Television and Culture in Putin's Russia: Remote control (BASEESRoutledge Series on Russian and East European Studies) by Stephen Hutchings & Natalia Rulyova

Author:Stephen Hutchings & Natalia Rulyova [Hutchings, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Humanities
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2009-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

Metaphor, metonymy and genre

The level of subversion accomplished by the three serials corresponds to the relationship between metaphor and metonymy within them. In The Zone there is no scene which does not take place within the prison compound. There is little account of the home lives of the officers (in marked contrast with the UK prison serial, Bad Girls, and other UK institutional dramas), nor the pre-prison lives of the inmates. This complete separation from everyday reality enables the serial to be posited as a metaphor for the latter (as the Tarkovskii maxim confirms); increasing the potency of the critique it mounts. As the director, Petr Shtein, put it, 'Prison is a parallel world that nobody wants to acknowledge, but it does exist' (quoted in MacFadyen 2007:188). One viewer suggests that the prison setting represents 'that special "zone" in which the essence of the social institution of power as such is revealed'. Another links this with an implicit critique of Soviet totalitarianism to which the thieves' laws (vorovskie poniatiia) provided resistance (www.zona.tv/forum/viewtopic.php?t+484; accessed 30 October 2006).

In UK hospital dramas, by contrast, the plots invariably revolve around tensions between home life and official duty. Likewise, Soldiers traces an arc commencing in a civilian setting with the pre-army lives of the recruits and ending with their demobilisation. It includes glimpses of life beyond the barracks; one of the officers suffers sleepless nights following the birth of a child and he calls upon Tundra's 'Eastern' healing powers to calm the baby. Shmatko begins a relationship with the daughter of a widow and much of the humour involving him centres on conflicts arising from the clash of female gentility with gruff, military manners. The most telling example of metonymic confusion is also the most ideologically controversial; when Kolubkov marries Irina, an entire episode dwells upon the reverse contamination of the normal sanctity of the marriage ritual (including an excruciating nuptial bedroom scene) by the horrors of military corruption. Thus, the tension between the narrative arc and the comic micro-narrative of each episode carries a significant political charge.

Penal Battalion includes examples of metonymic slippage in the characters' interactions with civilians (Glymov's relationship with a war widow; Tsukerman's love for a military nurse), and in flashbacks to the pre-war period, but the shadow of the war hangs heavy over all the action. In terms of the metaphor/metonymy balance, Penal Battalion thus falls between the other two serials – areflection of its political stance.

The austere settings of the Russian serials also diverge from those of the western institutional drama in their male-centredness and absence of private space. The ethics of mutual responsibility, asceticism, physical rigour and a strong collective spirit are also part of the national myth into which the viewers are successfully inscribed. A female forum participant from Moscow praises the serial for showing 'not only the barracks [kazarma], but friendship as well, and mutual support [vzaimovyruchka]'. Another female contributor tells her male peers that 'the army will make you into real men, like Medvedev and Kabanov'.

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