Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives [1st ed.] 978-3-030-04911-9, 978-3-030-04912-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xvii
Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular Culture (Dimitris Akrivos, Alexandros K. Antoniou)....Pages 1-9
Front Matter ....Pages 11-11
Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Bridge (Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen)....Pages 13-39
The Representation of Crime and Criminals in the TV Series Sherlock and Elementary: A Corpus Study (Archontoula Menti)....Pages 41-71
Person of Interest or Crime and Surveillance on Post-9/11 Network TV (Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska)....Pages 73-88
Front Matter ....Pages 89-89
A Televised Social Problem Construction? Pushing Back Against the Invisibility of the Male Rape Victim in American Crime (Dimitris Akrivos)....Pages 91-119
The ‘Cool Girl’ Strikes Back? A Socio-Legal Analysis of Gone Girl (Amanda Spalding)....Pages 121-145
Neoliberal Enticements, Neoliberal Dangers: An Ethnographic Content Analysis of Everyday Sexuality in Fresh Meat, Greek, and Sweet Vicious (Demetris Hadjigeorgiou)....Pages 147-174
Front Matter ....Pages 175-175
Wrongful Conviction, Pop Culture, and Achieving Justice in the Digital Age (Greg Stratton)....Pages 177-201
Aftermath: The True Crime Memoir Comes of Age (Jean Murley)....Pages 203-229
Front Matter ....Pages 231-231
Popular Culture, Populism and the Figure of the ‘Criminal’ On the Rising Popular Support of Outlaw Bikers and Anti-Establishment Resentment (Tereza Kuldova)....Pages 233-258
Instagraff—The Influence of Web 2.0, Social Media, and User-Created Content Upon Graffiti Culture Performed in Cyber/Space (Nicola Harding)....Pages 259-286
Front Matter ....Pages 287-287
Portrayals of Middle Eastern Background Communities as Criminal in Australian Popular Media (Megan McElhone)....Pages 289-314
Modern Sports as a Deviant Practice? How Not to Play Sports According to the Islamic Online Fatâwâ (Alberto Testa)....Pages 315-334
Conclusion: Popular Criminology Revisited (Dimitris Akrivos, Alexandros K. Antoniou)....Pages 335-338
Back Matter ....Pages 339-343

Citation preview

CRIME, DEVIANCE AND POPULAR CULTURE International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Dimitris Akrivos and Alexandros K. Antoniou

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CRIME, MEDIA AND CULTURE

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture

Series Editors Michelle Brown Department of Sociology University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN, USA Eamonn Carrabine Department of Sociology University of Essex Colchester, UK

This series aims to publish high quality interdisciplinary scholarship for research into crime, media and culture. As images of crime, harm and punishment proliferate across new and old media there is a growing recognition that criminology needs to rethink its relations with the ascendant power of spectacle. This international book series aims to break down the often rigid and increasingly hardened boundaries of mainstream criminology, media and communication studies, and cultural studies. In a late modern world where reality TV takes viewers into cop cars and carceral spaces, game shows routinely feature shame and suffering, teenagers post ‘happy slapping’ videos on YouTube, both cyber bullying and ‘justice for’ campaigns are mainstays of social media, and insurrectionist groups compile footage of suicide bomb attacks for circulation on the Internet, it is clear that images of crime and control play a powerful role in shaping social practices. It is vital then that we become versed in the diverse ways that crime and punishment are represented in an era of global interconnectedness, not least since the very reach of global media networks is now unparalleled. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture emerges from a call to rethink the manner in which images are reshaping the world and criminology as a project. The mobility, malleability, banality, speed, and scale of images and their distribution demand that we engage both old and new theories and methods and pursue a refinement of concepts and tools, as well as innovative new ones, to tackle questions of crime, harm, culture, and control. Keywords like image, iconography, information flows, the counter-visual, and ‘social’ media, as well as the continuing relevance of the markers, signs, and inscriptions of gender, race, sexuality, and class in cultural contests mark the contours of the crime, media and culture nexus. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15057

Dimitris Akrivos  •  Alexandros K. Antoniou Editors

Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Editors Dimitris Akrivos School of Law, Criminal Justice & Computing Canterbury Christ Church University Canterbury, UK

Alexandros K. Antoniou School of Law University of Essex Colchester, UK

Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-04911-9    ISBN 978-3-030-04912-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04912-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018964124 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Bob Thomas / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all of those who took each step with us—from the first call for papers to the final submission. It was a pleasure working with you. We learnt a lot. It is your work that makes this book valuable. This collection would not have been possible without Palgrave’s editorial team, who have been a model of professionalism throughout this process. We wish to extend our sincere gratitude to Josie Taylor, who shared our vision for this book from the very outset. We would also like to express our special appreciation to the Crime, Media and Culture Series editors for their useful suggestions. We are particularly indebted to Evangelos Alexandrakis, Georgia Vassalou and Georgia Taratsa, who have stood by us during every struggle and all our successes. Finally, our heartfelt thanks go to our loving and caring families for their encouragement and unconditional support.

v

Contents

1 Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular Culture  1 Dimitris Akrivos and Alexandros K. Antoniou

Part I The Twenty-First-Century Fictional Detective

  11

2 Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Bridge 13 Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen 3 The Representation of Crime and Criminals in the TV Series Sherlock and Elementary: A Corpus Study 41 Archontoula Menti 4  Person of Interest or Crime and Surveillance on Post-9/11 Network TV 73 Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska

vii

viii Contents

Part II Negotiating Gender Expectations and Sexual Mores through Popular Culture

  89

5 A Televised Social Problem Construction? Pushing Back Against the Invisibility of the Male Rape Victim in American Crime 91 Dimitris Akrivos 6 The ‘Cool Girl’ Strikes Back? A Socio-­Legal Analysis of Gone Girl121 Amanda Spalding 7 Neoliberal Enticements, Neoliberal Dangers: An Ethnographic Content Analysis of Everyday Sexuality in Fresh Meat, Greek, and Sweet Vicious147 Demetris Hadjigeorgiou

Part III True Crime and the Quest for Justice

 175

8 Wrongful Conviction, Pop Culture, and Achieving Justice in the Digital Age177 Greg Stratton 9 Aftermath: The True Crime Memoir Comes of Age203 Jean Murley

Part IV Mainstreaming Deviant Subcultures

 231

10 Popular Culture, Populism and the Figure of the ‘Criminal’ On the Rising Popular Support of Outlaw Bikers and Anti-­Establishment Resentment233 Tereza Kuldova

 Contents 

ix

11 Instagraff—The Influence of Web 2.0, Social Media, and User-Created Content Upon Graffiti Culture Performed in Cyber/Space259 Nicola Harding

Part V Racialisation, Islamophobia and Popular Culture

 287

12 Portrayals of Middle Eastern Background Communities as Criminal in Australian Popular Media289 Megan McElhone 13 Modern Sports as a Deviant Practice? How Not to Play Sports According to the Islamic Online Fatâwâ315 Alberto Testa 14 Conclusion: Popular Criminology Revisited335 Dimitris Akrivos and Alexandros K. Antoniou Index339

Notes on Contributors

Dimitris Akrivos  is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Law, Criminal Justice and Computing of Canterbury Christ Church University. His research interests lie mainly at the intersection between law, criminology and cultural studies with a particular focus on violence, sexual deviance and mental health (as well as their representations in news and fictional media). His book The Rise of Extreme Porn (co-authored with Alexandros K. Antoniou) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. He was involved as a data researcher in the ‘Reading the Riots’ project developed by The Guardian and the London School of Economics, which offered an insight into the social causes behind the 2011 England riots. Alexandros K. Antoniou  is a Lecturer in Media Law at the School of Law of the University of Essex. His research interests lie principally within the fields of communications law, intellectual property asset management and cybercrime. He is the lead author of The Rise of Extreme Porn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and a legal correspondent for the European Audiovisual Observatory, reporting regularly on matters concerning media law and regulation. He was awarded a PhD in Law by The City Law School (City University London). He also completed an MA in Cultural and Creative Industries (King’s College London) and an LLM in Media Law (City University London), after having read law at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has previously held academic appointments at Birkbeck, University of London; Glasgow Caledonian University, London; the University of West London and the European Business xi

xii 

Notes on Contributors

School London. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Accredited Mediator. Demetris Hadjigeorgiou  is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Roehampton. He has previously lectured at Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of West London. His research interests lie at the intersection of popular culture, politics, pedagogy and crime and deviance. Nicola Harding  is a lecturer at Lancaster University. Her PhD examines the everyday experiences of women subject to community punishment using visual, creative and participatory methods. Prior to this, she secured a Santander fellowship to travel to Valparaiso, Chile, to complete a photo-ethnographic study of Latin American graffiti and street art. Working closely with graffiti artists in both Stoke-on-Trent and Valparaiso, Harding continued researching graffiti in online spaces. Her research interests include visual criminology, feminist criminology, community and the city, and qualitative research methods. Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska  is an assistant professor at the Department of English Philology, University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland, where she teaches film and media studies. She has published articles and edited volumes devoted to contemporary television and film, conspiracy theories, William Gibson’s prose and cultural representations of the city. Her research focuses on the theoretical and practical aspects of reimagining and repurposing iconic literary characters. Tereza Kuldova  is a social anthropologist and researcher at the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, and a visiting senior researcher at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna. She has studied the elite segment of the Indian fashion industry and the relations of production. She works on her individual research project ‘Gangs, Brands and Intellectual Property Rights: Interdisciplinary Comparative Study of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs and Luxury Brands’ funded by the Norwegian Research Council. She is the author of Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique (2016) and editor of Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (2013), as well as Urban Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia (2017). She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology and founder of the Extreme Anthropology Research Network. Megan McElhone  is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia. McElhone researches processes of c­ riminalisation and racialisation, with a focus on the policing of Middle Eastern background communities in Australia.

  Notes on Contributors 

xiii

Archontoula  Menti  is a linguist researcher with specialisation in computational linguistics. Graduate of the Faculty of Philology (Major in Linguistics) of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, she holds an MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) and also an MA in Language Technology (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and National Technical University of Athens), where she graduated first in her class. She has worked on research projects on collecting, processing and analysing language data as well as studying the aphasic speech. She has written papers and participated in linguistic conferences. Her research interests focus specifically on the fields of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, corpus-based lexicogrammar, phonetics and computational linguistics. Jean Murley  received her PhD in American Literature from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 2004. She is Associate Professor of English at Queensborough Community College in New York and teaches classes in writing and literature. Murley is an acclaimed true crime expert, and her book The Rise of True Crime: 20th Century Murder and American Popular Culture (2008) is an analysis of both the historical development and current forms of the genre. She publishes and gives TV, radio, internet and print interviews on both contemporary and historical true crime (‘Making Murderers: The Evolution of True Crime’ in A History of American Crime Fiction, 2017; ‘Documenting Murder before in Cold Blood: The 1950s Origins of True-­Crime’ in Violence in American Popular Culture, 2015). Amanda Spalding  is a Lecturer in Law and Criminology at the School of Law, Criminal Justice and Computing of Canterbury Christ Church University. She holds a PhD in Law from King’s College London. Her thesis considered the effect that the criminalisation phenomenon has on the human rights of immigrants in Europe and examines the adequacy of the European Court of Human Rights’ response to this. She also holds a first-class honours Law LLB degree from the Robert Gordon University as well as an MA in Law from King’s College London. She has previously taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her main research interests include immigration law, border criminology, human rights, criminal law, discrimination within the law, especially criminal law and practice. Jakob  Stougaard-Nielsen  is a Senior Lecturer in Scandinavian Literature in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society at University College London. He is the author of Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2017) and articles on literary studies, crime fiction, cultural studies and literary theory in anthologies

xiv 

Notes on Contributors

and journals such as Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Journal of World Literature, Book History, The Henry James Review and Journal of Scandinavian Studies. Greg Stratton  is a Lecturer in Justice and Legal Studies at RMIT University and is also the manager of The Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative at RMIT University. Stratton’s research interests focus on wrongful conviction, state crime, media and crime, and identity in the digital age. In pursuing these interests under a broader social justice agenda, he has conducted research across a range of interdisciplinary fields including criminology, sociology, marketing and education. Alberto Testa  is an Applied Sociologist of Deviance and Crime and currently an Associate Professor in Criminology at the University of West London. He has achieved Certified Sociological Practitioner status, which is granted by the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology and recognised by the US Commission on the Accreditation of Programmes in Applied and Clinical Sociology and the American Sociological Association. Testa has researched and published widely on football spectators’ violence (hooliganism) and the farright; among his publications, there is the book Football, Fascism and Fandom, which is a highly original and empirically rich study on the inner life-world of far-right ultras (hooligans).

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Fig. 3.11 Fig. 3.12

Concordance lines of ‘brother’ in SC Concordance lines of ‘friends’ in SC Concordance lines of ‘people’ in SC Concordance lines of ‘rape’ in EC Concordance lines of ‘serial killer’ in SC Concordance lines of ‘serial killer’ in EC Concordance lines of ‘assassin/s’ in SC Concordance lines of ‘gunman’ in EC Concordance lines of ‘bomber’ in SC Concordance lines of ‘abductor’ in EC Concordance lines of ‘blackmailer’ in EC Concordance lines of ‘accomplice’ in EC

48 48 48 53 57 58 59 59 60 61 62 62

xv

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5 Table 3.6 Table 3.7 Table 13.1

Sherlock and Elementary data in numbers 45 Top ten key nouns of Sherlock and Elementary47 Categories of basic keywords in Sherlock and Elementary50 Crime keywords in the Sherlock corpus 51 Crime keywords in the Elementary corpus 51 Gender of criminals and victims in SC 54 Gender of criminals and victims in EC 54 Key themes 318

xvii

1 Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular Culture Dimitris Akrivos and Alexandros K. Antoniou

Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show tells the story of Truman Burbank, a man unaware of the fact that he has been the star of his own reality TV show since the day he was born. When a journalist asks Christof, the director of the show, how he has managed to keep this secret from Truman for so long, he replies: ‘We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented. It’s as simple as that.’ Truman thinks he is an ordinary man living an ordinary life, but his entire world is a lie: the place where he lives is a television set with cameras hidden everywhere; everyone around him, including his wife and friends, are actors playing their roles. When he finally finds out the truth, he decides to break free from his comfortable mediated ‘cage’ and explore what lies beyond the world Christof and his team have built for him. Released in 1998, The Truman Show was at the time regarded mainly as an exaggerated satire of the increasingly popular D. Akrivos (*) Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. K. Antoniou University of Essex, Colchester, UK © The Author(s) 2019 D. Akrivos, A. K. Antoniou (eds.), Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04912-6_1

1

2 

D. Akrivos and A. K. Antoniou

reality television and the media’s intrusion into people’s lives (Miller, 2018). Two decades later, Weir’s film seems largely prescient. This is not just because of the plethora of reality television shows like Big Brother, Survivor, The Real Housewives and Keeping up with the Kardashians currently being produced and airing worldwide. It is mainly because the media have, in the twenty-first century, become such an integral part of our everyday lives that many of us are effectively producing and starring in our very own reality shows through our constant Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Snapchats and so on. In line with Christof ’s aforementioned statement about accepting the reality of the world we are presented with, the media’s influence in this process is crucial and often sought after. However, although Truman was successful in escaping the mediated reality he was living in, this is almost impossible to achieve nowadays. Contemporary popular culture—in the form of Netflix, Twitter and Instagram stories, the new iPhone, Taylor Swift’s latest album, a game of Fortnite or even Hulk Hogan’s sex tape—is pervasive and has real-life implications. On the day these lines are being written (30 May 2018), Donald Trump, former host of The Apprentice, posted a Twitter message that reads, ‘Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing.’ This is not another Truman Show-like satire involving two reality TV stars casually exchanging views on crime and justice-related issues. The accompanying picture of Trump and Kardashian in the White House’s Oval Office serves as a good reminder of that. This is 2018 and Donald Trump is the 45th president of the United States; the #MeToo social media movement has given a voice to victims of sexual assault, going as far as to challenge Brett Kavanaugh’s US Supreme Court nomination; and an increasing number of true crime documentaries like Netflix’s Making a Murderer put real-life crime cases under a microscope, considering possible miscarriages of justice while attracting millions of viewers along the way. Before we look more closely at the complex, modern-day connections between crime, deviance and popular culture, it is essential to first briefly explore the historical context in which this concept of ‘popular culture’ emerged. Classic and contemporary scholarly attempts to define popular culture often emphasise its links to the capitalist market economy of modern societies, largely considering it a highly commercial, homogenised ­culture

  Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular… 

3

which is mass produced for mass consumption. Key theorists of the ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition (which dominated the relevant cultural discussions until the middle of the twentieth century) saw this allegedly inferior culture of the masses as a serious threat to the high culture of the elite and likely to lead to anarchy (Arnold, 1960; Leavis, 2009). The Frankfurt School regarded the homogenising power of popular culture as a means to achieve conformity and maintain social authority (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2006). In the second half of the twentieth century, however, the rise of postmodernism led to the rejection of ‘the great divide’ between high art and popular culture (Huyssen, 1986), focusing primarily on the heterogeneity rather than homogeneity of the latter and the opportunities it offers for a plurality of voices to be heard (Lyotard, 1984). Whether involving a juxtaposition between high and low, dominant and subordinate cultures or even as an ‘anything goes’ culture breaking away from the cultural elitism of modernism, the notion of popular culture is inextricably intertwined with cultural conflict and debate (Storey, 2018). Although its entertainment value should not be underestimated, twenty-first-century popular culture does not merely seek to provide an escape from mundane reality but reflects real-life anxieties and constitutes a dynamic arena where the nature, causes and appropriate responses to different social problems are defined, debated and negotiated (Maratea & Monahan, 2016). Cultural criminology has drawn attention to the popular cultural portrayals of crime and deviance, aiming not just to explore their role in shaping public attitudes but also to closely examine the ‘microcircuits of knowledge regarding crime, deviance, and the societal reaction to these phenomena’; microcircuits which ‘often feed each other or blend into one another’ (Websdale & Ferrell, 1999, p. 349; emphasis in the original). As the boundaries between social and media reality become increasingly fluid in our postmodern world, images ‘bounce endlessly one off the other’ creating an ‘infinite hall of [mediated] mirrors’ (Ferrell, 1999, p. 397). Therefore, any attempt to understand the meaning of crime and deviance, and the politics of social control outside their popular cultural representations, would be seriously deficient. Although in recent years there has been a growing scholarly interest in how crime and deviance are represented in popular culture and what the potential social consequences of such representations are, it has been

4 

D. Akrivos and A. K. Antoniou

­ ifficult for academic research to keep up with the ever-expanding and d multifaceted sphere of the twenty-first-century popular culture. This collection explores the links between crime, deviance and popular culture in our highly mediatised era with a view to offering an insight into the cultural processes through which different practices acquire a criminal or deviant status and are often identified as social problems. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, the book addresses these issues by bringing together UK and international scholars with different areas of specialisation in order to provide an up-to-date analysis of some important and topical issues in contemporary popular culture. More specifically, the collection looks at different aspects of popular culture (from fictional television shows and films to true crime podcasts and memoirs, outlaw motorcycle clubs, graffiti, sports and more), examining a wide range of relevant case studies through the lens of different theories of crime and deviance. The studies included in this collection do not seek to provide a comprehensive analysis of every single aspect of contemporary popular culture, but to offer an insight into its dynamic, fast-paced, heterogeneous landscape, advancing the existing scholarship on the subject by raising questions, introducing new perspectives and opening up avenues for further research. The collection comprises five thematic parts. Part I brings together chapters looking at how the detective/crime solver is represented in contemporary television and crime fiction. In Chap. 2, Jakob Stougaard-­ Nielsen explores how the deviant female detective in Scandinavian crime fiction is used to engage audiences in considerations of social trust and equality in the contemporary welfare state. Drawing on examples of neuro-diverse detectives in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the TV show The Bridge, the research focuses on fictional representations of autism and considers the apparent paradox that socially dysfunctional and non-empathetic detectives, such as Lisbeth Salander and Saga Norén, have become globally celebrated as heroines embodying social justice and egalitarianism. Archontoula Menti’s study in Chap. 3 investigates the representation of crime and criminals through the language used in two contemporary crime TV shows based on the Sherlock Holmes detective stories, Sherlock and Elementary. Combining two types of linguistic analysis, corpus

  Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular… 

5

l­inguistics and critical discourse analysis, the chapter suggests that the two shows follow gender stereotypes in their representation of criminals and address contemporary aspects of crime in their stories such as terrorism and organised crime. In Chap. 4, Anna Krawczyk-Łaskarzewska examines the narrative and ideological aspects of portraying the contemporary surveillance state in the American TV show Person of Interest. The analysis highlights the inherent ambiguity of the discourse of surveillance and security. It suggests that Person of Interest goes beyond the generic confines of science fiction and crime drama in order to address the anxieties of the post-9/11 world, allegedly on the brink of technological singularity. The chapter also discusses human and non-human character development in the show and draws attention to the ways in which the demands of mainstream storytelling may have undermined its subversive potential. Part II considers popular culture as an arena where gender expectations and sexual mores are debated and negotiated. In Chap. 5, Dimitris Akrivos offers an ethnographic content analysis of ABC’s American Crime, discussing the role of popular television in social problem construction and evaluating its contribution to the demarginalisation of the male rape victim. His study highlights the blaming and stigmatisation of the latter, the shortcomings of the dominant feminist framing of sexual victimisation as well as the failure of the criminal justice system to effectively handle male rape cases. The author concludes that ‘socially aware’ TV shows like American Crime could serve as a form of ‘edutainment’: they have the strong potential to push back against dominant male rape myths and offer a better insight into the victims’ experiences, getting audiences much more emotionally involved than pertinent factual sources of information. In Chap. 6, Amanda Spalding considers Gillian Flynn’s commercially successful Gone Girl story and its relevance to the wider society and the law. Focusing on the backlash phenomenon, this study examines the relationship between Gone Girl and recent legal and political developments and debates concerning rape law. The chapter suggests that Gone Girl relies on and reinforces many of the problematic aspects of the current treatment of rape in the criminal justice system. An alternative exploration of Gone Girl as a nuanced portrayal of natural justice, especially in

6 

D. Akrivos and A. K. Antoniou

light of the #MeToo movement and other popular culture developments, is also offered. In Chap. 7, Demetris Hadjigeorgiou offers an ethnographic content analysis of three comedy dramas set in universities (Fresh Meat, Greek and Sweet/Vicious), examining how these institutions are constructed as sites of neoliberal, everyday sexuality. His study argues that the shows largely portray controversial aspects of everyday sexuality in universities (e.g. laddishness) as existing on a continuum with its enticing aspects and not as deviant or criminal outliers. Drawing on Foucauldian neoliberalism, his research examines two key dimensions of this continuum: universities as sexual markets and sexual agency. The chapter underlines the mediated nature of contemporary sexuality and makes suggestions on how to incorporate pop cultural analysis into efforts to combat everyday sexuality’s problematic elements in universities. Part III examines how notions of crime, justice and victimisation are made sense of in true crime narratives. In particular, in Chap. 8, Greg Stratton considers how the pop culture success of Serial and Making a Murderer have exposed a significant, receptive audience to the true crime genre of entertainment. It is argued that digital technologies create opportunities for audiences to commit to online ‘participatory practices’ supporting the claims of wrongful convictions via social media. The study explores how digital media converge with narratives of wrongful conviction to develop public perceptions of miscarriages of justice. The chapter advocates that the combination of narratives of wrongful and the digital platforms offer disruptive effects in which audiences can consume, re-­ consume, adapt and respond to criminal justice issues. In Chap. 9, Jean Murley discusses the growing popularity and key features of true crime memoirs with reference to four key texts: Jo Ann Beard’s The Fourth State of Matter, Terri Jentz’s Strange Piece of Paradise, Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Sarah Perry’s After the Eclipse. The chapter argues that, as the true crime genre has evolved and developed in recent years, memoirs written by survivors of violent crime have become more prominent and popular, comprising an important part of the true crime genre. It is suggested that, compared to older, more traditional true crime texts written by journalists or true crime experts, the work of true crime memoirists tends to be more heavily contextualised and often

  Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular… 

7

expresses criticism of the genre as a whole. The study concludes that victims and survivors have strong claims to authenticity and redefine victimhood, arguing for a feminist critique of misogynistic violence as they articulate their experiences of the aftermath of crime. Part IV is concerned with the politics of ‘mainstreaming’ what were in the past largely deemed to be deviant subcultures. In Chap. 10, Tereza Kuldova documents how outlaw motorcycle clubs have, over the decades, morphed into strong transnational organisations engaged in their own self-commodification and been labelled as organised crime groups by law enforcement. The chapter looks at the different ways in which these organisations engage the superimpositions of fact and fiction in order to mobilise new supporters. It considers why more and more people in Europe align themselves ideologically with the outlaw bikers, support them and share their anti-establishment resentments—against the ‘weak’ state, ‘official’ media or politicians. In Chap. 11, Nicola Harding looks at the influence of Web 2.0, social media and user-created content upon graffiti culture performed in cyber/ space. Her research discusses social and technological advances that have prompted graffiti culture to appear ‘mainstream’. Building on the works of Goffman, Burgess and Baudrillard, the study analyses images from social media accounts of graffiti writers. The author argues that online representations of graffiti culture are no longer necessarily based upon sensory, deviant, risk-taking associated with urban graffiti. Therefore, graffiti shared on social media cannot be considered a true representation of graffiti subculture, but a procession of simulacra, developing new forms of graffiti culture dislocated from graffiti’s deviant origins. Part V addresses issues of racialisation and Islamophobia in popular culture. In Chap. 12, Megan McElhone offers a qualitative content analysis of three Australian popular media texts (The Combination, Underbelly: The Golden Mile and Down Under) that frame Middle Eastern background communities in Australia as being crime-prone. The chapter argues that these texts represent Middle Eastern background communities as having proclivities for gang membership, firearms-related violence, and disregard for police and the rule of law. Finally, in Chap. 13, Alberto Testa investigates how modern sports can be framed as a deviant practice by Muslim spiritual leaders in Islamic

8 

D. Akrivos and A. K. Antoniou

online Fatâwâ (authoritative, yet non-binding, opinions or interpretations issued by a qualified jurist or mufti on matters pertaining to the Islamic law). The analysis suggests that, although part of the Muslim world has accepted organised sports as a symbol of the modernisation of Muslim societies, these are still largely considered deviant by cyber-­ imams, being viewed as clear examples of contemporary society’s materialism, individualism and secularism and thereby a religious and moral distraction.

References Arnold, M. (1960). Culture and Anarchy. London: Cambridge University Press. Ferrell, J.  (1999). Cultural Criminology. Annual Review of Sociology, 25(1), 395–418. Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. (2006). Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. In M. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.), Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (2nd ed., pp. 41–72). Boston: Blackwell. Huyssen, A. (1986). After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. London: Macmillan. Leavis, F. R. (2009). Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture. In J. Storey (Ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (4th ed., pp. 12–20). Abingdon: Pearson Education. Lyotard, J.  F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Maratea, R.  J., & Monahan, B. (2016). Social Problems in Popular Culture. Bristol: Polity Press. Miller, J. (2018, June 5). Twenty Years Later, Everything Is the Truman Show. Vanity Fair [Online]. Retrieved May 30, 2018, from https://www.vanityfair. com/hollywood/2018/06/truman-show-anniversary-jim-carrey-peter-weirlaura-linney Storey, J.  (2018). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (8th ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. The Truman Show. (1998). [Film] Directed by Peter Weir. USA: Paramount Pictures.

  Introduction: Crime and Deviance through the Lens of Popular… 

9

Trump, D. (2018). Great Meeting with @KimKardashian Today, Talked about Prison Reform and Sentencing. [Twitter] 30 May. Retrieved May 30, 2018, from https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1001961235838103552 Websdale, N., & Ferrell, J.  (1999). Taking the Trouble. In J.  Ferrell & N.  Websdale (Eds.), Making Trouble: Cultural Constructions of Crime, Deviance, and Control (pp. 349–364). Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Part I The Twenty-First-Century Fictional Detective

2 Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Bridge Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen

Introduction The global success of Scandinavian crime novels, movies and TV series, such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005), The Killing (2007, 2009, 2012) and The Bridge (2011, 2013, 2015, 2018), has, to a large extent, depended on, what are generally perceived to be, their refreshingly ‘new’, mysteriously unsociable and unsentimental female heroines: the goth-­ hacker Lisbeth Salander and the socially dysfunctional police detectives Sarah Lund and Saga Norén. In bestselling crime novels, blockbuster film adaptations, globally disseminated TV series, novelizations and transnational TV adaptations, the deviant detectives of ‘Nordic Noir’ (deviance understood here as behaviour that violates generally accepted norms in a group or society) have infused the crime genre with recognizably new and complex characters, whose personal struggles, especially difficulties with J. Stougaard-Nielsen (*) School of European Languages, Culture and Society, University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Akrivos, A. K. Antoniou (eds.), Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04912-6_2

13

14 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

interpersonal relationships, in intricate ways, complement the violent crimes they are investigating and the troubled societies in which they navigate. These female investigators and detectives, to which we can also include non-Scandinavian ones, such as the bipolar Carrie Mathison in the US TV series Homeland, have not only attracted a wide audience because they provide novel characters who deviate from the gender norm of the still male-dominated global genre of crime fiction; that is, they take on characteristics usually associated with hard-boiled male detectives and refuse to conform to generic female stereotypes such as the classic femme fatale or the passive victim. Salander, Lund and Norén, in fact, also deviate from the late-modern tradition of feminist crime fiction in Scandinavia and beyond. It is particular to these Scandinavian female detectives that they are presented as socially dysfunctional and even recognisably neurodiverse, somewhere on the autism spectrum. Such more or less explicit diagnoses dissociate them from normative feminine characteristics such as being caring, empathetic mothers, wives, companions and co-workers. Now forming a veritable genre trait in ‘Nordic Noir’, it is arguably still unclear why this troubled deviant female detective—deviant both in terms of genre expectations and in contrast to a perceived notion of ‘neuro-normalcy’—has attracted a wide global audience, and why particularly Scandinavian narratives return to this character or trope. That the deviant detective amounts to a surprising cultural obsession was reflected in a Danish newspaper article that concluded: ‘We are obsessed with emotionally frigid masculine women: Why is the brilliant, sickly woman suddenly everywhere?’ (Brovall, 2013). In the UK, taking stock of the British fascination with female protagonists in Scandinavian TV series, The Guardian (2012, n.p.) produced the satirical Venn diagram, ‘Anatomy of a Scandi-Protagonist’, which illustrated traits shared between Lund, Norén and Birgitte Nyborg (the main character in the Danish political TV drama Borgen), including their shared penchant for ‘trouble with society’ and ‘trouble with social skills’. In the following, I shall explore what function the detective’s neurodiversity, her deviance from societal, gendered and generic norms, has in Scandinavian crime narratives and attempt to answer why this detective has generated such a wide interest. These stories do present stock typologies of psychopathic serial killers and other mentally disabled criminals,

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

15

meant to excite fear and suspense, representing transgressions of societal norms to be reined in by maverick hard-boiled detectives. However, my assumption is that their preoccupation with mentally and socially diverse or disabled heroines inserts a dominant sentimental storyline into the melodramatic crime narrative. It is the sentimental personal stories of the deviant detectives, which make these narratives well placed to explore ‘the pleasures and challenges of community—with sentimental fiction supplying the original template for that community’, following Leonard Cassuto’s observation that ‘inside every crime story is a sentimental narrative that’s trying to come out’ (2009, p. 3). I shall argue that the deviant detective, by embodying a gendered conflict between normative empathy and social dysfunction, has become a seminal figure for exploring contemporary conflicts in the neoliberal welfare state through the staging of sentimental negotiations of interpersonal trust on a background of wider social dissolution and violent crimes. Trust, in particular, can be seen as a founding principle and the very kit that holds together the Scandinavian welfare state (Rothstein, 2005). From my perspective, it is exactly a perceived threat to the cohesion of these welfare societies (and societies beyond the Scandinavian region) that has made interpersonal and social trust a central preoccupation in the hard-boiled, sentimental mode of ‘Nordic Noir’—the ‘brilliant, sickly woman’ is seemingly everywhere, I argue, because she is used as a figure through which to explore the ‘pleasures and challenges’ of community, interpersonal and social trust.

 he Rise of the Deviant Detective in the Post-­ T Welfare State As generic types, especially Salander and Norén challenge the ­traditionally gendered image of women detectives. However, they also deviate from the collectivist values and social norms associated with the Social-Democratic Scandinavian welfare state—at least in its persistent early-twentieth-century image of a ‘people’s home’ (folkhem). Swedish prime minister Per Albin Hansson’s vision in 1928 of an idyllic Swedish ‘people’s home’, which would replace a society mired in class

16 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

divisions, had, in the eyes of many, materialized in a near-perfect nation-family characterized by equality, mutual understanding, low unemployment and a general optimism for the future following steady economic growth during ‘the record years’ in the decades following the Second World War. As I have discussed elsewhere, Scandinavian crime fiction at the turn of the millennium operates within a neoliberal post-welfare state, nostalgic about a utopian golden age and critical of the perceived dissolution of trust and social responsibility (Stougaard-Nielsen, 2017). In popular crime narratives since the 1990s, detectives may successfully bring criminals to justice, yet they are troubled by a sense of uncontrollable and irreversible social and moral decay to which they themselves remain mere spectators, leaving them in a firm grip of melancholia. Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander is a well-known example of this Scandinavian detective. He is a witness to the deterioration of the welfare state and his own family, while maintaining the hope that he might help restore both to their idyllic past. Scandinavian crime fiction is commonly considered obsessed with domestic realism and social critique, with morose detectives rummaging in the shadows of the otherwise well-functioning welfare states of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The moniker ‘Nordic Noir’, as used to describe the dark, cold, indignant and melancholic crime narratives which have come out of Scandinavia in the twenty-first century, is embodied in the stereotypical Scandinavian male detective. It has, indeed, become a cliché of the genre that at first male and, more recently, female investigators need to struggle with and refract their conflict-­ridden private lives through their investigation of violent crimes and crumbling societies. Mankell’s Wallander, Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck, Gunnar Staalesen’s Varg Veum, Stieg Larsson’s Mikael Blomkvist, Arnaldur Indridason’s Erlendur and Håkan Nesser’s Van Veeteren are all male detectives who must cope with strained family relations. Some are prone to heavy drinking and melancholia, and they are all unhealthily obsessed with police work. What has been described as the male-dominated ‘ulcer school’ has been matched by the dramatic rise in narratives featuring female sleuths in the new millennium, such as Liza Marklund’s Annika Bengtzon and

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

17

Elsebeth Egholm’s Dicte Svendsen, both maverick journalists whose inability to maintain a balanced family life and their troubled interpersonal relations stand in stark contrast to their investigative abilities. However, in their different ways they are all searching for meaningful interpersonal ties, homes and relationships at the same time as the crimes they investigate expose such ties, social norms and institutions as at best fragile if not outright dangerous. Such narratives featuring postfeminist investigators often centre on their (in)abilities to juggle their private lives as wives and mothers with professional ambitions in still male-dominated professions such as journalism. These are, I would argue, essentially sentimental stories about persistent gender inequalities in the modern welfare state and attempts to establish new norms for collective feminine identities. Their detectives are, according to Nete Schmidt (2015, p. 436), ‘alienated as regards the expectations of a normal feminine/female life, and they constantly battle the threat of being labelled as deviants in trying to overcome the dichotomous vulnerability expressed in their private versus official existence’. Marklund’s Bengtzon, for instance, was a new heroine in Scandinavian crime fiction in the late 1990s. Her Sweden is not a ‘lost paradise’ like Wallander’s, but one in which individual idealism and progress may lead to a brighter future, at least for a woman, who is not afraid to take on the patriarchal society, even if it means to live with the anxiety of not quite living up to the ideals and persistent norms of motherhood. In this way, Marklund’s Bengtzon series may be read as an example of a post-welfare state crime novel as it appears to be accepting that the big collective ­project of the ‘people’s home’ has shattered into ‘countless small and individual’ projects (Svensson, 1999, p. 182). A similar critique of ‘covert neoliberalism’ has been levelled against Stieg Larsson’s hyper-individualist heroine, Lisbeth Salander, whose private vendetta against misogynist rapists and serial killers could appear to merely reproduce the symbolic violence of the individualist and competitive society, which she is seemingly called upon to destroy (Stenport & Alm, 2009). According to such a view, the social criticism we have come to expect of Scandinavian crime fiction has dissipated in the hands of crime writers in the early years of the twenty-first century, where collective social responsibility has subordinated the aspirations of the individual

18 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

who has learned to ‘perform’ successfully on the stage of the narcissistic, neoliberal state. However, while the deviant, neurodiverse detectives may suggest a continuation of this tradition of individualistic, aspirational female sleuths, her condition signals a more complicated—at times intimate, at other times critical—relationship between the welfare society and the individual as represented in crime fiction.

Nordic Narratives of Proximity The close relationship between the police procedural and the normative contrasts between social order and deviance in the welfare state is perhaps best illustrated in a rare Danish serial killer TV crime series, wherein we come closer to what is truly novel about the rise of the deviant female detective. In Den som dræber (TV2, 2011; Those Who Kill), written by the bestselling crime writer Elsebeth Egholm, the police detective Katrine Ries Jensen is a recognizable Scandinavian detective with a dedication to her work bordering on monomania. In the police unit, she is under pressure to prove herself as a deputy chief inspector surrounded, as she is, mostly by male colleagues with a male chief inspector. Together with the obsessive forensic psychologist, Thomas Schaeffer, they investigate several brutal serial killings over ten episodes in recognizable contemporary Danish environments. However, as the creators’ description of the series intimates, the setting is to be understood as a near-future, dystopian vision of a wrecked Danish welfare state, where the hitherto almost non-existent psychotic serial killers now roam the streets due to a breakdown in welfare services: Those who Kill is a crime series about a violent criminal who is surrounded by fear and mystique—the serial killer. Up until now, we have been able to curtail their activities with early—and effective—interventions via the safety net of a comprehensive social welfare system in Scandinavia. But times have changed. Borders have opened up, social welfare is in decline, and slowly but surely the whole system has become imbued with a sense of resigned impotence and callous disregard for those it once sought to rescue. The rifts in the net have become so large that bigger fish are slipping

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

19

through the mesh, and as a result, a new type of crime is starting to burgeon—killings not grounded in traditional motives and patterns of behaviour. You need a very particular kind of person to catch the serial killer; someone who knows and understands the killer’s dark side, and the fantasies that plague him—someone like our two lead characters, Deputy Chief Inspector (DCI) Katrine Ries Jensen and forensic psychiatrist Thomas Schaeffer […], who in very different ways each possess a deep psychological understanding that connects them to the killer’s victims and to the killer himself, driving them to pursue each case to the end of the line, again and again. (Trust Nordisk, Those Who Kill Pressbook, n.d.)

Those Who Kill is arguably the most explicit example of how contemporary Scandinavian TV crime drama foregrounds the connection between social deviance and the protection of the welfare state, wherein the serial detective is intimately ‘connected’ to the monstrous serial killer. It is, to use Gill Plain’s (2001, p. 223) term, an example of a ‘narrative of proximity’: ‘a discourse in which the other proves uncomfortably similar to the bourgeois individual self ’. Yvonne Leffler (2013, pp. 52–53) has also noticed this trait in recent Scandinavian crime fiction explaining that [t]he reason why the detective eventually catches the criminal is their similarity. The investigation requires a detective almost as obsessed, guilty, and contaminated as the killer; that is, a detective who has experienced, or is emotionally involved in, something similar to what made the killer into a killer. Therefore, at times, the story is just as much about the detective’s conflicts and emotional fragmentation as it is about the crime that is to be solved.

This motif where, for instance, the ‘murder stirs up the investigator’s hidden memories, personal secrets, emotional traumas, and even questions concerning their own origins’ is particularly prevalent in crime stories with a female protagonist, Leffler (2013, p. 53) argues, ‘as if it is possible to dig deeper into the consequences of crime, especially questions of victimhood and sexual violence, through a female investigator’. The gendered proclivity for proximity between female investigator and criminal may also stem from its connection to a traditional trope in crime fiction where the approximation has tended to be between detective and

20 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

victim. Kathleen A. McHugh (2018, p. 537) has argued that the crime genre traditionally exhibited a ‘problematic conflation of the female detective with the usually female (or feminized) victim’, and any progressive renewal of gender norms in the crime novel with a female protagonist and the female detective’s agency itself ‘is offset by “archaic” representations of victimized femininity’. McHugh suggests that, by reaffirming gender norms of the objectified feminine victim through narratives that sport acting female investigators, contemporary TV drama achieves wide appeal by staying both ‘current and familiar’. As mavericks with strained, if not directly adversarial, relations to their families and the wider society, these deviant detectives appear the least likely to pose as a bulwark against challenges to the ingrained social norms and values of the ‘people’s home’. Figuratively and literally, they appear incapable of having a ‘home’ in the first place. In The Girl who Played with Fire, Lisbeth Salander leaves boxes of flat-packed IKEA furniture for her new apartment unopened, illustrating her inability of creating a ‘home’ for herself; in the first season of The Killing, Sarah Lund repeatedly postpones her departure from the Danish police to join her Swedish partner in their new home, due to her obsession with the case of a murdered young woman; and Saga Norén’s apartment, in the first season of The Bridge, mostly doubles as her solitary work place. That detectives deviate from the norms and collectivist values of the wider society is significant as the Scandinavian police procedural, according to Michael Tapper (2011, p.  38), ‘is different from other genres, because when a police man is confronted with the criminal, the crime is not only an individual conflict but also involves a moral nature, an ideological conflict between individual and society, normality and deviance’. The detective as a guarantor of social values is challenged when such a detective embodies deviant traits that place her at odds with the norms of the wider society. Tapper is here in line with John Scaggs’ (2005, p. 99) identification of a common trait in the subgenre of the police procedural, the dominant subgenre in Scandinavian crime fiction, wherein imbuing the killer with monstrous (deviant) traits isolates the criminal’s instincts ‘“from all social, political or economic causes”, exonerating the social order of all responsibility regarding its “deviant” citizens […] [I]t returns to the clarity of black and white distinctions in which evil […] is a pure “other”

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

21

that is uncomplicatedly monstrous and inhuman.’ The detective in the police procedural, then, comes to function as ‘a powerful weapon of reassurance in the arsenal of the dominant social order’ (Scaggs, 2005, p. 98). The deviant detectives, however, question generic black-and-white differentiations between ‘social order’ and ‘deviant citizens’, self and other, from within the genre that traditionally has functioned as a reaffirmation of ‘normalcy’ against the threat of the deviant other. In a crime series such as The Bridge, the ‘borders’ between social order and monstrous other, between ‘normalcy’ and deviance, are repeatedly blurred, not only as a consequence of the socially dysfunctional detective, but also through crime plots where, apparently, ‘socially conscious’ criminals are seeking to re-establish the state’s social responsibilities through killings meant to draw attention to the state’s inability to prevent social ‘ills’ such as homelessness, animal welfare, pollution, prostitution and gender inequality. In the case of the neurodiverse detectives Salander and Norén, to whom I shall now turn, one could add that it is partly their gender but especially their neurodiverse traits and behaviours that make them simultaneously ‘current and familiar’ to a global crime fiction audience. The deviant female detective is a paradox, particularly in the context of the Scandinavian welfare societies, wherein the state and its representatives are traditionally viewed as guarantors of collectivist ideals and social empathy, but also in the context of the genre itself, where, according to Suzanne Keen (2007, p.  10), lack of empathy usually ‘spells social ­problems, danger to others, criminality, and inhumanity’; in other words, traits usually associated with deviant criminals such as serial killers. According to McHugh (2018, p. 539), ‘the neurodiverse female detective, with a compromised relationship to empathy, presents a special case that nevertheless reaches back to the genre’s literary origins.’ The neurodiverse or dysfunctional detective has a long-standing tradition including seminal examples such as Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, the latter of whom psychologists and fans have diagnosed as autistic. This tradition, according to McHugh (2018, p. 539), ‘includes asocial, alcoholic and workaholic, and physically disabled detectives and those who are neurodiverse’. To this list belong also the deviant detectives in Those Who Kill and Homeland, who ‘exhibit what the neurodiverse community refers to as the savant stereotype; that is, their protagonist’s disorder

22 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

­ roduces their genius.’ In the Scandinavian tradition, the savant detective p has relatives in Mankell’s Wallander and Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Beck, whose ‘dysfunctionalities seem to be the very reason for [their] potency’. As argued by Camilla Schwartz and E.  Ann Kaplan (2018, p.  216): ‘[t]hese male detectives […] are brilliant not in spite of their outsider position but because of it.’ Though related to savant male detectives, the empathic dysfunctions shared by savant female detectives insert them in a particularly troubled position in relation to the societal norms they are presumably called to uphold.

Diagnosing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Stieg Larsson’s Män som hatar kvinnor (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2008) has been read as an example of socially conscious Scandinavian crime fiction in its depictions of a seemingly realistic Swedish social and geographical environment. The novel’s epigraphs reference statistical data of men’s violence against women, which call into question the progressive egalitarianism of the Swedish welfare state and lend a degree of authenticity to the crime novel. Widespread violence against women is depicted as having deep roots in the past represented by Swedish Nazi serial killers and contemporary amoral representatives of the patriarchal welfare state, including lawyers and doctors, who abuse their roles as guardians and protectors of a traumatized and alienated, yet immensely resourceful and resilient, young woman, Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. In the novel, as a consequence of her work as an investigator for a private security firm, Salander is drawn into the journalist Mikael Blomkvist’s investigation of the mysterious disappearance of a young woman from the industrialist Vanger family several years in the past. Parallel to the melodramatic crime narrative, the novel’s central focus on Salander’s personal story forms a recognizable ‘narrative of proximity’, in Leffler’s (2013, p. 53) sense, in that the disappearance and suspected murder ‘stirs up [Salander’s] hidden memories, personal secrets, emotional traumas, and even questions concerning [her] own origins’: her traumatic childhood with a violent father, whose identity has been kept a secret by an

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

23

illicit cell in the police force; Salander’s attempted murder of him, provoked by his repeated violence against her mother; her own repeated institutionalizations as a young girl due to ‘diagnoses’ of social and mental dysfunctions, and her placement under guardianship—at first with Palmgren, a lawyer of moral integrity, who falls ill and is replaced by Bjurman, a sadistic lawyer bend on denying Salander her personal freedom. Her traumatic childhood is presented as the direct cause of her introvert behaviour, anti-social appearance and her deep suspicion of authorities, and is at the same time her prime asset and motivation for bringing the rapist serial killers of young women to justice by whatever means necessary. According to Leffler (2013, p. 59), [Salander] rejects all established relationships, social identities, and traditional contracts of employment. She is a fusion of incompatible gender roles, as she is an extremely clever researcher and a physically fit fighter at the same time as she is a tiny woman and a vulnerable social outcast. As a combination of threatened victim, revenging computer hacker, and feisty avenger she is paying back for her lost childhood.

She is the prototype savant detective, whose exceptional investigative skills as a hacker pertain to her social isolation. Her interpersonal dysfunctional behaviours have deep roots in a traumatic childhood, experiences of violence and incarceration, and in ‘diagnoses’ of mental dysfunctions, which leave her vulnerable to exploitation from a state-­ appointed guardian. In the now-famous scene, where Salander reclaims her independence and takes her revenge on Bjurman by documenting his rape and where she tattoos the words ‘I AM A SADISTIC PIG AND RAPIST’ into his chest, the narrator explains that in Sweden guardianship has mostly been used in cases involving mental illness. We learn about Salander’s history with social and psychiatric guardianship. When she was 13, she was committed to a psychiatric ward for children. She was considered emotionally disturbed and violent, and was unwilling to discuss her emotions, which made it difficult to diagnose her mental deficiencies. In a report used to justify her being committed and later to place her under guardianship, she is described as lacking self-awareness, she was introvert, lacked empathy, was socially inhibited with psychopathic

24 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

t­ endencies and had difficulty cooperating—a list of deficiencies which is also a rather precise description of the stereotypical deviant detective in ‘Nordic Noir’. The guardian is a central figure in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as Salander’s two guardians come to represent extremes of the paternalistic welfare state: Bjurman not only violates her body but also takes away her independence when he limits her access to her bank account. He is contrasted to Palmgren, who embodies traditional welfarist values and only accepts his guardianship if Salander agrees and decides to put her trust in him. The crime novel does not provide a ‘state solution’ to clearing Salander of her diagnosis, or a desire to ‘normalize’ her gender position, neither is her independence immediately reclaimed as a result of her contribution to the successful investigation into Harriet Vanger’s disappearance. Salander’s struggle to reclaim her independence from her state-appointed guardian in a dysfunctional, violent and corrupted welfare system is mostly concerned with her access to independent funds. When she cannot be liberated through the corrupt legal system, she takes the law into her own hands and secures access, through threats and hacking, to illicit funds placed conveniently in off-shore accounts. It is, therefore, tempting to read Salander’s deviance as proximate to the socially dysfunctional neoliberal welfare state. However, in a crime novel comprising a host of genres including financial thriller, locked-room mystery, serial killer fiction and police ­procedural, the embedded sentimental narrative largely pertains to the developing relationship between Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, which hinges on her ability to develop interpersonal trust. Towards the end of the novel, following the close of the crime plot, Salander leaves Blomkvist in the cottage on the island of Hedeby. She is angry with him following his refusal to continue their casual sexual relationship asking instead for her friendship. Not sure why she is angry and towards whom her anger is directed, Salander’s feelings for Blomkvist are ambiguous to her. Though she prefers to work alone, she had quite unexpectedly liked working with him, perhaps because he did not try to tell her how to live her life. Salander eventually returns to Blomkvist in the cottage. Unable to express her conflicting emotions, she changes into a t-shirt with the inscription: ‘I can be a regular bitch. Just try me’ (Larsson, 2008,

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

25

pp. 462–463). She admits that she likes his company, and their conversation turns to Salander’s special abilities as an investigator: ‘That’s just how it is. I know computers. I’ve never had a problem with reading a text and absorbing what it said.’ ‘Your photographic memory,’ he said softly. ‘I admit it. I just have no idea how it works. It’s not only computers and telephone networks, but the motor in my bike and T.V. sets and vacuum cleaners and chemical processes and formulae in astrophysics. I’m a nutcase, I admit it: a freak.’ Blomkvist frowned. He sat quietly for a long time. Asperger’s syndrome, he thought. Or something like that. A talent for seeing patterns and understanding abstract reasoning where other people perceive only white noise.

While unapologetically taking on the role of ‘a regular [hard-boiled] bitch’, as proclaimed on her t-shirt, her self-portrait as a ‘savant’ tech-­ nerd is revealing a shameful recognition of her own otherness, which Schwartz and Kaplan (2018, p. 216) identify as a common trait in the female detectives; yet, I shall argue, while her uncommon ‘savant’ abilities are instrumental to solving the melodramatic crime plot, which will in turn help Blomkvist re-establish his ‘trust capital’ as a financial reporter, her ‘freakishness’ and appendant social dysfunctions are central to the novel’s ‘narrative of proximity’, wherein her neurodiverse difficulties with establishing a meaningful interpersonal relation to Blomkvist represent a wider social diagnosis of the Swedish late-modern welfare state, and here Salander comes, paradoxically, to represent that which is absent from the wider community. The shame of inhabiting the position of the deviant other is, thereby, through the novel’s sentimental narrative of Salander’s Asperger’s, as diagnosed by Blomkvist, and her relation to a non-impaired companion, transferred onto the community, enveloping also the reader.

The Crime Novel and the Autism ‘Epidemic’ The detective diagnosed with Asperger’s or autism is not a novelty in recent popular culture; the diagnosis itself seems to be in tune with a widespread Zeitgeist. ‘Autism’, according to Stuart Murray (2006, p. 25),

26 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

‘(including Asperger’s syndrome, usually thought of as “high-­functioning” autism) currently occupies a place in the public consciousness that is akin to a phenomenon […] we live in a time of an autism “epidemic”’. One reason for the ubiquity of narrative representations of autism, according to Murray, is that characters with autism appear proximate to or indistinguishable from the non-autistic, yet their behaviour and mannerisms deviate considerably from the norm, and have come to figure as the very ‘personification of difference and otherness’. While considered a diagnostic category at the time of Larsson writing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in 2013 Asperger’s Syndrome was placed on a complex continuum with other pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autistic disorder, commonly referred to as ASD. These are ‘broadly characterized by repetitive behaviours and varying degrees of difficulty in social interaction and verbal and nonverbal communication’ (Badone, Nicholas, Roberts, & Kien, 2016, p. 477). The narrative appeal of fictional characters with autism is, according to Murray (2006, pp. 25–26), their apparent familiarity made uncanny by a condition that ‘supposedly defies logic and understanding’ yet enables ‘the discussion of any number of issues that circulate in the popular understanding of the human condition’. Therefore, we should think of popular cultural representations of autism as less interested in the autistic individual herself (i.e. how autism may be considered a ‘way of being in the world that does not require “treatment” or “correction”’), instead presenting the autistic character as a reflection of the non-autistic world, as being preoccupied with ‘an understanding of supposedly core human concerns, which are seen to inform and enrich the non-disabled and which work towards what [Lennard J.] Davis terms “the construction of normalcy”’ (Murray, 2008, pp.  14, 23). In the case of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander’s relationship with Blomkvist and her Asperger’s ‘diagnosis’ is used as a sentimental allegory for a dysfunctional society (where ‘men hate women’ and sexual exploitation has become the norm) in need of developing social and interpersonal trust. The ‘ontological difference’ between the neurodiverse and the ‘neuro-­ normal’ central to autism-fictions is dramatized, Murray (2006, pp. 27–28) argues, by placing ‘the individual with autism in relation to the depiction of an individual with ostensibly typical nonimpaired

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

27

b­ ehaviour’ thereby mediating ‘an idea of the human by a refractive comparison of the two’. In the Anglo-American novels and films discussed by Murray, this relationship often hinges on what he calls the ‘“sentimental savant”, a figure who displays the supposed savant abilities of the autist, especially in the realms of creativity and an understanding of supposedly core human concerns, that are seen to inform and enrich the nondisabled’. Just as Asperger’s was commonly perceived an impairment predominantly, if not exclusively, found in men, so the representation of autistic individuals in fiction and popular culture, particularly in the Anglophone world, has mostly featured male protagonists. Murray’s cases are therefore also exclusively English-language narratives, where autistic behaviour features in discussions of contemporary masculinity, where, for instance, contemporary films make ‘moral or sentimental points about masculinity and, frequently, family, and they do so largely through the use of specific genre-based narratives, especially melodrama’ (Murray, 2006, p.  28). While the popular representations in crime fiction of neurodiverse characters must be understood as involving ‘a fundamental misapprehension of the actual nature of autism’, as Murray (2006, p. 29) argues, the deviant female detectives in Scandinavian crime fiction provide ‘contemporary sentimental’ storylines wherein feminine neurodiversity becomes a paradoxical figure with which to imagine how meaningful and affective relationships may be built on interpersonal trust. Salander’s personal history of traumatic ‘othering’ and violation does not suggest that she will ever find it easy to build trusting relationships with ‘men who hate women’ (as the Swedish title points out). As a victim of sexual abuse and a patriarchal welfare state, she has good reason to distrust the men she encounters. The novel’s sentimental narrative, however, suggests that a few male characters, such as Palmgren and Blomkvist, may ultimately allow Salander to relate to others without the shame associated with her ‘diagnosis’. In the scene where Mikael considers whether Salander has Asperger’s, he, like Palmgren before him, asks Salander for her friendship defined as a relationship built on mutual respect and trust, and, importantly, a relationship she can choose to enter freely. As the popular cultural understanding of Asperger’s intimates, Salander is struggling to understand Blomkvist’s proposal, as she still lacks the necessary interpersonal awareness; yet it is crucial for the subsequent parts of the

28 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

trilogy that Salander is exposed to affective strategies, which may foster interpersonal relationships and positive change enabling her to live as an independent individual with a diagnosis in society.

Diagnosing Saga Norén While the link between a neurodiverse diagnosis and critique of the contemporary welfare state is part of Salander’s sentimental narrative, intimating that the moral corrosion of the welfare state’s ability to provide for the wellbeing of a young woman has led to her social dysfunction and distrust in others, it is still a narrative of proximity that aligns the female neurodiverse investigator with the female victim(s). As a revenge narrative, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is fundamentally different from the four-season TV-police procedural Broen/Bron (The Bridge, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2018), where the deviant detective is a representative of the state, and one whose implicit diagnosis prevents her from acting outside the protocols of the law, leading her to situations where she will have to sacrifice her relationships with unimpaired partners to uphold the moral integrity of the law and the state. On top of being a hard-boiled female detective whose behaviour transcends the norms traditionally associated with her gender, Saga Norén too is a social outsider who ‘suffers’ from an inability to respond empathetically to anyone she gets in contact with: she asks inappropriate questions, shows little concern for other people’s feelings and is neurotically following rules and regulations to the dismay of her laidback and sociable Danish colleague Martin Rohde in the first season of the serial. Her lack of social skills emphasizes her deviance from the norm, but a deviance ironically portrayed as necessary for protecting societies against border-­crossing crimes, which effortlessly criss-cross the Öresund Bridge connecting Denmark and Sweden, crimes that constantly blur the borders between the social and the individual: In season one, what at first appears to be a case of a serial ‘truth terrorist’ on a mission to avenge social injustices turns out to be a disturbed former partner’s personal vendetta against Rohde for ruining his marriage. In the following season, a case of politically motivated serial eco-terrorism turns out to involve a

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

29

disturbed man’s erotic desires for his dying sister and a plot to strengthen the stock value of a medical company; and in season three, what at first appears to be serial killings of civil-rights activists motivated by a rightwing commentator turns out to be the result of a young man’s carefully planned revenge against his biological father and those who had wronged him as a child growing up in foster homes. In the final season, the pattern is repeated when a brutal murder of the head of the Danish immigration board, suspected to involve a left-wing radical terrorist group, turns out to be linked to a son’s revenge over the individuals who had failed to prevent the killing of his father. The larger world of social insecurities linked to the globalized, neoliberal state is the smokescreen behind which ancient crime themes of revenge and jealousy leave a wake of broken, dysfunctional families. It is central to the series that the investigations’ revelation of the personal and familial motives behind the crimes is ‘proximate’ to the detectives’ personal conflicts. As the serial progresses, Saga Norén appears increasingly implicated in her own traumatic family history, and her two Danish partners, both of whom are family-men, are either failing to keep their families together or are living in a drugs-infused limbo with the ghosts of a wife and young children, who had mysteriously disappeared. The serial begins its first season on the otherwise invisible border, half-­ way across the Öresund Bridge, where a body has been placed; or, as it turns out, two bodies. Mirroring the transnational location of a near-­ borderless region in the wider Nordic Passport Union, where one Scandinavian nation merges into the other, the severed dead bodies of two women, a Malmö politician and a Copenhagen prostitute, have been joined to form an apparently intact body lying astride national and social boundaries. The location of the crime scene in the border zone between two nations on the iconic bridge demands a cross-national investigation, where the two detectives must collaborate, overcome personal, cultural and linguistic differences, and, importantly, constantly criss-cross the bridge in order to match a killer who respects no borders. The symbolic gesture and spectacular arrangement of the crime scene is the modus operandi of an elusive serial killer, who sees himself as a vigilante ‘protector of the truth’. Through websites and the press, he proclaims that his killings are motivated by a desire to attract attention to the

30 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

lack of care and social justice for the marginalized and dispossessed in society such as the mentally ill, the homeless, prostitutes and drug addicts. In this sense, narratives about lone ‘truth terrorists’ are always troubling symptoms or ‘narratives of proximity’, prompting the representatives of the law, readers and viewers by proxy, to confront their own collective responsibility for the corrosion of personal and societal bonds in society. As Larsson’s The Girl with the Dagon Tattoo employs statistics about men’s violence against women as attention-gripping ‘authenticity effect’, so does the ‘truth terrorist’ in The Bridge refer to actual reports about crime and social inequality to justify his actions. In a recorded message to the police, he takes responsibility for the murders of the two women with the statement: ‘Our part of the world would be wonderful if we solved our problems. I would like to point out five in particular. The women on the bridge are just the beginning’ (s.1, ep.1). In the following episode, he calls attention to a series of ‘facts’ established in The Swedish Crime Survey 2007 and in a survey among socially marginalized groups in Denmark conducted by the National Institute of Public Health and the Council for Socially Marginalized People. To the terrorist, these surveys demonstrate that even in the most egalitarian of countries not everyone is ‘equal before the law’: crime investigations target disproportionally marginalized groups, whose health and wellbeing continue to deteriorate. These reports do indeed corroborate the killer’s social critique as they document deepening social inequalities. The Bridge is explicit about its welfarist egalitarianism, though it does not in the end endorse the vigilantism of the ‘truth terrorist’. He eventually turns out to have misled the detectives and the public with his social agenda in order to pursue a covert personal vendetta. Instead, it is Norén’s savant abilities, her naivety about social forms, her rationality, objectivity and her inability to speak nothing but the truth, which makes her an ideal protector of the law and the embodiment of the incorruptible, egalitarian welfare state. Her role as protector of social coherence and her proximity to the terrorist is humorously demonstrated when she questions the murdered politician’s bereaved husband. Norén asks him whether his wife was in any way threatened or had upset anyone lately. The only thing he can think of is that she wanted to charge for library loans and that some disapproved. Norén’s prompt reply is, ‘That’s foolish’, and she elaborates,

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

31

‘Reading becomes a money matter. Social differences will grow.’ It is, however, as she says, unlikely that library fees were the cause of her death. Saga Norén is presented as the representative of the traditional egalitarian values of the ‘people’s home’. When four wealthy investors are summoned to the police station in season one to discuss the possibility of paying a ransom as demanded by the ‘truth terrorist’, Norén interjects that they should not expect them to pay and that they are only used to stockpiling money and have no social conscience (s.1, ep.3). In the same season, the killer attempts to diverge the investigation by taking on the issue of immigrants being penalized harder by the courts. When the chief of police presents the case as relating to failed integration policies supported by statistics, Norén is able to go beyond the statistics to consider unethical motivations by declaring that the society’s failure to act reveals that ‘we don’t want it to succeed’. ‘Anyway’, she continues, with a further intimation of her awareness of complex personal motivations in others, ‘all of this doesn’t matter, because this is personal’ (s.1, ep.6). From the very beginning of the series, the apparently socially dysfunctional representative of the state is the one who speaks up for the welfare state and its egalitarianism. Before we know that the crimes she and Rohde are investigating are motivated by social indignation, we have learnt that Norén, and with her the police, plays the role of an idealized guardian of the incorruptible, rational and socially just state. When the self-proclaimed ‘truth terrorist’ in the end turns out to have used his militant social critique as a red herring, Norén’s neurodiverse lack of empathy, her disinterestedness and unwavering dedication to the letter of the law, makes her incorruptible and without personal interest beyond solving the case and catching the criminal. However, they would not have been able to catch the killer without her uncharacteristic subtle awareness of the other’s ‘feelings’ or motivations. Like Salander, Saga Norén is a borderline character operating not only on geographical and social borders but also on the borders of what may be understood as ‘normalcy’. Her story is a ‘narrative of proximity’, in Keen’s (2007, p. 10) definition, wherein the protector of the state comes uncomfortably close to its threatening other, ‘lack of empathy spells social problems’ and ‘lacking empathy often correlates with sociopathic behaviour’. That the series explores the border between Norén’s neurodiversity

32 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

and the perpetrator’s is further emphasized when, in the first season, the police have asked a forensic psychologist for a profile of the killer. The profiler determines that the perpetrator is single, focused, successful, has clearly defined targets and is good at planning, but when Saga relates this to her superior, he believes she is talking about herself (s.1, ep.3). The series suggests that in order to deal with criminals in the post-welfare state, its representative has to be proximate to the deviant, anti-social criminals with the borders becoming increasingly blurred between the serial detective and the serial killer: To operate ethically in a society with wayward morals and lack of care, the detective has herself to deviate from the norms of the community. However, we could also understand Saga Norén’s abnormal inability to set personal and familial motives above the state, in Bruce Robbins’s perspective, as a refusal of that kind of “normal” social relationship that would ordinarily permit and even encourage state corruption: favoritism, cronyism, collusion with private economic interests, and so on. These are exactly the charges that Nordic noir is usually taken to be levelling at the welfare state.

These are also the charges the ‘truth terrorist’ is pointing out as reasons for his killings. As such, the deviant detective is a hero of the welfare society, as she effectively dispels her own bonds of dependence associated with the family, which in The Bridge is presented as a source of violence and vengeance. We should of course ask, as Robbins (2015) does, what it says about the state that ‘contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction chooses to represent it by means of such a figure’. ‘In other words,’ Robbins points out, ‘from one perspective the unsocialized women may represent a problem, but from another perspective she represents the solution to a problem.’ Following McHugh (2018, p. 546), we need to consider a more refined understanding of neurodiversity and its relation to empathy and ethics to be able to tell apart the neurodiverse detective from the ‘monstrous’ killer. In her view, although Norén is subtly aligned with the serial killer in season one, ‘psychopaths and people with ASD differ in their empathetic capacities based on two functional axes: accurate recognition of other’s

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

33

feelings (cognitive function) and appropriate response to those feelings (affective function)’. Drawing on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, McHugh points out that while psychopaths are often ‘astute readers of others’ feelings’ their ‘affective or subjective response is inappropriate, self-serving, or non-existent’, while people on the autism spectrum ‘have compromised cognitive function; they cannot read or recognize others’ feelings’, yet ‘their affective responses to others’ feelings, once they understand what they are, are highly functional. They do care and can care deeply.’ It is precisely Norén’s ASD, her ‘compromised ability to emphasize’, that results in her need to ‘systematize to an extraordinary degree’, leading her to be, what McHugh (2018, pp.  547–548) calls, ‘super-­ moral’: ‘While Saga has trouble anticipating, reading, and understanding the social cues given off by others, when she is prompted or logically discerns someone’s feelings, she responds appropriately.’ Her superior investigative abilities, particularly on this case, and her ‘superior ethics derive from a “felt knowledge” where ASD proclivity for systems and rules fosters her capacity for affective empathy’. McHugh’s reading allows us to see how the deviant detective in The Bridge is being used not to approximate the detective to the killer, as their capacities for empathy are radically different, but instead to approximate the detective to communal values also shared in Scandinavian ‘people’s homes’. A curious aspect of the series’ presentation of the deviant detective is the fact that at no point is Saga Norén explicitly diagnosed or ASD even mentioned; still, her behaviours, facial expressions and the responses she incites in her aghast or amused co-workers all point to popular perceptions of Asperger’s syndrome or autism. It is as such an unlikely female deviant hero that she has been widely diagnosed by viewers, according to an article on BBC News (Townsend, 2015): she is lauded not just because she is a leading character with the condition, but—more unusually—because she is a woman with it. She is blunt, doesn’t understand jokes and struggles to build relationships. She strips down to her underwear to get changed in the office without embarrassment, and asks and answers questions with often excruciating honesty. ‘Would you like the recipe?’ asks her dinner host. ‘No, thanks, it wasn’t tasty,’ comes her reply. While the writers of The Bridge have never c­ onfirmed

34 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

that Saga has Asperger syndrome […] it has been generally assumed to be the case. Sofia Helin, the actress who plays her, has regularly referred to it in interviews. She researched the condition before filming started and has been sent letters and fan mail from people with the condition, as well as from the Swedish Asperger society.

While it is discernible from the portrayal of Saga Norén that she conforms to popular perceptions of Asperger’s, the ‘refusal’ to diagnose the detective allows the series to explore a wider spectrum of deviance, where the ‘ontological difference’ between the neurodiverse and the ‘neuro-­ normal’ is blurred, and where rigid perceptions of empathy and interpersonal trust are challenged. While Norén’s lack of social skills dominates the first season, she becomes increasingly aware of her own difference and explores strategies for affective empathy (how to respond appropriately to another’s emotions) as the series progresses, mainly prompted by her relations to male non-impaired colleagues. It is centrally Saga Norén’s personal story that forms the series’ sentimental narrative. As part of her strategy to develop ways to understand the personal motivations of the killers and other p ­ eople around her, Saga Norén actively uses her partners as guides and mirrors— though they are not always reliable as they are incapable of seeing problematic patterns in their own behaviours. Rohde, for instance, possesses excellent social skills and has a flirtatious nature that makes him much liked among colleagues; however, these are also character traits that result in the breakup of his own and others’ families, including the killer’s. That Saga Norén is left undiagnosed in the series allows us to more freely perceive her otherwise recognizable neurodiversity as less abnormal when contrasted to her non-impaired colleagues. Their developing relationships do not suggest that Saga Norén’s neurodiversity is simply signifying a lack that disables her ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. Instead, her awareness of her own difference and her lack of social skills (‘empathic interaction with other people is not my strong side’ [s.3, ep.8]) prompts her to ‘interrogate’ her partners about their private lives, their motivations and affective responses, partly to build her own capacity for affective empathy and partly to allow her to understand successfully the private motivations of the falsely ‘socially conscious’ killers.

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

35

Furthermore, by withholding a medical diagnosis as part of the narrative, we are also invited to ‘read’ Saga Norén’s condition as caused by her experiences and therefore as an expression of a wider human or social condition. In season three, she explains to her partner that the reason why she never lets people get close to her is that everyone has left her. In the context of this season, it again makes her experience similar or proximate to her partner’s (who is still traumatized by the loss of his wife and two children) and the serial killer’s (who is taking revenge against his father and the social system who abandoned him as a child). Saga Norén’s accumulated losses drive her to an attempted suicide in the final season. She is only saved by her partner who pleads with her to help him find his lost children—and at the emotional climax of her personal story, she chooses companionship. Her capacity to care for others with whom she is establishing trusting relationships without immediate personal gain is in the end what disassociates the deviant detective from the ills that have overwhelmed the welfare state (gender inequality, violence, distrust, revenge and lack of social care). It is in the end not capacities associated with her gender that allow her to empathize and treat the ills of others and herself; instead, they are learned capacities for affective empathy gained from her application of a neurodiverse proclivity for rule-based justice and social equality to accumulated ‘felt knowledge’ from interactions with non-impaired others.

Conclusion In line with critics such as Rita Felski, I believe that literature offers us important ‘social knowledge’. Crime novels and TV series are not mere symptoms of deeply hidden social realities, neither are they predominantly escapist or mindless entertainment. They are ‘useful’ because they engage us as readers and viewers, and they invite us in and may potentially transform us ‘by drawing us into certain attitudes, postures, and modes of engagement’ with the social conditions and imaginations we share (Felski, 2013, p. xii). The deviant female detectives in Nordic Noir, discussed in this chapter, engage us particularly through their dramatization

36 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

of how social and felt knowledge, central both to an ASD diagnosis and to the development of trusting interpersonal and societal relationships, need to be rearticulated in the post-welfare state. In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander’s ‘diagnosis’, her social deviance, points to a wider social dysfunction that needs (literary) treatment: trusting relationships between men and women, between the state and its citizens need mending in order to re-establish a just, egalitarian home for all its citizens. The social knowledge dramatized by Stieg Larsson through the socially impaired Salander figure shares a fundamental ethos with The Bridge. Both narratives appear to use neurodiversity, and ASD in particular, not as a way to invoke the readers’ and viewers’ sympathies towards the protagonists, but instead as a way to engage the audience in explorations of the intimate, and sometime fraught, relationship between the state and the individual. Such ‘social knowledge’ is particularly relevant to the Nordic universal welfare states and their ethos of ‘statist individualism’. Against the commonly held belief that the universal welfare state inevitably undermines individual autonomy and freedoms, the central ethos of the ‘Nordic model’, in fact, helped to strengthen individual autonomy ‘by freeing citizens from their family obligations as well as from the constraints of the market’ (Hilson, 2008, pp. 107–108). Apart from social trust, which has not waned with the expansion of the state, it is ‘statist individualism’, ‘a concept that captures the seeming paradox of an ethos that is based on a strong alliance between the state and the individual aiming at making each citizen as independent of his or her fellow citizens as possible’, that sets the Nordic welfare states apart from other societies (Berggren & Trägårdh, 2010, p. 56; Trägårdh, 2012, p. 41). The neurodiverse, ‘othered’ detective, her ‘superior morals’ and her use of ‘felt knowledge’ to build relationships and solve crime mysteries, wherein ‘social’ injustices are intimately linked to the personal, is, therefore, posturing as a wider challenge inherent to the maintenance of just, egalitarian societies, namely to pursue individual freedom and autonomy through others. I have argued that the deviant detectives in Scandinavian crime fiction are presented within sentimental storylines that counterpart the melodramatic crime narratives of social dissolution and violent crime. These

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

37

s­ tories explore ‘the pleasures and challenges of community’, how to form meaningful relationships build on interpersonal trust across ‘borders’ and ‘ontological differences’, where Saga Norén, in particular, represents a perception of deviance not as a symptom of the post-welfare state (and the detective not its victim), but instead its treatment. If the supposed decline of the social state has resulted in a more violent, misogynist and individualized society, then, perhaps, only an equally anti-social detective can stem its tide. While such a perspective may appear persuasive, particularly from an anti-statist point of view, I argue that the detective’s neurodiversity or deviance should instead be perceived as a narrative, sentimental and ‘affective strategy’ with which Scandinavian crime fiction engages audiences in negotiations of social responsibility, interpersonal trust and our reliance on a just, dispassionate state to stem the tide of perpetrators (and melodramatic crime stories) who merely use social conscience as a cover for personal gain (Felski, 2008).

References Badone, E., Nicholas, D., Roberts, W., & Kien, P. (2016). Asperger’s Syndrome, Subjectivity and the Senses. Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 40, 475–506. Berggren, H., & Trägårdh, L. (2010). Pippi Longstocking: The Autonomous Child and the Moral Logic of the Swedish Welfare State. In H. Matsson & S.-O. Wallenstein (Eds.), Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State (pp. 50–65). London: Black Dog. Broen/Bron. (2011, 2013, 2015, 2018). [TV programme]. Danmarks Radio, DR1. Brovall, S. (2013, September 20). Tv-tendens: Vi er vilde med de følelseskolde’mandekvinder’. Politiken Online [Online]. Retrieved August 2, 2018, from https://politiken.dk/kultur/medier/art5545617/Tv-tendens-Vier-vilde-med-de-f%C3%B8lelseskolde-mandekvinder Cassuto, L. (2009). Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories. New York: Columbia University Press. Den som dræber. (2011). [TV programme]. TV2 Danmark. Felski, R. (2008). Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Felski, R. (2013). Introduction. New Literary History, 44(4), v–xii.

38 

J. Stougaard-Nielsen

Guardian. (2012, December 29). Anatomy of a Scandi-Protagonist. The Guardian, p. 9. Hilson, M. (2008). The Nordic Model: Scandinavia since 1945. London: Reaktion Books. Keen, S. (2007). Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larsson, S. (2008). The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (R. Keeland, Trans.). London: Maclehose Press. Leffler, Y. (2013). Lisbeth Salander as a Melodramatic Heroine: Emotional Conflicts, Split Focalization, and Changing Roles in Scandinavian Crime Fiction. In B. Åstrøm, K. Gregersdotter, & T. Horeck (Eds.), Rape in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Beyond (pp. 51–66). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Marklund, L. (2011). The Bomber (N. Smith, Trans.). London: Corgi. McHugh, K.  A. (2018). The Female Detective, Neurodiversity, and Felt Knowledge in Engrenages and Bron/Broen. Television & New Media, 19(6), 535–552. Murray, S. (2006). Autism and the Contemporary Sentimental: Fiction and the Narrative Fascination of the Present. Literature and Medicine, 25(1), 25–45. Murray, S. (2008). Representing Autism: Culture, Narrative, Fascination. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Plain, G. (2001). Twentieth Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. New York: Routledge. Robbins, B. (2015). The Detective is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State. Post45 [Online]. Retrieved August 2, 2018, from http://post45. research.yale.edu/2015/05/the-detective-is-suspended-nordic-noir-and-thewelfare-state Rothstein, B. (2005). Social Traps and the Problem of Trust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scaggs, J. (2005). Crime Fiction. London: Routledge. Schmidt, N. (2015). From Periphery to Center: (Post-feminist) Female Detectives in Contemporary Scandinavian Crime Fiction. Scandinavian Studies, 87(4), 423–456. Schwartz, C., & Kaplan, E. A. (2018). The Female Detective as the Child Who Needs to Know. Saga Norén as an Example of Potent Yet Dysfunctional Female Detectives in Contemporary Nordic Noir. European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 48(2), 213–230. Stenport, A.  W., & Alm, C.  O. (2009). Corporations, Crime, and Gender Construction in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Exploring

  Deviant Detectives in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The… 

39

Twenty-First Century Neoliberalism in Swedish Culture. Scandinavian Studies, 81(2), 157–178. Stougaard-Nielsen, J. (2017). Scandinavian Crime Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Svensson, P. (1999). Syndafallet. In B. Eriksson (Ed.), I neonljusets skugga: den moderna kriminalhistorien (pp. 167–183). Lund: Boströms. Tapper, M. (2011). Snuten i skymringslandet: Svenska polisberättelser i roman och film 1965–2010. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Townsend, L. (2015, December 9). How The Bridge’s Heroine Became a Role Model for Women with Autism. BBC News [Online]. Retrieved June 25, 2018, from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-34995327 Trägårdh, L. (2012). Mellem liberalisme og socialisme: om det særlige ved den nordiske model. Kritik, 206, 40–50. Trust Nordisk. (n.d.). Those Who Kill Pressbook [Online]. Retrieved August 2, 2018, from http://files.trustnordisk.com/files/ftpfiles/movies/TN31/public/ docs/TWK_Pressbook_Final.pdf

3 The Representation of Crime and Criminals in the TV Series Sherlock and Elementary: A Corpus Study Archontoula Menti

Introduction As media play an increasingly important role in daily life, and especially in the representation of reality, they have become a powerful social force that communicates messages and values. Crime, along with deviance, has been a favourite topic in news and entertainment media (books, films, TV programmes, etc.) for decades. The relationship between crime, mass media and culture has been systematically studied from various perspectives both outside and within criminology. Researchers of a number of disciplines focus on the representations of crime and their influence in public knowledge and the perception of crime and criminal justice. Some of the main issues that have been under research are the following: How do the media shape public perception? Do they present a distorted view of crimes, creating fear among the public (e.g. see Dowler, 2003; Reiner,

A. Menti (*) National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 D. Akrivos, A. K. Antoniou (eds.), Crime, Deviance and Popular Culture, Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04912-6_3

41

42 

A. Menti

2007; Schlesinger & Tumber, 1994; Williams & Dickinson, 1993)? How do they portray criminals and victims (Davies, Francis, & Greer, 2007)? The majority of studies on media content analysis are quantitative, focusing on measuring the amount of crime with the use of statistics. However, as Greer (2013, pp. 146–148) points out, qualitative research (based on quantitative data) can be more revealing of the nature of media representations of crime, by exploring the processes and constraints through which media content is produced, exchanged and interpreted. An interesting factor related to media content quality that has much to reveal is language. The investigation of language use gives us the opportunity to uncover hidden or ‘out of sight’ values and perspectives. Exploring media as discourse can lead to an alternative way of analysis, since, by focusing on the language of crime in media, we can approach the complexity of media representations of crime and outline patterns and ideologies that media shape and communicate through language. At the same time, most news studies concern real crimes (e.g. see Boyd, 2016; Machin & Mayr, 2011). By contrast, the present research deals with crime fiction, and particularly with crime fiction in television. By adopting a linguistic approach, the study aims at examining the language in two contemporary crime drama television series based on Sherlock Holmes detective stories, namely the British BBC Sherlock and the American CBS Elementary. Both television shows set the iconic character of popular culture, Sherlock Holmes, in the modern day and have received critical acclaim1 and earned thousands of fans all over the world.2 The main aim of the research is to investigate the representation of crime and criminals through the language of TV shows, focusing on the crime types and the gender of the offenders, respectively. In order to reveal some of the more subtle patterns in the language used in the two series, two types of linguistic analysis are combined: corpus linguistics (CL), which makes use of computational tools to analyse quantitatively and qualitatively large amounts of text (corpora) (see Sinclair, 1991; Stubbs, 1996), and critical discourse analysis, which studies language in relation to its social context (Fairclough, 1995a, 1995b, 2003). The study comparatively examines the representation of crime and criminals in two different cultural contexts (British and American), exploring ways in which the combination of CL and critical discourse analysis (CDA) can

  The Representation of Crime and Criminals in the TV Series… 

43

contribute to the study of popular culture. Lexical choice and linguistic patterns are investigated by using techniques such as frequency lists, keywords and concordances, in order to outline the semantic field of crime and reveal criminals’ profile, through their type and gender, as represented in each television show in its own cultural context.

Sherlock Holmes: A Diachronic Cultural Hero The character of the private detective created by the British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle first appeared in print in 1887 (in the novel A Study in Scarlet) and since then has never left the limelight of popular culture. Sherlock Holmes, the eccentric investigator with the extraordinary skills in solving mystery cases in Victorian-era London, is probably the best-­ known fictional investigator. His special character is unfolded in the canon that consists of 56 short stories and 4 novels and includes the adventures of the famous detective, most of which are narrated by Dr Watson, his friend and companion during his investigations. Holmes is an expert in observation and logical reasoning, while his investigative techniques include basic methods of forensic science, a science that was at a very early stage when the stories were written. Arthur Conan Doyle’s literary work has radically affected mystery fiction and has influenced popular culture for over 100 years, making Sherlock Holmes a cultural icon. The stories of the famous private investigator have been adapted for a wide variety of different media outlets: literary (from The Late Sherlock Holmes by Doyle’s friend, J. M. Barrie, in 1893 to Nicholas Meyer’s novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution in 1974), comic books (such as the Black House Comics series The Dark Detective: Sherlock Holmes and New Paradigm Studios’ Watson and Holmes), stage, film (from the 1922 movie Sherlock Holmes to the latest Guy Ritchie-­ directed Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows in 2011), television (e.g. ITV Granada series Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, BBC Sherlock and CBS Elementary), board games, video games and so on with varying degrees of fidelity to the original characters and setting. A contemporary manifestation of the character’s cultural impact is the success of two contemporary television series inspired by his stories: BBC Sherlock (first

44 

A. Menti

aired in 2010) and CBS Elementary (first aired in 2012). Both drama series present the main character, Sherlock Holmes, investigating mystery cases in modern-day London and New  York City, respectively; both adaptations have met critical and commercial success, having millions of viewers all over the world and high rates on popular rating sites such as the Internet Movie Database3 and Rotten Tomatoes.4 This chapter is concerned with the use of language in relation to crime and deviance in the two TV series. It does not focus on the similarities and differences between the main characters and stories, nor with how faithful they are to the original ones. The section that follows provides information regarding the methodology and the data that were used in the research. Section ‘Keywords in Sherlock and Elementary’ presents the most frequent and salient words, that is, keywords, in the two series, as well as their categorisation into semantic fields. In section ‘The Field of Crime in Sherlock and Elementary’, we discuss the language of crime used in the serials, focusing on the types of crimes, while in section ‘Criminals and Victims’ we investigate the representation of criminals and victims through their gender and type. Finally, section ‘Discussion’ concludes the chapter by presenting the overall conclusions of the research.

Data and Methodology ‘Data! Data! Data! … I can’t make bricks without clay’, says Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of the Copper Beeches (Doyle, 1892, p. 289). For the purposes of the study, two corpora were created: the Sherlock corpus (SC) and the Elementary corpus (EC). SC includes all episodes of Sherlock’s first three series (aired between 2010 and 2014), namely nine 90-minute episodes in total. EC includes eighteen 45-minute episodes of Elementary first four seasons (aired 2012–2016) in an attempt to compile corpora of equal running time videos. The episodes selected are those which were inspired to a large extent by Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories (see Appendix). The data were retrieved from an online source that contains transcribed scripts.5 The texts were checked against the series videos, ‘cleaned’6 and annotated with respect to the speakers and characters. Subsequently, they

  The Representation of Crime and Criminals in the TV Series… 

45

were converted so as to be readable by computational linguistic software and were analysed by using the corpus analysis toolkit AntConc7 (Anthony, 2017). As Table 3.1 displays, the two corpora come from episodes of almost the same duration, but their number of tokens, that is, single, particular instances of an individual word in the corpus (McEnery & Hardie, 2012, p. 252), differs. Does this suggest that they talk more in Elementary or is it the case that Sherlock is based less on dialogues and more on visual image? A multimodal analysis, which is beyond the scope of the present study that exclusively focuses on language, may give an answer to this question. The study follows a corpus-driven approach (see Biber, 2009, pp.  276–277; Tognini-Bonelli, 2001; Xiao, 2009, pp.  993–996) that allows the analysis to be driven by the data, through the examination of what is frequent and salient within them. CL provides us the tools for quantitative and qualitative research: these include frequency lists, which list all the words that appear in a corpus and their number of occurrence; keyword lists, which list words that appear statistically significantly more frequently in a corpus in comparison to a (larger) reference corpus; and concordances, which present all occurrences of a word in a corpus in the context in which they occur (Baker, Hardie, & McEnery, 2006, pp. 42–43; p. 97). CL is here combined with CDA, a method of studying implicit or indirect meanings in texts (Van Dijk, 2001). CDA views discourse as a form of social practice, investigating ideologies involved in discourse and focusing on how social and political ideas are reproduced and reinforced through language use (Fairclough, 1995b). The combination of the two methods is not a novel practice, as it has been fruitful in many studies (see Baker et  al., 2008; Orpin, 2005; Stubbs, 1994). The use of CL techniques when carrying out CDA can help the researcher make the most of Table 3.1  Sherlock and Elementary data in numbers Series

Episodes

Duration

Word tokens

Sherlock Elementary Total

9 18 27

13  h & 11 min 12  h & 50 min 26  h & 01 min

99,777 120,952 220,729

46 

A. Menti

their advantages and eliminate their weaknesses. CL provides a reasonably high degree of objectivity; it enables the researcher to approach large amounts of data free from any preconceived notions, uncover lexical patterns through statistical analyses and examine through the accuracy and reliability of computers, tendencies or exceptional cases that are often unavailable to human intuition. The lexical patterns need to be investigated as linguistic choices, especially with regard to their potential cultural and ideological implications. CDA comes to provide a systematic and explicit analysis of the language strategies (Van Dijk, 1998), allowing the researcher to observe these lexical choices and investigate the meanings and aspects foregrounded. Therefore, using both approaches offers not only an objective and reliable description, but also rich and in-depth interpretation of the language data. The first stage of the analysis involved obtaining the most frequent and salient words of the corpora. In order to generate keyword lists, we have chosen British National Corpus (BNC) Baby as reference corpus. This is a 4-million-word sampling of the 100-million-word BNC, a large collection of written and spoken texts from a wide variety of genres that cover British English of the late twentieth century.8 Our selection of reference text allowed a comparison with the data under investigation, which are scripts, that is, language written to be spoken. The keywords of the two corpora were generated by AntConc; the statistical measure chosen to calculate the keyness, that is, the statistical significance of frequency difference between words, was Log Likelihood with significance value (p value)