Lessons from Chernobyl... the HBO Series...
/“we learn from fiction”
“it brings reality in front of you”
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”
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.
Biography
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.
