Cinema of cruelty and streaming platforms: The eroticism of perversity in mainstream series Years and years and Chernobyl

Abstract

Today, far from those times of war between film and mass televisión and immersed in a culture of series that is increasingly accessible thanks to streaming platforms, series are beginning to be recognized as works of art that criticize the upper echelons of power, own sign of the third golden age of the series, and where true audiovisual originality resides in the eyes of large audiences to the detriment of a cinema that seems to be increasingly stagnant or uninteresting .In the middle of the revolution of the industrial panorama of the mainstream audiovisual, characterized by the presence of streaming platforms, increasingly democratized, varied, accessible, and close to the vision of «consumer» rather than «spectator», the mass audiovisual recover a cruel, hyper-realistic, denunciative and moralistic vision that goes back to the cinema of cruelty enunciated by André Bazin. However, the presence of horror pornography, a estheticization, abyection and the eroticism of cruelty, already debated by Jackes Rivette and Serge Daney in the second half of the 20th century, is perceived to combine the depressive with the playful in the eyes of spectators who are hungrier for perversity and cathartic plots. For all these reasons, a case study has been carried out, through an exploratory and descriptive descriptive analysis, of the series Years and years and Chernobyl in order to diagnose the presence of a prestigious narrative in the streaming platforms that comply as abject under the simulacrum of denunciation.