Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2011

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the significance of locations in TV series, in particular in crime series. The author presents different theoretical approaches on settings and landscapes in TV series and crime stories. By analysing both the Swedish and the British versions of the Wallander series, the author examines the various types of location used, focusing especially on their dramaturgic and aesthetic roles, and on the various ways in which locations are conceptualized in the two series. The analysis also includes extra materials on the DVDs. Finally, the author discusses some theoretical and methodological challenges of analysing the significance and impact of locations in TV productions.

This article focuses on the guilty houses of the Belgian kidnapper, child rapist and child murderer, Marc Dutroux. Our aim is to explore which role the houses of Dutroux fulfil in the collective memory of this traumatic, highly mediated affair. In total, sixteen in-depth interviews have been carried out with spokespeople of the local governments, neighbouring residents and local entrepreneurs in the tourist industry. Additionally, two discussion forums have been analysed. Results show that the houses of Dutroux fulfil a problematic role within the collective memory of the Dutroux affair. On the one hand, there is the need to retain the memory of this painful affair, often accompanied by placing tangible objects at the locations by the municipalities. On the other hand, a need to forget can be identified. We conclude that feelings of guilt and shame related to the Dutroux case seem to spill over to its spatial surroundings with his guilty houses playing the leading role.

Based on questions of genre and generic modulation, this article traces the making of Sherlock Holmes as a popular hero in Denmark. Its central historical claim is that a long-forgotten theatrical play made a significant contribution to this process. The play Sherlock Holmes was written by Danish writer Walter Christmas as an – officially unacknowledged – adaptation of a likewise popular American play by William Gillette. Christmas’ play (and other Holmes plays) swept across the entire country of Denmark for a major part of 1902 following its Copenhagen opening on 26 December 1901. From a generic point of view, the stories and the play diverge significantly. The play, its relationship with the stories, its generic modulations and the ways in which it was perceived by newspapers and audiences of the period together form the basis for the theoretical explorations of the article, which claims that the generic modulations from the stories to the play are due to the preferences and expectations of readers and theatrical audiences, respectively. Empirically, the article is based on material – the play, the reviews, newspaper announcements and other archival material – which has not been scrutinized before.

Western history of crime fiction usually designates Edgar Allan Poe as the undisputed father of the detective fiction genre. Crime fiction is, hence, generally associated with incipient modernity and modern societies and cityscapes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even asks: Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it? The usual answer is that crime fiction, in fact, was invented by Poe, but another counterview is that China – at that point – had had a long narrative tradition for stories about crime and detection. The so-called gongan genre – court case fiction – was probably established as early as the sixth century AD, whereas the first substantial evidence of the tradition is from thirteenth century and the first Chinese crime fiction novels were written during the seventeenth century. This article is, then, a corrective for the international history of crime fiction based on numerous sinological sources introducing a revised introduction of crime fiction on the world’s literary scene. So to answer Doyle’s question about crime fiction before Poe: Crime fiction may have been in China.

This article explores representations of media reporting and cot death in the British writer Sophie Hannah’s recent crime novel A Room Swept White. The article argues that Hannah’s novel interrogates the mediatization of cot death and maternal identity, in order to probe notions of gender and power. Hannah’s representations are closely linked to the figure of the female detective, whose own identity is challenged by what she discovers during the course of her investigation. Recent media coverage of cot death, and mothers accused of infanticide, suggests that this controversial subject is capable of provoking a re-evaluation of conventional constructions of motherhood. The article concludes that the complex relationship between the mediatization of cot death, maternal identity and the probing of crime in Hannah’s novel allows the reader to reassess the role of the female investigator and the nature of authority.

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.

Traditionally, Scandinavian TV crime fiction has been regarded as a public arena for critical exhibition of and debate about salient features in contemporary social development. As a point of departure, the development of TV crime fiction in Sweden and Denmark is delineated. To explain the continuing, acknowledged impact of this socially engaged crime fiction, both domestically and abroad, it is necessary to involve the notions of emotion and gender in combination with the mixing of genres, as especially the thriller and the melodrama have invaded the police procedural during the last decade. These assumptions are displayed in an analysis of the Danish series The Killing, showing that it exhibits prevailing features of common public interest, representing a reversal of masculine and feminine stereotypes and the invalidation of family life in the process. The genre mix and the style are essential ingredients in conveying this to the viewer in a way that both provokes debate and is emotively impressive.

The article, after giving a short overview of the history and characteristics of German crime fiction on television, elaborates on recent tendencies in this area. Furthermore, a short reference concerning the resurrection of the gangster film genre in German cinema is made before focusing more specifically on the textual analysis of the TV crime serials KDD – Kriminaldauerdienst/KDD – Berlin Crime Squad and Im Angesicht des Verbrechens/In Face of the Crime. Through critically discussing the dimension of ‘Quality TV’ and proposing, instead, to use the concept of ‘narrative complexity’, the transformative potential of complex generic narrations is emphasized. Focusing on aspects of multiple interwoven and interacting story arcs, a high number of dominant and developing round characters, a clear visual style, a tendency towards world making, self-referentiality and (generic) intertextuality, differentiating normative messages, as well as innovation and emergence, a textual analysis of the two abovementioned TV crime serials follows in order to exemplify recent tendencies in German crime fiction.

The article first discusses how crime fiction centrally activates moral emotions related to feelings of social trust and social conflicts. The article uses psychological theory to analyse audio-visual fiction, and it takes an evolutionary stance in relation to morality; within film studies, and especially within literary studies, the inspiration from evolutionary studies has been strong in the last decade. Humans are adapted to group living, and emotions linked to fairness have an innate basis. The article then shows how different crime stories activate different stages in Kohlberg’s functional typology of moral systems and how different stages relate to different social systems. Further, a functional description of the various moral emotions is used to characterize crime fictions. The use of moral emotions in crime fiction is exemplified in Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), angry vigilantism in Fincher’s Se7en (1995) and moral disgust, shame, embarrassment and guilt in the Showtime TV series Dexter (2006–).

This article maps the development of the crime coverage in Danish mass media from 2002 to 2008. Fictional entertainment programmes as well as factual news representations have been systematically studied. Empirical data include samples from newspapers, television and web media. We find that editorial differentiation has increased in competing newspapers and television channels. Web media, on the other hand, show no signs of such segmentation. On the contrary, we detect a high degree of similarity between online crime presentations across the board. In terms of fiction, the traditional detective stories still prevail on public service television, while forensics-driven crime series of the CSI type are increasing their relative share of commercial TV channels. We claim that these aspects of continuity and change may be interpreted as a domestication of the so-called CSI effect, and discuss how fictional crime mediation influences factual reporting and vice versa.

What is the meaning of tabloid crime journalism? This article is based on research into the crime journalism of the Danish tabloid Ekstra Bladet between 1966 and 2006. At the root of the research lies an understanding of tabloid crime journalism as being most appropriately conceptualized within a framework of ritual storytelling and existence. The narrative structure of Ekstra Bladet’s crime journalism is characterized, and the changes in its way of narrating crime stories during the period are uncovered: a change from describing crime as seen from the point of view of the police to a more melodramatic narration, which implies a stronger dramatic reader appeal, as well as a blurring of the line between fact and fiction.

News media reporting on mental illness in western countries shows that mentally ill persons are mostly portrayed as dangerous and as perpetrators of violent crimes. A comparison with news media in a post-Soviet nation shows the same result. A Lithuanian non governmental organization initiated a quantitative analysis on media reporting on mentally ill persons in comparison with Norway and Sweden. The most common topic in all three nations was violent crime stories. This article discusses some of the results from the quantitative study of 566 news articles in autumn 2008, and offers a deepened discussion about the reporting on violent crime stories with a mentally ill perpetrator via an exploratory qualitative analysis of one violent crime case from each nation.