The dark ambivalences of the welfare state: Investigating the transformations of the Swedish crime film

This article presents a new analytical perspective for understanding the Swedish crime film. Ever since its emergence in the Swedish cinema in the 1940s, the crime genre has dealt with the perceived dark sides of social life in the welfare state. Based on an extensive historical overview of cinema and television, I argue that the thematic transformations of the Swedish crime genre can be theorized in terms of a changing attitude towards crime as social ambivalence. Drawing on the works of Zygmunt Bauman, I conceptualize the cinematic representations of crime as a manifestation of the disturbing ambivalences that otherwise have been downplayed in the media culture of the welfare state. Focusing on key films, the article elucidates a sociocultural process at the heart of the transformations of the genre: whereas movies of the past cautiously depicted crime in terms of ambivalence, contemporary crime films portray brutal violence and human darkness as an inescapable condition of present-day Sweden.