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Chernobyl (HBO)

"What is the cost of lies?"

When I was younger -- my family and I were lower middle class, living outside of a small town in the middle of northern lower Michigan -- there were limited options for media. Top 40 radio and three and a half TV channels and a few local movie theaters were the windows to the larger world, a place that seemed to offer no pathway to connection aside from how one would feel from the stories the media offered up. Of course, most of those stories were loosely tethered to fact, even the oxymoronic "based on a true story," but in the mostly literal mind of a preadolescent, they felt as real as the warmth of the clothes dryer in my bedroom.

Now, I live in a world of overwhelming media options, where several lives could be lived in parallel fashion with completely different media experiences, where choice is both a tyranny and a paradox. On a daily basis, this means that I miss stuff that I know would be appealing, but with only so many hours in the day, one has to take a pass. Until the past year or so, for example, I had no idea that Blue Öyster Cult was so fucking awesome (at least, until 1983's The Revolution By Night). I'm just now getting to Happy! and Maniac on Netflix, because I was too busy with Killing Eve and What We Do In The Shadows and The Tick and countless other shows and albums and movies and stories. But when you fully submerge yourself into the storytelling muck, what's the cost of all those lies, however cleverly they're presented?

After reading about HBO's latest prestige limited series entitled Chernobyl, I forced myself to watch the first episode (and listen to the accompanying podcast). One of the first things you hear is Valery Legasov, the deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, rhetorically pondering "What is the cost of lies?" into a tape recorder. After collecting and hiding the tapes under the watchful eye of the state, Legasov sets out extra food for his cat and then hangs himself, a true event that happened two years after the explosion at Chernobyl. The episode then flashes back to the explosion and the immediate aftermath, which plays in hindsight as the most chilling horror film I've seen in years. And I have four more episodes to go.

If you’re bombarded with lies -- the Rand Corporation called it "The Russian 'Firehose Of Falsehood' Propaganda Model" in a position paper -- and the truth become elusive, then stories become the prevailing narratives. Accordingly, the forces that create and propagate the narratives drive the stories we tell, and those forces are often monolithic and intractable, with little regard to the fallout. Meanwhile, the objective world continues to act upon you, regardless of your ability to understand those processes. The first episode of Chernobyl lays these processes and the immediate aftermaths out with excruciating effectiveness, and while I recommend it wholeheartedly, it's not entertaining in nearly any sense. But if you want to examine the structures and moments that allow Americans to acquiesce to kids in cages and warmer and wetter weather and blatant and stupid illegalities -- as well as what happens if we allow those things to continue to metastatize -- look no further than Chernobyl and Chernobyl. Don't say you were never warned.

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