Par le petit écran de Fringe

• Main Author: Aurélie Villers
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2014-12-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: Fringe; embedded structure; reflexive screen; meta-narration
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/344

Fringe is a work that shows itself to be highly aware of its status as a TV series, whether by the intertextual scavenger hunts it offers to spectators in the screens placed in the background, by the dialectic between fiction and the real that crystallizes there, or by the reflexive and metanarrative aspects of the works that are shown there. Negligible intertextual references appear on the televisions and monitors placed in the scenes, which, nodding to fans and making references to venerable masterpieces of the small and big screens, quickly become commentaries on the story in progress. The screens pose themselves as frames that reinforce the real nature of what surrounds them and the fictional nature of the images enshrined in them. These screens permit spectators to watch the fiction before it becomes porous over the seasons and pushes the protagonists into and out of the frame, literally changing universes and fictional regimes. The small screen defines the scope of space, but also indicates temporality. From old televisions from the 1950s placed in the decor to the 3D projections of the Observers, who have come to invade the world, the screen shows Fringe to be a story of the dematerialization of frames. Thus, screens are the principal places of the narrative ellipses that, one after another, they fill in (by projecting elements that the protagonists leave out) or create (when, in season 5, old video cassettes dictate the program of each episode).