ABSTRACT
In continuing our gradual reorientation away from news and current affairs programming towards fiction and light entertainment, we would seem to be moving further from the realm of the political, and therefore from problems associated with hegemonic meaning in its most obvious sense. However, and despite their unambiguously fictional status, the spate of army-related serials to have appeared during the lead up to the 60th anniversary of the Second World War victory would, of all the genres we consider in this book, seem to be closest to Putin’s ideological mission to rebuild Russian nationhood. Indeed, it is difficult to discuss such serials without reference to Putin’s desire to install a militaristic culture at television’s heart by establishing in 2004 a channel devoted to the army (Zvezda).1 But the more that his regime imposed its authoritarian stamp, the more that resistance seemed to emerge at every point of the meaning-generating process. And it is, paradoxically, those discursive points, where the voice of the ideological centre is strongest, at which the lines of resistance can be most effective. The scope of this chapter goes beyond the military drama narrowly con-
ceived. Indeed, of the three serials we treat, each deviates from the generic norm: an army setting featuring plots which revolve around military characters, actions and routines. Penal Battalion (Shtrafbat) is set in the Second World War rather than the present, and features criminals-turned-soldiers. Soldiers (Soldaty) contains no military action and is closer to a sitcom than a serial. The Zone (Zona) is set in a prison, though the culture is militaristic and its focus on discipline and the numbing repetitiveness of institutional routine strikes a military chord. Apart from the shared generic peripherality and institutional environments
the serials articulate intersecting thematic patterns (Penal Battalion and The Zone feature criminals; The Zone and Soldiers are set in the present; Soldiers and Penal Battalion are army serials in the stricter sense; and Soldiers and The Zone possess comic elements). The institution-based genre in its western variant tends to involve ‘civil’ settings, such as hospitals (ER and Casualty) and schools (Teachers and Waterloo Road) in which tensions between professional
and personal, official and unofficial, male authority and female ambition are explored. In the Russian variants, the ‘private/public’ dichotomy is downplayed because the routines are confined to spaces where living is communal; the institutional culture is predominantly male; and the themes of order and national pride are foregrounded. These three qualities define the broader category of what we propose to call the pseudo-military drama (itself a subgenre of the institutional drama). The serials are linked, likewise, by their popularity. During 2004-6, each
occupied the position of most popular programme on Russian television.2
Each generated much discussion (and, in the cases of Penal Battalion and The Zone, controversy). Among the programmes that we will not discuss is Channel 1’s Border (Granitsa), on air through 2005. A strictu sensu military drama building on the popular docu-drama Border Guards (Pogranichniki), it features the struggles of the traditionally feted border troops to prevent cross-border crime. So transparently in tune with Putin policy it could have been written by a government hack, it failed to secure a respectable audience and was discontinued. The failure of Border indicates the difficulties that modern states encoun-
ter when attempting to transmit ideological messages to visually literate, discerning viewers. The current proliferation of ‘reality TV’ shows everywhere can be seen as an attempt to accommodate the active role of audiences in shaping televisual meanings by making participation central to programme structure (for example, the audience votes on, and views of, the Big Brother ‘housemates’ are central to the game’s outcome). Border failed less because of its ideological message than because it omitted to engage its intended audience. Assertive state notwithstanding, television in Russia operates in the competitive sphere where channel differentiation still matters. Significantly, unlike Borders, none of our serials was made by Channel 1, or Rossiia, the two closest to the ideological centre (Soldiers was a REN-TV product, the other two belonged to NTV). Another factor hampering the militarisation process is the blurring effect
of television’s fluid textual boundaries upon the distinction noted in Chapter 1 between author (the person whose words are spoken), animator (the person who articulates them) and principal (the person whose position is represented). Thus, in a pseudo-military serial, the characters who articulate the script (animator), the screenplay writer (author), the commissioning channel (mediating principal) and the government (ultimate principal) coexist in a complex, shifting relationship. The conflation of text (programme) and context (wider cultural tendencies operative at the time of transmission and, later, retransmission), and of text and audience reception, comes into play vigorously. So, too, does the role of generic hybridity (the loosening of borders between genres resulting from the circulation of global formats adapted to native models). We have already argued that television’s function in negotiating the bound-
aries outlined has accorded the medium a particular form of self-reflexivity.
As we saw in our previous chapter, one of the prime examples is the studio audience, through which television models its external viewing audience within its own programme structures. It is this which accords it its performative tendency to enact both its relationship with its audience and its representational object. We will see this performative tendency at work in a different way in our chosen serials. We first concentrate on the location of the serials at an intersection of
peripheries (geographical, socio-cultural and ideological). This places a particular onus on the role of various sub-cultural discourses in relation to those of an unspecified, but ever-present, centre which dissipates as it attempts to appropriate them: a risk inherent in attempting the performative legitimation of order. The peripheral locus is next linked to the serials’ dual function as both metaphors of a larger whole and metonymically displaced parts of that whole which expresses a fault-line in their realist aesthetic opening the way to an unintegrated, anti-realist transcendentalism. The problem is also reflected in their contradictory narrative models (the overarching narrative, and the open-ended ‘soap’ format) and in the multi-faceted ambiguity over the standpoint from which the action is framed: spatial (the excessive use of facial close-ups), temporal (chronotopic confusions over the associations between institutional place and Soviet past/post-Soviet present) and ideological (nostalgia for Soviet order and dissident oppositionalism). In the concluding section we identify procedures according to which this concealment of sources is self-reflexively incorporated into the narratives and which convert the anonymous, all-seeing Other into an object of viewer voyeurism in its own right, thus disrupting the viewer identification system and its sustaining ideological regime. We link this disruption to the ghost of Stalinism haunting each serial, and to a collapse in the Symbolic Order designed to hold it in check. The analysis is situated loosely under the umbrella of Gramscian hege-
mony. However, the methodological vocabulary used is eclectic and draws on Bakhtinian notions of chronotope and multi-voicedness, theories of narrative framing, and accounts of televisual representation. We also refer to reactions to the serials as expressed in web forums, not for empirical ‘triangulation’ purposes, but because, as in Chapter 4, the meaning-generating structures themselves seep into the wider reception context. In this sense, the subgenre’s ability to manage the conflict between (repressive) official and (resistant) subcultural discourses renders it a model of the wider encounter of television production and audience reception.
