Past imperfect: Transition narratives, popular discourses and <i>The Informant</i>

Introduced in April 2022 on HBO Max, Hungarian coming-of-age espionage dramedy set in the mid-1980s, The Informant fits seamlessly into the trend of Eastern European contents that utilize global waves of nostalgia and socialist allegories to reference contemporary political issues. In this article, we propose that due to the specific situation of the totally centralized Hungarian media industry, and its capacity to rearticulate history in favor of the populist vision of the Orbán regime, the series goes much further than the aforementioned global trend. The television series effectively thematizes a fundamental doubt in the transition narrative as a teleological story with a universal moral lesson and injects an alternative interpretation of history into public discourses by proposing a third, critical space not overdetermined by the bipolar logic of contemporary right-wing populism. As such, the show utilizes a transnational – often highly stylized – image of socialism with the explicit goal of distancing itself from the discourses on individual moral responsibility, collaboration and resistance. The significance of this detachment consists in the fact that the language of moral responsibility has been effectively monopolized by the post-globalized, nationalist Hungarian state media, in which the forces of the nation are always cast in the roles of heroes, and anybody who does not agree as antiheroes. This in turn highlights the gap between the operational aesthetic of a transnational television series created for global audiences and the blind spots of the local cultural memory of the 1980s.