Abstract
This article explores civic engagement with the Danish/Swedish crime series The Bridge (Danmarks Radio/Sveriges Television 2011–) based on qualitative interviews with 113 audience members, and drawing on the notion of cultural citizenship. The perspective of cultural citizenship, as understood and operationalized mainly by Hermes, is married with critical perspectives on the crime drama genre and its audiences, along with cultural analysis of the construction of and engagement with the cross-border region in which the drama is set. The analysis shows that civic engagement with the crime series is prompted through the construction of community and allegiances through which audiences feel connected. This argument unfolds in three main analytical sections, detailing how audiences’ articulations of community are focused around distinct yet overlapping dimensions of community as (1) a national social ritual, (2) a sense of Nordic community, and finally (3) community as regional identity and sense of belonging to a borderless Öresund utopia – the integrated region between Denmark and Sweden. In so doing, the article offers rich insights into how audiences shape civic identities as members of nation states, of historical and cultural regions and as border-crossers between these geo-cultural entities - in dialogue with popular culture and around the boundary-work of the different communities offered by such texts.
Keywords
Introduction
On a wall at the media production company Filmlance in Malmö, next to the offices of the costume designers, location managers and set designers – who in the past six years have been involved in the creative process around the production of the Danish–Swedish television (TV) series The Bridge (Danmarks Radio [DR]/Sveriges Television [SVT], 2011–) - two pieces of paper have been taped together and stuck on the wall. The note, which details the aesthetic manifesto written by the creators of the show, reads:
We’re depicting a society which is in the process of de-humanizing. A welfare society that once was carefully crafted and rationally thought through to work efficiently is falling apart. The facades are cracking up, the dirt is showing and the functions of institutions, buildings and places seem more and more diffuse. Humans have been left neglected. We are strangers in our own society.
This article explores how audiences engage with the representations of this broken-down society: a dark, fictive post-welfare Scandinavia constructed for them by the creative team behind the popular crime series. Crime fiction as a literary genre is generally understood to be a ‘tool to dissect society’s flaws and failures, and to expose the wrong turns that a capitalist economy and the political structures to which it is allied, has taken’ (Messent, 2013: 17). As a distinct subgenre, so-called ‘Nordic noir’ crime fiction has in recent years become hugely popular among audiences around the world, not least for how it offers ‘socio-political insights and builds up a complex picture of Scandinavian society and the cracks in its democratic ideals’ (Forshaw, 2012: 2). The TV crime series The Bridge, set on the border of Sweden and Denmark, provides a pertinent example of this genre in how it examines and displays Scandinavia’s thorny problems of widening social divides and growing vulnerable groups in long-form storytelling that brings out ‘the hidden side of the welfare-state miracle in decay’ (Zizek, 2008).
These gloomy forebodings conveyed through aesthetics and character development resonate powerfully with audiences who engage with the political dimensions of the subtle societal critique embedded in the crime drama. However, in the research presented here, audiences also repeatedly articulated more optimistic sentiments, for example, talking about ‘light coming out of the cracks’ of this dystopian image of a crumbling society. Instead of leaving them feeling as ‘strangers in their own society’ as envisioned by the show’s creative team, audiences in Sweden and Denmark expressed a profound sense of hope and unity evoked by the show. The analysis shows how audiences engage with and reflect upon the complexity of contemporary societies through a drama series, which complicates ideas of good versus evil, and disturbs black and white representations of characters, plots and storylines. In this sense, audience engagement with the drama resonates with the multiple, often contradictory, ways in which politics and popular culture intersect. The analysis asks how The Bridge induces a sense of community and fosters cultural citizenship in audiences. 1 It offers insights into cultural citizenship as community and civic subjectivity by identifying three key themes in the data, which illustrate the different dimensions of this sense of belonging for audiences. I begin by introducing some key concepts and ideas that are later unfolded in more detail in the analysis.
A starting point for this article is the idea that popular culture can work as a resource for citizenship and civic engagement. It is by now a well-established argument that TV entertainment and popular culture in general, however indirectly, play an important role in how we piece together the puzzle of our political subjectivities (see, for example, Coleman, 2006, 2010; Dahlgren, 2009; Hermes, 2005; Klein, 2012; Van Zoonen, 2005). While arguments pertaining to the relation between popular culture and the performance of cultural citizenship are well rehearsed, this has not yet been sufficiently studied in empirical audience research on television drama and crime genres in particular (Müller and Hermes, 2010). To study the democratic potential of popular culture empirically, Joke Hermes (2005), drawing on the work of Hartley (1996), proposes the notion of cultural citizenship as identity construction. In her 2005 book, Hermes defines cultural citizenship as ‘the process of bonding and community building, and reflection on that bonding, that is implied in partaking of the text-related practices of reading, consuming, celebrating and criticizing offered in the realm of (popular) culture’ (p. 10). Applying ideas of cultural citizenship to the study of TV audiences implies asking questions of what they ‘do with (popular) cultural texts to understand, take up, reflect on and reform identities that are embedded in communities of different kinds’ (Hermes, 2005:10)
To operationalize the tricky notion of engagement, I turn to Dahlgren (2009) who in his extensive work on media and democracy makes a distinction between civic engagement as ‘activities which pertain to the democratic character of society’, whereas ‘political engagement implies some dimension of conflict and captures any activity that is oriented towards influencing government action in some way’ (p. 59). When researching civic engagement then, we are looking for the multiple ways in which ‘the political’ is manifested across the cultural terrain at the micro level of everyday life, and in everyday talk in which audiences make connections between the personal and the popular on one hand, and issues of public concern on the other. If we couple Dahlgren’s (2006) culturalist approach to media and engagement with Hermes’ notion of cultural citizenship, we may understand civic engagement in the context of audiences of TV entertainment to signify both the subtle and explicit articulations of connectivity to different forms of community, be they national, regional, or cross-cultural. Taking these ideas on board, I wish with this article to broaden the scope of the field of research that probes how media and culture relate to civic engagement and citizenship by providing a rich empirical analysis of how theses dynamics play out in the context of audiences of crime drama. Although more and more critical empirical research is emerging on these issues, only rarely have questions of cultural citizenship been raised in relation to the crime genre (for an exception, see Hermes and Stello, 2000), and never have they been explored in relation to TV crime series specifically. Despite recent attention to the interplay between popular culture and politics (see, for example, Street et al., 2013), the bearing of cultural mediations of politics on audiences’ heads and hearts is still often assumed and implied rather than empirically substantiated (Corner, 2011).
Furthermore, audience research in this area has primarily focused on the relationship of overall patterns of media consumption to the cognitive capacities of audiences and their civic subjectivity (Corner et al., 2013). When close attention is directed to a specific text or genre, research tends to focus on films, drama series or other forms of fiction which dramatize institutional politics in the traditional sense - for example, political comedy (Doona, 2016; Jones, 2013) or politicotainment (Riegert, 2007), while neglecting audience engagement with the plenitude of media forms which narrate ‘the political’ in a much broader sense of the word. In this sense, I subscribe to the growing body of research that takes an epistemological leap to assume that content that does not make explicit references to formal politics may also be understood as political and as a valuable source of civic engagement (Inthorn et al., 2012).
In attempting to understand audience engagement with the construction of the Öresund region, 2 in which the drama is set, as a form of cross-border, cross-cultural place-making, I am inspired by two concepts from a line of thought in cultural studies focusing on region-building in different integrated border areas across Europe. I understand these border areas as ‘political dreamscapes’ and the people inhabiting them as so-called ‘regionauts’ who perform cross-border identities (Löfgren, 2008). As Chow (2016) points out, The Bridge is the first major TV production to specifically address, represent and reimagine intercultural encounters in this binational region and the new spatial experience made possible by the bridge connecting the two countries. Whereas her research shows how the series, at the level of both production and narrative, articulates the difficulties and contradictions in fostering a sense of a ‘coherent Öresund identity’, this research examines how these efforts actually resonate with audiences.
Method
This audience study is part of a larger research project on the producers and audiences of TV entertainment in Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom (Media Experiences, 3 2013–2016). The article draws on an extensive data set of production and audience research, including both production interviews and observations, qualitative in-depth audience interviews, focus groups and participant observation. 4 From this larger data set, it focuses on interviews and fieldwork conducted with 113 audience members in Denmark (39) and Sweden (74). 5 The sample includes an equal number of females and males with an age span from 21 to 71. Participants were from a broad spectrum of professions ranging from unemployed, students and social workers, to teachers, journalists, clerks and retirees. Danish participants lived in Western and Eastern Denmark and Swedish participants in the Stockholm urban area, Mid-West and Southern Sweden. While these are not in the majority, the sample also includes a few (3) Danes who live in Sweden and Swedes living in Denmark. The data analysis focused on common themes across respondents in the two countries. After an initial mining for subtle differences in responses based on nationality, differences emerged based on communities of affinity other than that of the nation state. For example, physical distance/proximity to Öresund was a decisive factor, as respondents in the region shared a sense of local identity besides that of the Nordic, a pattern that pertained to the sample as a whole.
The qualitative semi-structured interviews have been conducted with participants individually or in smaller groups of two to three in home settings or in public venues such as cafés or libraries, while four were focus groups of seven to 10 participants. The interviews were conducted in Danish and Swedish and later translated into English. Prior to all interviews and focus groups, participants were informed about the research project and given assurance about ethical principles, such as anonymity and confidentiality. 6 Interviews were conducted until the point of theoretical saturation when no more variations in the data were found (Seale, 1999). All interview data have been transcribed and coded for common themes. In the inductive-analytical process of working through the comprehensive empirical material, I have looked for ‘traces of community and reflection’ (Hermes, 2005: 11). While the voices of all 113 participants are not represented in this article, I use extracts from conversations with 31 interviewees as representative of the spectrum of voices within each of the broad themes identified around issues of community and identity construction. In the analysis, I follow up on the cues of the interviewees, linking these to relevant perspectives in media and cultural studies to offer a thematic analysis indicative of the wider repertoires of audiences’ cultural and civic engagement with the show. 7
The research was conducted in two rounds: the first in relation to Season 2 of the series during the autumn of 2013, and the second during and after the broadcasting of Season 3 in late 2015. Often, however, participants did not discriminate between seasons and tended to also talk about issues raised in Season 1 as well as character development over the course of all three seasons. Although this article will not address differences in audience engagement across seasons, it will to some degree deal with engagement with the storyline and character development over the course of the three seasons.
Cultural citizenship as (a sense of) community: three modes of civic engagement
Scandinavian crime drama as a genre is often associated with a serial rather than episodic narrative structure. They span a large number of episodes and often several seasons, allowing their central murder mystery to act as a catalyst around which a number of other storylines and themes can revolve (Creeber, 2015). Stretching over three seasons of 10 episodes each, a serial drama such as The Bridge enables intimate relationships with the fictional world of the drama and its characters. Because they unfold over a longer period of time, TV series can create imagined communities to which viewers can relate (Gillespie 2005: 140) and install a sense of affinity on different levels (e.g., local, European, transnational). To be sure, The Bridge gives audiences a sense of access to a symbolic community, a world of belonging beyond themselves. Viewers’ bonding over common identity and their reflections on this identity are articulated in various ways. Furthermore, expressions of cultural citizenship range from engaging with the subtle political undertones in aesthetic and storytelling qualities of the text, to the explicit articulation of ‘real’ and topical political matters in Denmark and Sweden, which are often anchored in viewers’ personal experiences of the issues raised by the drama. These observations are unpacked in an analysis of articulations of community on three different yet overlapping levels: community as a national social ritual, a sense of Nordic community and finally community as regional identity and a sense of belonging to a borderless Öresund utopia.
Social ritual: a Sunday night community
We talk about it at work. We don’t just watch this alone in each of our different houses. We share it afterwards. (Dan, 48, Denmark)
Hermes (2005) argues that ‘popular cultural texts and practices are important because they provide much of the wool from which the social tapestry is knit’ (p. 11). For The Bridge, this social tapestry is woven together through a mix of TV production, broadcasting and audience practices, which over time have developed into a social ritual bringing together the nation in front of (TV) screens on Sunday nights during the dark autumn and winter months. To audiences in Denmark and Sweden, there is thus a certain sense of community in the mere act of being a Sunday night quality drama TV viewer. In both countries, there is a strong Sunday night TV tradition, and the prime time 8 o’clock slot has historically been dedicated to serial crime dramas coming out of Nordic countries (primarily Denmark), which are often labelled and branded outside Scandinavia as Nordic Noir or Scandi-Noir. Public service dramas such as The Killing (DR, 2007–2012) and Borgen (DR, 2010–2013), and before that Unit One (DR 2000–2003) and The Eagle (DR, 2004–2006), have paved the way and ensured The Bridge (DR/SVT 2011–) this sweet spot in programming and audiences’ weekly routines: ‘They are aired sort of at the end of a weekend and afterwards you get yourself ready to go to bed. It wraps up the week in a good way. It’s a bit of a ritual’ (Karen, 56, Denmark [DK]). Audiences express sentiments of pride and a sense of togetherness in how they know that the rest of the nation is watching TV with them:
I think the fact that there are so many other people watching the same show, that even if you watch it alone you might get a text message in the middle of it or talk to your friends about it the next day. That makes you feel like you are not watching it alone. (Tanja, 37, DK)
Although often watched in solitude and in the privacy of one’s home, this drama is a shared ‘text’ in the sense that it works as a topic of conversation during lunch breaks with colleagues, in Facebook groups dedicated to the show or the genre, in online chat messages with friends and over dinner between family members.
On Sunday night at nine pm, I get the first text message from my friend! We text message about it, but also talk when we get a chance ( … ) I discuss it a lot with a colleague and a friend and we have a lot of different conspiracy theories, trying to figure out all the different storylines that are running. (Mette, 36, DK)
Mette’s reflections pay testimony to how popular representations can work as a cohesive social and cultural force that offers means of bonding (Hermes, 2005). This sense of unity is also articulated at the level of storytelling. Audiences link the intertwined complex web of different stories with stories of their own lives and express a sense of how their trajectories as viewers and citizens are being intertwined. Nanna (63, DK) elaborates on how the drama makes her reflect upon how, although alone in front of the TV, she is sharing an experience with everyone else in the country on Sunday nights:
It confronts me with the fact that the only thing I am experiencing right now is what is taking place within my bubble, but my story intersects with everything else that is going on around me. This series sort of went ‘bling’ on me. It made me realize: My God, we’re all part of each other’s stories – we are all connected. In some bizarre and fascinating way. That’s also why you have to watch your step and keep concentrated when watching, because you get this feeling that is not just parallel stories, they are interrelated. It is like a web.
What Nanna hints at here is a sense of connectivity invoked by the complex and multi-layered storyline. This ‘double-dimension narrating’ characteristic of the genre (Novrup Redvall, 2013), in which several storylines are unfolding simultaneously, is crucial to understanding how the genre ‘reveals an intensely complex and divided world which can only be healed through a combination of tolerance and co-operation’ (Creeber, 2015: 24). In her work on TV writing and production practices in Denmark, Novrup Redvall (2013) shows how this double narrative structure is one of the crucial ways in which producers seek to stir debate, mirror relevant and topical issues and provide a window onto different values, cultures and ways of living among their audiences (p. 68). In essence, the story of two police officers forced to collaborate despite differences and borders suggests the interconnectedness of humanity in a world ‘where everything and everyone is implicitly linked’ (Creeber, 2015: 24). Ultimately, being part of a national Sunday night ritual thus connects viewers to an affinity beyond that of the nation state.
A sense of Nordic community: post-welfare dystopia as the ‘creepiness of everyday life’
It strikes a chord with that community and unity we have in the Nordic countries. (Nanna, 63, DK)
A second dimension of cultural citizenship that emerged in the analysis of the interview data relates to audiences’ identification with a Nordic or Scandinavian community. This is a community of shared values, grievances and frames of reference, and audiences’ engagement with this community is suggestive of the ‘affinitive capacity of popular culture to make people aware of communities of interest to which they might belong’ (Street et al., 2013: 5).
The series prompts deliberation on the cultural similarities and subtle differences between the two countries. To Nanna (63, DK), the Nordic feel,
besides from the story and the plot, is in pictures of the nature and our architecture. You have the feeling that although you cross the bridge to another country, we are still very much alike. I can’t explain it, what the Nordic dimension is. I have friends in Germany who I think are very different from us.
Difference is in fact a key element in how audiences ‘deploy a sense of self and of identity’ (Hermes and Stello, 2000) around their interpretation of the series. Some audiences pay close attention to how the subtle and almost imperceptible differences between the two neighbouring countries are represented through the two detectives’ relationship and collaboration:
They represent two countries with differences but also similarities. They work together to solve issues, they don’t take into consideration who they are, where they’re from, if they are man and woman, they just cooperate. They don’t play on the categorisation of people and that is really refreshing. (Mette, 36, DK)
To viewers, the main female character Saga Norén
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symbolizes these subtle cultural differences: ‘Saga has a diagnosis so that makes her very direct, but in general that is a Danish trait. In Sweden, you beat around the bush and don’t dare to bring up sensitive issues’ (Julia, 27, DK). Katarina (50, Sweden [SE]) contemplates how Saga’s complicated personality is used to negotiate boundaries of difference and connects this to larger, more existential questions invoked by the show:
In a sense, it’s about: How can society work, really? How do we work in society? To Saga it’s like life is a set of building blocks, but they forgot to include the manual. It’s interesting how we approach people who don’t have a manual.
Corina (51, SE) taps into this idea when she argues that, for her, the show raises the question,
What does it mean to be a human being? For example, how can someone want to be with Saga? Her boyfriend is weird or stupid. It’s not logical that he would be dating her. But if it does make sense, then yes okay, humans are indeed that complex ( … ) and all of that is stuff that we don’t just accept, we have to dive deeper into it. And in doing so, you learn something about yourself. To me, that makes the show not only an escape from everyday life, but also a way of trying to understand life.
Many viewers conceded to having a love–hate relationship with Saga in the first two seasons because of her lack of social skills and empathy. But somewhere between the end of Season 2 and the beginning of Season 3, audiences started empathizing with the character and her personal struggles, seeing Saga as the emotional hub of the storytelling. To audiences, Saga’s story and development over the course of the three seasons thus epitomize themes around relationship dynamics, moral dilemmas and political and cultural tensions Hill (2018).
Bound together by ‘endless Scandinavian winters’
Another community-building element is evoked by something as mundane as the weather, which to audiences epitomizes the drama’s sense of melancholy and nostalgia. Time and time again, audience members remarked how the ceaseless cold, grey and dim weather in Scandinavia is powerfully used in the drama to enhance a feeling of gloominess and despair. As fellow sufferers who each year live through the ‘endless Scandinavian winters’, this seems a familiar and realistic depiction of everyday life in Scandinavia during most of the year:
It’s this kitchen sink realism. It’s scaled back ( … ) grey and raining. Autumn. This Nordic light when the sun doesn’t go all the way up. Ever. ( … ) This raw, cold tone makes it feel familiar. (Maria, 30, SE)
Katarina (50, SE) agrees when she describes the look and feel of the show:
[It is] very grey. That’s something I like with the Scandinavian series, it can be completely unglamorous. It can be raining for an entire series. Nobody cares, and I like that. It’s sort of mundane. It’s so grey, it’s so foggy, it’s so boring. And that’s just how it is. But we live here anyway, and go about our lives.
Her experience of feeling at home in the rainy and grey landscapes relates directly to that of Sara (52, SE):
It feels just right. It describes with sound and image exactly the feeling you get. Very Malmö-ish weather. It’s always a bit windy here. And it’s not even proper rain, it just hangs in the air. And it’s dark, and there are windscreen wipers, and it’s all very drab.
Because ‘that darkness is part of our reality here’ (Anna, 23, DK) viewers feel at home in the images positioning them as members of a group of like-minded viewers ‘in the know’ of what everyday life in Scandinavia feels like. The weather and the way it is creatively tampered with and poetically enhanced thus work as a trope in the storytelling and as an important element in how the audiences are invited to feel part of a larger social self in a Nordic community. We might usefully understand these dark, grey and raw tones described by the audiences as part of the ‘local colours’ embedded into the so-called ‘Nordic noir production values’ (Waade and Jensen, 2013). In this sense, viewers are responding to the aestheticizing of the distinct ‘climate, seasonal conditions and light’ of the region and to how this is used strategically to produce ‘structures of appeal and [to] evoke imagined communities’ in audience members’ minds (Eichner and Waade, 2015).
Engaging with the post-welfare state – cracks in the Nordic model
It is in the very essence of crime fiction to ‘lend itself to political and oppositional purposes’ (Horsley, 2005: 158–159). Common to the novels, films and series labelled under the broad banner of Scandinavian crime fiction or Nordic Noir, is the exposition of the social and political fissures and failings of the Nordic countries, which are so often highlighted as exemplars in questions of welfare, living standards, education and so forth. The genre thus uncovers the underbelly of the state apparatus in purported social democracies. To some audiences, the idea and ideal of Scandinavia as a community is intrinsically enmeshed with how the genre trenchantly addresses questions of (the collapse of) the welfare state ‘in [its] often anti-establishment probing of society’ (Forshaw, 2012: 9). Indeed, the attempt to portray ‘a society in the process of de-humanizing’ as envisioned by the creative team comes through clearly to the audiences:
There is something about this safe society that turns out to be not so safe after all. Some have considered the Scandinavian countries as ideal types. We have the welfare state but then you start scratching in the surface and realise that the state is evil. (Camilla, 42, DK)
In Camilla’s response, we see both culture and engagement with culture crystalize into a form of political commentary. She picks up on moral, social and political concerns as these are narrated through stories of broken relations, soundscapes and the blue-toned aesthetics of the cold urban landscapes and barren, abandoned rural areas. To audiences, this political commentary is understood and appreciated as a very subtle undertone, an element hidden or embedded in the portrayal of the societies in which the narrative unfolds. Maria, a young Danish viewer sums it up in the following way: ‘There’s some politics, yes, but it isn’t political per se, that would have annoyed me’. As Nanna notes, ‘When politics are put in play in this subtle manner, it becomes relevant to me’. The attention to detail in efforts to produce a sense of decay and destruction when filming in both exterior and interior settings resonates with audiences:
It has a bit of a Roy Andersson feeling to it in the way it induces a sort of realistic tone or sense. In the scenes in the police station, there’s this fluorescent light that flickers. When you see nature, it’s flat and desolate. (Maria, 30, DK)
Drawing on their often extensive knowledge of the crime genre and how The Bridge, as part of this genre, draws on the abstract aesthetics pioneered by the Swedish film director Roy Andersson, audiences indicate how the show evokes for them a sense of artificial realism.
When Peter (58, SE) concedes that the series to him produces ‘a doomsday feeling’, he is putting words to the very sentiments envisioned by the producers and to how the crime genre represents in a realistic fashion ‘the most anxiety-producing issues and narratives of a culture’ (Nickerson, 1997: 744–745). But drama confronts us with these uncomfortable issues in the comfort of our homes. As Frida (24, DK) explains, ‘There is something I like about watching something that is a little bit scary when I am at home, within the safety of my own house’. Consuming drama in these settings then becomes a means to come to terms with worst-case scenarios and reflect upon a changing society (Nickerson, 1997). Part of the allure and anxiety-producing features of crime fiction is precisely the fact that the story is embedded into everyday routines and narratives that take place in familiar locations.
‘Mundane Creepiness’ and the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’
There’s this sense of danger, but at the same time it is also situated in everyday life. (Robert, 37, DK)
In Season 2, the plot revolves around a deadly plague set off by eco-terrorists dressed in sinister animal masks. In Season 3, we follow the detectives as they track down a maniacal and vengeful serial killer who publicly stages the bodies of his victims as grotesque art installations. Engaging with such acts of transnational terror or gruesome and gory crimes, which in The Bridge are centred around narratives of evil in and among ‘ourselves’ in familiar settings, creates a contradictory mesh of sentiments among audiences. They describe the experience as ‘mundane creepiness’ or ‘scary cosiness’, and as being immersed in a disturbing and strange, yet cosy and familiar setting: ‘the greyness of the show creeps into me’ (Jenny, 22, SE). As one young female student explains:
I think it reminds me of when I was younger and Beck (SVT 1997–) was always on, late on Sundays. I’d lie in my parents’ bed and watched until 10 o’clock when the news came on. And it was a bit creepy. But you felt very safe. You could just close your eyes when it was too scary. (Emma, 21, SE)
To Maria (30, SE), ‘It transmits this feeling of unease because of this sense of everyday life. Or the fact that you can recognize the locations. I suppose it’s both thrilling and uncomfortable because it gets close to you somehow’.
Viewers stress how the death and horror that play out in this familiar, everyday, apparently safe society are what makes them reflect upon how evil or terrorism are not external threats; instead, evil is lurking everywhere, and the viewer has the sense of something malignant taking place ‘on the other side of the privet hedge’, as this female respondent explains:
It’s that way it makes you think it could be your next-door neighbour who has gone crazy. That creepiness of everyday life … of the mundane. But that’s also what makes it easy to relate to and what triggers so many emotions. Like ‘what are they doing on the other side of the privet hedge? (Mathilda, 27, DK)
Katarina (50, SE) shares this view when she argues that
It’s this gloomy, dramatic feeling. But there is also a very everyday feel to it. So, there is both this very dramatic … but the everyday is there too. I thought a lot about why these Nordic series are so scary. I think in the North we are so sound and safe. You are situated in the Swedish welfare society, but still something dangerous is lurking. I mean you are not in a jungle or in the ghettos of LA. In a nice villa area but still something is dead wrong. (Katarina, 50, SE)
It is through the fine-grained analysis of how the vernacular and familiar imprint on buildings, locations and landscapes, along with how the aesthetics of everyday life in Scandinavia are experienced by audiences, that we come to understand key elements in how the show engages them in a sense of Nordic community.
Still, in the midst of the darkness, decay and gruesomeness unfolding in everyday settings, audiences sense rays of light and glimmers of hope:
Sometimes in between all this gloominess there are these liberating moments between the two main characters. (Niels, 61, DK) It’s sad because it’s about violence, death, and lost souls. But there is still light at the end of the tunnel, somehow. In the atmosphere. There are cracks where the light sort of comes through. (Robert, 37 DK)
A young female focus group participant (Alice, 21, SE) explains that the drama keeps her hanging somewhere in between a sense of hope and despair:
It always feels like it’s all really hopeless: ‘Oh no, everything is going to hell’. And then something happens that makes you feel a tiny bit of hope. They always trigger that sense of hope: ‘Oh, it might work out’. And then: ‘No, it won’t’. And then: ‘Well, it might’. I suppose that’s where the suspense comes from. Things are always on the brink of destruction.
Some of the features evoking these more optimist sentiments of hope and community in audiences are the values and ideals of the cross-border co-operation at the heart of the story. The Bridge speaks to a desire for understanding across differences, and to a utopian vision of an Öresund region without borders. A strangely mesmerising and persuasive image of a region in which the two countries and cities blend together in a grey and foggy borderland builds up over the course of the three seasons. This perspective comes across most clearly in how audiences relate to the construction of the Öresund region.
Community as the borderless utopia of Öresund
Malmö and Copenhagen feel like one ( … ) It doesn’t seem like two countries, it seems like one. It’s very beautifully portrayed. (Madeleine, 27, SE)
Commentators and critics have called the place portrayed in the show ‘a Malmö that does not exist and an Öresund region yet to come’ (see, for example, Flykt, 2013). What they are hinting at is how the drama persuasively constructs the region as a friction-free utopia in which all cultural and language barriers have been eliminated. Audiences too react to how ‘it seems like it takes two minutes to go across’ (Sara 46, SE) and how ‘everybody understands each other, it’s unrealistic’ (Eva, 42, SE).
Löfgren (2008) considers a region such as that of Öresund a ‘political dreamscape’ to signify how these integrated transnational territories are often more of a political project rather than a lived experience of the citizens in the region. This also applies for the Öresund region, which at least initially existed more in public relations material intended to attract investors and tourists than in the consciousness of people on both sides of the strait. Even though the Öresund region, along with many other integration projects across Europe, may be considered a top-down political project, there is also a more bottom-up or on the ground dimension to region-building that involves creative and cultural practices of various kinds. In this final section, I suggest that a production such as The Bridge and the various ways in which audiences identify with its fictive portrayal of the borderland between Denmark and Sweden could be understood as part of these cultural practices that build bonds between citizens across borders.
To be sure, the Öresund region is primarily an economic and political project spearheaded by a powerful elite. In fact, it is often considered one of the success stories and was, at least in the initial phases, seen as somewhat of a laboratory of cultural and economic integration within the European Union and as ‘an experiment in the new Europe without borders’ (Löfgren, 2008: 198). Audiences critically relate the drama to the strategic communication and branding around the opening of the bridge around the millennium, which was directed at investors, citizens and tourists and which for many years influenced life in the region. One young male contemplates,
They’ve succeeded very well in painting Malmö and Copenhagen as some form of Scandinavian capital. It almost feels like it’s one city. Almost like it’s an elaborate marketing project. Maybe you want to live in the city where everyone dies. But they’re presenting Malmö as the Öresund region, as one. It almost feels deliberate. As if Region Skåne had teamed up with filmmakers and bought a show in order to paint that picture. (Arvid, 23, SE)
Reminded of the mass-mediated spectacle of the opening of the Öresund bridge around the millennium, one female viewer comments,
It’s really smart. The Öresund consortium, the branding of Öresund, and all these organisations we have spent millions creating to put the Öresund regions on the map. They must have all gotten a lot of help from this show. (Ann Marie, 60 SE)
Local audiences who have first-hand experiences with the integration of the region are, despite knowing that the representation is not all true to the realities of everyday life in the region, intrigued by the vision of the drama. A long-term commuter proclaims, ‘To me, it’s like: “Well, it would be great if it was really like that”: a little utopia without borders’ (Sara, 46, SE). The fact that everybody seems to understand each other is seen to be ‘unrealistic’ and ‘unreal’, but viewers appreciate it as a ‘what if’ comment on the potential of the region and the future prospects of Scandinavia at large.
Many local audiences in the Malmö and Copenhagen area express a very strong sense of belonging to an Öresund community and of being citizens of the region. They appreciate the fact that The Bridge takes place in the region and that it projects an image of a metropolitan and international hub to the outside world. To Swedes in Scania, the southern part of the country, many of whom consider Copenhagen their go-to metropolis, this is especially true in relation to – and often in opposition to – Stockholm:
It means so much to me that it’s from the Öresund region. Partly because I think the region should be featured more, but also because it’s nice to recognize things. I’m tired of seeing scenes from Stockholm all the time. (Sara, 46 SE) We don’t get a lot of attention in this region, compared to Stockholm. In Stockholm, they tend not to care about a lot of issues down here, least of all supporting the Öresund region, so I like that the show is from here. (Katarina 50 SE)
Morten (49, SE), an entrepreneur and businessman in the region, describes the representation of Öresund in the drama:
It’s not just an urban landscape, it’s a metropolis. The international atmosphere that comes with the bridge, going back and forth. You barely know where you are, which country you are in. When you live here it makes you a bit proud. I’ve often wondered if people up in Stockholm get the same feeling.
To Malin (36, DK), who works for the Swedish Migration office on issues of integration, the filmic techniques by which the borders are erased are particularly significant to her engagement with the drama:
It’s an interesting initiative in terms of trying to weave together Scandinavian countries through television, like they do for example through Skavlan,
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which is also a cooperation between not Denmark but Norway and Sweden. The same goes for The Bridge. I may be a bit influenced by my job, but I think it’s a positive thing to try to make connections across borders and create relations. Because that is essentially what they do – they create a vision of a region in which people collaborate. To me it’s almost part of a larger diplomatic strategy. I think that is extremely positive as a way to try to erase existing borders.
A male viewer from the region similarly argues that
The urban setting or background that they use, where they portray the Öresund region as a big city type of urban jungle, is interesting ( … ) I think the bridge as an actual geographical reference point makes it believable and it brings you further into this make-believe universe. I see this area as part of my daily life, the Sweden–Denmark area, and that makes me identify with the series. (Lars, 43, DK)
In this sense, some of the local viewers fit the profile of what Löfgren (2008) has called cultural regionauts. 10 Regionauts are ‘people who develop skills and regional knowledge in using the world on both sides of the border’ (Löfgren, 2008: 196). They move in both ‘the physical and mental landscapes of a region, exploring differences’ (Löfgren, 2008: 196). To local audiences, the drama thus plays into an already exiting yet porous regional identity; engaging in a set of collective narratives about “our region” and how we and our region are understood to differ from others (Paasi, 2003). Cultural geographers have argued that that people living near a state border embody particular ‘hybrid border-crossing identities’, which refers to the identity of an individual whose life is entangled with border crossings and the multiculturalism of a particular region (Prokkola et al., 2012). Crossborder regions like these, Löfgren argues, are not only defined in terms of physical distances and transport systems, but also by cultural definitions of proximity and reachability.
One of the ways in which the show installs this feeling of proximity and reachability in its audiences, is through the constant and swift travelling back and forth across the border. These sequences often depict the two detectives in Saga’s car, driving across the bridge in what seems to be a matter of minutes. In this construction of the imaginary crossover-cityscape between Malmö and Copenhagen, it does not matter which location we are in. As Hans (44, DK) notes, ‘I can’t always see if it shows Sweden or Denmark, but perhaps it is not so important either since it is the Öresund region they are showing’. By the end of Season 3, viewers have naturalized the cross-cultural community of the region to the extent that they stop even noticing the cross-border settings: ‘As a citizen of Öresund, I think the co-operation between Sweden and Denmark was much more obvious in the first season, less so in the second one, and then in season three it’s normal’ (Heidi, 47, DK).
As we can see, audiences articulate the boundary-work between the two cities, countries and main characters, and speak to how the lines between them are blurred or erased. Just as the two detectives and main characters are constructed as ‘regionauts’, effortlessly and swiftly traversing national territories in the ‘imagined cross-border metropolis’ in the series (Chow, 2016: 45), audiences share a sense of being positioned as regionauts by the series. If popular culture allows us to fantasize about the ideals and hopes we have for society (Hermes, 2005), then engaging with the producers’ way of portraying the region as a successful political and cross-cultural project, as well as how audiences experience this portrayal, allows us to account for the ways that ‘utopian wishes mix with more sinister feelings of foreboding about how culture and society will develop’ (Hermes, 2005: 3). The Bridge as both a wishful story of a region and a critical commentary on this region thus engages audiences not only in a persuasive ‘territorialisation of culture’ (Löfgren, 2008: 196) but also works to naturalize border crossing and the idea of a borderless Scandinavia. Perhaps it also allows audience members to ultimately imagine a borderless Europe or world.
Closing borders (and closing remarks)
By 2016, the invisible boundaries of a cross-cultural community and absent borders so present on The Bridge were conceived as a bit of a paradox in relation to the real-world political crisis and the new border controls installed between Denmark and Sweden, which were constructed as a consequence of the ‘refugee crisis’ that unfolded over the summer of 2015. As events started to develop by the end of the third season, Danes and Swedes living in the region all of a sudden found themselves in a fully-fledged political crisis between the two countries over issues related to the Geneva Conventions and how to collaborate on the sudden influx of migrants and refugees, and saw extensive border controls being reinstalled for the first time since the 1950s. At the time of the final interviews conducted for this study, these issues were all over the news and were consequently a topic of debate amongst viewers. ‘Now it is all different because of the border controls that have been introduced’. In one of the last interviews, a viewer exclaimed, ‘Today the government said they might close the bridge’ (Julia, 27, DK). Indeed, many noted how border controls between Denmark and Sweden were in full force – and the irony of this given the theme and vision of the show they had come to love:
I really love the way they try to erase existing borders … It’s interesting that the reality is completely the opposite. Now we have border controls and it’s not at all possible to just pop over the bridge as [the detectives] do. It’s a really sad turn of events, and I wish it had gone in a different direction. (Malin, 36, DK)
The image of cross-border collaboration at the heart of the drama no longer reflected the political realities in the region. As a borderless, integrated region all of a sudden seemed distant, viewers encouraged the producers of The Bridge to take action:
In the next season, they must do something with these border controls. If they do a fourth season it would be an amazing historical document about what is happening right now. They have to do something on that theme now that all this has happened in the region. They can’t ignore that! It’s probably already being written! (Måns, 42, SE)
Cultural citizenship and TV crime series
How does this sense of community expressed by the viewers translate into claims about civic engagement and ultimately the citizen revenue of the drama? Audience engagement with the series is mainly prompted through the building of community and allegiances through which they feel connected. The Bridge positions viewers as members of a community, which mobilizes particular forms of social subjectivity. These communities may not be the same to all viewers, but take different shapes and sizes, three of which I have highlighted here. Audiences do not pertain to one single identity that is exclusively national, Scandinavian or regional. They construct and see themselves as belonging to different yet overlapping communities – as Danes, Swedes, Scandinavians, citizen of Öresund or perhaps all at once. With these categories, I do not mean to suggest an idea of place as a container of identity, but rather a relative understanding of place as an arena for multiple identities, ‘with borders being understood not as exclusive differentiators of places but as porous lines’ (Massey, 1995: 67–68). Just as lines between national borders are porous and unstable, the boundaries between the national, transnational or regional communities that bind audiences of The Bridge together as they go ‘in search of the fantasies and feelings that connect us to each other’ (Hermes, 2005: viii) overlap and intersect in intricate ways.
In their study of audiences of multicultural TV drama, Müller and Hermes (2010) advise audience researchers to remain careful of mistaking active viewers for active citizens. Indeed, it would have been relatively easy to cherry pick and highlight the parts of the data which provide solid arguments for ‘proving’ or demonstrating how audiences are engaging in different ‘political readings’ of the show, and are performing the role of ‘good political subjects’ of intelligent, quality TV. What is important to this study, however, is instead to reflect the complexity of the data set, and of audience practices in general, by demonstrating how engagement with the explicit political themes and formal politics addressed in the series were in fact largely marginal. Instead, civic engagement was intricately articulated through the discursive strands of quality entertainment as social ritual as well as the community-building capacities of drama, in a manner which positions social and political issues in much more implicit and subtle ways. If we understand cultural citizenship as identity construction in line with the broad definition proposed by Hermes (2005), then performances of cultural citizenship among audiences of this study were not marginal or isolated at all. Rather expressions of community and bonding and reflections on this community – while of course registering at various degrees of intensity – saturate audiences’ accounts of their experience of the show.
In some cases, these accounts were ambiguously intertwined with place-branding discourse and audiences were in a sense replicating region-building and marketing lingo. At the same time, however, they were critically reflecting on their own sentiments of almost naïve regional pride and engagement with these utopian tales. These dual, sometimes contradictory, articulations suggest to us that audiences are savvy of how such elite-driven discourse may indirectly inform their sense of inclusion and belonging, while they still allow themselves to be fully immersed into the experience produced for them and to buy into the premises that indulging in this media experience entails.
Certainly, as this study draws on a sample of participants from Denmark and Sweden exclusively, many of whom lived in the Öresund region, it is important to take into account how the national and regional specificity of the contexts in which these subjects are inserted are critical factors in how the drama plays into civic subjectivity and engagement. The sense of community (or lack thereof) might be very different to audiences outside Scandinavia (for empirical analysis of international audiences of The Bridge, see Askanius, 2017; Hill, 2016a, 2016b). Despite the limitations of the data, the analysis is not, however, merely suggestive of how audiences in Denmark and Sweden engage with this particular crime series, but might be considered to have ramifications for how to understand the cultural mediation of politics and audiences’ engagement and identification with such representation more broadly. We see how audiences shape their civic identities as members of nation states and historical and cultural regions, and as border-crossers between these geo-cultural entities, in dialogue with the text and around the boundary-work of the different communities offered by this text.
In 1973, Richard Dyer argued that entertainment offers audiences a utopian vision of a better world. Returning to Dyer’s notion of entertainment as utopia, Sue Turnbull (2010) in her discussion of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) adaption of the Swedish crime series Wallander (BBC One, 2008–) entertains the idea that Scandinavian crime fiction might be the very antithesis of Dyer’s matrix. In Wallander’s world, which is ‘full of manipulation and deceit, and far from a sense of community pulling together in the face of a challenge to the moral order’ (Turnbull, 2010: 822), Turnbull does not find much evidence of a better world to come. The findings of this study suggest that perhaps neither of the two is particularly accurate. Rather, crime fiction registers to the audience as both a vision of utopia and the exegesis of society’s underbelly. It may well be the sense of being thrown back and forth between hope and despair for our common future that mesmerize audiences and keep them critically engaged.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Alice and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, Sweden (MMW 2012.0027).