The Chosen: expansão narrativa rizomática

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to discuss that the series The Chosen (Dallas Jenkins, 2017), the corpus of this research, is different from other films, series and audiovisual products about the life of Jesus Christ. The argument is justified by the fact that, while most productions merely reenact the biblical text, The Chosen breaks with the existing tradition in the history of audiovisual productions that depict the life of Jesus Christ by innovating when presenting the biblical characters from the four canonical gospels of the New Testament.The research problem of this thesis lies in the fact that the series, an adaptation that stages the accounts of the Gospels, goes beyond the biblical text and represents it on screen, giving rise to an unprecedented perspective of interpreting what happened in the life, ministry, Passion, death, and resurrection of the character Jesus Christ and several other New Testament characters. It does so while maintaining a certain verisimilitude with the accounts of the original texts. We argue that there is a “rhizomatic narrative expansion”, based on the concept of “rhizome”, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with its plateaus and lines of flight. While the plateaus denote the thematic convergences between The Chosen and other related audiovisual works, the lines of flight configure the rhizomatic narrative expansion that we posit as the central argument of this thesis, structured in four chapters.