Popular Culture Review Volume 30, Number 2, Summer 2019 | Page 239

Popular Culture Review 30.2
rampant mental illness that is manifest in most of the series ’ characters , whom Missoffe himself regards as disturbed ( Nurbal ).
Indeed , Missoffe has given his viewers a Gothicized series in which the terrors of living in Villefranche , a contemporary version of Dante ’ s Hell and a microcosm of the contemporary Western world , are exaggerated to the point of grotesque caricature . In this series , Gothic terrors
activate a sense of the unknown and project an uncontrollable and overwhelming power which not only threatens the loss of sanity , honor , property , or social standing but the very order which supports and is regulated by the coherence of those terms . ( Botting 7 )
At the core of the terrors and horrors that characterize life in Villefranche and that find a parallel in the anxieties that have gripped the Western world that this small village represents lies a level of despair that verges on a form of madness . Indeed , the despair that grips not only Villefranche and but the Western world it represents may have its ultimate source in the absence of God .
Interestingly , perhaps typically , Missoffe treats the problem of God ’ s seeming absence with ambivalence . In the series ’ first episode , after Frank Siriano observes that the village has no church , Laurene responds that , in the 15 th century , the village sent for stone that would be used to build the edifice . She adds that a storm sank the vessel carrying the stones , the church was not built , and now , more than 500 years later , Laurene is left with the conclusion : “ We are alone .” Laurene ’ s somewhat ambiguous observation reveals a fear of abandon-
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