Melancholy in Nordic noir

Abstract

Nordic Noir on screen is characterised by a certain melancholy displayed in the plot, the imagery and the characters. These elements also characterise Scandinavian crime fiction, for example the troubled protagonists and the climate. Nordic Noir has attracted considerable interest among audiences and academics. However, none of the academic contributions reflect the connection to the historical Nordic Melancholy. In this article

Nationalization of Spatiotemporal Artifacts: National Chronotope, Authenticity, and Local Colors in Danish TV Dramas

“…Audiences recognize these signifiers and index their origin as Danish, Denmark, or Nordic. As Reijnders (2009, 176) argues “this local atmosphere is intensified by the representation of stereotypical weather conditions.” Something as “ordinary and mundane” as gray weather (Jensen 2009; Waade 2017) and dark colors are astonishingly significant to Turkish audiences who are more familiar with bright colors, sunny days, and a great quantity of light in terms of their viewing experiences of American and Turkish dramas, as well as their everyday life experiences. In a similar study with Japanese audiences of Danish dramas, a female audience member states that she likes “Northern European dramas and when [she] turns them on and sees them [she] knows immediately if it is from Northern Europe because it is very grey” (Jacobsen 2020, 86).…”

Anthroposcreens

“…. with the Norwegian national discourse originating in the romantic perception of (a specific type of) nature as something exceptionally Norwegian" (2020: 92; see also Waade 2017). Like Sonja Henie's penchant for the color white, the visual whiteness of national naturesnowy mountains, iceblue fjords, glacierssurrounding Ragnarok's fictional town of Edda (named for two foundational texts in the study of Old Norse) aesthetically reinforces the aura of ethnic Whiteness already accrued around the show's central inspiration: Norse mythology and Norwegian cultural heritage.…”

Analysing the melancholy of Nordic Noir as stimmung: Affective world-building inThe Bridge

“…The almost interruptive, contemplative breakers render the series relatively slow compared to other noir crime dramas and thrillers. The pace of the storytelling and cutting follow a punctuated rhythm that fosters a ruminative mode of relating to the world, described as both a key feature of melancholy (Bowring, 2016;Waade, 2017) and of the rise of landscape spectacles in television more generally (Wheatley, 2016). Contemplation and lingering also occur on the level of action as the series features several scenes where the characters are seen in a contemplative mode, often at home or sitting in the kitchen of the Malmö police station.…”