On the left this week was a very tempting queering of time and relationships that might be well suited to Ensor’s Spinster Ecology. However, my Geiger counter was ticking more toward the right, so I decided to work with Haraway’s ideas of trouble and making kin. Our viewing for the week, Dark is a sci-fi/suspense thriller set in the sleepy German town of Winden, translating as ‘to wind or coil’. Such a word calls to mind a spring or ball of wire, or perhaps a snake ready to strike. In Winden, a troubled history seems to be coiling back around and repeating itself, and few can grasp why or how.
In each time period depicted, the disappearances of these children have the effect of troubling what seemed otherwise a peaceful town. Haraway points early to the curious origins of the word ‘trouble’ in the French language, meaning to “’stir up, ‘to make cloudy,’’ to disturb.”’ The opening episode of Dark would have us believe that this is what has happened in Winden, that the sleepy town is only abruptly transformed. Such as assessment does not hold up after further viewing, and Dark demands (as does Haraway) that we stay with the trouble. Plotlines slowly uncoil and show us there is no simple solution to the crisis facing Winden, and that there was no time in which Winden stood without this trouble. Haraway similarly troubles our understanding of ecology, saying “staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1). Throughout the first season of Dark, Jonas and a handful of other figures come to partially understand the prickly, tangled web of events and people in which they live. The adult Jonas refuses to let his younger self return Mikkel to the future, and later refuses to release the younger Jonas from a bunker, in part because he understands that these actions have more far-reaching consequences than initially assumed.
The apparent peace and quiet of Winden mask the pain and grief of nearly a century of disappearances and murder, and many of our plotlines hinge on our characters’ ability, or lack thereof, to respond to this pain. The unresolved grief for his lost brother leads Ulrich Nielsen to attempt the murder of Helge Doppler as a child in 1953, in hopes that he might alter the future and bring back his brother. His belief in time and these events as linear entities renders him unable to recognize the possible intricacy and fragility of the pasts and futures he may create.
Thinking tentacularly in order to look at the roots of these catastrophes, we might recognize a fatal flaw in the inability of Winden to properly grieve, or according to Haraway, to grieve together. She asserts “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing” (39). When the bodies of two young boys are found near the groundbreaking of the new nuclear plant, a cynical Bernd Doppler claims that the murders were likely the work of the coal industry. Within hours, Doppler’s son goes missing (nearly killed by Ulrich Nielsen) and his tune changes. Doppler asks the police chief to find his son at any cost, even the cost of the power plant. We are constantly faced with characters unable to empathize with those outside their own small spheres, and the pain of these losses persists. In Haraway’s terms, we recognize this shared grief in particular and emotion in general as characteristic of networks of kin. She makes the case that we need to reach outside of our nuclear family to craft new connections with unlikely people, that we might build communities from these connections.
We are led to believe that Bernd Doppler does not understand this notion. He leads a life of luxury lobbying for the nuclear industry, and his sympathy is aroused only when his family is on the line. When the troubled dust settles, he remains unchanged. He decides eventually to store excess radioactive materials in the cave system under his own town, jeopardizing both his children and neighbors. As we see later, this quiet act of violence circles back around and enables a series of troubling events in Winden. Change in Dark doesn’t come from tragedy, but from the ability to collectively and effectively grieve tragedy.
Such a process of productive healing is evidenced in the few moments of genuine togetherness in this season of Dark. Jonas returns from the past having learned that Mikkel Nielsen is actually his father. He embraces his mother, saying “I believe Dad loved you very much.” This is one of the few moments of genuine growth and healing among characters, and it comes because Jonas recognizes Mikkel as his kin, and the love that exists despite this strange pairing. The connection may be frustrating to him, but he can empathize with the love that Micky carried for his wife. These moments of genuine healing and production occur when people recognize the complex connections they share, and disaster results when they fail to recognize the same.
Haraway’s notion of kin is far-reaching and finds interesting results in Dark. As she says, “Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers; kin are unfamiliar (outside what we thought was family or gens), uncanny, haunting, active” (103). Perhaps Haraway was not envisioning meeting your future self on the other side of a door, but Dark creates an environment that coils back in on itself. Our various time travelers must thus recognize their kin in their own time, as well as past and future. They must work with these kin to win the victories they can and grieve the losses they must, or else expect more tragedy.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Odar, Baran bo, and Jantje Friese. Dark, Season 1, episode 1-8, Netflix, 2017.
Alex,
I find your connection between Haraway and “Dark” very much on point, and I appreciate that you chose to lean towards the affective aspect of the series. As you say, “thinking tentacularly”, or viewing the world through sympoietic spectacles, seems to be not the solution to all our problems, but a more productive way of understanding both human and nonhuman grief. Just like you point out, I also believe that “change in ‘Dark’ doesn’t come from tragedy, but from the ability to collectively… grieve tragedy”.
The series is filled with hints that points us towards this conclusion, and, in fact, the queering of time happens to be but a reflection of the queering of human relations, particularly the ones that have to do with the institution of marriage and family-systems determined by blood. If we look closer, we realize that “Dark” is positing a new way of making kin through the conception of time as a circular (instead of a lineal) structure, in which we are all being affected by past-present-and-future actions and actants —we never remain untouched by their symbiotic movements.
In terms of relationships, I can think of the following example that challenge the notion of linearity and binarism in the series:
– Mikkel Nielsen and Ines Kahnwald.
– Charlotte Doppler, Peter Doppler, and Bennie.
– Michael Kahnwald (alias Mikkel Nielsen) and Jonas Kahnwald.
– Egon Tiedemann, Doris Tiedemann, and Jana Nielsen (1953).
The unfolding of all these relations presents to us an octopus-like map in which kin is made through collective and fluid interactions; what hinders their healthy development is the imposition of normalcy, the unquestioned everyday rules that define our ways of moving about. As you say, it is the realization that “his or her kid” can also be my kid, or “his or her lover” can also be my lover, that has the potential to shift the order in Winden (both in a physical and affective sense). Ulrich from 1986 points out to Hannah: “In the end, they’re all stuck in their pigeon-holes” —it is here the Haraway seems to shine as an exit from the narrow perception of what it means to make kin.
The series is also constantly presenting facts from chemistry and nature to make us understand the queerness of our relationships: one of these is the apophallation of banana-slugs (this is fascinating! You must look it up), and Goethe’s novel “Elective Affinities”. Indeed, one can go crazy with all these references, but I believe this is what “Dark” does best, i.e. portray a very complex ecology through science-fiction while also being very entertaining for the masses. We just need to be perspicacious.
In your use of Donna Haraway and mentioned a “prickly, tangled web of events and people in which they live” in prompt 7’s post, I immediately thought of Haraway’s “String Figures” and how appropriate it is in an analysis of season one Dark (2017). In your conclusion you mention that Dark ‘creates an environment that coils back on itself’ and that ‘our various time travelers must thus recognize their kin in their own time, as well as past in future.’ I agree with this and think that it would be most appropriate to add string figures to this statement and your overall analysis because there are countless examples of strings and string figures throughout the first season. These are most noticeable with Jonas and most memorable in the final bunker scene in episode 10, where the entire wall is full of pictures of the Winden villagers with strings connecting them. However, string figures goes beyond physical strings and its figurative uses can work well with your concluding point. Using her concept of string figures as “a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark” [how ironic!] (Haraway 3), I think that this will help the human actors better understand how their actions are affecting all aspects of the environment, including other human actors, and as a result help them make kin in their past, present and future.
Since Haraway’s concept of string figures has a “triple sense of figuring” (3), I believe that there are multiple ways that this concept can be used when discussing Dark. When considering your current post, there are many different ways to go since these concepts are broad and the series is layered, however under the current conditions, I believe the way of using string figures outlined above can only add to your already good post.