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.