10 - Troubling Entanglements: Death, Loss and the Dead in and on Television

Summary

This chapter utilizes a form of diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007) to outline several conceptual relationships between television as a medium and death, and to examine how one televisual text – the French supernatural drama Les Revenants (2012– 2015) – functions to explore a range of sociocultural ideas about death, loss and the dead. According to Huddleston and Rocha (2018: 27) popular cultural texts or ‘objects’ are ideal candidates for diffractive analysis. Diffraction, they argue, is ‘a way to glimpse into the entangled nature of our world’, and popular cultural texts can facilitate an understanding of some of the ‘complicated entanglements’ that exist both within texts and in their connections to the social worlds they inhabit (Huddleston and Rocha, 2018: 27). As this chapter will show, the thematic engagement with death in the television series Les Revenants is directly and allusively entangled with a range of sociocultural ideas about death, loss and the dead. These are in turn entangled with complex relationships to death, both metaphorical and literal, enmeshed within the medium of television itself. By unpicking some of these entanglements, it is possible to explore different perspectives informing the series and its potential receptions, and to consider materialdiscursive meanings about mortality that popular cultural texts can expound. The relationships outlined between television and death and the ideas enmeshed within the series Les Revenants can both be understood to trouble conventional, established and often reinstated assumptions and perceptions about death, loss and the dead.

Barad's conception of a diffractive methodology is focused on placing ‘understandings that are generated from different (inter)disciplinary practices in conversation with one another’ (Barad, 2007: 92– 93). This involves ‘thinking insights from different disciplines (and interdisciplinary approaches) through one another’ in a way that is attentive to their discrete and nuanced differences. This means reading them not against each other, but together in a way that acknowledges the ‘material-discursive boundary-making practices’ that produce both those disciplinary definitions, texts and more broadly ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ (Barad, 2007: 93).