In 2011, a new twist to the standard murder mystery emerged. The television show that started it all was “The Killing,” a Danish production. A plethora of shows later copied its wild success. The genre today is known as “Nordic noir” or “Scandinavian noir” or, in abbreviated form, “Scandi noir.”
The shows all have an easily identifiable quality. The landscapes are unrelentingly bleak and the mood dark and morally complex. Underneath the still, placid settled-ness of Nordic culture lurks untold evils, ready to pounce at any moment, producing an unnerving, eerie sort of suspense.
The language is spare, the pacing slow and anguished. The characters appear world-weary, drained of feeling. It’s as if they’re just going through the motions, while external forces draw them inexorably towards an unknown but stealthy oblivion. All human interactions are muted, if not utterly joyless. They walk through an inhospitable and unforgiving world as if zombies.
Even at the conclusion, after the crimes have been solved, an existential dread hangs in the air. Justice seems hollow somehow. Too many moral, existential questions remain. The meaning of life, even in victory, seems tragic if not pointless. Was it all worth it?
These shows portray a reductionist view of human nature, as something less than the fullness God created it to be. Personhood is narrowly defined by external circumstances, or by cold logic, or sex, or death, or passing moods or physical sensations. They reveal human existence as defined by radical individualism and unremitting alienation, all to be born within a hostile world drained of transcendent light and spirit.
This worldview betrays what Roger Scruton, the estimable British philosopher and Christian, calls the “charm of disenchantment,” a world otherwise absent forgiveness, redemption, and grace.
The reason for this, argues Scruton, is that we moderns have lost a sense of the sacramental, that which connects us spiritually to God, neighbor, and the created order. “[We] reach out to the sacred,” he writes, “but [we] do not find it. No God, we believe, reaches down to meet the arms that reach for him, and our arms fall helplessly to our sides.”
April 1 marks the 100th anniversary of the “Bauhaus” movement, an architectural style that came out of Weimar Germany in the immediate aftermath of WWI. It reflected the civilizational crisis wrought by the war and served as a reaction to the disillusionment and alienation of that chaotic era.
Its intent was iconoclastic, meaning that it sought to destroy wholesale traditional European culture, which, its theoreticians surmised, had been solely responsible for the war.
And how did it presume to replace the past? By rejecting anything “bourgeois,” anything that smacked of aristocratic or “elevated” sensibilities. No, the common worker didn’t need ornate facades and elaborate designs.
Walther Gropius, pioneer of Bauhaus, famously expressed the guiding philosophy of this nascent movement as “starting from zero.” Zero meant everything now must be new. Nothing of the old would be countenanced. Raging battles took place within the movement over even a hint of lingering bourgeois sensibilities. Tradition was to be rejected wholesale in iconoclastic fashion to make way for a brave utopian future.
The iconoclast, Scruton explains, “seeks to replace old gods with new, to disenchant the landscape and to mark the place with signs of his defiance.” Unwilling to tolerate the sacred or the sacramental about him, precisely because he refuses to be accountable to its truths and moral demands, he seeks to deface or desecrate.
“In a culture which is in full flight from the sacred, the practice of desecration becomes a kind of moral necessity – something that must be constantly performed, and performed collectively, in order to destroy the things that stand in judgment over us.”
From now on, wrote Tom Wolfe describing Bauhaus, “whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & sparseness” would typify the Modernist norm, the cry of the iconoclast.
As its heirs, the denizens of Scandi noir thus move as ghosts through barren cityscapes occupied by row after row of bleak, anonymous high-rise boxes made of glass and steel. The urban creature is dwarfed and rendered faceless and insignificant.
Curiously, though, and with no small amount of irony, the time-honored solution to the perennial problem of human alienation is heedlessly jettisoned in favor of an untested contrivance that has only exacerbated the problem.
In his book, The Face of God, Scruton writes: “Guilt, shame and remorse are necessary features of the human condition. They are the residue of our mistakes and the sign that we are free to make them. But they direct us towards a higher form of reconciliation – a reconciliation in which our guilt is comprehensively acknowledged and forgiven.”
“Our sufferings,” in short, “stem from the burden of responsibility that we assume in our membership of the community of persons.” It’s natural, in other words.
The key, ultimately, is piety. Piety is a “posture of submission and obedience toward authorities you have not chosen.” And it is this piety that connects us to the sacred and the sacramental.
We receive the world as a gift, not as something that emerges from personal choice. In receiving any gift we are bound to the giver in ways both obvious and not. In accepting the gift, we willingly take on its burdens which invariably require privation and suffering.
In our willingness to suffer, our sacrifices become redemptive. Christians believe that through Christ’s sacrificial suffering, our suffering is “lifted…out of the negativity in which we tend to view it, and [is shown] to be an attribute of God, something that is not, therefore, alien to the world of creation but an integral part of it.”
“All that we truly esteem,” he adds, “love included, depends in the end on suffering, and on our freedom to accept suffering for another’s sake.” This is the way we rise above life’s existential angst.
Thus, instead of wallowing in the tragic (something palpably, though somewhat exaggeratedly, felt in the Scandi noir genre), instead of living as hapless victims of an endless series of irredeemable moments marked by angst and regret, we are invited to participate in a spiritually vibrant world, a world filled with light, one where grace and joy and love abound, where the face of God is seen, and where gratitude becomes the inevitable human response.