Is Egypt doomed
to be the
lost revolution?
World Press Digest
New Zealand’s recovery
It used to be a cult.
But now it’s a full-
blown religion
The Cafe 2
Colin Stewart and
John Cameron
The Cafe 2
I’ve read plenty of things in the Scottish Review which have entertained, educated or inspired me, along with a fair few which have incensed me.
I wonder if you would please pass on to Kenyon Wright that his piece on AV inspired me to donate to the No to AV campaign.
Colin Stewart
(Scottish Conservative candidate, Dundee West)
In the political satire ‘Wag the Dog’, the producer of the phony war, Dustin Hoffman, told that the rebels seek ‘freedom and democracy’, asks ‘Why would they want that?’.
When in 2006 we finally succeeded in bullying the Palestinian territories into holding a ‘free and democratic’ election, the terrorist organisation Hamas won hands down.
The naivety of military intervention against Gadaffi is breathtaking and the assumption that the outcome would be a ‘free and democratic’ Libya was never questioned.
Senators Lieberman, Kerry and McCain led the calls for intervention – as they did in Iraq – and Suez serves as a warning against Anglo-French ploys in the Middle East.
Perhaps as a rule of thumb, the next time Turkey, Germany, Russia, China, Africa and the Arab League line up to tell us a course of action is ill-advised, we should listen.
John Cameron
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It used to be a cult.
But now it’s a
full-blown religion
Andrew Hook
Early in March, I wrote of a cult composed of dedicated viewers of BBC 4’s extraordinary Danish crime series ‘The Killing’. That was then. By time the series ended on 27 March, the cult had become a full-blown religion.
Everybody was watching it – no less than half a million of us per episode. And everybody who was anybody in the world of media comment and criticism felt the need to let it be known they were among the believers. Look at the Guardian on 31 March: a four-page article trying to answer the question ‘why is everyone talking about a grim 20-part crime series with subtitles?’.
SR readers already know the answer. Barbara Millar provided it in her excellent piece on just how ‘The Killing’ kept her rooted to her seat every Saturday night for the last two months.
I agree with almost everything she says about the series’ fascination in terms of plotting, characterisation, acting, filming, and setting. But we do have one disagreement. Barbara was disappointed by the show’s closing episodes. She found them jarring and unsatisfactory. Specifically she felt that there were ‘too many loose ends needing to be tied up’; that the reason offered by the murderer for his crime was unconvincing; that Sarah Lund, the investigating officer had become too detached and peripheral; and that the high standard of acting and writing had not been maintained.
I would concede that in terms of plotting Vagn’s decision to ‘kidnap’ Theis and drive him to the woods where the murder had been committed was less than self-explanatory. (Or did he know that the game was up and wanted to die where he had killed?). But about the other points there is certainly room for disagreement.
Writing when the series was only halfway through, I suggested that what we were seeing was a bleak cycle of disintegration and failure in the lives of all those caught up by an initial act of brutal violence. I wondered whether any of the characters in the story would be able to put their lives back on track. Nothing in the episodes that followed made me see things differently. And in fact no one in ‘The Killing’ survives unscathed.
There is no ‘solution’ to a crime like this. And to attempt to provide a comfortably logical one is simply to distort (and evade) the reality which is Nietzsche’s abyss.
The lives of the main characters are hopelessly shattered. The consequences of violence are unpredictable and uncontrollable. It is no surprise to learn that Soren Sveistrup, the writer of the series, says he had Nietzsche in mind in the creation of Sarah Lund. Nietzsche wrote, ‘When you stare at the abyss, the abyss stares back at you’. Lund, he says, has stared into the abyss, and that is what makes her what she is. But I would suggest that what is true of Lund is true of all the main characters in the story. The murder of Nanna Birk Larsen has made all of them look into the abyss. All suffer as a result. That is why loose ends remain untied up. There is no ‘solution’ to a crime like this. And to attempt to provide a comfortably logical one is simply to distort (and evade) the reality which is Nietzsche’s abyss.
What are we to make of ‘Uncle’ Vagn’s confession? Barbara says she is not convinced by it. I would ask whether we are meant to be? Vagn is providing only a self-serving, rational gloss for what he has done. The truth is very different, and we know what it is because we have seen the photographs of Nanna’s tortured and sexually-abused body.
And Sarah Lund? In these final episodes she is ‘detached’ and ‘peripheral’ because she has been traumatised by the events that have occurred – above all by the death of Jan Meyer for which she feels responsible, though of course not in the sense in which she is cruelly accused by the ‘justice’ system. By this stage her life has fallen apart: her son has left her and gone back to his estranged father: her relationship with Bengt seems not to have survived the devastating pressures produced by the investigation. But she is not alone in suffering such personal disintegration.
Pernille and Theis Larsen, Nanna’s parents, are brilliantly portrayed throughout the series. Theirs is an almost wordless relationship. But for all the moving sense of irreparable grief, the unspoken truth is that Theis is a man familiar with the abyss of violence – however hard he tries to be the loving husband and father. His shooting of Vagn in the end is inevitable, and Pernille, protected from but denied the truth throughout, is helpless to prevent it. There will be no redemption for the Larsens.
The high-minded politician Troels Hartmann is finally equally undone. He may survive politically but now in as flawed and corrupt a condition as any of his opponents. He has destroyed the woman he loves – not realising that Rie is the victim of the manoeuvrings of his campaign manager Morten Weber, a closet homosexual who resents her relationship with his boss.
The ending of ‘The Killing’ is as bleak as its setting in a dark and dismal, rain-soaked Copenhagen. Will the follow-up series show us the different Copenhagen of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid and the Tivoli Gardens? Somehow I doubt it.
Andrew Hook is a former professor of English literature at
Glasgow University
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