Oh boy, I’m going to annoy some of you today.
It’s a question I keep asking myself so I thought I’d ask it here on the blog, to set the thoughts down and see how they might look in black and white. It’s not a deep moral question – mine rarely are – but sometimes the more trivial questions can lead on to the deeper truths.
It’s a question I keep asking myself so I thought I’d ask it here on the blog, to set the thoughts down and see how they might look in black and white. It’s not a deep moral question – mine rarely are – but sometimes the more trivial questions can lead on to the deeper truths.
Not this time, mind you, but never mind.
Why are we all watching Scandinavian Drama and, perhaps more interestingly, is it really as good as we all like to think it is?
Annoyed yet? Hang in there.
Actually before I go on, I need to place myself firmly in this picture. I love Scandinavian Drama. Saturday nights, Beeb Four, I’m there with my can of beer, lapping it up (the drama, not the beer) (well…). So I’m not on the outside, looking in here, I’m on the inside_ you get the picture.
We recently finished watching ‘The Bridge’ and Patricia and I really enjoyed it. This was more fun for me that The Killing if only because my wife stayed along for the ride instead of falling into a semi-comatose state within minutes of Sarah Lund appearing on screen. So, yeah, we watched ‘The Bridge’ and Saga took a while to warm to and Martin was loveable but a bit of a dog and we thought we knew who did it but we didn’t really and it was all good. When it was over, we looked at each other and we agreed that it had been good and then I went on Twitter and agreed that it had been good and then we met our friends and they had quite like it too (although don’t tell them the end cos they had Sky Plussed the last two episodes). It was all good. Roll on the second series.
Yes, but how good was it really? Eh?
After it was finished, I got to thinking about an ITV Sunday Night series called ‘The Bridge’. Two hours a week for five weeks. We would watch it, sure we would, we would give it a good chance, but would we like it? If it was the same story, the same script, the same quality of acting, would we similarly adore it?
I don’t think we would.
I think we would probably come to hate it. We might find the characters over-simplified, we might bemoan the lack of sophistication in the script, the woodenness of some of the lesser character actors. We might also worry about the promising sub-plots unceremoniously dumped along the way, the jarring tendency to incidental melodrama, the ‘Relationship 101’ approach to affairs of the heart.
You get where I’m coming from now. You’re getting annoyed. I can tell. I'm like that kid, in the crowd, shouting at The Emperor, "Hey, I can see your willy!" (Which, in Scandanavian Drama, is often the case anyway).
But, remember, I like all this Scandinavian Drama, just like you do. I’m on your side. Hell, I even wrote a whole blog thing about The Killing over here. So please don’t shoot me, I’m just asking the question. Sit down again for a moment and let’s think some more about it.
The answer, as it often is, is simple.
It’s Different.
That’s it, isn’t it? It’s good but that’s not the main reason we migrate towards it. We go there because it’s Different. It’s a different world. They speak a different language for a start but that’s only one thing. All the actors are new to us, we’ve never seen them before, it’s like they’ve dropped from a different planet. The landscapes are markedly different, cold and bleak and wild and cold and, oh, I said cold, and cold and cold and cold.
Even the doors open the wrong way for Chrissakes! It is Different and that’s why we, myself firmly included, love it so much. It’s good too, if it wasn’t good we wouldn’t be there, we’re not stupid. But it’s not quite as good as we may think it is, it’s the Difference that makes up for that.
I think the subtitles play their part too. Obviously they contribute to the Difference but it’s a little more than that. They simplify things considerably. You’ll have noticed that the characters on screen often seem to be saying much more than the subtitles are. They use each other’s names a lot and the subtitles hardly do this at all. My pal Jason Arnopp has written an enlightening blog post on the art of writing subtitles for film, here’s a link. Everything is pared down to the quick. I think this becomes an attractive aspect of the Scandinavian Dramas too, this simplification of the text. We get the pure drama without the embellishment of the everyday nuances.
I loved The Killing and The Bridge and I’m loving Borgen at the moment (I’m late to it, I know). Borgen is sharp and witty but it’s no West Wing for sharpness and wit, yet is seem almost comparable because it is so Different. That’s a little illustration of my point right there.
That’s it. Now I’ll just read this back and see how it sounds.
Tak and goodnight.