As the world shut down last year, I was anxiously refreshing Twitter for news that SCMS 2020 — due to be held in late March, in person — would be canceled [Narrator: it was]. After a year’s delay I’ll finally get to present my accepted talk: “The Core Cannot Hold: HBO’s Chernobyl as a Disaster Parable and the Limits of the Dystopian Imaginary,” expanded to include the context of the global pandemic, as part of this year’s fully virtual conference. I’ll be in Session Q on Saturday March 20, with a great panel of media scholars discussing “Environmental Dystopia, Witnessed and Imagined.”
Abstract
In the fallout of HBO’s 2019 Chernobyl, many critics rushed to laud its grim science-fictional vision, as well as the way its rendering of the reactor failure and its aftermath could be read as a cautionary tale for the climate crisis. Around the same time I was due to originally present this paper, at SCMS 2020, this interpretation of the series shifted to include global responses to the accelerating COVID-19 pandemic. The aesthetic and narrative choices made by the show runner and directors, and seized on by the viewing public, raise compelling questions about the consumption and reception of dystopian science-fiction media. To an observer of the genre, the series’ catastrophist framing of events, and its fairly conventional tale of striving lone scientists against state groupthink, ending in the two years immediately following “the event,” seems far from a mirror of the global and epochal span of a changed climate, or the inexorable pace of other ongoing disasters produced by late capitalism. Indeed, the show’s creators made the narrative choice to condense an international coalition of hundreds of nuclear scientists who worked on the crisis to two solitary Soviet researchers standing alone before the wall of Stalinist bureaucracy and party secrecy. Despite the thirty-plus years that have elapsed since Chernobyl, there is no storyline about how the citizens of Ukraine and Belarus have continued to live and interact with their disrupted social and natural environments. Instead, the series traffics in the ruin-porn aesthetics of The World Without Us imagery, when the stories we most need to think about survival and solidarity in an altered world are stories with us. Using literature on dystopian science fiction, the politics of climate change, and popular obsessions with imagery of ruin and catastrophe, I will analyze the aims and aesthetics of Chernobyl, and question what its representation can actually tell us.
Kristin M. Miller 