I have created a category of blog entries called "Film Reviews," but I probably should have labeled that category "Film Reactions" or "Film Responses," since I don't see myself as qualified to critique works of art, cinematic or otherwise. I leave that to the professionals. At the same time, I believe a work of art, performance, musical, pictorial, cinematic or otherwise, should be judged in terms of how people respond to it, so I make no apology for writing these bits and putting them under the rubric of reviews. I take comfort in the knowledge that one of the best professors I ever had in a literature course began each discussion of a new book not with the question, "What are its strengths and weaknesses?" but "Did you like it?"
I want to respond here to the series which Netflix posted on June 1 entitled The Days. "The Days" in question are March 16 and the days following, when engineers and administrators of the nuclear power plant at Fukushima, as well as employees of TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, and government officials struggled to keep the earthquake and tsunami from becoming an even greater disaster, with consequences potentially ten times more severe than the disaster at Chernobyl. The story focuses on the heroic self-sacrifice of men who put the lives of others before their own, and on the bungling missteps of incompetent bureaucrats who often got in the way of their efforts. The resulting tension between these two opposing forces makes a gripping narrative. It is not a documentary but a fictionalized version of events played by talented actors.
Because the comparisons with Chernobyl are inevitable - they stand out as the two worst nuclear disasters in history - it is not surprising that the two fictionalized series (i.e. not documentaries on the topic but films packaged as entertainment first, history second) are also compared. Because Chernobyl (Netflix) gets better reviews than The Days (HBO Max), I felt obliged to watch Chernobyl to see why. Once again, we're talking about two different things: the historical significance of the events, their impact on the world, on the one hand, and a critique of the films as cinematic entertainment.
That touches a chord with me. Offends me, somehow. Reminds me of the cautions one sees when one prepares to view a film or a series: Warning: rape, bestiality, genocide, smoking. It's like the producers of the film have lost touch with reality. Do you really not understand how ridiculous it is, I want to ask, to list smoking as something an audience might be concerned with when confronted with genocide? What the hell's the matter with you? Here I want to ask, when you sit down to watch five or eight hours of gory terror, people facing a certain grisly death from radiation poisoning, and you want to talk about whether the actors are overacting in some of their scenes? Where are your priorities?
That's one of the reasons I write reaction pieces when it comes to social- or political-theme shows, rather than reviews. For me, when films take up critical political or social issues, it's those issues I want to give priority to in any discussion about them.
How do I put into words the problem of reviewing something like Fukushima/Chernobyl/Three-Mile Island as "entertainment" when my gut and my heart and my soul are all convinced it's obscene to fuss over script and scenery and acting quality when the focus should be on the event, not some artistic interpretation of the event.
The immediate answer, of course, is that just as Americans have come to prefer getting their news from the likes of Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow or the Republican truth-be-damned Fox News Network, the medium may not be the message, exactly, but it is no less consequential than the message itself.
So let me talk only briefly about the two depictions of the disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima and then get to what I take to be the real issue: what are the long-term consequences of these disaster events?
Chernobyl was made with English-speaking actors and I assume that means it also has an Anglo-American political orientation. In any case, the bad guy is the Soviet Union, and the KGB in particular. The blame for the accident is put squarely on the political class and the villains are real ones and found at all government levels, top to bottom. The hero of the series is a nuclear scientist named Valery Legasov and two colleagues who represent composites of professional engineers whose loyalty is to science and not to party hacks. Legasov comes through in the end to lay the blame on the people who made the decision to cut corners to save money and lie about the Soviet Union's capacities in order to maintain the illusion that the Soviet nuclear energy industry was second to none in the world. In contrast, in Fukushima, the bad guys are not a deceitful government but the essentially vertical structure of Japanese institutions, where one communicates within one's organization up and down, but not across organizations. The problem is not a culture of deceit but a culture of in-group loyalty. With focus on authority over expertise, power company officials get in the way of the nuclear engineers instead of deferring to them. In both cases there are super heroes and super villains. Whether the filmmakers are reflecting real heroes and villains takes me beyond my knowledge - and, I assume, the average viewer's level of knowledge as well.
So what are we actually seeing in these two non-documentary but documentary-like productions? Are the conclusions we draw from them legitimate? Were the Soviets really this committed to "social realism" (depicting life as the way the Soviet ideology wants things to be rather than the way they are) where objective truth is not just a back-seat participant in the drama, but a back-of-the-bus participant, if indeed it is present at all? The lies surrounding Putin's invasion of Ukraine certainly suggest that Russia, the successor state to the Soviet Union, has not been able or willing to escape that pattern of weakness common to authoritarian states.
And are the Japanese really this easily divisible into two extreme stereotypes: self-sacrificing other-oriented heroes versus hierarchical ass-kissers? Or are these divisions milked because they match the stereotypes? How much is complexity simplified because stories with sharp conflicts make more dramatic plot lines?
We are living in an age when the media are no longer trusted. And that goes not just for the news media, but possibly for makers of pseudo-documentaries, as well. What should one expect from these two productions? A truthful explanation of what happened and why? Or an entertaining tickling of cultural and political stereotypes?
I don't want to write a review of fictionalized narratives because I fear they trivialize the impact of the actual events. But now I wonder if anybody can ever assess that impact properly, anyway, in an age when truth may have bit the dust.
I don't have a clear answer to that question.
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