Communicative Generations between Cold War Trauma and HBO-Type ‘Televisuality’: Entering the Paratextual Flow of Chernobyl, The Informant, and Spy/Master

Abstract

The aim of the article is to characterize an emerging type of cultural memory-work with reference to Eastern European collective traumas and various media platforms. Through an analysis of the introductory parts and the credit sequences of 2019 Chernobyl, 2022 The Informant, and 2023 Spy/Master it is demonstrated that historical Cold War era television – as institution and objects, but also as an electronic medium – is remediated in these (paratextual) segments for the digital era, while making use of ‘cool medium’ characteristics (McLuhan 1964), or of the four ‘televisual modes’ (Caldwell 1993). The HBO-type ­‘aestheticization’ (Caldwell) of Cold War era, collectively traumatic experiences in the three segments exposes the addressees of these messages: those who do not have a personal memory of that period, having been born after the 1989–1990 regime changes, or the ‘forgetters’ and/or ‘mourners’ in the Assmannian model of the three communicative generations (2011, 2012). The comparative analysis allows for the suggestion that Chernobyl may be considered a ‘benchmark hit[s] in a genre [that] serve[s] as [a] prototype’ (Grindon), preformatting the field of non-autobiographical, second or third generation(al), transnational, and ‘televisual’ remembrance of Cold War era traumatization – as indexed by secret service characters.