The world is on fire. Little is being done about it because the dominant energy corporations in the United States and the world do not want the consumption of fossil fuels to come to an end. They have no other business model than the liberation of huge amounts of carbon into our atmosphere. They flood the popular media and democratic institutions with people and materials that claim that what is actually happening all around—the melting of icebergs, the severity of storms, the fires in the tropical forests—is not really happening. This is the kind of madness that HBO’s exceptionally moody miniseries Chernobyl explores.
Directed by Johan Renck, written by Craig Mazin, starring Jared Harris and Emily Watson, and scored by the haunting Hildur Guðnadóttir, the five-part miniseries is about one of the greatest industrial accidents in human history. It happened in 1986, during the twilight of the Soviet Union. In the series, as in reality, a badly made nuclear reactor cracked, caught on fire, and went through a meltdown. The scientists knew the scale of the damage and how to best address it. But the political party in power at the time wanted to hear nothing about anything that had to do with the realities of the dangerous situation. The party wanted to maintain the fiction of Soviet mastery. The scientists knew this fiction would kill thousands, if not millions, of people not only in the USSR, but in the world. In present times, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union is the GOP, and state propaganda is distributed by Fox News. There has even been talk about “freedom gas,” which the Department of Energy—now simply a department of ExxonMobil—describes as a prosperity and liberty gained from the spread of gas. This is Chernobyl. And this is why the show about it should win an Emmy for outstanding limited series. This is our world today.
Now I will repost two points I made about the show in the past. One:
In Chernobyl, action is always taken when it’s too late. Only a large number of deaths can challenge party policies that are opposed at every point to scientific facts. This is exactly how we—under the GOP, with assistance from the center-left—are heading into the disaster of global warming. In one powerful scene at the end of “1:23:45,” a bird falls from the poisoned sky and hits a sidewalk in the city of Pripyat. It struggles. It dies. And ahead of it are Soviet children heading to school like nothing is happening. This little bird is, in our times and country, the ignored brown deaths of Puerto Rico. And USA (and particularly white USA) is a Pripyat.
In another powerful scene, the citizens of the city watch the catastrophe from what they believe is a safe distance; they watch the fire like tourists as radioactive ash falls on their faces and hair. Many will be dead within in a few years.
Two:
Chernobyl wasn’t an accident at all. Instead, it was the moment the pure fiction of a culture (Soviet culture) finally exploded in the real world. As Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), a Soviet nuclear physicist (and the star of the series), puts it: “The chain of disaster is now complete.” That chain links culture and nature. “That is how an RBMK reactor explodes, lies,” Legasov says in the last act of the series.
The insight here is deep. It’s not that lies have real consequences (that is obvious), but that culture, despite its plasticity and impressive usefulness for humans, must never be confused with nature. Though one, culture, is embedded in the other, nature, they are not the same. Recognizing this distinction, however, opens the possibility of bringing the two in closer alignment. No such possibility exists if one is confused for the other. To see culture as nature actually has the opposite effect. It delinks them. (I encourage my readers to reflect on this for a moment or two—it’s of the greatest importance.)
