La serialità religiosa nell'età di Netflix. La globalizzazione della religione silenziosa

This thesis examines the process of diffusion in the contemporary world of a form of religion that usually goes unnoticed, almost unperceived by public opinion. It appears in the realm of entertainment and, for this reason, seems indistinguishable from pastimes and leisure activities. This is what we have called 'silent religion'. This form of religion is a particular result of the multiple transformations that have marked religion in the course of modernity. The processes of secularisation, disenchantment and re-enchantment have given rise to new attitudes in the religious field, aimed at a direct and unmediated encounter with the divine, and at the abandonment of the authority of tradition, but also at the rediscovery of the aggregating factors of groups and communities. These attitudes gave rise to the two best-known forms of modern religion, namely revivalism and new religiosity. In the context of these dynamics, the Industrial Revolution took hold, producing a reorganisation of life time that replaced the cycle of communal and festive time with that of work and leisure. This time was emptied of the presence of the divine and destined to rest from work, so that the sacred stories of the feast were flanked and sometimes replaced by profane stories. In line with this development, a cultural industry was created to produce fictional stories for the consumption of the masses during times of rest. Some of these stories took on a realistic tone to represent the man of urban civilisation, while others took on an extraordinary tone to represent the religious ferments of the man of secular civilisation. By recovering elements of epic, fairy tale and legend, these stories gave rise to the third form of modern religion, silent religion. It stems from the establishment of entertainment as an independent social sphere, responding to its own commercial, technological and aesthetic logics. By virtue of this independence, the entertainment media began to develop their own religious content autonomously, without reference to the dictates of institutional religions, but freely using and recomposing them. In this way, a process of mediatisation of religion has taken shape, from which fictional narratives have proliferated, sometimes drawing on cases of revivalism, sometimes on cases of new religiosity, evoking ancient mythologies and folkloric beliefs, and mixing doctrines and symbols from different traditions. This phenomenon has exploded in Anglo-American culture, the culture that, more than any other, has absorbed and shaped the instances of disenchantment, secularisation and re-enchantment. From a narratological point of view, the narratives of silent religion have been and continue to be structured by the fantastic, that is, by the narrative mode that emerged in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution in relation to the growing disbelief and, at the same time, the recurring fascination with the supernatural, aimed at challenging the scientific conception of phenomena. This is expressed in the genres of horror, fantasy and science fiction, which have established themselves as the narrative matrix of much of Anglo-American popular culture. From here, through the mechanisms of the westernisation and Americanisation of the world, the fantastic and the silent religion have gradually spread to various areas of the planet, acting on the one hand as a means of propagating the paradigm of disenchantment, and on the other hand as a means of contesting it, or as instruments of affirming the enchanted gaze of a nativist or revivalist matrix, or even aimed at the new religiosity. This diffusion took place over almost two centuries, during which Great Britain and the United States exercised their hegemony over the entire planet. During this long period, the fantastic spread in a first direction from the Anglo-American region to the rest of the world, and in a second direction within individual countries and regions of the world. Until the end of the last century, the first direction represented the dominant vector, that emanating from the Anglo-American centre, while the second represented the subordinate vector, that emanating from the peripheries. At the end of the millennium, the advent of satellite and digital technologies extended the reach of the centralist directrix while increasing the projection of the peripheral directrix, so that the usual centre-periphery assumption was reconfigured according to a multidirectional perspective that came to fruition with the appearance of global SVOD services. These services, by virtue of their geographical reach and production policies, represent on the one hand the most accomplished expression of American media imperialism, and on the other, the manifestation of a multipolar media horizon that challenges it. Netflix in particular, with its multi-territorial strategy, is the most emblematic example of a service that is both national and transnational, that has international libraries and that exploits the cosmopolitanisation of its audience. On the basis of this configuration, the US company pursues the commissioning of horror, fantasy, and science fiction titles in numerous regions of the world, as well as their distribution on a planetary scale. This activity makes use of the fantastic in cultural industries that have little use for it, and disseminates it in regions that have little contact with it. In this way, the Californian company becomes the driving force behind the globalisation of silent religion