Intermedial Realism in Chernobyl

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

INTERMEDIAL REALISM IN CHERNOBYL

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

The persuasive effectiveness of the miniseries Chernobyl (HBO, 2019) comes from its documentary approach (Odin 2013). It is not just about historical accuracy in representing places and people, furnishings, clothing and technology in the fictional reconstruction of a narrative possible world (Eco 1979; Ryan 2014). The "figures" of death from invisible radiation are achieved through a sound design that remixes Geiger counters; the scenes of contaminated urban spaces and forests are based on iconographic sources from photo reports at the disaster site; characters and narrative situations (e.g., the death of the young firefighter) are created using investigative literature of interviews with survivors and their families as source texts. And after the fictional finale, Chernobyl goes on to feature a long documentary sequence, with photos and archive footage, that becomes an ethical and political commentary on the nuclear disaster and its management.

Photographic sources

Talking about photographic sources, let me recall the first photographs taken the day after the Chernobyl reactor’s explosion by Igor Kostin (for the Novosti Press Agency in Kiev), and in 2001 by Canadian Robert Polidori. These pictures focus on the interiors of empty and devastated homes and schools, in which the passing of time has not affected the bleak truth of the spaces and the abandoned objects of daily life. Some of these photos feature in the editing of the final documentary sequence of Chernobyl, others are the basis in the series for silent scenes of explorations of the emptied spaces of the city after the forced exodus of the population. These photographs become visual documents on which set and costume designers rely for the fictional recreation of the iconic world of the series, to create a setting resembling a Soviet cityscape of 1986, with its devastation by blast and radiation. The fictional world thus translates a reality mediated by photography. A translation and reinterpretation in which the historical source becomes a matrix of invariance.

Literary sources

As for the literary sources, an important one not cited in the credits yet repeatedly mentioned in the podcast, is the book Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (2005), used in particular for the screenwriter Mazin’s portrayal of the young firefighter’s death from radiation poisoning. The choice to narrate this particular death in the miniseries lies perhaps in the power of an exemplary (and documented) case, combined with a tender and sensitive love story, as a way to simultaneously remember the victims of Chernobyl and their families and to thematize the sacrifice of thousands of people who served to stem the catastrophe (see Alberto Garcia post).

In the firefighter burial scene of the TV series (ep. 3), a truck arrives in the cemetery: it is a cement mixer that begins unloading fresh cement onto the zinc coffins. The end of the sequence alternates shots of the dripping concrete with a detail of the face of the young woman, who is holding back tears: we watch (in slow motion) the filling of the pit with the thick, grey liquid, which first encircles then slowly submerges the coffins.

This figure of the flow of concrete is a key “isotopy” in the series (Eco 1979; Greimas, Courtés 1979), a thematic idea underlying the images. The slow flow of the grey concrete that covers everything appears, in fact, as a good metaphor for the strategy of the Soviet Union narrated by the miniseries with respect to the nuclear accident – not telling and lying, deception and concealment, attempting to make inviolable the secret related to the disaster and to construct an official truth that reassures public opinion, making the surface as smooth as a tombstone slab.

Sound design

Recalling the sound design of Chernobyl (composed by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir), what is interesting are not just the moments of lyricism aimed at emphasizing (with classical music, or choral and vocal arrangements) the heroism of some characters, but a less perceptible and still present background sound composed of mild distortions and broken tones: a kind of background buzz taken up (and remixed) by the noise of Geiger counters measuring radiation. The pervasive noise of Geiger counters metaphorize the silent and inexorable poisoning of places and people, of buildings and objects and animals, affected by something invisible, pervasive, and yet - in this mode -"noticeable", that is, audibly perceptible by the viewer.

So, what does it mean to write the script for a TV series like Chernobyl, to construct the sets and to provide costumes for the narrative possible world of the series, starting from historical documents?

Photographic (and audiovisual), literary and material sources become source sign systems that are copied, translated and reinterpreted in the new textual project of serial fiction, building similarities and cross-references through a reconstruction of urban and private spaces with their furnishings, objects and technologies (including telephones and cars) circulating in the possible world of the past.

Accuracy and controversy discussions

Because of the “accuracy” exhibited by the fictional story, but especially because of the fierce criticism of the Soviet handling of the nuclear disaster by an American television series, Chernobyl has generated, among other things, the so-called forensic fandom (Mittell 2015) of curious and critical viewers who search for old footage and photos online in order to compare them with scenes from the series. Fans and prosumers argue online as to whether the work done by set designers, costume designers and sound designers is true or false, and even produce interviews and video-essays both to glorify the seriousness of the work and to de-legitimize it.

This fandom triggered by the Chernobyl series also draws on paratextual “top down” materials, such as the series discussion podcasts that circulated immediately after the airing of TV episodes, featuring interviews with the showrunner Craig Mazin, who is also the author of the script.

In the HBO podcast, Mazin emphatically stresses the accuracy of historical reconstruction for what he calls a docu-drama, that is, a "dramatic retelling of history".

In the podcast, Mazin claims: “we had a chance to set a record straight about: what we do that is very accurate; what we do that is a little bit sideways to it; what we do compressed or changed”. In this way, he introduces a gradualness and a kind of classification that appears very useful in semiotic terms, distinguishing four modes of reconstruction in relation to historical sources. We could hypothesize logical and semiotic relations (see Giorgio Grignaffini post), related to these considerations by Mazin. Thus, we are not dealing with amorphous reality, but with translative relations between a fictional representation aiming at historical verisimilitude and a “semiosphere” (Lotman 1990) composed of many mismatched historical sources, to a greater or lesser extent verifiable and reliable. The translational and interpretive relationship is semantically organized by the continuitywith the historical sources (we can talk here of a complex term like “truth” or "reality" or think of a documentary communicative pact) and the discontinuity with the sources (we can call it “invention” or “fiction”); in this tension we could put at least two conflicting semantic pairs:

- (A) the accurate reconstruction VERSUS

- (B) the reconstruction that radically changes and transforms

- (not B) the reconstruction in which events, actions and characters in the historical narrative are compressed or displaced VERSUS

(not A) the fictional reconstruction that invents but parallels the directions given by the sources

In a semiotic perspective, those mechanisms are all translational. Furthermore, referentiality is never given as absolute, because it is discursively and narratively intertwined in intertextual, intermedial and transmedia ways.

The intermedial expansion of the documentary finale

In the fifth and final episode of Chernobyl, after the public trial and Legasov's revelations accusing the Soviet state of keeping silent about the problems of nuclear reactors of that model, the head of the KGB informs him that from now on his social and professional life will be reset to zero. The ending of the episode is silent: Legasov is escorted out of the building where the trial took place and taken away.

It is the conclusion of the story, marked by an explicit threshold of suspension since we already know, from the first images of the first episode, what the character's bitter end will be. But it is not, yet, the miniseries finale.

The discourse in fact expands, moving out of the "fictional" pact and into the "documentary" one with a sequence of archival materials, accompanied by elegiac background music, while overlay scripts inform us about the historical fate of the real-life protagonists of the story.

The final documentary threshold of the Chernobyl series constructs an authoritative narrative that stands as an ethical and political commentary on what happened. Data are introduced as objective elements, in contrast to the "official truth" provided by the former Soviet regime.

In this intermedial expansion, creating a second finale, the very credibility of the production and artistic operation of the miniseries is being reinforced.

So we have a dual strategy: on the one hand, the narrative with archival images commented on by the intertitles informs and, at the same time, constructs historical knowledge. On the other hand, it seeks to establish a documentary complicity with the viewer, tending to reset the media filter in order to bring the discourse to historical and phenomenological life.

If the documentary mode sets up a discursive pact whereby what is being told "directly concerns me" (Odin 2013), conveying historical-economic as well as biographical and generational knowledge, the produced media experience serves the miniseries to attest itself as truthful, demonstrating how the fictional narrative is based on intersubjectively verifiable historical sources. Furthermore, the ethical position is the result of the rhetorical construction that denigrates the use of information in totalitarian regimes.

Hence, “intermedial realism" in contemporary TV series means that it is the interweaving of media that builds the truthfulness or veridical effect linked to historical reality (Pethö 2009). Thus, historical memory is “an editing machine” (Didi-Huberman 2002).

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DIDI-HUBERMAN G. 2016 [2002], The Surviving Image, PennState University Press

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GREIMAS A. J., COURTES J. (a cura di) (1979), Sémiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, Hachette, Paris

JENKINS H. (2006), Convergence Culture, New York University Press, New York.

LOTMAN J.M. 2001 [1990], Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Tauris, London and New York,

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

PETHÖ A. (2009), “(Re)Mediating the Real. Paradoxes of an Intermedial Cinema of Immediacy, Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 1, pp. 47-68, 2009.

ODIN R. 2022 [2013], Spaces of Communication. Elements of Semio-Pragmatics, Amsterdam University Press.

RYAN, M.L. (2014), Story/Worlds/Media: Tuning the Instruments of a Media-Conscious Narratology, in M.L. RYAN, J. THON (eds.), Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media- Conscious Narratology, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 25-49.

Biography

Nicola M. Dusi, PhD in Semiotics, is Associate professor of Media Semiotics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), Department of Communication and Economics. He is the author of the books: Il cinema come traduzione (Utet, 2003); Dal cinema ai media digitali (Mimesis, 2014); Contromisure. Trasposizioni e intermedialità (Mimesis, 2015); Capire le serie TV. Generi, stili, pratiche (with. G. Grignaffini, Carocci, 2020). He edited some monographic issues of international journals: Versus (85-87, 2000, with S. Nergaard) dedicated to "Intersemiotic Translation"; Iris (30, 2004, with M. Troehler and F. Vanoye) dedicated to "Film Adaptation: Methodological Questions, Aesthetic Questions"; Degrés (141, 2010, with C. Righi) about "Dance Research and Transmedia Practices"; Mediascapejournal (16, 2020, with R. Eugeni and G. Grignaffini) dedicated to “La serialità nell’era post-televisiva”. He also edited many Media Studies books such as: Remix-Remake. Pratiche di replicabilità (with L. Spaziate, Meltemi, 2006); Matthew Barney. Polimorfismo, multimodalità, neobarocco (with C.S. Saba, Silvana Editoriale, 2012); Bellissima tra scrittura e metacinema (with L. Di Francesco, Diabasis, 2017); Confini di genere. Sociosemiotica delle serie tv (Morlacchi, 2019); David Lynch. Mondi Intermediali (with C. Bianchi, Franco Angeli, 2019).