Mazes and Zones: Part 1

While the vast majority of the discussion of post-modern television has focused on its stylistic formulation and structure (non-linear narrative, intertextuality, pastiche, etc), it has largely ignored the substance of content that is fundamental to the era of post-modernity.  As an intellectual progression of history, post-modernism is the shift from a question of epistemology (and its potential) to one of ontology: not just what can we know, but what is real? [1].  As television progresses into a mature medium of artistic form (and a post-modern construct itself) to challenge and (in the case of the popular conscious) supplant literature, it has now begun in its new golden age to successfully articulate and reveal the reflections of post-modernity as such.  The narrative content can now possess the substance of these questions: the shifting nature of the experience of our surrounding realities,  the unavoidable perspectivism of truth, the elusiveness of identity and the self.

Literature eventually reveals the underlying conditions of an era, but the illustration of an actual event presents them much more poignantly.  This is the case with Chernobyl, an A-grade drama that blends perfectly with the top television works of the era, but with an added weight of the history that it faithfully tries to represent. Chernobyl is perhaps the first real-world zone on Earth, a place that doesn't exist, that no longer has history, that doesn't function in synchronicity with the rest of existence.  From this real heterotopia, the series forms a complete integration of dramatic narrative and history, inseparable as the drama elucidates the significance of reality while the reality exhibited dramatic and unreal elements. Most striking is how the function of the perception of reality in wake of the event is still an ever increasing problem.  The total elevation of political opinion over scientific facts is a condition that firmly places the Chernobyl event within our own era (and it is not a coincidence that this event was one of the final break-downs of the Soviet Union, thrusting history fully into the post-modern in 1991).  Presenting one of the first real-world fixed zones, the narrative of Chernobyl realizes the concept of displaced places, and therefore makes a great companion piece to the expanding collection of neo-golden-age television which can accurately be called postmodern television.

Regarding the structure of the external world, the postmodern age has revealed that the order of discrete spaces, delineated by borders, with individual rules, laws, and underlying meaning, has become obscured, as it was based on illusion. Space is no longer a series of spaces, but non-contiguous zones in which meaning may materialize as it fluctuates, overlaps, and diminishes.

In Philosophy and Film Noir, Jerold Abrams presents Umberto Eco's analysis of mazes. The first kind of maze is the classical labyrinth, in this maze "you can enter and leave without difficult; and, while the string may help a little, the only real problem is the Minotaur."[2] This illustrates classical thought - reality is straightforward and is clearly perceptible with unproblematic access to knowledge (perhaps with the help of divine oversight).  With the advent of modenism the maze became "mannerist."  Faced with "distortion of perception," "nothing is what it seems"- "getting out is (with your sanity intact) is all the challenge requires. But that will never happen unless you have the all important modern [string] - pure reason." [3] In the post-modern era, the maze has transformed into the rhizome, which has "no center, it has no perimeter, and worst of all, it has no way out.  Here, the Minotaur is still the form of the labyrinth itself, but now there is no escaping him with reason (or faith, or any combination of the two."[4]  This is our problem.  There is no knowledge that can explain the entire structure of our reality.  Neither reason or faith can give us the answers, leaving us in an existential condition of of blind self-reliance as the only means of navigation.

Man in the High Castle

The Sinner is another series thoroughly dealing with post-modern difficulties.  Each season is concerned with reconstructing an elusive self, built upon shifting and failing systems of memory, while being somewhat constructed through intensive external conditioning.  In this case the maze involves recreating the hidden history of events and the labyrinth of the subconscious.In season two, the labyrinth/Mintoaur metaphor becomes an explicit (even visual) representation and "escaping the labyrinth" articulated as the explicit problem.

Taking a quirky, positive, light approach to the problem, Lodge 49 also explicit confronts the contemporary ontological problem, as characters attempt to see "above the maze," get to the "center of the maze," and uncover the "hidden reality" underneath the everyday, mundane world of continual difficulties, setbacks and soul-crushing difficulties.  Behind the events which shape the community and change the cultural and economic forces are deeper levels of groups and individual who influence events, unknown and unidentifiable  at the surface. This notion of ever-increasing levels of hidden power is prevalent in much of recent art-televison, perhaps starting with Lost and featured in series such as Breaking Bad, in which the accosiates Walter White encounters become much more insidious with each season, with power increasing in relation to invisibility, from street dealers to drug cartels to international conglomerates forming a pyramid, with the fundamental base always deeper and obscured.

At the other end of the spectrum Westworld is disturbingly dark examination of this condition. Explicitly confronting the question of reality, Westworld brings in all of the postmodern substance.  Set in an intentional heterotopia, the park presents meaning from the historical past, but it is not just a simulation, but a simulacrum, as it reflects a history that is not faithful to true reality.  Within this zone of constructed historicity, Hosts attempt to achieve consciousness by reaching the "center of the maze."  Delos

Owing much to Lost as a direct predecessor, with underground bunkers, and mainland institutions at work pursuing their own nefarious plans, both series feature those trapped inside, unaware of the structural laws,  looking for the exit and the meaning in transcendental terms.*

Unlike those works which attempt to navigate the maze of  contemporary society, the Walking Dead series examines the zone as a the totality of existence. All borders, as elements of structure, are completely gone.  There is no particular meaning to any space.  It is not a heterotopia, a space beyond an event horizon marking the normality of an attempted surface structure.  Like Chernobyl, The Walking Dead explores the unavoidable catastrophic encounter of the Lacanian Real beyond the artificial construct of the Symbolic that we perceive as fundamental reality  While spaces like Westworld and Chernobyl exist as zones through their own laws in relation to a larger external structures, outside of history, there is here no longer any difference here; all is pure disorder, as there is no longer any history in a functioning sense.

While existence becomes realized as a maze rather then a single, clear plane, the contemporary disintegration of space renders the search for the center of the maze as a contradiction - as space is a rhizome without a center.[5] The maze then becomes only relevant to the self, the internal subject which stands in opposition to the disorder of externality, the zone.  The new golden age of TV, this art-televison, realizes this condition and fully engages with this postmodern question of space in relation to knowledge and being, as postmodern literature and science fiction began doing during the twentieth century.



[2] Mark Conard. The Philosophy of Film Noir. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006. 70.
I've mentioned the analysis of  this article before, and I think it only becomes more relevant in the new era of film/TV/literature.
[5] Compare this to modern cosmology is which no place in the expanding universe is center or edge - everywhere is.