"You might actively root for their collective demise, if you could rouse yourself to care one way or the other. Go gallivanting in Chernobyl and you get what you pay for, nimrods," wrote one reviewer; reality, however, is not the point of The Chernobyl Diaries; reality is never the point, a deeper, greater truth is, and if that reviewer is upset for the kids "gallivanting in Chernobyl" we, as Americans, should be furious that our government is on the road to mimicking the same epic disasters, and that is the point of the film.
where there have been executions and staged accidents to rid the Party of undesirable opposition to Party lines).
There are several well-constructed scenes, one of which is the group looking out the window of an apartment building, reactor number 4 in the distance, and Uri, in another room, sees where someone had been in there and built a small fire; kicking the remains of the fire off to the side (literally pushing the fact of someones existence into the margins) they then hear something. The audience thinks it's the people who built the fire, but instead, it ends up being a great bear, the traditional symbol of Russia itself, running through the halls of the abandoned apartment building where thousands of families once lived. What does this scene mean?
Amanda, Natalie and Chris take home movies of the travels they are making to London, Rome, France, Venice, Germany, Prague and Kiev (reminding us of how easily and freely we can travel, and how limited and suspicious travel was in the Soviet Union, the government keeping track of anyone wanting to escape to the "free world") but we are also reminded of the success of capitalism in the places where the three tourists start out, and their willingness to be lead astray by Paul to "the center of communism" is what destroys them all. Why Paul? Symbolically, Paul "left home," and had no intention of returning (defecting in a sense) and, as Paul himself says, "Chris has always had to pay for my bad ideas," and so Chris has to pay this time around, too, with his life, because he didn't want to be called a pussy. This is the challenge being thrown down to us: are we going to be called "cowards" by Democrats and cave in to their socialist agendas or stand firm and learn the lesson from The Chernobyl Diaries?
What happens at the end?
Why is Paul shot?
Paul being shot summarizes everything I learned in Russian history: even if you managed to survive the day-to-day struggles of just living, the Soviet system could decide to kill you just to keep everyone else on their toes and living in fear so Paul is basically shot "for no reason" other than to remind us that once the government starts to take over your life, it owns your life and can do with it what it wants.
Why do the film makers "save" Amanda?
So they can demonstrate that even had the tourists gotten help, there is no help. A joke earlier in the film when the van first dies is, "I guess there is no Triple A out here, huh?" and "out here" isn't just in Chernobyl, but in the land of socialism, because to Triple A, people matter, but to socialism, you are no better than an animal the government has to pay to keep alive, so you are better off being dead to the government. It matters more by far to keep "contained" the fact that there are "people" still living in Chernobyl than to rehabilitate Amanda and help her (to say nothing of reclaiming the bodies still inside Pripyat).
Eat Your Art Out,
The Fine Art Diner
where there have been executions and staged accidents to rid the Party of undesirable opposition to Party lines).
Pripyat as the tourists see it. To be fair to the city, it has been abandoned and did not have any improvements beyond the year the reactor blew. When the group arrives, the first thing they see are bumper-cars and a Ferris wheel, Uri tells the tourists they were getting ready for the May Day celebrations in the city but never got to enjoy it. This "celebration of the arrival of spring" might have been a spring time for Russia, even a springtime for socialism but because of the terrible disaster, it spelled the beginning of the end and the government's inability to overcome its own inner-corruption sufficiently to develop technologies that were safe for the people and monitor its own monitoring of the situation revealed what was truly inside the USSR as the radiation began eating away at the "Iron Curtain." Murray Feshbach's terrifying book Ecocide In the USSR demonstrates the terrors that the Soviet government wrecked on the environment. My Russian history professor was there on her sabbatical and told me about visiting with another Russian professor on the train. As they passed the countryside (no where near Chernobyl, but the heartland of Russia) the native professor said, "Look, you don't see any animals, you don't hear any birds. The government has killed nature." My professor got proof within the same week (again, no where near Chernobyl) because she was bitten by a bug (she still doesn't even know what kind) and she got so sick that she would have died within hours had penicillin not been an over-the-counter medicine. The Soviet doctors wouldn't help her because she was an American, so she had to wait a month to be flown out (because of the bureaucracy, the government was afraid the story would get out so they weren't going to let her out to keep it secret, rather like Amanda in The Chernobyl Diaries) and then spent three months in critical condition in hospitals in the US, then several more months just being nursed back to health, then she couldn't even return to teaching for a year because her system was so shocked; from a bug bite. They believe it was mutated from toxic waste in the area where she was at the time because the government didn't monitor dumping of waste. Not to mention that every time she turned the water on in her hotel room, the water was rust-colored, and she couldn't leave her hotel room without hiding everything because hotel rooms were regularly ransacked by the employees looking for money and valuables. |
Amanda, Natalie and Chris take home movies of the travels they are making to London, Rome, France, Venice, Germany, Prague and Kiev (reminding us of how easily and freely we can travel, and how limited and suspicious travel was in the Soviet Union, the government keeping track of anyone wanting to escape to the "free world") but we are also reminded of the success of capitalism in the places where the three tourists start out, and their willingness to be lead astray by Paul to "the center of communism" is what destroys them all. Why Paul? Symbolically, Paul "left home," and had no intention of returning (defecting in a sense) and, as Paul himself says, "Chris has always had to pay for my bad ideas," and so Chris has to pay this time around, too, with his life, because he didn't want to be called a pussy. This is the challenge being thrown down to us: are we going to be called "cowards" by Democrats and cave in to their socialist agendas or stand firm and learn the lesson from The Chernobyl Diaries?
Amanda and Natalie in the home video on their way into Russia... doesn't look like there are very many other passengers wanting to go with them... |
Why is Paul shot?
Paul being shot summarizes everything I learned in Russian history: even if you managed to survive the day-to-day struggles of just living, the Soviet system could decide to kill you just to keep everyone else on their toes and living in fear so Paul is basically shot "for no reason" other than to remind us that once the government starts to take over your life, it owns your life and can do with it what it wants.
Why do the film makers "save" Amanda?
So they can demonstrate that even had the tourists gotten help, there is no help. A joke earlier in the film when the van first dies is, "I guess there is no Triple A out here, huh?" and "out here" isn't just in Chernobyl, but in the land of socialism, because to Triple A, people matter, but to socialism, you are no better than an animal the government has to pay to keep alive, so you are better off being dead to the government. It matters more by far to keep "contained" the fact that there are "people" still living in Chernobyl than to rehabilitate Amanda and help her (to say nothing of reclaiming the bodies still inside Pripyat).
Eat Your Art Out,
The Fine Art Diner
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