Paper short abstract:

The rural lower class is increasingly represented in Romanian media as mimicking unsavory Western models of success. Such negative portrayals advance a view of lower class mimesis akin to what used to be perceived as the „savage” mode of imitation, thus contributing to social polarization.

Paper long abstract:

The most popular TV comedy show in post-socialist Romania puts forward grossly mimetic characters. A young man recently returned from Italy, where he’s learnt to comb his hair backwards in the generic Mafioso style, or the tavern keeper wearing a cowboy hat and heavy golden jewelry are designed to perpetuate negative stereotypes of Romanian peasants. These representations of mimesis are thus putting into visual discourse the clear distinction between urban elites and rural lower classes while also providing a postmodernist construction of the post-rural environment as a place of unenlightened imitation of Western success. This paper use a socio-semiotic approach to illustrate that imitation in the show isn’t represented as the typical indigenous mimetic practice, where the essence of Western power is sought and diverted to the local signifying system. Rather, it’s represented as attempts to discard the traditional cultural matrix and replace it with hollow signs of the power of a dominant cultural force. Mimesis is represented as imperfect control of semiotic codes, aping models of success which are also discredited by the educated urban class. Simply put, the characters are shown to imitate the wrong models. Thus, the actual sense of incongruity (Lempert 2014) may come less from the actual representation of aping in the show and more from the creators’ mimetic positioning within what is generally perceived as the „correct” Western subjectivity – one which disregards both the imitating peasants and their models.