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«Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate, tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte, tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum» — this is St. Paul in the first letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13:12), the passage that has tormented thinkers and theologians, writers and poets, with fevers of reason. It is not so much its literal translation that occupies the intellect (“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known”), so much as the inherent symbolic vertigo that holds thought (the soul?) in check. Jorge Luis Borges, more than any other, dedicated his pen and his refinement to this passage, but as in all his blind fervour, it was always a palimpsest, a gloss, in this case of the railwayman-ascetic Léon Bloy.
Throughout his work, Bloy had sown continuous and exhausting exegesis of the passage from St Paul, between the peremptory doubt that the servant shining the Tsar’s boots is responsible for the fate of all the Russians, or the ecstatic vaticinium that Napoleon is merely the forerunner of another hero to be expected in the near future. Everything is a symbol in Bloy, everything is a two-dimensional hieroglyph transformed into three-dimensional image, an image that is double, triple, expected, rejected, promised, negated, overturned, transfigured.
St Paul, Borges, Bloy — and thus De Quincey and the Kabbalists — spoke of a mirrored glass capable of returning a vision that is not just pure reflection but something else. As on a cold morning in October 1860, when the photographer James Wallace Black hovered above Boston in a hot-air balloon and took the first aerial photographs of the city: as soon as his fellow citizens saw the ships in the harbour and the dark alleys, the hill above the houses and the sloping roofs, all these things together for the first time, they were no longer the same. Their view of the world, and thus their being in the world, changed forever; that world they called the “Hub of the Universe” or “The Athens of America” was nothing but wood, sweat, tar and miasma.
Some time later, it was another Bostonian who made a new vision appear, no longer above their heads but behind them — no, inside them: William Mumler, an amateur photographer, who gained notoriety in those same years as a “spiritual portraitist”, since in his Washington Street studio it was possible, for the princely sum of ten dollars, to have a photograph taken with one’s deceased loved ones, who appeared for the occasion. Mumler’s success was such that it attracted the indignation of his colleague Black, as well as of the circus performer P.T. Barnum, both of whom were engaged in unmasking the chemical-optical trick with which the amateur took advantage of, but at the same time mitigated, the pain of others. Indeed, the glaring wound of the American Civil War was still throbbing, with its womb laden with nearly 620,000 dead, and there was not a mother, family, village that did not mourn a loss.
This is how Spiritualism was born, this is how the brand new ouija boards were marketed, and this is how the queues began to form outside Mumler’s studio for a portrait in the company of a deceased person, who was not there and who would certainly never be there again; as did Mary Todd Lincoln, widow of Abraham, murdered five years earlier at Ford’s Theatre in Washington.
Bloy’s and Mumler’s visions are detached from the gaze that nourishes them, deprived by nature of univocal readings of the Cartesian and rational axes of time and space. The French writer’s Napoleon is the Ben Yosef who in the Talmud anticipates the arrival of the true messiah of the last days, Ben David; the American photographer’s portraits, on the other hand, cancel both present and past thanks to the supremacy of industrial processes and the pain of the survivors. They are mirror and image at the same time, as cinema would be a few years later, the technical and symbolic refinement of all this. For the twentieth-century urban legend of spectators fleeing the cinema as they watched The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in 1896 is not so much about the fear that there is something real on the screen but rather something possible.
Cinema, in the words of Paul Virilio, is the cenotaph of modernity, where you go to admire something that is not there and perhaps never was; or, to cite Mark Fisher, the uncanny that makes you sit in the dark in company, even though really you know you are alone. The moving image is the science of fantasies, and when this science meets the most advanced mass production (the digital and globalised one of cultural constructs forged within media conglomerates and supranational streaming services) then what results is the greatest and most accurate vision of St. Paul’s verse: “then shall I know even as also I am known”.
All this happens in TV series.
For a decade now, television production has occupied the centre of the global audiovisual sphere. This “small screen” has expanded and climbed over what used to be the horizon of reference to which it was confined, if we think of how long it was defined as a kind of minor image compared to cinema. But precisely from its artistic specifics, first and foremost the possibility of a serialised narrative that is both horizontal and vertical at the same time, as well as the renewal of its technical potential (StageCraft technology for Disney+, for instance), the growth of the actor pool (Hollywood A-list stars from at least House of Cards and True Detective onwards) and the integration of new authorships (the Spanish La casa di carta and the Korean Squid Game among many others), the old cathode ray tube is now able to construct increasingly discursive, penetrating, fertile imaginaries through its “mirrors”. Increasingly projected towards the resolutory tensions of our contemporaneity, to construct first of all accounts — not real but possible ones — of what awaits us as individuals and collectives. This has been done, for instance, by the blockbuster series Black Mirror and The Last of Us, on the one hand reconnecting their forms to titles and visions that have already gone down in history (the mystery and sci-fianthologies in the former case, the whole post-apocalyptic and zombie-outbreak jumble, in the latter), and on the other hand populating them with the risks and creeping paranoia that global society is facing (the nonchalant use of new technologies, the possibility of a new epidemic).
The next step is to understand how these imaginaries, contaminated by contemporary tensions, manage to find their own self-sufficiency, and two mirror-image moments like Westworld or Marvel series can demonstrate this to us: the four seasons of the HBO title penned by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy are, literally, a world building in the making, episode after episode, in which viewers can explore the fictional world of the android park (built as an not-so-futuristic update of Disney, Lucasfilm and Marvel attractions themselves) and simultaneously see how the NPCs (non-player characters), inhabitants of the park, self-consciously construct their own reality even though they are automatons. Their world is made of plastic, but the dynamics and relationships they establish are nonetheless real, possible — so what does it matter?
The Marvel series are also “playgrounds” to be experienced character by character, setting by setting, but they manage to achieve maximum immersion especially when they bring the “superhero” and science-fiction exceptionalism down to the level of contemporary urban reality, as in Ms. Marvel, the umpteenth American success story, told through the eyes of a young Pakistani heroine born and raised in New Jersey (also in a universe populated by interstellar alien races). Marvel, yet another American success story narrated through the eyes of a young Pakistani heroine born and raised in New Jersey (even in a universe populated by interstellar alien races and the gods of Norse mythology, the only place where you can fully realise your potential and distinguish yourself is always the USA).
Modern “seriality” has not shied away from constructing an alternative but direct future, either. It has done so by directly confronting the global anxieties over the collapse of human civilisation, in some titles still ascribed to the classic narrative deviceof nuclear conflict, epidemic or alien invasion (The 100, 12 Monkeys, Station Eleven, Defiance, War of the Worlds, etc.), while in others it sinks its pen into the eschatological scenario of global warming, closer to present and future society. Even as we list the variations on this theme (the ice age of Snowpiercer, the terraforming of Raised by Wolves), it is worth noting how even in narratives which are so heterogeneous in subject and form, subterranean drives are pushing to the surface: what is the cosmic-Western ride of The Mandalorian if not a return to one’s own traditions, one’s own people, and thus to an ancestral home that no longer exists? The planets of the Disney+ series are populated by legendary monsters and chimerical animals, all holed up in the depths of caves, seas, deserts, pushed further and further away from their primeval ecosystems — but is this less because of the invasive and predatory presence of intelligent alien races, than of those dedicated to an even more ravenous and titanic kind of interstellar capitalism?
Whatever the looking glass and the image provided by the seriality of our times, there is an evident desire to construct a futuristic imagery that is the most globally accessible and the most discursively inclusive. One in which, from one of this media form to the other, one can find not only all the unresolved nodes of contemporaneity, but also every “real” and “possible” development of them: from reflections on History as the only guide to navigate the near future (Watchmen, Foundation, The Man in the High Castle), to the cooperation of all mankind as a fundamental step to ensure our survival (Away, For All Mankind, The Expanse) and the uncontrollable twists and turns of the future technological singularity (Severance, Upload, Devs).
Now we see through the looking glass.
