The Detective is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State

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This essay is the first in a series guest edited by Bruce Robbins. Some years into the fashion, Nordic noir remains something of a mystery. Known for its pronounced left-wing tendencies and an uncompromisingly critical view of the Scandinavian welfare state, the genre has won huge audiences in a global climate of neoliberalism and among fiction, film, and television audiences abroad that do not seem to share the social and political assumptions of the region. But perhaps we have been too hasty in identifying those assumptions and their meaning in the countries of origin. The essays gathered here, from inside and outside Scandinavia, try to consider this enormously successful cultural export with fresh eyes, reflecting anew on why Nordic noir should have emerged where and when it did and on the gender and eco-political concerns as well as the concern with the welfare state that have animated its cross-cultural creativity.

There is a moment in the TV serial The Killing (the original Danish version, henceforth Forbrydelsen) when it looks like Detective Sarah Lund is going to lose her job on the police force for ignoring orders or overstepping her authority or in some other way breaking the rules. It makes sense that she should be at risk of losing her job. Conflict between her and the state authority she works for has been simmering for some time. The police bureaucracy has resisted her efforts to do that job, efforts that we know to be well-meaning and well-directed, even inspired, and that come at great sacrifice to her personal life. We suspect therefore that some corrupt figure in city government may be covering up for the killer, or maybe even is the killer. Her superiors are suspects. The parallel plot dealing with the campaign of a reform candidate to be elected mayor of Copenhagen and the suspicion hovering over various political operatives and opponents makes the same point. Government is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

My title is meant to refer, then, to what seems like the inevitable first hypothesis about the relationship between Nordic noir and the welfare state: namely, that Nordic noir is centrally and enthusiastically engaged in a critique of the state, specifically the welfare state.

In the US, this proposition seems uncontroversial.  One early discussion of the Stieg Larsson trilogy in n+1 is called "The Man Who Blew Up the Welfare State."  "To read the 1,082 pages" of Stieg Larsson's trilogy, it begins, "is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce." "Larsson brings the ostensibly protective welfare state to the fore," the article goes on, "making it not just a backdrop but a central force and, in a way, a villain."1 Slavoj Zizek says similar things about Henning Mankell, in whose novels he sees "the long and painful decay of the Swedish welfare state." This is also the thesis of Andrew Nestingen's  highly-respected Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia (2008).

No doubt there is considerable truth in this account, especially as seen from within Scandinavia.  No country can be denied the right to the self-critique of its own choosing.  But the idea of Nordic noir as national self-critique does not seem to me the whole truth, and the part of the truth it leaves out seems considerably more interesting, especially as seen from our side of the Atlantic.

In the US, the critique of the welfare state is largely a right-wing or pro-capitalist phenomenon. The ideological energy behind it comes in the main from what we have come to call neoliberalism: the belief that the state must be reduced in size as far as possible in favor of the so-called free market. The state is fine as long as it serves the market, the neoliberals say, but it should be deprived of all power to regulate or otherwise interfere with the market. The state is the last remaining antagonist the market faces, and it must be brought down or, even better, made to serve the market. That's the neoliberal line. Nordic noir replies, from time to time, that the state has always served the market; look at its collusion with rich industrialists, real estate developers, rapists, neo-Nazis.  This sounds like critique of neoliberalism from the left. But some of the genre's success outside Scandinavia, in countries like the UK and the US and Germany (and perhaps some of its success inside the Scandinavian countries as well) clearly comes from the audience's broader and deeper anti-statism, which was searching for outlets.

In America, critique of the state is a cliché of the noir genre, as of other popular genres (for example, the Western). It begins long before the ascendancy of neoliberalism.  And it too is politically ambiguous. There is almost always a moment when the detective is suspended from his duties (once upon a time, it would have necessarily been a he) because he has been doing those duties too well. There are close parallels in The Wire, True Detective and Justifiedas well as the American re-make of Forbrydelsen, The Killing.  In True Detective, not only is the detective suspended and his badge and gun taken away, but the premise all the way through Season 1 is that the detective is himself being investigated by his fellow police officers. The same is true of the more conventional series Justified. The threat of suspension that hangs over the detective is entirely conventional. This makes perfect sense in the US because our cultural traditions are so deeply anti-statist. Audiences are always already prepared to suspect the public authorities of being corrupt or merely fronting for private interests. And most often, this is in direct alignment with Americans' refusal to be suspicious of capitalism as such, a system seen as essential to the nurturing of private freedom. In the period of the old liberalism, most of the critique of the state that has been hard-wired into the mystery genre since Sherlock Holmes (think what stupid bunglers Holmes is always revealing the police to be) and in the US since the classic Western (think of Gary Cooper throwing away his badge in disgust at the end of High Noon) - most of this is not inconsistent with right-wing or at least pro-capitalist politics.

If it were true that Nordic noir is constitutively critical of the welfare state, at this point in history that would not be a self-evidently good thing. But this seems to me at best a very partial truth. The success of Nordic noir both domestically and for export contains an important component of Nordic progressivism. In order to see that progressivism, you have to look at the texts themselves, not just as symptoms of the Zeitgeist but - if you will forgive the expression - as works of art, in strenuous dialogue with themselves.

At least in Forbrydelsen and The Bridge, the key evidence is the female protagonist: a distinctively "difficult" or unsocialized or even autistic woman, lacking the social skills usually demanded of and thus associated with women. Lisbeth Salander, the best-known of the Nordic noir heroines, is very literally a victim of the state, raped and abused by those delegated by officialdom to deal with her case. But the most obvious thing to say about detectives Sarah Lund and Saga Norén is very nearly the opposite: they are the face of the state. Why give the state a new, female face? Perhaps, women being expected to be more socialized than men, choosing an un- or undersocialized woman to embody law enforcement, the state's most basic and uncontroversial function, has the effect of making the state itself seem unsocialized, awkward, and unnatural.  In other words, here too the intention could well be critique. But this interpretation seems unpersuasive. In spite of all the awkwardness, or perhaps because of it, audiences both male and female clearly identify with the unsocialized woman. Indeed, they identify quite strongly and surprisingly - for example, by buying Sarah Lund's unsexy sweaters in enormous quantities. What is it they are identifying with if not the state in all its unsexiness?

So what does it say about the state that Nordic noir chooses to represent it by means of such a figure?

All these women manifest some failure of socialization. This failure can be read as the mark of a loss or lack. But it makes more sense if seen as a voluntary sacrifice, a sacrifice of personal life, even of personality or personhood, in the interest of the public welfare. This may not seem plausible in the US, where the god on whose altar the woman's sacrifice is made is more often seen as work, which is to say money-making or career. Since the dimension of publicness is missing or muted, the woman's choice can look like the very reverse of sacrifice: pure self-interest. In Scandinavia, however, it seems important that whatever doubts may be expressed about the high cost of this sacrifice, the higher good itself is never thrown into question. In that sense what audiences are identifying with is in fact the legitimacy of the state as the proper recipient of personal sacrifice, the site where you can see the results of your work in the lives of other people and where work therefore becomes something that it might not otherwise be: worth doing.

This underlining of meaningfulness as a higher good manifests itself in another  innovation that Forbrydelsen brings to the police procedural: the extended screen time that the narrative chooses to devote to the Larsens, the family whose daughter has been murdered. At one end of the murder mystery's emotional spectrum, the victim can serve as merely a puzzle to be solved, a stick figure or functional necessity with no personal presence or emotional hold over the reader. In such cases, knowledge of the victim is nothing more than evidence relevant to exposing the murderer. Season 1 of Forbrydelsen occupies the other end of this spectrum. There the grieving family is treated with the close attention usually reserved for suspects. The more time we spend with them, the more their loss becomes our loss. This adds the audience to the emotional pressure Sarah Lund already feels to keep working on the case, even if working on the case means the sacrifice of her relations with her fiancé and her son. We want her to stay on the case; we need her to stay on the case. Her motivation fuses with our needs, our welfare. In other words, the narrative puts the audience on the side of the protagonist's sacrifice, and thus on the side of the state.

This is not a comfortable place to be. After all, as spectators we are enjoying our leisure while we watch the heroine work, and yet we are obliged to root for her to work harder, to surrender her own leisure. She surrenders her private life to ours. But it's this cruel dynamic that sheds such glory on her. She is like a soldier risking her life to defend the fatherland.

There is another thing that's accomplished by keeping the focus on the family and its loss. We watch Nanna Birk Larsen's family as much as if they were suspects because in a sense they are suspects. Not suspects in their daughter's murder (though her mother's sister almost makes it into that category). They are suspects in a crime that has not yet happened, but toward which much of the series nevertheless points: the crime of revenge for their daughter's murder. They blame the government for dragging its heels. And because they blame the government for failing them in their hour of need, they are tempted to take matters into their own hands. This temptation to rescind the state's monopoly of the legitimate use of violence makes the grieving family the main onscreen bearer of lack of trust in the state. The family is anti-statist. This anti-statism turns out to be a terrible mistake, almost a fatal mistake. The killer is not, as they suspect, the foreigner, wrongly protected by the state (and himself a teacher, a state employee). The actual killer, Vagn (note how different a choice the American re-make made: for us, the killer is a representative of politics!) comes from their own household: he is as close to being a member of the family as anyone can be without benefit of blood or marriage.  This is an allegory.  The family blames the state, as it blames foreigners.  It turns out that the daughter's embrace of a foreigner was unacceptable to Vagn, the almost-family member.  After directing suspicion both to a foreigner and to the state, the story places final responsibility at the family's edge, if not quite within it. Left to itself, the family would strike out viciously and blindly. The murder can only be properly dealt with, therefore, from outside the family: by the cold, inexpressive, unlikely representative of the state.

Why must this representative of the state be cold, inexpressive, unlikely? Consider the following coincidence: ideologically speaking, the final scene of season 1 of Forbrydelsen is echoed with uncanny precision in the final scene of season 1 of The Bridge, where Saga comes between Martin and Jens on the bridge, wounding Martin in order to stop him from killing the man who has murdered his son. In both cases, an individual who has been grievously wronged seeks private revenge against a murderer, and the murderer wants the revenge to happen. If it does happen, in the eyes of the law (and of Scandinavian society) the revenging individual will also be in the wrong, no matter how natural his act may seem. Therefore only someone lacking in "natural" or "normal" feelings can intervene. Cue the "difficult" woman.

In other words, from one perspective the unsocialized women may represent a problem, but from another perspective she represents the solution to a problem.

In the case of The Bridge, season 1, Saga's effort is explicitly an effort to stop her fellow detective from being suspended. If Martin had killed his son's murderer, she explains afterwards, then whether or not he went to jail, he would certainly have lost his position on the police force forever - he would been banished from the work that gives his life meaning. That goal is seen as important enough for it to have been Jens's own motive: he doesn't want to kill Martin, but to get him suspended.2

Saga is also a response to critiques of the state in another sense.  Her excessive, unreasonable concern for following the rules, which seems to come out of her absolute refusal of all personal feeling and motive, is also a refusal of that kind of "normal" social relationship that would ordinarily permit and even encourage state corruption: favoritism, cronyism, collusion with private economic interests, and so on. These are exactly the charges that Nordic noir is usually taken to be leveling at the welfare state. The protagonist's pathology may seem a high price to pay for a state that would be above suspicion, but that is the one clear logic behind it. In that sense too, she is both a problem and the solution to a problem.

On American television, as Merve Emre has pointed out, the figure of the "female sociopath" has become "central to workplace dramas like Damages, Revenge, Bones, The Fall, Rizzoli and Isles, Person of Interest, Luther, and 24."3 It is of course tempting to see women who hate empathy as a fitting response to "Men Who Hate women" (the Swedish title of Girl With a Dragon Tattoo).  But nothing could be farther from Forbrydelsen or The Bridge.  The fashion in the US is to pretend that gender inequality is an excuse for embracing corporate ethics - that is, stomping on the fingers and other body parts of the unwary in order to climb the corporate ladder or otherwise pursue one's advantage - without any of the customary shame or inhibition. This is feminism-as-neoliberal-propaganda. Men can enjoy it too. Yes, the Scandinavian female protagonists work too hard and suffer for it in their private lives. But what they do is not just work.  They are working for the common good. It's not their fault if we find their sacrifice hard to recognize for what it is.

Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where he works mainly in the areas of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author, most recently, of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence(Duke, 2012).  A companion volume is in the works to be entitled The Beneficiary: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Inequality.

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, "The Policeman in the Ill-Fitting Uniform; or, How to Write Crime Fiction After Utøya"

Anne-Marie Mai, "Eco-Crime: Scandinavian Literature Takes on the Environmental Crisis."

Yvonne Leffler, "Lisbeth Salander as Pippi Longstocking."

Peter Simonsen, "'A Shadow Had Descended': Alzheimer's in Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man."