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More than 6 million people watched the final Chernobyl evening on HBO on Monday night: a startling figure for a fictional mini-series that could easily have been used as a parallel program, intended for a niche of the public network. But after more than five hours of episodes, the show has managed to compete with some programming scheduled by HBO on Sunday night. Why? Perhaps people can not resist a good disaster story, and a stubborn government-centered speech aimed at avoiding accusations of wrongdoing seems particularly timely. (I will not even mention the country in which he is established.)
But Chernobyl despite his flowery speeches about the value of truth in a world that revolves around lies, does not force contemporaries harmonics on the viewer. He keeps his eyes on the road, detailing the 1986 Central Ukrainian nuclear disaster and its consequences, slowly and deliberately, leaving little room for change of terrain. Its uncompromising attention to detail and modest narrative objectives make it an ideal use of the miniseries format. The most innovative element of the series is the way it subtly moves away from its factual sources, while continuing to convey the drama inherent in the accepted "true" version of the story. It simultaneously drives towards universality and specificity, standing out from the base of contemporary pageant shows and movies.
There is a tension between the fictional and the forensic in Chernobyl which is the original idea of an unlikely couple: the American writer Craig Mazin (responsible for two suites Hangover ) and Johan Renck, a Swedish filmmaker known for his music videos and latent music career. This week in the of the New York Times a scientist who visited the Chernobyl facility explored how the series of in-depth studies (co-host of Mazin an HBO podcast ) material) departs from established historical facts. The article Times noted the nature of the cleaning work of the reactor described in the show, as well as the representation of a Soviet audience hall. But the most important work of Chernobyl is one of his three main characters. The main characters of the series, the physicist Valery Legasov (Jarred Harris) and the Soviet politician Boris Shcherbina ( Stellan Skarsgård) are badisted in their research by a third scientist, Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), who, According to the filmmakers
To at Chernobyl these forms of downsizing and essentialization serve not only to create a scientific but also a scientific discourse. more understandable for a wider audience, but also to tweak the story dramatically – to make the characters' arcs clearer. Chernobyl wisely avoids trying to build in-depth stories and personal lives for his three main characters, but he relentlessly follows the transformations of consciousness and motivation that they undergo during their work . The meager plots of support relating to secondary characters, such as the pregnant wife of a power plant operator who helped set up the countdown, are in the human interest. Spartans and little dialogue, they sometimes have the impression of dramatizing short Russian news. Such stories are supposed to highlight the human toll of the accident, but sometimes, aerial shots of evacuated rental buildings, surrounded by stray animals (animals are important in this issue), make also work.
Chernobyl [19659006L’aspectleplusimmédiatementinhabituelde] resides in the fact that he uses European actors (mostly English and Scandinavian) speaking in an unaffected voice while describing Russian and Ukrainian characters. From the working clbad of Pripyat up to Mikhail Gorbachev, no one seems to be a plausible citizen of the Soviet Union. Behind the scenes of the board meetings of the "yes" of the state, the Russian leaders are made up of actors behaving like soft-mannered European gentlemen. They make empty and self-expanding statements while hundreds and thousands of people suffer from direct exposure to untold levels of radiation. The accents are a surface tool that Chernobyl uses to prevent the viewer from convincing himself that the series is a kind of documentary narrative. Hearing a man introduce himself as Vasily in Cockney English, to name just one example, forces our attention to turn away from the mechanisms of historical accuracy.
Production draws the truth from its sources by placing it slightly out of sight, noting the universality inherent in the details of the catastrophe and the spread of misinformation it has provoked. Renck and Mazin described the drama in a claustrophobic way. neighborhoods, on empty and sterile bottoms, through landscapes that look like the end of the world. In this wasteland, there is no place for the kitsch signifiers of place and time; it is often easy to forget that we are in the 80s or to think that it does not matter. Specific references to the peculiarities of the time lie on the sidelines, like the indicators of a modernized Shakespeare – suggestive but aesthetically non-invasive.
speaks more generally about the humility of the project. Despite the mbadive piece of the reactor, the most crucial scenes of Chernobyl give the impression of a low-budget, step-by-step production. The treatment allows the scenes to breathe and gives the impression that small moments of incompetence or quixotic courage that stimulate action are more likely and crucial. We observe the disastrous decisions taken in their context, in short, waves of insecurity and despair. These moments of human weakness seem perfectly naturalistic, and therefore even more disturbing.
Chernobyl also breaks with the fundamental ambiguity of the biopic convention. Many workers make sacrifices, but their contributions are like dressings. In one scene, a group of men is ordered to scour the toxic waste to minimize the damage, and he is warmly commended for his valuable services rendered to the Soviet Union. But what are their long-term missions? Chernobyl worries more about the terror caused by these anonymous individuals masked by gas, as they stumble into the destroyed reactor, an artificial hell on Earth.
The broadcast makes his relationship unstable with the facts. clearer in the drama of the final hall of his final season. As the three heroes recount what happened in Chernobyl, we witness a dramatization of the reactor control room just before the explosion. The apparent flashback represents their words directly: a manifestation of a reconstructed narrative, distilled in favor of the courtroom. Despite all the evidence and all the evidence supporting this sequence of events, the characters still tell each other. The scene functions as a kind of meta-apparatus: a simplified image communicating the egomania and ignorance that caused the tragedy, painting exaggerated villains (building engineer Anatoly Dyatlov played by Paul Ritter) and underlying golden hearts). This gives a feeling of gloomy inevitability: we have a pretty good idea of what happened at Chernobyl, but we do not know exactly and we will never do it. (An epilogue describing the aftermath of the explosion, identifying the persistent mysteries of Chernobyl and the disparities between different stories, corrects this finding.)
It's the ultimate irony From Chernobyl : A history of the elision of truth and its long-term effects is itself constructed of lies, or at least exaggerations and simplifications complex and gnarly facts. The show completes the heroism of its main characters, just as the Soviet state has mitigated the implications of the "Chernobyl accident". This tension neither harms nor neglects the project of Mazin and Renck. Rather, it is Chernobyl more than a mere fortuitous political commentary, or a formal experiment; it's a one-of-a-kind venture that stands out from pageant entertainment, seeking revelations about human nature amid the ashes of this multivalent historical disaster.
In his exploitation of large and small screen tropes (the biopic, disaster film, drama series of television characters), Chernobyl forces us to closely examine our consumption more and more frequent entertainment inspired by real history. Where do we focus when we watch these shows? How do we judge their quality? What is the point of recalling the past in this way? Chernobyl does not present itself as a dramatized Wikipedia article, because it does not try to make us believe that we have learned something. It does not seek to enlighten or make sense of past events. Instead, it complicates the past and opens it, drawing attention to the unstable nature of history rather than reifying an orderly story.
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