Presenters
Abstract
“So I stumbled upon this thing called Hermeticism the other day, and i start to watch this show yesterday and to my surprise it’s absolutely littered with Hermetic symbolism!” wrote u/Resaren on December 19, 2017, 18 days after the première of Dark on Netflix. Social television has been well documented as a cultural phenomenon. In this talk, I plan to take a very close look at Reddit discussion of Netflix’s first German offering, Dark, which premiered in 2017 and was renewed for a second season soon thereafter. I will discuss how, although the show clearly demonstrates that there are no solid answers to the questions it poses, viewers remain tempted by the possibility of a unified explanation that would tie together all of the show’s disparate time-traveling elements. These two competing views of narrative demonstrate an ongoing tension between ontology and epistemology whereby close reading a cultural object according to the rules of its own fictional worlds is subsumed by an intertextual treasure hunt for references. The English-language r/Dark community is an especially active one, given the show’s relatively low profile among viewers in the United States, so an examination of what gets said there and how it gets said should prove fruitful for establishing the tenacity of popular theories of narrative as both teleological and curative.