

Mittell, Jason (2015). Complex TV. The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York – London: New York University Press

Ord, Toby (2019). The precipice: Existential risk and the future of humanity. Hachette Editions.

Pallarès-Piquer, Marc; Hernández, J. Diego; Castañeda, W. José; Osorio, Francisco (2020). “Vivir tras la catástrofe. El arte como intersección entre la imagen viviente y la conciencia. Una aproximación a la serie “Chernobyl” desde la ontología de la imagen”. Arte, Individuo y Sociedad 32, 738-798. doi: https://doi.org/10.5209/aris.65826

Rampazzo Gambarato, Renira; Heuman, Johannes; Lindberg, Ylva (2022). “Streaming media and the dynamics of remembering and forgetting: The Chernobyl case”. Memory Studies, 15(2), 271-86. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211037287.