“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.
About the presenterPeter Sorrell
Peter Sorrell has a PhD in French from Rutgers and teaches full-time in the English Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He has presented on using The Shining to teach critical thinking, and he discussed Dark at the 2019 Northeast Modern Language Association Conference. Peter has published on cinema in Queneau and the role of social media in education. He has a forthcoming article on intertextuality and is currently writing about fictionality in Stranger Things.