"We like your novel," says a publisher in a recent New Yorker cartoon, "can you make it Swedish?" The overwhelming popularity of Scandinavian crime drama continues this month: Dec. 21 will see the U.S. launch of another film version of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (this one American, but with Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and a variety of other English accents in a putative Sweden).
Next door, in Norway, where there is also apparently a rich and popular tradition of detective fiction, there is anguished discussion of the future of such stories in the wake of last summer's Utoya massacre. According to an impressively researched article by Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, Norwegian crime writers have reason to feel both smug and fearful about their own predictions: It has been commonplace for the last 10 years for their villains to be neo-Nazis or extreme nationalists. The same goes for Larsson himself, who relied on ultra-rightist characters to create his evil conspiracies.
These imaginings could have been dismissed as paranoid and sensationalist, or as the alarmist political propaganda of an admittedly left-wing bunch of writers. Now the madman Anders Breivik has come along to prove their worst imaginings true. What the crime writers will imagine next is not clear, but they seem to agree (according to Anthony in the Observer) that the great "22/7 novel" (22/7 is how Norwegians refer to the day of the massacre) will not be written in the next year or so.
It's probably just a coincidence that the great Danish misanthrope, Lars von Trier, has just put out a film about embracing the end of the world in a gloomy Swedish neo-Gothic castle. Melancholia is a beautiful and annoying film by a talented and annoying guy. He has said in interviews ... well, not only that he sympathized with Hitler and that he apologizes for saying that and then that he wishes he had never apologized – the stuff you may have heard about – but other more interesting stuff about the film.
He has said that the film's deeply depressed and callous heroine, played by Kirsten Dunst, is inspired by himself. Also that he had the idea for the film when he was depressed and he noticed that he was better able to deal with crises and emergencies when depressed, because he expected disaster anyway.
In the film, the depressed character is the only one able to calmly handle the impending end of the world; in fact, she appears to actually will the approaching rogue planet into a collision with Earth. As, presumably, the calm and collected and heroically depressed von Trier would do if he had a chance. It's quite an egomaniacal film. And there's the mandatory rich-white-male corporate bad guy. (I actually like most of von Trier's work very much: For my money, his best film so far is The Five Obstructions, a documentary inquiry into the nature of art, not a candle-lit melodrama like this one.)
Also, by coincidence, I just watched TrollHunter, a recent Norwegian fantasy film proposing that there are real trolls in the dark woods and mountains – big, stinky, man-killing trolls, just like those in fairy tales. The trolls are very stupid and can smell the blood of Christians. In typical Scandinavian style, their existence is covered up by conspiratorial and self-serving government departments.
Norway, Denmark and Sweden are all torn right now by discussions about non-European immigration. The right fears the Muslim hordes and communist-multiculturalist conspiracies in government. The left fears secret neo-Nazi organizations and conjures them into fictional life. Paranoia is a trope common to both sides. The paranoid Breivik was himself a genuine troll (of the Internet as well as the murderous kind).
Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg and Edvard Munch and Edvard Grieg certainly had their share of depressive mid-winter imaginings, and the Norwegian black-metal bands of the 1990s were famously extremist, but all these artists weren't quite as obsessed with cover-ups and collusions as contemporary Nordics seem to be. This angst is a particularly contemporary one, a fear and a moral turmoil that speaks to the entire Western world. It explains a lot about the international success of so much Scandinavian art right now.