I watched Chernobyl and it deserves a post. Again, structure here is very interesting, although I can see how to some this structure would appear much less characteristic of television than as, variably, three or four movies jammed together. For those who haven’t seen the show, uh, structural spoilers ahead.
So you have the first episode which covers the event of the disaster, or meltdown. You have episodes two, three and four, which follow different aspects of the effort to clean up the site and prevent further, slow-motion disasters from unfolding. The final episode covers what is intended to be a show trial, deflecting blame to a few individuals in order to avoid an effective (and costly, difficult) structural solution. This has the interesting almost film noir or mystery genre effect of, in the text’s final moments, reentering us around the event that gave rise to the rest of the text, and ultimately transforming our understanding of what in fact took place. Also, what is signified by what took place.
As I write I’m more and more certain that this structure is not really of television (if that means something). It’s a pretty cinematic strategy. And the series is never digressive in the way of, say, I May Destroy You (from my last post). There are no strange corners of Chernobyl. And if it does appear to be digressing, that’s only because the viewer is at the beginning of what will ultimately turn out to be a narrative thread with a beginning, middle and an end, and a coherent ending beat that will bear upon our reading of the primary thread.
It's really interesting to consider the chronology of Chernobyl. I was struck while watching it in 2019 by how anti-Russian/communism/Soviet the show was (a coproduction of HBO and Sky TV, all in English, with largely non-Slavic actors, etc.). In the trial sequence, when the true cause of the disaster is revealed to have been cheaper materials, I felt like the US/UK were pointing fingers to deflect blame. The whole series just felt like a way to stoke more cultural anxieties against Russia and communism. Does the serialized structure of the miniseries help to create such a clean narrative? What are the potential dangers of such a structure? (this is from Charlotte, in case that is not clear)
ReplyDelete