The Scandinavian Invasion

Figures

Figure 1. Segments 1–3: Comparison of first three segments of the respective opening scenes. Source: pilot episodes of Bron|Broen (Denmark/Sweden), The Bridge (US/Mexico), and The Tunnel (France/UK).

Figure 2. Segments 4–5: Comparison of fourth and fifth segments of the respective opening scenes. Source: pilot episodes of Bron|Broen (Denmark/Sweden), The Bridge (US/Mexico), and The Tunnel (France/UK).

Figure 3. Segments 6–7: Comparison of sixth and seventh segments of the respective opening scenes. Source: pilot episodes of Bron|Broen (Denmark/Sweden), The Bridge (US/Mexico), and The Tunnel (France/UK).

Figure 4. Elsa’s transformation during the ‘Let it Go’ sequence is informed by the visual language of noir femme fatales such as Rita Hayworth in Gilda (Vidor 1946) and Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (Wilder 1944).

Figure 5. Elsa’s Whiteness becomes luminous as she is centralised within the frame.

Figure 6. Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post and Sauna illustrates the playful nostalgia of Frozen.

Introduction: Nordic Noir Is Dead; Long Live Nordic Noir! Genre, Discourse and the Evolving Cultural Phenomenon

At the time of writing, Nordic Noir stands in a curious position. On one hand, it is easy to frame Scandinavian crime fiction’s history as an overwhelming success story – one that began in the 1960s, accelerated in the 1990s and then truly gathered steam in the late 2000s following the global publishing juggernaut of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels (2005–2007) and its screen adaptations (2009, 2011) (Peacock 2013; Bergman 2014a). The genre’s critical and commercial credentials were further amplified by the unexpected international success of Danish and Swedish television series like The Killing (Forbrydelsen, 2007–2012) and The Bridge (Bron|Broen, 2011–2018), successes that sparked several years of sustained media attention. Nordic films, novels and television series garnered critical acclaim far beyond their countries of origin, resulting in multiple BAFTAs and International Emmy awards to go along with impressive international sales, distribution and viewing figures. Even in the UK, a country with little history of importing non-Anglophone content (Batchelor 2018: 118), Nordic Noir became a staple ingredient in the cultural diets of BBC Four viewers and broadsheet newspaper readers, beginning with three different versions of Wallander (1994–2004; 2005–2010; 2008–2016). As Emma Kennedy’s The Killing Handbook declared in 2012, “[a]‌ virus has swept the Great British islands, blown in on a north wind; and it has brought with it the murky Nordic Noir televisual blockbusters that have gripped the nation ever since” (2012: xi). All of a sudden, more and more media producers, broadcasters and audiences seemed ←1 | 2→to be turning to the Nordic countries (and to Denmark and Sweden in particular) in pursuit of quality content.

By 2016, however, it was clear that this narrative being touted in the UK had begun to shift, as critical enthusiasm and fascination became less common. Tales of global conquest and underdog successes were gradually replaced with elegiac refrains such as: “Is this the end of the road for Nordic Noir?” (Lawrence 2018); “Has the phase passed?” (Dowd 2016); or the more blunt, “Scandi noir is dead” (Lawson 2017). These claims were not unreasonable. After all, broadcasters had begun to look beyond Scandinavia for their international content, and booksellers had folded standalone ‘Nordic Noir’ sections of their stores back into the ‘Crime Fiction’ shelves. In the UK at least, there was (and still is) a prevailing sense that the genre’s moment in the spotlight could well be over.

When a cultural phenomenon appears to be floundering, death knells like these can often become prompts for historicising the recent past. Commentators embark on a collective process of identifying and explaining the key events, objects, people and companies involved as they try to make sense of what had happened, what caused it and how significant it might all have been. This drive towards explaining and analysing popularity has become ever more pressing in the context of a convergent media landscape, in which creative industries increasingly overlap with one another, and consumers have become increasingly nomadic (Jenkins 2006; Meikle and Young 2012). If audiences’ attention is increasingly divided, mobile and unpredictable (Webster 2014; Anderson 2009), then it is Nordic Noir’s rise, rather than its purported fall, which is in particular need of attention. How did this category of media texts – an unlikely candidate for international success in so many ways – manage to cut through the heightened media ‘noise’ to capture the attention of so many people for a sustained period of time? How do we begin to explain the causes or significance of a cultural phenomenon like this? And has it really ‘died’?

Our answer to the final question is a resounding ‘no’, not least because Nordic Noir is far more than simply a category of text; rather, it is a cultural phenomenon. For our purposes, both in this introduction and throughout the rest of the book, our definition of a cultural phenomenon is in line with what Guerzoni and Nuccio (2014) refer to as a “disruptive cultural ←2 | 3→fad”. The word “fad” is commonly used in relation to short-lived and relatively inconsequential phenomena, novel and even “odd” examples of collective behaviour that appear suddenly and unexpectedly, then fizzle out without any lasting legacy (Aguirre et al. 1988). A disruptive cultural fad, however, is a “new version of a cultural good, which is not only successful among existing consumers, but also opens up new markets or attracts new demand segments” (Guerzoni and Nuccio 2014: 146). This is precisely the sense in which we suggest that Nordic Noir matters, and will continue to matter long after it seems to have disappeared. This is not merely a phenomenon from the perspective of enamoured audiences and reviewers, enjoying and championing a selection of particular Nordic texts and then seeking out similar content. It is also a phenomenon with profound implications for a diverse range of industries – a catalyst for overlaps and collaborations between television, film, publishing, tourism, advertising, broadcasting, news, food and drink, fashion and many other sectors – all of which viewed Nordic Noir as a popular and potentially lucrative trend that could be capitalised on.

This disruptive influence is what The Scandinavian Invasion seeks to examine, presenting a series of essays that collectively interrogate some of the most important features, causes and implications of Nordic Noir’s rise and alleged fall. But our aims go much further than that. This book is neither a celebratory obituary nor critical autopsy. Instead, this introductory chapter puts forward an argument that implicitly runs throughout the rest of the anthology: far from lying on its figurative death bed, we suggest that Nordic Noir is best understood as a transnational cultural phenomenon in transition. Aspects of the genre can easily be traced back to a specific strand of crime literature written by Nordic authors, but at the time of writing, the category constitutes a very different beast, having expanded to different media, different genres, different industries and different territories. By the time you read these words, it will inevitably have shifted even further, perhaps even to the point of being unrecognisable. In the recent anthology, Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation, for example, editors Linda Badley, Andrew Nestingen and Jaakko Seppälä use the term

to refer not only to police procedurals but also to elements in gothic, horror, science fiction, or neo-medieval texts such as Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 film adaptation ←3 | 4→of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s 2006 novel Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In, 2006), the Swedish television series Äkta människor (2012–2014) and its BBC [sic] remake Humans (2015–), or the History Channel’s Vikings series (2013–), which share characteristics with but are not limited to the Scandinavian crime fiction genre proper. (2020: 6)

Similarly, as Kim Toft Hansen and Anne Marit Waade emphasise, Nordic Noir is “not a clearly defined genre, but a concept with genre affinities” (2017: 9, our emphasis). Indeed, the term itself originated in Britain, coined by the Scandinavian Department at University College London, where a ‘Nordic Noir’ blog and book club were launched in March 2010 (Agger 2016: 138; Anon. n.d.). The term was soon adopted (or assimilated) across multiple sites, including the BBC documentary Nordic Noir: The Story of Scandinavian Crime Fiction, which was first broadcast in December 2010, as well as entertainment journalism and branding, such as Arrow Video’s Nordic Noir label (Badley et al. 2020: 6; also see McCulloch and Proctor, this volume). Put simply, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down exactly what Nordic Noir consists of at any one moment in time, because generic definitions are constantly in motion, and subject to continuous contestation (Altman 1999).

The book’s focus thus remains deliberately broad, with a diverse range of essays providing snapshots of what Nordic Noir has been in the past, what it has since become and where it may be heading in the future. On this final point, our aim is not to make accurate predictions but to emphasise the importance of thinking through the temporalities of cultural phenomena. We strongly believe that Nordic Noir is important because of its commercial success, international popularity and its aesthetic, thematic and cultural innovativeness. Indeed, the chapters that follow make a strong case for each of these. But we also want this anthology to outlast the phenomenon itself. After all, popularity (however we might define or measure it) rarely exists in perpetuity, and even the most enduring, resilient and widely recognised of cultural forms will fall in and out of favour with different audiences over time. To talk of a genre’s ‘death’ or ‘end’, even in a speculative sense, is to ignore the ways in which cultural objects continue to be recycled and renewed long after they cease to be ‘popular’. Raymond Williams (1977: 121–127) famously argued that culture is best understood ←4 | 5→as consisting of emergent, dominant and residual elements. A given cultural object (such as a book or television series) need not cycle through each of these categories in turn, or in a particular order, but its meanings will be determined through the cultural practices and conditions that surround it. So, to explain a phenomenon like Nordic Noir – in order to understand why it became ‘popular’ in the first place, to identify the form(s) that popularity took and to assess the extent to which this popularity has changed over time – we need to conceptualise our object of study as complex, multifaceted and always evolving, and then examine some of the ways different groups of people have made use of it.

With that in mind, this introduction argues that Nordic Noir’s journey from relative obscurity through to international phenomenon has neither been simple nor unidirectional. We draw on influential work in genre studies in order to theorise Nordic Noir as a cultural category rather than either a set of stylistic or formal characteristics, or as a coherent and stable approach to media production (Mittell 2004; Naremore 1995). From there, we look towards ‘marginal’ and hybridised examples of Nordic Noir to explore how the phenomenon evolved as it became a more established market presence in the UK and beyond – developments which are explored further throughout the chapters in this book. Ultimately, we want to suggest that Nordic Noir can act as a valuable category for thinking with – a case study that can help us to see genres as intertextual webs that are constantly in a state of flux.