Alexander Ageev. Order 444

Order 444
Alexander Ageev

Publication date: June 4, 2004

Order #444 kicked Leonid Parfenov out of NTV .

Did we like Parfenov? In some years - very much. It was most likely the mid-90s, when postmodern discourse (a way of speaking, roughly defined) was still new - and we wanted to consume it. Then it became more boring because the genre changed. After all, Parfenov is not much of an analyst, but he is a first-class showman.

His television fate was built contradictory: you cannot be both a showman and an analyst, even if you have an excellent team and the boys from it are ready to get involved in any dangerous business fraught with unpredictable consequences. But he didn’t count the costs (I don’t even mean material ones) - he rushed to where it was “interesting”, and built his programs as a series of “tasty” things, fulfilling the long-standing dream of the Russian consumer: to be smart, simple, and useful .

Probably, Parfenov could be accused of a lot of “borrowings”: clearly there was some kind of foreign model of exactly this behavior on air, but, frankly, I’m too lazy to look for analogues. The world is so small, there are so few forms and formats in which a TV presenter can still work, so he has the right to creative plagiarism. This - to make it clearer - you take something else, think about it for a long time, and then make something of your own out of it, tied to the local culture, habits, and mores. This is what Parfenov knew how to do. And the reporters he trained were drawn into the format and carried out what he had in mind.

We are talking about will: someone must have the will to send someone somewhere, bear full responsibility for everything, and then coldly assemble everything they have obtained, adding some “baubles” (almost T-tanks) 90 Leonid Gennadievich dragged me into the studio so that the viewer would not get bored. It was a very beautiful strategy, and I remember that in 2000 I really didn’t want Parfenov to leave NTV, as Kiselev left. In Kiselev there was rationality, in Parfenovo there was sensual and emotional, and I, a rationalist myself, still wanted some plasticity, moisture and ambiguity in the perception of the outside world. And Parfenov tried to give me this: every time it gets worse and worse, but such is the fate of all permanent columns. They “get tired”, and they cannot always be saved by changing the layout, style, design, or something else external. They get tired intellectually, and the “curators” of such columns need to “refresh their eyes” from time to time: read some other literature or watch some stupid Hollywood film, maybe from such a stupid viewing of standard products some Thought will appear.

Parfenov tried to produce freedom. This is a multi-stage phenomenon: first you learn to speak freely, then you understand something about your rights, then you try to behave like a free person with rights. But at the very beginning there is still some kind of, how can I put it, “rhetoric of freedom” - or a person in a “box” who demonstrates to you how a free person should behave.

I think that for many many Parfenov was a kind of “factor” of freedom; he taught many to use this gift of the gods. I had my own experience of gaining freedom, but it was always very interesting for me to observe how others do it: with the help of a “picture” on a TV screen, artificially dynamic speech (so fast that sometimes it resembles hysteria). This was justified: we are unlikely to want to travel back (to where there is “confidence in the future”), but for several years we have been shown how difficult, but extremely exciting, life “here” is.

The circumstances of Parfenov’s dismissal are both dark and simple: Nikolai Senkevich’s official statements are ridiculous, and the point, apparently, is a change of culture: the Putin era wants to have its own culture. Why is Parfenov here, who arose, turned around and built several projects during the Yeltsin era? It has passed irrevocably, and now the authorities require a different style.

The question is this: where do you put all the talented people who emerged in the 90s and still know how to do something? There are no concentration camps, not everyone will die from heavy drinking, therefore, they need some free space for the implementation of their creative gift. And it seems that it exists, but Parfenov’s dismissal is a completely unambiguous signal: there will be less and less of him. And here you don’t even know whether to rush to occupy it or neglect it, since before our eyes it is becoming either state-owned or very dependent on big business, which, in turn, depends on the supreme power.

I don’t know a language in which we can talk about all this seriously. Maybe it's sociology, maybe cultural studies. However, I want simple logic: what do you want? As a simple man in the street, reader and viewer, I have the right to ask this.