Les Revenants

From France, that place of cultural exceptions, a country that decentralises a major museum like the Louvre to Lens, an economically depressed region — almost as if it were a homeopathic cure — comes Les Revenants ["The Returned"], a television series that is full of surprises. In any case, for its indistinct position between life, death and the world; then, for the architectural functioning that is implied. The story begins on a dyke and overflows from the waters of the lake that it regulates. Les Revenants is produced by Caroline Benjo and Jimmy Desmaris of Haut et Court, which previously brought us Laurent Cantet’s film The Class, winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or, about the dense human-geometric relationship in the world of a school class.

The production seems to take advantage of a number of filters from the cell block typology, applied to the theme of the return from the beyond: a rigid ultramodern grid, written and filmed with cool detachment by Fabrice Gobert and his collaborators, at least during the first series.   Far from being a gory opus like that of Romero’s zombies, a blueprint of architecture is superimposed onto the functioning of a world that from one episode to another also constructs its criteria. The dead move as if they were alive, they are not ghosts but rather ultra-political bodies, completely different from those which normally nestle in low-budget movies: they don’t assault shopping centres to devour humans but are instead in search of old loves who work as librarians in a provincial media-centre. Piazzas, churches, tunnels, bus-stops, police stations and even funeral monuments are just as fundamental in redefining and restoring a place of belonging to each single existence that re-emerges. The soundtrack, by Mogwai, is another special element in the definition of the immaterial confines of this truly captivating TV series.

The series makes one think of a landslide of skills, that overflow from the disciplinary banks of design or architecture and set to work in collateral areas: the Internet, film or television for example. All media that are used to redefine subjective perception with the creation of parallel places that up until the last century seemed the unique prerogative of narrative. Fiction is still absent-mindedly free from the mediatic universe. Later, one realises that the link between the cyclic nature of the feuilletton, the extension of the sewer network in Paris, or between the periodic and/or formal structures of social control are urban growth on a Haussmann-like scale, corresponding to the same plane of storytelling and of rewriting of modernity.

In its disenchanted embrace of the world, the contemporary mediatic universe is engaged in building rhythms, times and spaces for our spectacular universe with strategies very similar to architecture. Guy Debord had already explained how progressively the stratification of existence around advertising or goods needed to retrace and describe similarly real geographies. Now, localised on our digital screens, residues of psycho-geography are becoming the perceptible elsewhere, well before their perfect formal description in digital presence. Our know-how of the world is not the indistinct wallpaper that seemed to have to cover the desert of the real (junk food, muzak); it is not even a simulacrum itself of the world in which we move rather easily.

The virtual universe and the real universe seem to coincide as never before. It was perhaps imaginable, philosophically, at the dawn of the Greek polis, with that peripatetic theory that named the world. With cursors, touch screens and 360° vision we can walk along the streets, squares and tunnels and enter in the rooms of council houses in a French provincial town thanks to Les Revenants. What is most striking in this experience of controlled dérive is that, from this system, emerge the series’ protagonists, dead bodies that inhabit the “world-system” and we move through it in their company like an emotional map, as children of the modern utopia.

Prime-time television from the 1980s and 90s, treating us with topography right from the start of the theme tune, facilitated our entry into new scenarios. The Texan ranch in Dallas, the New York city streets in NYPD Blue, the beaches and freeways of Miami Vice all were more than entertainment, filling an emotional agenda, no less than the human stories in ER, Baywatch’s shores, the island of Lost or the prison in Prison Break.

Today, the TV series has been relocated, presenting the same degree of precision and entertainment on the grid of a smartphone. Series like Six feet Under, Nip/Tuck or Sex and the City have acquainted us with a system of skills that resemble the geographic localisation of the emotional experience, intertwining a system of scripts and relationships through which to interpret the everyday. If a satellite system is very useful but only serves to sell telephones, so the hyper-realistic universe of the successful TV series marks the final act of the birth-life-death of the TV commercial.

Paradoxically, it was in the provincial town of Twin Peaks (51,201 inhabitants) that, collapsing into the perverse and surreal minimalism of a great master like David Lynch, the lines of no-more-reality were redrawn for the great public. With the disintegration of the television medium confirmed by the 1990s reality show, the life of this town on the border between the US and Canada imposed the victory of the simil-esoteric spectres and a model of access and supremacy of the screen. Today all you need is a double-click and a full-screen vision. Ivo Bonacorsi