Die paradoxe Provinz in der französischen Fernsehserie Les Revenants

Abstract

The French Quality TV serial Les Revenants belonging in the broadest sense to the zombie genre shows a province that has left behind the traditional opposition between city and country, centre and periphery. It is shaped by the technical devices of modernism, which at the same time refer to its being a commercial, serial product that can be continued endlessly. This  deterritorialized, paradoxical and hybrid space, which has no identity-forming function whatsoever, introduces the same error into the spatial logic as the return of the dead entails an error into the temporal logic. In Les Revenants, the province is not the decelerated 'other' of modernism but its correlate, insofar as there is no longer an outside in contrast to which the province can be province. The US remake The Returned, on the contrary, eliminates this hybrid representation of the province linking both the spatial semantics and the plot with traditional genre expectations.