Watching Jude Law Digging a Hole: Games and Covid-19 On-Line Participation in HBO/Punchdrunk’s The Third Day and “Autumn”

Conference: The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film (EuroMedia2022)
Title: Watching Jude Law Digging a Hole: Games and Covid-19 On-Line Participation in HBO/Punchdrunk’s The Third Day and “Autumn”
Stream: Social Media and Communication Technology
Presentation Type: Virtual Presentation
Authors:
Bo Kampmann Walther, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

Abstract:

This paper will explore how online participants during Covid-19 transformed the HBO/Sky miniseries The Third Day into a laboratory of ‘gamified’ storytelling, serial fiction, and the deconstruction of celebritization. Empirical material will consist of messages on Sky’s Facebook pages on October 3rd, 2020, and later picked up by British newspapers. The Third Day chronicles the journeys of Sam (Jude Law) and Sam’s wife Helen, Naomie Harris, who arrive on the island of Osea at different times. The miniseries plays on the natural causeway as a ’portal’ to a fantastic world of religious symbols and a violence driven history. During the broadcast of "Autumn", a twelve hour long, single camera recorded event, audiences on social media heavily commented on Law’s gruesome trials as he dug his own grave for over an hour and stood erect on a pole in freezing water. One could argue that "Autumn" turns from a carefully crafted piece of ’immersion’ designed to pull the barrier between fiction and reality to pieces – and yet while still being unmistakably ’fiction’ – to a knotty crossbreed where ’realism’ as a commodity is pushed to just reality. This may aspire to what Adorno called "negative dialectics": the attempt to recognize the non-identity between thought and object while still carrying out the project of conceptual identification. Consequently, Law was asked to perform in a fictional drama while, at the same time, to embody the character/person who destroys it - for our amusement.



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