The Informant Falls Silent. World-Systems Analysis and Debates over the Socialist Past

Abstract

The Informant, a historical thriller series produced by HBO and distributed by HBO Max between March and June 2022, provoked heated debates about its representation of the 1980s Hungarian political climate, society and lifestyle. In the first section of this paper I will highlight the core aspects of the critical discourse around The Informant. What directions did the collective recollections and contemporary interpretations of the historical past take? What kind of controversial expectations were brought to surface by the question of authenticity, a central theme of the reviews about the series? In the second section I will argue that the production, the ensuing debate, and the incidental suspension of the discourse should be interpreted as a case study of world-systems analysis. After establishing the framework and contemporary relevance of this theory, I will connect it to the findings of recent papers in production studies regarding Central and Eastern Europe. In the last section I will argue that due to the semi-peripheral status of Hungary, the Western economic centre plays a key role in the local cultural production, and in this case, the reformation of national collective memory. However, this relationship between centre and periphery is originally organized by economic interests, thus it is generally insensitive about the symbolic values of cultural productions. This means that it cannot fulfil the progressive social role that the local intelligentsia is expecting from it.