Tag Archives: Dark
Finding closure in shot/countershot
(Note: It isn’t Group C’s week to post or comment—I just got carried away.)
When asked to reflect on the serial form of Dark, I thought immediately of the series of episodes that makes up a season, and the seasons that make up a TV show (Odar and Friese). But while looking back at episode 1, I realized there’s another type of serialization that links film to manga: serial images.
Manga marks the transitions between panels with space, using the gutter; film transitions between shots through time, without pause. I think this distinction affords manga a more involved reader, who is invited to make comparisons and pace their interpretation as meaning allows. Watching film is a more passive experience, as reading goes, and so tends to rely on tacit suggestion to lead viewers toward connections and conclusions.
Either way, both forms speak the same language of closure—the act of putting pieces together into a whole, or moving from observation (observing the pieces) into perception (perceiving the whole).
There are two moments in the first episode that speak to nuclear energy as the backdrop to Dark, as Martina discusses in her post below. In the first example (approx. 7:36–7:50), we see Jonas bike to a stop light, look at the nuclear plant in the distance, look at a “vermisst” (missing) sign for Erik Obendorf, and leave the frame:
A first reading would probably consider this simply an excuse to give new information to viewers. The scene sets place and time for the show: Winden, a town with a nuclear power plant, and 2019, the year local boys begin to mysteriously disappear. And what else do we do at a stoplight, anyway, besides observe our surroundings absentmindedly?
On closer reading, though, we recognize that a connection is being made between the nuclear plant and the missing boy. Once the shot/countershot sequence becomes clear, we see that the camera is centering Jonas as the subject in the scene. The camera appears to be tracing his thoughts, and we, as subjects ourselves, are meant to follow. We are meant to position ourselves in the scene, looking at nuclear energy first, and only then at the mysterious goings-on, and to look at these data up-close and in real time.
And then, well, we leave the frame and continue on our way.
The second example follows a similar pattern (approx. 35:40–36:04). The camera follows Jonas as he looks at the nuclear power plant in the distance:
The nuclear plant is cast as an omen for what’s about the unfold: Mikkel’s disappearance, followed by the many events in the future (with effects on the past) and in the past (with effects on the future) that compose the show’s plot. More explicitly, we associate nuclear energy with the “Achtung” sign, translated to attention in the subtitles but also of course meaning danger. Nuclear energy calls for our attention because there is imminent (radioactive) danger.
What’s most interesting about this scene, for me, is the way the camera lingers for a moment after Jonas has walked out of the frame, as if signaling to us behind his back. Here, unlike in the first example, we can’t tell whether Jonas notices the sign. We’re left wondering how much he knows, or how great a sense of foreboding he feels, and at the same time are reminded of the advantage we have, able to watch and draw connections from a distance—and, as viewers, stop and replay time.
How to win friends and shuffle off this mortal coil
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.