Human Free Will Representation in TV Religious Serials: A Case Study of Key to Mysteries

The fundamental significance of free will and determinism in religion, and its role in people's daily lives, and the consideration of the media potential in capturing people's interpretation of the existential system of causes has led the researcher to answer this question: What kind of conceptual representation of free will can the audience receive from the serial Key to Mysteries. The first thing to offer is therefore a brief presentation of free will in Islamic thought and its signifiers which provide the possibility of the recognition of the antagonism between absolute determinism and absolute free will in the practical domain of our study. With adopting a representational theory approach, a combination of discourse analysis approaches has been used for analyzing the film dialogs relating to human free will and also Grimas Functional Model for analyzing functionalism structure in the film. A schematic diagram of initial and final stages of the serial shows that both its narrative and discourse are tended to a deterministic outlook. By bringing the divine power into focus in the overall structure and character's dialogs, the film shows a tendency to determinism so that this signifier attracts the others to itself and renders them meaningful. Signifiers such as dream, retributive nature of hardships, rewarding nature of joys, fatalism, and comprehensiveness of religious textual ordinances, cosmic order and social traditions are all endorsed, and on the contrary, those concerning curiosity, intellectual and philosophical methodology, and also the effectiveness of social structures are renounced, thus negating philosophical discourse and free will premises. The relation between each of these signifiers with free will discourse is discussed in data analysis section.