Abstract
Scholars of crime fiction continuously discuss what Nordic Noir series have in common, arguing that it is a genre, a brand and a style respectively. Instead, this article explores Nordic Noir as an atmosphere, observed through the concept of stimmung, and argues that affective world-building in TV-series should be analysed beyond matters of style and narrative. Based on an analysis of The Bridge (2011–2018), the article discusses the aesthetic and critical potentialities of attuning oneself to the melancholic world of Nordic Noir and demonstrates that the affective quality of a series impacts how its themes can be read.
When we flip through channels on the television or browse for certain genres on a streaming service, a large part of what we are drawn to is connected to the question of what we are in the mood for. As indicated by the popularity of countless reruns or the unabashed second, third or even fourth binging of a beloved show, we do not only engage with works of art to satiate our narrative desires. Just as much as the viewer wants to know what happens, they want to be in the company of and attune themselves to a certain mood. As the Danish philosopher Ole Thyssen formulates it: (T)he pleasure of falling into human hands and becoming tuned by a work of art, letting oneself be carried away and opening oneself to the world that the tuning permits access to is a central part of aesthetic pleasure. (…) And the being tuned must be delimited from the ‘mood’ which can arise spontaneously and which colors our way of observing. Vis-à-vis a work of art, one can always ask which world is opened – what is stressed, what things are emphasised or omitted, what attention is required, what atmosphere prevails (Thyssen, 1998: 229–230, my translation).
Being tuned is not just a matter of being swept up in a mood, but is also a process that is sometimes instantaneous, but can also take years or even decades. Attunement is thus part of whether we ‘get’ a work of art or not and if it appeals to us.
The appeal of mood, atmosphere or tone has consequently risen to prominence within research on Nordic Noir, where scholars seem to agree that there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the television crime series that are given this label. Many scholars connect this special quality of Nordic Noir television to the ‘intense sense of place’ (Creeber, 2015: 22) that seems to emanate from series such as The Killing (2007-2012) , Wallander (2005–2013) and The Bridge (2011-2018) . Consequently, the role of landscape, setting and location in production practices, funding and community building has featured prominently in recent academic literature on Nordic Noir (Agger and Waade, 2010; Chow, 2015; Hansen and Waade, 2017; Riber Christensen and Toft Hansen, 2016). Another strand of scholarship foregrounds landscape and setting as narrative and symbolic climates reflecting the moody dispositions of the troubled main characters, an ideological critique of the modern welfare state or the symbolic negotiation of cross-Nordic stereotypes (Agger, 2016; Creeber, 2015; Stougaard-Nielsen, 2017). However, understanding the je ne sais quoi of Nordic Noir requires engaging with not just the narrative symbolism and geographic representation of its landscapes, but precisely with the sense of place that they create.
This might be one of the reasons that the notion of ‘atmosphere’ has started to spread within Nordic Noir scholarship. The premise of this article is to follow this atmospheric orientation and observe Nordic Noir not as a brand, a genre or a set of formal aesthetic properties but as a space with particular affective qualities. By offering a new conceptual approach based on atmosphere, or stimmung, and developing an analytical methodology for analysing the stimmung of a specific Nordic Noir series, I build upon and nuance new insights into Nordic Noir and beyond by delineating the analytic relevance of stimmung for a series’ world-building. In many theories of world-building that have been popularised through the widespread practice of transmedial storytelling in films and other media, the main emphasis is often on world-building practices as they relate to narrative, or as they relate to imaginary communities for fans (Boni, 2017; Jenkins, 2008). The notion of stimmung instead sensitises us to the ‘feel’ of the worlds disclosed rather than their story world. By zooming in on the dramaturgy and critical potentialities of affective world-building specifically, I therefore show how watching for stimmung focuses the analytical lens on the sense of a series rather the attention economies of its narrative and the emotions of its characters.
Firstly, I qualify the concept of stimmung by using insights from a range of theories of mood and atmosphere, combining recent affect theoretical explorations of mood within literary theory with older philosophical approaches. Secondly, I take inspiration from theories of melancholy to suggest a dialectic between intimacy and immensity as the point of observation for melancholic stimmung in particular. Thirdly, I use this dialectic for analysing melancholy in the Danish-Swedish television serial The Bridge (2011 – 2018). The series provides an obvious case study for testing the analytical sensitivity and efficacy of stimmung-analysis as a way of approaching Nordic Noir, because it is widely covered in the existing literature and exhibits many of the elements typically associated with fictions given that label (Hansen and Waade, 2017: 273). Throughout the analysis, I point to examples from both Nordic Noir and other kinds of noir film and television to indicate the differences in the affective gestalt and potentialities of attuning oneself to different noir worlds.
Using The Bridge as a case study, the article demonstrates how attuning oneself to the melancholic world of the series means that what stands out is not the thematic tension between societal critique and personal revenge or a sense of hope through the collaboration between different nations and personalities, as has been pointed out by other scholars, but rather the melancholic contemplation of the persistence of life itself in the face of hardships. Observing The Bridge from the perspective of stimmung thus contributes to a wider understanding of how affective world-building widens the critical potentialities of a series more generally.
From mood to stimmung
When it comes to affect in Nordic Noir television, the literature gives us a surprisingly consistent starting point. When naming the feel of Nordic Noir’s ‘intense sense of place’, melancholy is by far the favoured descriptor by leading scholars. Glen Creeber has foregrounded the ‘slow and melancholic pace’ of narrative progression and a ‘mood of eerie melancholy’ in the soundscape and soundtracks (Creeber, 2015: 22, 26). Gunhild Agger and Anne Marit Waade have related melancholy to elements such as ‘complex characters, grim stories, bleak and cold landscapes, miserable settings, gloomy lighting, sound and music’ (2018: 69), as well as an understated acting style, a particular narrative structure and a disorienting aesthetics of reception. Existing research thus convincingly demonstrates that there are important analytical insights to be gained from observing Nordic Noir television through the lens of melancholy. However, there are two main ambiguities about the aesthetics and functionality of melancholy that the concept of stimmung helps to clarify.
The first ambiguity is a paradox between what could be termed an ‘essentialist’ position of melancholy as a particularly Nordic affect and a ‘superficial’ position of melancholy as result of transferrable stylistic features. For instance, Waade has rightly argued that the melancholy of Nordic Noir could be seen in relation to a broader tendency for melancholic aesthetics in Nordic art going back to the 19th century (Waade, 2017: 382), while many scholars also acknowledge that Nordic Noir has inspired television beyond the borders of the region, and therefore cannot be contained in a geographically defined aesthetic tradition. The second ambiguity is the fact that many of the characteristics related to melancholy, such as complex characters, intricate narrative structures and a certain cinematic style, are also features of what has been termed ‘complex TV’ more generally (Mittell, 2015). This begs an elaboration of what exactly makes these features appear melancholic in Nordic Noir and not in other types of television – or even in other types of ‘noir’. To this end, I argue that an approach that identifies and qualifies melancholy as stimmung – a special mood, atmosphere or tone, gives us a better understanding of melancholy in Nordic Noir.
Within film and television studies there has been a growing interest in affect, emotions and feelings (Garcia, 2016; Grodal, 2002; Kennedy, 2001; Laine, 2013; Marks, 2000; Pribram, 2011; Stavning Thomsen, 2018; Weik Von Mossner, 2014). This interest has started to spill over into studies of mood and atmosphere in film and television (McKim, 2013; Plantinga, 2012; Walton, 2018), but these perspectives are still few and far between. The dominant understanding of affect in film and television is one operating in terms of momentary impingements (Nelson, 2016) and frequent shifts in mood (Plantinga, 2012). However, conceptualising mood in terms of strong triggers and moments misses the more general ‘feeling’ permeating a series, like the pervasive melancholy of Nordic Noir. It also risks simplifying the relationality between affect in a series and affect in the viewer to a causal transmission model, where watching a melancholic television show automatically means feeling melancholic.
Therefore, the approach to atmosphere and mood presented here foregrounds different aspects of affectivity than what is typically found within the ‘affective turn’ (Clough and Halley, 2007) more generally, as well as in Television and Film Studies more specifically. In their introduction to New Literary History’s special issue on mood, Rita Felski and Susan Fraiman write: Recent work on affect in literary and cultural studies (…) often pivots on a language of intensities and flows that seems ill suited to the phenomenology of mood. Moods are usually described as ambient, vague, diffuse, hazy, and intangible, rather than intense, and they are often contrasted to emotions in having a longer duration. Instead of flowing, a mood lingers, tarries, settles in, accumulates, sticks around (2012: v).
This view of mood as durative and permeative is evident in most theories on the topic within art, philosophy and cultural studies. While some theories of mood in film and TV tend to relate it to the human moods of characters or specific instances or scenes, mood is generally thought of as relational, spatial and distinguished from other types of affect such as emotion, feeling, sensation and passion (Altieri, 2003; Flatley, 2012; Shusterman, 2012). While theories and philosophies of mood are blossoming across the humanities, I am using the German term stimmung here. Firstly, it avoids the linguistically cumbersome and analytically dichotomous separation between the concepts of mood and atmosphere to differentiate between what might be termed subject-centred and object-centred stimmung, which seems unnecessary given the wide agreement that stimmung is a relational phenomenon. Secondly, it ameliorates some of the ambiguity related to the words mood and atmosphere that stems from their usage as academic, scientific and everyday concepts respectively. Thirdly, the concept points back to Martin Heidegger’s seminal 1927 dissertation Being and Time (2002), which is still one of the main sources inspiring mood theories today. In a more recent vein, we also find the notion of stimmung in the writings of German Professor of comparative literature Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2012). Lastly, as German philosopher Angelika Krebs has noted, stimmung embraces three aspects of what could generally be termed ‘spatial relational affects’, whereas most English words such as mood, atmosphere or humour only capture one or two. These three aspects are mood, atmosphere and attunement: First, ‘Stimmung’ refers not only to what is called ‘mood’ in English, which is typically transitory and not too reliable in its take on the world, but also to longer lasting and more trustworthy affective attitudes. Second, ‘Stimmung’ does not only refer to moods as psychological states of individual human beings, but also to atmospheres, both interhuman ones, such as mass panic, and nonhuman ones, such as the melancholy of landscapes or cities. Third, ‘Stimmung’ employs a musical metaphor, the metaphor of a musical instrument tuned. Thus, it stands in the tradition of the ancient Greek idea of world harmony or ‘musica mundana’, to which the good human subject is attuned (Krebs, 2017: 1420).
Using the term thus has several implications for the analysis of a series. The fact that stimmung is more permanent than the common English conception of mood, in terms of both duration and pervasiveness, allows for the analysis of stimmung across whole seasons, series or genres of television, such as I am attempting with The Bridge here. I am not identifying a plurality of different moods that change with each scene or sequence (Plantinga, 2012), but instead analyse what could be called a Grundstimmung – a kind of basic affective assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013) that is dynamically produced and negotiated over time.
Stimmung also captures the more-than-subjective and more-than-human notion of serial affect, often found in concepts of ‘atmosphere’. German sociologist Niklas Luhmann describes atmosphere as ‘what the individual objects that occupy places are not, the other side of their form’ (2000: 112), and Italian philosopher Tonino Griffero conceptualises it as ‘a qualitative-sentimental prius, spatially poured out, of our sensible encounter with the world’ (2014: 5). Both of these conceptions of atmosphere show how it is dependent on, but also in excess of material objects and spaces. In both conceptions, as well as those found in the writings of Martin Heidegger and Gernot Böhme (Heidegger, 2002; Thibaud and Böhme, 2017), it is also something that creates rather than depends on human subjectivity. The atmospheric aspect of stimmung thus shifts the analysis of melancholy in Nordic Noir from human stimmung in characters or viewers to the affective excess of a range of material, dramaturgical and aesthetic elements in the series itself.
Moreover, the musical connotation of stimmung captures our relation to the world as a matter of attunement, an aspect less foregrounded in most concepts of atmosphere. As such, it takes the fundamental relationality of our encounters with moods and atmospheres into consideration. The musical metaphor emphasizes attunement as a relation, not a submission. We do not automatically become melancholic by watching a melancholic television series. This suggests that there is something more to attuning ourselves to the stimmung of a TV-series than mimetic affective pleasure.
In her book Media Audiences: Television, Meaning and Emotion (2009), Kristyn Gorton argues that emotion in television texts is not just there for pleasure, but should also be seen as a formal aesthetic quality, since it is constructed in the work of art through formal devices. Drawing on S. Elizabeth Bird, she therefore points out that emotionalism and sentimentalism are genuine ‘aesthetic discriminators’ that allow both critics and audiences to make aesthetic judgements about the quality of popular television. This argument contrasts much popular television criticism where sentimentalism is often seen as something that takes away from the quality of a show or fosters a passive or uncritical mode of viewing. Gorton’s argument about the connection between aesthetic qualities and emotionality, defined as the expressive quality of objects, also applies to a phenomenon like stimmung, as it helps us to comprehend and attune ourselves to an artwork’s distinct affective world, of which the melancholy of Nordic Noir is a great example.
The something more than (guilty) pleasure of affect is also a key part of Heidegger’s concept of stimmung. As Jonathan Flatley has noted: For Heidegger, Stimmung (…) is fundamental to our being-in-the-world; it is nothing less than the overall atmosphere or medium in which our thinking, doing, and acting occurs. Only within a mood or by way of mood can we encounter things in the world as mattering to us (Flatley, 2012: 503).
As an essential feature (fundamental existentiale) of Dasein, or our human way of having a world (Ratcliffe, 2013: 157), stimmung both relates to aesthetic form and judgement, as argued by Gorton, but also goes beyond it, as the general form that our affective being-with, or rather becoming-with, a programme takes. Attuning oneself to the stimmung of a series is therefore a ‘being-there-with’ not only the fictional but also the affective world that it discloses.
How can the analysis of the affective dimension of world-building be approached? Before diving into The Bridge, a few methodological considerations are in order. Analysing the melancholy of The Bridge is not straightforward because the excessive nature of stimmung makes it hard to capture analytically. On the one hand, it conditions and envelops particular spaces, situations or domains, and as such seems to be everywhere. On the other, it also hovers ‘on the edge of semantic availability’ (Anderson, 2014: 139), as an intangible but felt quality that is hard to translate into words. However, such a translation must nonetheless be undertaken, if we are to avoid an overly mystifying notion of stimmung as an ungraspable and elusive otherness on the one hand, or a simplifying reduction of stimmung to the mood of characters on the other. In order to operationalise and concretise the analysis, I am using the tension between intimacy and immensity as an analytical prism for observing how a melancholic world is built. This is inspired by scholar of landscape architecture Jackie Bowring, who, in her book Melancholy and the Landscape, unfolds a series of ‘places of melancholy’ and their affective qualities. She describes one such place of melancholy as characterised by intimate immensity, seen as circling ‘around the irresolvable poles of nearness and distance’ (Bowring, 2016: 161).
Bowring is in turn inspired by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s (1884–1962) seminal work on The Poetics of Space (1958/1994), where he uses the sense of immensity and intimacy as part of an exploration of the phenomenology of poetic spatiality. Bachelard relates immensity to a sense of expansion, extension and infiniteness and intimacy to a sense of depth. While the two impressions of the senses seem like opposites, in Bachelard’s writings they appear as mutually dependent features of spatiality. In the analysis of The Bridge, the poles of immensity and intimacy thus constitute two interconnected senses of distance, expansion and grandeur on the one hand and closeness, connectedness and smallness on the other that condition the analysis of melancholy. In line with Bowring and Bachelard, I conceive of them as felt rather than empirical or thematic qualities. However, as Bachelard also points out, they can only be approached through the empirical (Bachelard, 1994: 198–199). For the purpose of stimmung analysis, I therefore approach them through the formal aesthetic qualities of The Bridge that can be used as analytical concepts to make its melancholy more concretely identifiable. It is worth noting that a tension between intimacy and immensity is not unique to The Bridge. But the general prism allows a point of comparison for how melancholy is specifically configured or collapsed in The Bridge’s way of building an affectively ‘noir’ world. The fact that intimacy and immensity are neither psychological concepts nor basic emotions, also aids the identification of melancholy as Grundstimmung rather than a psychological property of the characters or viewers.
Stimmung in The Bridge: Generating melancholy between intimacy and immensity
The opening sequence from the very first episode of The Bridge illustrates the show’s specific way of creating melancholy through a tension between intimacy and immensity perfectly. There is foreboding music. Surrounded by shadows, a pair of leather-gloved hands hold the driving wheel of a car. Lights flicker. In the rear-view mirror, there is only darkness. The driver is anonymous and faceless. The camera looks over his shoulder from the back seat. He drives onto a dark city road. Streetlamps, boarded shop windows and road signs are the only sources of light. Through the front window, the Øresund Bridge appears. The camera cuts between the bridge seen from the back seat and from afar, the driver’s hands as he checks the time on his wristwatch and blurry flickering lights from the city. Suddenly, the spotlights illuminating the bridge go out one by one. The camera cuts to the bridge’s control tower on the Swedish side. ‘The lights went out! The lights on the bridge went out’ says a controller in disbelief. The camera cuts back to the car. The trunk opens. The driver walks out in front of its headlights and strews something on the ground. His movements are obscured, as they are filmed from under the car and intercut with close-ups of its trunk and back lights. He gets back in the car and drives away.
On the one hand, the opening sequence evokes a sense of intimacy through the crisp, but muffled sound, extreme close-ups of the driver’s hands and car, the density of the night and hushed qualities of colour. On the other, it evokes a sense of immensity through the grand perspective of the panoramic city shots, the monumentality of the bridge and the anonymity of the character. This opening scene takes place on the concrete and steel Øresund Bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden. The bridge itself appears as a monumental structure simultaneously dividing and intimately connecting the two Nordic nations. It is also a testament to the closeness and distance between humans and nature, acting as an index of how we are both masters of and slaves to the temperamental waters of Øresund. In the following, I aim to demonstrate that the tension between intimacy and immensity is not a narrative or symbolic feature, but rather an affective quality. However, by diving into the narrative structure and themes of the series as part of the analysis, I also aim to show that narrative features are not separate from affective matters either. I therefore begin by observing intimacy and immensity at a narrative level.
The Bridge is comprised of four seasons with 10 episodes each. For purposes of limitation, I will only focus on the series’ first season here. The season is kicked off by the finding of a body in the middle of the Øresund Bridge. Apart from its intimately immense features as real structure and place, it thus literally frames the season, providing the setting for both the opening and the closing scene and acting as narrative catalyst for the central crime. The Øresund Bridge is thereby at the centre of both the fabula, the story or the imaginary construct inferred progressively and retroactively by a viewer and fitted into a linear pattern of space, time and causality, and the syuzhet, the plot or the actual arrangement and presentation prompting us to infer and assemble the story (Bordwell, 1997: 49–52). The perpetrator has placed the body on the exact border between the two countries, and it turns out to be cut in half and comprised of the upper body of a Swedish local politician and the lower body of a Danish prostitute. This forces the Danish and Swedish police to work together, and we follow two detectives from departments in Malmö and Copenhagen as they investigate the case: the socially awkward, and rule-following Swede Saga Norén, and the jovial Dane with a messy family life Martin Rohde. Both the cross-national nature of the investigative effort and the crime’s epic sense of proportions created by removing it from the intimate sphere of a domestic home and displaying it on the Øresund Bridge add to the sense of immensity.
The central crime itself is also grand in scale. The scene at the bridge turns out to be part of an elaborate series of crimes and murders planned for 5 years and involving the deaths of at least 25 people across Denmark and Sweden. At first, the crimes seem politically motivated. The perpetrator uses a tabloid journalist and his own websites to systematically highlight five problems in the Danish and Swedish societies: a lack of judicial equality, rising levels of homelessness, defunding in the psychiatric sector, rising rates of xenophobia and racism and the use of child labour by regional corporations. The tension between crime and broader societal themes is a common feature of Nordic Noir. When describing its narrative design, scholars often note the Danish public broadcaster DR’s trademark of ‘Double-Storytelling’, where the crime-plot acts as a catalyst for the unfolding of separate but entangled social, political and personal storylines (Creeber, 2015; Gamula and Mikos, 2014). However, even for Nordic Noir, The Bridge has an unusually extensive narrative structure that makes up a whole network of different threads and themes.
This structural and thematic immensity is contrasted with the intimacy of the singular, personal stories that these broader societal issues are explored through. The season has a large number of subplots related to individual characters. These minor characters are presented in relative detail, each with their own complicated backstories and motivations that all thread into the larger crime narrative. The gradual interweaving of the character’s individual narratives and the crime plot creates a tension between the singularity of the character’s intimate lives and a grander sense of interconnectedness between them. It also contributes to the disorienting reception aesthetics of the series, described by Agger and Waade as a melancholic feature. However, where Agger and Waade only connect the sense of disorientation to the ‘keep them guessing’ structure of the crime plot, I would add that it is also connected to the double-storytelling. As we often get far into a character’s story before the connection to the crime plot is revealed, the series creates a tension between the intimate relation to each character and the counterbalancing estrangement caused by their initial isolation from the crime plot.
For most of the season, The Bridge’s syuzhet appears to be structured by the investigation of the crimes. But this premise is flipped when we discover that it is in fact structured by the perpetrator Jens Hansen’s grand plan. With every clue uncovered, the detectives are spun further into this plan without their or the viewer’s knowledge. The crimes turn out to be the result of a long-planned and meticulously conducted personal vendetta against the detective Martin, because he had an affair with Jens’ wife, whose death in a car crash on the bridge sets the plan in motion. The sense of immensity of the social critique thus fades into the background, as the more melodramatic intimate psychological relations between the characters become the narrative focal point. These relations culminate in a dramatic scene on the bridge, where the weight of suspense is put on the character’s moral and emotional dilemmas.
However, while collapsing on a thematic and narrative level, the tension between intimacy and immensity is maintained on an affective level. The epic setting of the Øresund Bridge provides a contrasting immensity to the sense of closeness between the characters. The visual framing of the scene supports the affective tension by constantly shifting between close-ups, full shots and panoramic wide shots that make the characters appear as tiny black dots in relation to the monumental concrete structure and the deep blue waters of Øresund. A melancholic sense of distance is therefore maintained even at the height of series’ narrative suspense. This clearly demonstrates that stimmung cannot be reduced to an effect of narrative structure alone.
Glen Creeber has argued that The Bridge’s multi-perspectival narrative design encourages its viewer to adopt a similarly multi-perspectival one. According to this line of thinking, the independent unfolding and subsequent interweaving of the many narrative threads, and the human lives that inhabit them, fosters a sense of interconnectedness that lies at the heart of the series’ morality: (…) it reveals an intensely complex and divided world that can only be healed through a combination of tolerance and cooperation. (…) In short, Bridges have to be built. It is a belief that hints at the interconnectedness of humanity, suggesting that no man is an island and that every individual action will influence the rest of the community (Creeber, 2015: 25).
This passage echoes the themes of intimacy and immensity in the series’ narrative structure, perhaps with special attention paid to intimacy as connectedness. However, the pervasive melancholic stimmung in The Bridge seems incongruent with the sense of hope described in this passage, unless melancholy is only seen as a visual style rather than the series’ ‘way of having a world’. We therefore also need to observe intimacy and immensity in The Bridge beyond its narrative structure to truly understand its stimmung and how it impacts the way the series can be read.
Contemplative stillness
Apart from visually bookending the season and acting as catalyst for both the fabula and syuzhet, the Øresund Bridge figures prominently in the series’ ‘breakers’ (Hansen and Waade, 2017), which are shots of landscapes, architecture and nature used to punctuate the scenes. Some of the breakers function locatively, informing the viewer of the next scene’s setting, but many of them act more abstractly as mood-pieces, displaying images of the Øresund Bridge camouflaged through grey morning fog, the cloudy sky over abandoned industrial buildings or the surface of the deep waters of Øresund. The use of water as central visual trope is also found in other noir series, with one of the most notable recent examples being BBC’s crime serial Broadchurch (2013-2017). Here, the water by a small English seaside town creates a foreboding sense of danger and mystery under the surface through its wild, dark and unpredictable qualities and its connection to the drowning of a young boy. By contrast, the water in The Bridge appears melancholic through the panoramic, wide shot framing and qualities of infinite grey stillness. Using the breakers to punctuate the story with quiet shots of cities and landscapes provides a counterbalance to the immediacy of typical crime drama viewing. The recurring imagery of the deep grey surface of Øresund adds a stillness and quietness to the disclosed world that, as argued earlier, is difficult to account for through a more narratively or cognitively oriented idea of affect as related to desire, suspense or strong moments (Grodal, 2010; Plantinga, 2012). On the contrary, the water as central stylistic trope gives The Bridge’s landscape a significance beyond its symbolic and narrative features and becomes part of generating the series’ affective space by functioning on multiple sensual levels.
A major part of the series’ sensuality is its rhythm. 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. Scenes where detectives research by reading through materials or clicking through content are a trope of many noirs, but the contemplation displayed in The Bridge is less narratively agential than in the typical crime drama. It does not usually result in the case moving forward or the investigators uncovering a vital clue. We simply observe the characters contemplate without any other action going on than ‘thinking’. Leaving the viewer to observe the characters from a distance thus offers a contemplative slowness to the viewing experience itself. Reflective stillness and contemplative lingering are therefore not just a stylistic feature or a narrative device for transmitting the inner world of the characters, but also part of the series’ way of disclosing a melancholic world to a viewer.
Intimate estrangement is also a key feature of the way The Bridge is filmed and framed. The camera is literally estranged from much of the action, observing from a distance or through mirrors, open doors and glass. This partly obscures the viewer’s visual and emotional access to the action and characters as they are filmed through windows, behind pillars, in shadows, out of centre and from large distances. This feature is especially poignant in scenes that play out in the Malmö police station, which is the primary setting for the investigation. The sense of estrangement that the use of obscured close-ups and wide-shot framing causes is reinforced by use of the so-called ‘mirror-effect’. Filming through mirrors and other reflective surfaces is a trope carried on from film noir and neo-noir. In film noir it often contributes to a stimmung of paranoia (Dixon, 2009; Ngai, 2005) by creating fear, doubt and uncertainty about who or what is going to be reflected, but it is also used to create a sense of moral ambiguity and vertigo, by playing with angles, depths and surfaces. By contrast, in Nordic Noir this mirror-effect has been described by Hansen and Waade as a kind of doppelgänger motif that ‘is often used to pinpoint the mood and personality of a character, mark an obstacle or a distance between people, or create multiple rooms in one scene’ (Hansen, and Waade, 2017: 176). While these character-related and symbolic functions of the mirror-effect are prominent, the role of fragmentation, estrangement and camouflage is also significant in relation to stimmung, as these are part of creating the melancholic space that the viewers are invited to attune themselves to. The framing creates a feeling of watching from an outside position, which is reinforced further by what could be described as subjective camera angles without subjects. The shots are often framed as though an outside eye is observing the characters, especially when they investigate crime scenes or are in their homes. In much horror and noir crime drama, this uncanny outside eye perspective is later revealed as the villain’s or criminal’s, as he or she watches the detectives from a distance, while hiding from them or planning an attack; however, in The Bridge there is mostly no one there.
In an article on melancholy in Nordic Noir, Waade uses philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s reflections on the sadness of being an outside observer, such as a policeman, to characterise the characters in The Bridge as melancholic observers (Waade, 2017: 387). I would argue that the sense of being an outside observer is not just a condition for the series’ characters, but also for its viewers since the subjective angles with no subject attached creates a sense of displacement and estrangement that goes beyond characterisation. The cinematography and framing thus frequently operate in an uncanny mode of voyeurism that adds a contemplative longing to both the aesthetics and viewing experience of the series. The ‘close and yet so far’ relation to the world is amplified by a lack of classic film noir subjectivity such as voice-over narration or other character-centred audio-visual focalisation techniques. As such, the tension between immensity and intimacy is a prominent characteristic of the series that plays with distance, proximity and contemplation as features of both its style, characters and viewing experience.
Ambiguous greyness
A paradoxical sense of ‘grand intimacy’ is also present in the soundscape of the series, which is often hushed and sparse. Many scenes play out in complete silence with no use of background noise, sound effects or mood music. When background sound is used, it is often in the form of wind, which accompanies many of the breakers, adding a melancholic sense of abandonment, longing and isolation. Wind has qualities of both the intimate, as its audibility requires silence and it mimics the feeling of a whisper, but it also evokes the immensity of nature and a grand sense of infinite emptiness. The most frequently used mood music is made up of single long notes from an electric keyboard and eerie electronic sound effects in the more narratively tense scenes. The melancholic quality of the sound of Nordic Noir has been noted by Waade, who connects it to the emotional expression of the contemplative landscape panoramas (Waade, 2017: 388), and Creeber, who notes that ‘rather than attempting to create a soundtrack that builds drama and suspense, it is frequently melodic and ethereal, evoking a sense of quiet meditation’ (Creeber, 2015: 26). This again points to the fact that the affective gestalt of a television drama goes beyond the effects of narrative desire. While The Bridge does use suspenseful narrative techniques associated with the crime genre more generally, such as the twist ending and a strict, well-timed attention economy of clues and false leads, this logic of suspense is not consistently reinforced by elements such as cinematography, sound and rhythm, which instead tend to follow what could be termed a logic of contemplation. From the perspective of stimmung, the soundscape of The Bridge thus unfolds a melancholic world of intimacy and immensity with its own distinct feeling rather than ‘playing second fiddle’ to a hierarchically superior narrative design.
Another important element for stimmung is the use of light, which plays with qualities of subduedness and grey stillness. The Bridge opens at night, and daylight does not break the darkness until 24 minutes and seven seconds into the first episode. Night-time scenes occur in most of the season’s episodes that usually start by day and progress into darkness. Consequently, a certain ‘feeling’ of the night permeates the series, which will be easily recognisable to anyone who has ever stayed up late with a deadline, worked the graveyard shift or had night owl tendencies. At night, the world appears extended and compressed at the same time, enclosing you with a paradox of simultaneous intensity and subduedness. Given all of this darkness, The Bridge surprisingly appears less ‘noir’ than many of its counterparts. Even though it employs characteristic noir conventions of chiaroscuro lighting, the darkness is less pervasive than the eternally shadowy worlds of some cinematic neo-noirs such as Sin City (2005) or Se7en (1995).
Se7en′s world is marked by perpetual and inescapable darkness, even though most of it takes place in the daytime. By contrast, relatively bright daytime scenes break the darkness in The Bridge, making the night seem less heavy and all encompassing. The daytime scenes have a distinct greyness displayed in the colour-grading and filters of the cinematography, which sets The Bridge apart from similar Nordic Noir series following a more blue-tinted visual concept, the most notable example being The Killing. The subdued colours are also a feature of the costumes, as most of the characters wear neutral grey, brown and dark colours. The world presented through lighting is thus neither characterised by pessimistic darkness or optimistic brightness, but a distinct melancholic greyness that is much more morally and affectively ambiguous. This ambiguity is also reflected on the level of character, where no one is presented as unequivocally good or bad, but instead balance in between. Greyness is thus a feature of both the thematic, visual and relational aspects of the series, which make up its particular stimmung.
Attunement to a melancholic world
The visual features of darkness and greyness and the empty aesthetic of the framing are also mirrored in the settings and climate of the series. Several of the crime scenes and scenes of investigation are industrial buildings like slaughterhouses, old factories and production plants. This worn and industrial appearance is in stark contrast to the architectural pleasure of the touristic gaze performed by the visual landmarks of Copenhagen and Malmö and the beautiful homes of Saga and Martin. The worn concrete, tin and PVC materiality of The Bridge’s echoic spaces of underground parking lots, factories and building sites seem to also embody the balancing act between grandness and insignificance present in the distanced and panoramic framing of the shots. The settings’ simultaneous evocation of human civilisation as persistent and fragile makes them differ greatly from the sensibility of moral degeneration afforded by the dilapidated grandeur of the grungy art-deco interiors found in many neo-noir films, with Se7en being a prominent example. The visuals of dark, empty streets, suburbs and concrete residential buildings are also very different from the bustling, gritty cities of neon lights and seedy bars found in Blade Runner or Sin City. The buildings, cityscapes and landscapes presented in The Bridge mostly have an empty quality to them, rather than a claustrophobic one. While the cityscapes of Copenhagen and Malmö with their electric lights, graffiti and modernistic architecture feature prominently, these are consistently contrasted by the panoramic shorelines of Øresund and its surrounding landscape. As such, The Bridge falls in between possible typologies for the settings and cinematic landscapes of noir fictions, because it places itself between a city-centred noir aesthetic and the more rural variants found in Fargo (1996), True Detective (2014-2019) or Broadchurch. The intimate yet lonely life in the cities is juxtaposed with the immensity and connectedness of nature.
In addition to the concrete weathering of its settings, The Bridge is also weathered in a more material sense. The Bridge is set in the autumn months, which is the greyest time of year in the Scandinavian countries. The season has been closely connected to melancholy since ancient times, where it was rooted in the idea of the humours and associated with black bile, coldness and dreariness (Bowring, 2016: 13). More than just a visual concept, the cold, grey materiality of autumn permeates the world of the series and invites its viewer to experience the world through autumn’s sensibilities. Surprisingly, while autumn in Scandinavia is famously rainy, The Bridge is distinctly dry. It never rains in the series’ first season, which is one of the characteristics of other Nordic Noir series such as The Killing as well as neo-noirs like Blade Runner or Sin City. Its domestic interiors are similarly well-isolated Nordic homes, rather than the moist, filthy spaces of Se7en or the humid, hot environments overtaken by nature in True Detective.
While stylistically significant, the melancholic coldness of autumn and dry interiors and exteriors also have implications for the melancholic way that The Bridge discloses its world to a viewer and thus impacts how its themes can be read. In this sense, affect is essential for the critical potentiality of a series, as has similarly been argued about emotions in art by Gorton (2009) and affective poetics in film by Hauke Lehmann (2016). The narrative is largely driven by Jens’s personal revenge, but I contend that the dry, cold melancholy prohibits revenge from appearing as a dominant theme in the series. Revenge is characteristically hot – something that grows in warm, humid or fiery climates. The cold, dry and grey space of The Bridge does not embody these qualities, and instead invites a relational mode of contemplation, stillness and reflection. Autumn’s melancholic sensibility and materiality generates an affective space that envelops the viewer and shapes perception and imagination. Metaphorically speaking, attuning oneself to the melancholic stimmung of the series means going winter bathing on an empty stretch of beach, rather than revelling in the fast-paced, sizzling intricacies of revenge. As such, stimmung is not just a style or aesthetic of reception, but reveals the intricate connections between the ‘feel’ of a series and its themes.
The weathering of the settings carries a certain immense temporality, connoting the passing of time through days, seasons, years and generations. The accumulative quality signals that there is a more-than now – almost aeonic forces of persistence and erosion displayed in how nature weathers the man-made structures that inhabit it. However, one should be careful not to equate this persistence with hope, as I argued in relation to the narrative structure. When analysing the tension between intimacy and immensity beyond the narrative level, the tone of the series appears not so much as one of hope, but as a quiet, melancholic persistence reflected in the immensity of the landscape. What critical potentialities does attuning oneself to this melancholic space offer?
One way of viewing the criticality of melancholy has been presented by philosopher Robin James, who in her book on Resilience and Melancholy (2015) identifies resilience, defined as the spectacular overcoming of damage or trauma, as the dominating discourse within neoliberal capitalism; Resilience must be performed explicitly, legibly, and spectacularly. Overcoming is necessary, but insufficient, to count and function as resilience, this overcoming must be accomplished in a visible or otherwise legible and consumable manner. (…) ‘Look, I Overcame!’ is the resilient subject’s maxim or mantra (James, 2015: 88).
In contrast to this, she identifies melancholy as a form of counter-resilience that contemplates, persists, stays with the trouble and fails to bounce back enough. Melancholic inflexibility becomes the antidote to the resilience discourse of progress. As such, the logic of contemplation displayed in The Bridge’s melancholic world might offer an alternative to the logic of overcoming. As noted previously, the third sense of stimmung, connected to the realm of music, invites us to think about stimmung as something that we attune ourselves to. The Bridge invites us to inhabit its melancholic climate, landscapes and interiors and contemplate the inevitability of erosion and loss over time. Resilience and persistence are not shown as subjective, individual values, but as the general resilience of knowing that life goes on. Not my life, but the aeonic life of nature. There might be hope in resisting through melancholy, but it is a different hope than we find in the notion of interconnectedness and overcoming often foregrounded in literature on Nordic Noir.
Conclusion
Observing Nordic Noir in terms of stimmung, rather than genre or style has four important implications for analysis. Firstly, it configures a different analytical triangulation than a more narratively oriented analysis would. As previously noted, analyses of Nordic Noir often employ a more or less explicit hierarchical relation between elements, where landscape, cinematography or rhythm become supporting or contrasting elements in relation to plot, genre and character. As I have demonstrated, the dramaturgical approach to stimmung outlined here does not mean that elements such as characters, narrative and style become irrelevant. Instead, it means that they become horizontalised as parts of an affective whole rather than primary points of interest. The role of less foregrounded elements such as breakers and climatology thus becomes more prominent. Secondly, this allows for a more nuanced understanding of the melancholy often ascribed to Nordic Noir. Rather than claiming that this melancholy is either an exclusively stylistic phenomenon, a property of the characters or a quality inherent to a Nordic Volksgeist (folk spirit), I have used the difference between intimacy and immensity to chisel out the elements of a melancholic Grundstimmung that is dependent on but also in excess of The Bridge’s narrative, stylistic and relational elements. Thirdly, I have shown that an analysis of stimmung enables us to account for the affect of a TV series as not just a question of empathy or identification, the pursuit of a narrative desire or the thrill of suspense, but also as one of attunement to a world and its affective and critical potentialities. By observing stimmung as something performed in and by the programme itself, rather than locating it in the viewer or characters, the analysis emphasises the fact that melancholy and other stimmungen are part of the appeal of engaging with a programme or a genre. Being there with the stimmung of a television programme or film and making it part of our cultural and private milieu is a less foregrounded aspect of their appeal, but it might nonetheless be an important factor in why we choose Horror, Nordic Noir or Romantic Comedy when scrolling through a streaming service or when keeping company with a series that we already know by heart. Finally, I have argued that the affective world of a programme has implications for the viewing beyond mimetic affective pleasure. It also impacts how its themes and critical potentiality can be understood and engaged with, as in the case of The Bridge, where the pervasive melancholy offers a very different sense of hope than what is often foregrounded through an exclusively narrative analysis of how different nations and personality types can overcome adversity by working together and building bridges.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author biography
Josefine Brink Siem holds an MA in Dramaturgy and is currently a PhD-fellow at the department of Dramaturgy and Musicology at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on developing and qualifying concepts for analysing the affective dramaturgies of works of art in theatre and on television. She is also a member of the editorial board and reviews editor of the Danish dramaturgical journal Peripeti.