The Informant Falls Silent. World-Systems Analysis and Debates over the Socialist Past

Abstract

The Informant, a historical thriller series produced by HBO and distributed by HBO Max between March and June 2022, provoked heated debates about its representation of the 1980s Hungarian political climate, society and lifestyle. In the first section of this paper I will highlight the core aspects of the critical discourse around The Informant. What directions did the collective recollections and contemporary interpretations of the historical past take? What kind of controversial expectations were brought to surface by the question of authenticity, a central theme of the reviews about the series? In the second section I will argue that the production, the ensuing debate, and the incidental suspension of the discourse should be interpreted as a case study of world-systems analysis. After establishing the framework and contemporary relevance of this theory, I will connect it to the findings of recent papers in production studies regarding Central and Eastern Europe. In the last section I will argue that due to the semi-peripheral status of Hungary, the Western economic centre plays a key role in the local cultural production, and in this case, the reformation of national collective memory. However, this relationship between centre and periphery is originally organized by economic interests, thus it is generally insensitive about the symbolic values of cultural productions. This means that it cannot fulfil the progressive social role that the local intelligentsia is expecting from it.

Keywords:

• HBO
• streaming
• socialism
• politics of memory
• film criticism
• world-systems analysis

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Kommunista Ifjúsági Szövetség’ or KISZ was the Hungarian Young Communist League, a youth movement attached to the ruling state party.

2 János Kádár (1912–1989) was the General Secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party for 32 years; the Socialist era in the history of Hungary from 1957 to 1989 is often called the ‘Kádár era’.

3 The first episode of The Informant was premiered on the 1st of April; the 2022 general elections in Hungary were held on the 3rd of April.

4 Viktor Orbán has been the prime minister of Hungary since 2010.

5 Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége (Alliance of Free Democrats), or SZDSZ, was one of the parties that participated in the system change and won the second most seats in the first democratic general elections of 1990.

6 The website of the exhibition and its corresponding material (e. g. newly published books of history) is still available at https://www.30eveszabadon.hu/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bence Kránicz

Bence Kránicz is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He writes and lectures on contemporary genre films, fantastical genres, and studies in film criticism. His articles and essays have been published in academic journals and books in Hungarian and English.