When the phrase “work of genius” is applied to a TV series, it’s usually in the context of Breaking Bad or Mad Men. But one American professor has recently proposed an unlikely addition to that list – the Maltese series Deċeduti.
“It is an exemplary distillation of the problems that surround taking the sacred out of history and bringing the secular periphery into the European mainstream,” said Michael Cooperson, a professor of Arabic at the University of California.
Prof. Michael Cooperson.Speaking during a public lecture last Thursday, Prof. Cooperson said the supernatural comedy perfectly encapsulated Malta’s at-tempts at making sense of its own identity and history. Moreover, he argued, it is the best place to look for the “low-level theological rumination” of a society rapidly changing its relationship with religion.
He’s completely serious too, as he stressed when it was suggested that most people wouldn’t really consider Deċeduti a fit subject for such rigorous academic analysis. “Maybe it’s worth studying precisely because people dismiss it.
“The good stuff is often in what people consider to be the trash. If we’re trying to understand our own culture as anthropologists, then we have to look at how it works, whether it’s good or bad.”
Deċeduti, which became one of the most popular Maltese series in history during its two-year run, tells the story of a group of ghosts from all eras of Maltese history who find themselves trapped in an apartment block.
Prof. Cooperson, who has also written academic papers in Maltese on Malta’s history, believes it is most notable for the way it presents an essentially secular worldview, couched in the language of the sacred and the spiritual.
The good stuff is often in what people consider to be the trash
“Even though it’s about the afterlife, it’s not a particularly Christian world,” he said.
“There’s no god, no devil and it’s not particularly clear whether Christian teaching actually holds true. This is not what you get in Church on Sundays.”
The series, Prof. Cooperson argued, also used its historical premise to implicitly critique our existing historical narratives.
He gave the example of a scene where a ghost from 1565 discusses the “excitement” of barbaric public executions with a shocked ghost from the present. “It refers to a memory tradition where Malta is defined by the Crusader period, and the idea of repelling Islam. But the scene is built on an Enlightenment-era critique of religion. It challenges the notion of the Crusader as hero, making European-ness dependent on Enlightenment values,º not Crusader strength.”
In this context, Prof. Cooperson said, it was telling that the series avoided depicting any Turkish or Arabic characters, despite their prominence in our history.
Doing so would have forced it to make a decision on which moral order – if any – was correct, which would fly in the face of what Prof. Cooperson sees as an “overt message of harmony”.
“In a sense, it resembles Malta, and the EU, as a whole, in that its commitment to pluralism ties itself in knots when faced with communities who reject or are thought to reject those same values.”
Prof. Cooperson is currently in Malta for an interdisciplinary conference organised by the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities.