Craig Mazin
Chernobyl

It hurts even more today to watch Chernobyl. It hurts because History is "a scandal that has lasted for ten thousand years." When it unleashes, it is monstrous, and unfortunately, the ordeal is not brief. It is articulated, complex, full of decisive crossroads, painful choices, sacrifices. A slow skinning of the bulk of the body, a sore that slowly devours everything.

I can't help but connect the horror of this series with what we have read and heard, what we read and hear in these months. For many reasons, for the arbitrary decisions made by some incompetent politician, for example. "But who decided it has to be 30 km?" For that terrible human chain that demands sacrificial victims. Volunteers go in naked into the tunnel to bring out one stone at a time. They are not allowed to use a fan, and it's 50 degrees. Science and politics chasing each other, collaborating but only up to a point. Both fallible, only one learns from its mistakes. (The other then tries to devour it).

The coffins carried away by the military, the living bodies that are already corpses, the masks, and the hospitals like lazarettos. A gangrene that power abhors, refuses to bear. When forced to face it, it does so with deaf insensitivity, pours cement over bodies and truths. It pours the disastrous consequences upon us. It kills the cow we were milking.

It's the story of the inadequate power (impotent if you will, a cloying spectator, sinister actor), that of Chernobyl. It's the story of the scientific man who does not know. Of the industrious man who can do nothing now. Humanity that builds its world but does not know how to face the crises that cyclically rage. Today as then, we are almost powerless, blind, fragile. Apes beating a bone on the ground. Power always reacts in the same way when faced with catastrophe. A movement of repulsion, denial. Then, one must confront the fight with bare hands, but the sores stick. The monsters we have birthed come to meet us.

Could that nuclear error have caused unimaginable damage? Two-megaton explosions? Watching the series, it seems so, then reading around and further scouring, one discovers many inaccuracies. Broadly speaking, we can say that HBO certainly emphasized to make its product more appealing. And I will certainly not be the one to censor this choice. It is not a documentary.

However, I am struck that, without searching the internet, I could not have suspected any of this. The ease with which the series subtly convinces us about so many aspects says a lot about the substantial ignorance we have of such an important historical fact. The truth is always malleable and nuanced.

There is an atmosphere reminiscent of parchment and many dark, somewhat dingy rooms, which provide an implicit political reading. It's cinema, the reading one wants to give is clear and also substantially agreeable, the means it uses are not Pulitzer-prize worthy, that's for sure.

It is also aesthetically beautiful, if we want to put it all out there. I especially love the ferrous hum when exposed to radiation. In general, the spectral music, the grayish colors. The Soviet high-rise buildings. Nothing extremely original, but it works. Not to mention the bodies when they turn purple.