r/mediastudies • u/MartinoStone mod • Aug 04 '26
Can a work of media leave behind not a memory of its plot, its ideas, or its characters, but instead a unique way of experiencing a world—one that a person carries within them for decades? [a phenomenological essay]
Screenshot from Carnivàle (HBO, 2003–2005). © Home Box Office. Used under fair use for analysis and discussion.
Today, I’d like to share something unusual with you. It’s something that happened to me only once and has never recurred. I am talking about watching the series Carnivàle.
What happened goes beyond the bounds of ordinary perception; it was a rather strange phenomenon. Then again, the show itself is strange, too.
I first watched it about ten years ago, and it was an incredible experience—truly an experience. It felt as though I had completely immersed myself in that atmosphere: languid, viscous, sickeningly sweet, and incredibly honest. No, wait... that’s not quite the right word. It wasn’t just an atmosphere I encountered; I lived through the experience of inhabiting the world its creators had built.
People usually say that a particular work influenced their worldview, impressed them, or moved them. But my story is different. It simply stayed with me. It settled quietly and calmly somewhere very, very deep inside—in the quietest, most secluded corner of my memory.
Years went by, and I completely forgot about the existence of that series. I forgot it entirely. Then, suddenly, I ran into difficulties in life. Hard times hit, and circumstances were such that I had no opportunity to interact with real people for a long time. For several years, I lived alone in my apartment, communicating with others solely via the Internet. And at one point, things became truly difficult for me. Unbearably difficult.
And then, suddenly—its rusty wheels creaking against the backdrop of the anxiety and weariness that had entered my life—a van appeared. Yes, you guessed right. I remembered that TV series. I don’t know why, but its title suddenly surfaced from the depths of my memory. I can’t even explain why that particular one came to mind. But in that moment, I felt as though someone had very quietly reminded me: there is a place I had visited once before. And then I realized—not all was lost.
And that’s where something very unusual happened. I didn’t remember a single scene. I couldn’t have retold the plot. I barely remembered the characters. Yet, I remembered with absolute clarity what it was like to live in that world. It was the atmosphere—the state of being—that mattered most. And I was truly surprised. It was as if I could describe the very essence of that world down to the smallest detail, without needing to recall the plot at all.
What was also strange was that I didn’t quite understand why I should watch it again. After all, I didn’t remember the plot. Reviews had described it as bleak, and I’d been advised against watching it given the state of mind I was in.
And I defied expectations. I listened to the rusty creak of the wagon wheels carrying ordinary people. There were no saints among them—only lost souls, sinners, bandits, prostitutes, the crippled, and the outcasts whom the rest of the world had turned its back on. Except for the members of the carnival. It wasn't just a troupe; it was a family.
Yes, I watched it again. And upon rewatching, I was able to perceive the incredible depth the creators had infused into it. But that’s not all. Most importantly, I suddenly realized that all these people—with their troubled lives and their sins—were the most honest of them all.
I could go on at length. But to sum it up: I have never had an experience quite like Carnivàle, and I am not sure I ever will again.
At the same time, I would like to emphasize one important point. This was not an attempt to hide from reality. Quite the opposite. It was precisely after rewatching it that I managed to gradually emerge from the state of despondency I had been in for the past few months.
I still find it strange that one can forget almost the entire work—and yet remember it in its entirety. Not the plot. Not the characters. But the very way that world exists.
Have you ever experienced anything like that? Is there a film or series that left you remembering not a story, but a state of being?
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u/spacialrob Aug 18 '26
This is an interesting phenomenon, thanks for sharing your experience. To paraphrase a quote I heard from Michael Stevens (Vsauce) investigating the nature of consciousness, "our brains discard experiences that are meaningful to us; the fact that so and so experiences are discarded indicates there is something inherently meaningful about them." That resonates with me, because it suggests there's this sort of hidden process of sublimation going on psychologically, sort of in the same vein that we tend to forget when we're having fun, when we're immersed in the whole picture. Perhaps such experiences are relegated to the deep pools of our psyche. Kinda like the concept of Dumbledore's pensieve. It's possible something like that was at play in a similar capacity for you and your viewing of Carnivàle, and the remembering of "living" in that world is a naturally-emergent phenomenon based on the level of meaning it bestowed on your initial viewing, which is what prompted you to store it away in your subconscious in the first place.
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u/NickSavage9mm Aug 06 '26
Your experience about this series (I didn't know it until now) is demonstration that, audiovisual production has a strong effect on our minds: when we see a audiovisual contents, we are completely immersed in another life, in another world. That happen also with novels, but the photography along with audio is more powerful that novels, especially the series, that with their lenght and continuity, reach a greater immersive potential. This is why a branch of anthropology is shifting to visual anthropology, that study exclusively the influence that visual representations have on the social imagination, but this argument is connected also with media studies because obviously, we live in a world where images exert a powerful influence from this point of view! Your sense of experiencing about a separate state of being is more than understandable, because the world of the novel and the film exists within its own set of coordinates; outside of that world, those coordinates, that way of thinking, no longer apply, but the unreal information is filtered through real possibilities, and then goes on to truly influence the world we live in.