Why Are Scandinavians Like This?!
They're supposed to be some of the world's happiest people—so why are all of their movies SO grim?
This is a submission to our Complaints Department, the place where we collect all the stuff we just want to complain about.
The other week, I saw a much-buzzed-about (among a certain circle, anyway) new movie from Norwegian writer and director Kristoffer Borgli called Sick of Myself. It’s literally about a young woman who purposefully disfigures herself with contraband pills in pursuit of attention and metaphorically about many other things that you can easily guess. Here’s the trailer:
I liked the movie fine enough—it’s a blissful 95 minutes long!—but what hung with me upon leaving the theater, and in the following days and weeks, was: Why are Scandinavians like this??
Seemingly every six months or so, a flood of new articles come out about how people in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden are among the happiest people in the world. There are the pieces with the “hard data,” as much as that can even exist, and then there are the endless stories about why and how these people manage to be so happy. Is it hygge? Better social structures? Universal healthcare? The frigid cold?? Are these people the living embodiment of the higher selves many of us strive to be? Are they mildly insane?
We in the United States—which sits in the middle of the pack as far as happiness goes—are desperate for answers. And yet…if you look at the popular cinema that emerges from these places, a very different story starts to take shape. Many of the biggest movies from Scandinavia and directors from Scandinavia don’t seem particularly happy at all. They actually seem pretty dang twisted.
Sick of Myself is among a certain niche drama of films with a specific look, tone, and sense of humor. It’s black comedy, absurdism, and fantasy, all rolled up into a goofy, shocking, exhilarating, and depressing package, with a pleasing but emotionally removed washed-out color palette to boot. Not all these words apply to all the movies I’m thinking of, but if you’ve seen even one of them, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And yes, these movies are often from Scandinavian countries, but before we get much further and at risk of sounding like a reductive dolt, I’ll confess that one of the prime peddlers of this subgenre is Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, Dogtooth, The Favourite, The Killing of a Sacred Deer), who regrettably, is Greek.
Let me be clear: I like these movies generally and appreciate what they’re bringing to the table. But it’s an undeniable, very specific vibe that I need to understand on a psychological level. Let’s run down a few of the examples, starting with a longstanding and very notable director: Lars von Trier, who is Danish. This man has given us Melancholia (a phenomenal film about the end of the world), Dancer in the Dark (notoriously soul-crushing and featuring Björk, who is Icelandic!), and Nymphomaniac (a movie that along with Melancholia and Antichrist, make up the director’s Depression Trilogy). What a riot!
Then there’s Ruben Östlund, the Swedish filmmaker behind Force Majeure, The Square, and most recently, Triangle of Sadness. Or how about Thomas Vinterberg, another Dane, who co-wrote and directed the iconically bleak 2020 film, Another Round? Or what about Nicolas Winding Refn (seriously, are Danish people okay?) who directed Drive, Only God Forgives, and Neon Demon? I’m also tempted to make note of Joachim Trier, who’s Norwegian, simply because he directed a movie called The Worst Person in the World, though that movie is markedly more upbeat than many of the others mentioned here, despite a significant plotline about premature death. Lol. And yes, while we’re on the subject of grim subjects, I am very depressed by the fact that all these examples are men.
When I tossed out this idea in Slack, my fellow Discourse Bloggers seemed to be picking up what I was throwing down, and Rafi offered this contribution: “I learned recently, that Liam Neeson’s ‘avenging snowplow driver who takes down the mob’ movie (which fucking ruled) is also a remake of a weirdo scandi film.” I was not at all familiar with this movie, but it’s called Cold Pursuit and it’s directed by the same guy who made the original (In Order of Disappearance), a Norwegian director named Hans Petter Moland. Other Mads Mikkelsen (Danish) movies were also mentioned, but frankly, I think you get the point!
So what exactly is going on here? Are the people of Scandinavia uniquely suited to cinema that’s just a little bit fucked up and weird? Am I only aware of a particular subset of Scandinavian movies that are just a little bit fucked up and weird? Here’s more of what Rafi (and Jack) had to say on the matter:
Meanwhile, Cros offered something else to consider: “Also like, how happy can they be. it's cold as shit and their food sucks ass.”
This is actually a good point. Many of those aforementioned articles about how and why Scandinavian people manage to be so happy are about how they aren’t exactly happy per se. They’re just people with well-adjusted expectations, a healthy sense of realism, and are perhaps not very happy at all, but find contentment with the help of a certain amount of quiet perseverance and grit. I can’t say for sure whether this is true, but it makes some sense. In my reading about the happiness polls, I got the sense that the Danes and the Swedes and their ilk were a lot like Midwesterners, which is to say, good at being cold, concurrently grim and cheerful, often deeply strange, and often deeply funny. And you can’t get mad at me for that characterization, as I myself am a Midwesterner.
It seems that there are two possibilities here: 1) The general contentment of Scandinavians opens up a portal to a kind of ecstatic strangeness, and it’s only natural that happy people might channel some of that into the darker realms of existence, which they can only consider intellectually as they only experience passing glimpses themselves or 2) The polls are complete garbage and these people aren’t especially happy at all, and are in fact, channeling an innate and universal turmoil.
Alas, the truth is probably somewhere in between. Another truth: I don’t really need to know whether Scandis are in fact the happiest people on earth or why they make the specific movies they make. I walk into these films knowing I’m opening myself up to a variable cocktail of hilarious, violent, strange, somber, wise, silly, insane, and well-considered content. In a world that gets madder and madder by the day, it’s often the only kind of art that makes any damn sense.
Thanks for reading the latest submission to our Complaints Department.
I think Jack nailed it. They have dark thoughts and like dark stories, but they have a healthy society. A minority of people are actually miserable. And the declining rates of alcoholism in Iceland might be another data point - drinking in Iceland is way down over the last few decades. In the 90s Iceland had this reputation of being a dark place where everyone sucked down vodka was either into black metal or EDM. The latter is still true. But Icelandic people are so good. Want to join them? You just need to to live there for 7 years and prove you can make a living there. No one will picket you to "go back where you came from." Make it there and you can live there. That deal surely won't last. What are they thinking?
Scandinavians are awesome people. They just have a different emotional baseline then we do. And that baseline is contentment. Have a kid in college with just modest credit card debt? Good. Have both a gasoline car and an EV? You're affluent! Have a solid roof over your head? And a summer cottage? You rule. I just came back from northwest Iceland. They are not the shiniest, happiest people. But I watched them closely. They work from home and have side gigs like farming or running a cafe or inn. They enjoy their imported coffee. They spend at least 15 minutes each day in a public hot pot or the town pool. Their kids are safe. There are no mass shootings. There's no minority political party stripping rights away or threatening to rush into the legislature with guns. In fact, you can call the president. His cell phone is public much like Boston Mayor Menino gave people his number back in '94. I was told the president dined at a fish restaurant in Ísafjörður days before I got there and it was no big thing. The Prime Minister is a good woman. The society is decent. Iceland is good.
Were not. Full stop. We're ill. We're sick. We're killing each other. We have no future. We drink and do drugs too much. We commit suicide too much. And the men among us sometimes commit suicide by gunning down dozens before they expire. We're no good. The fucking problem is us.
no doubt about it all, yes all, the scandinavian shows I watch on the tube are very dark. From when I was lad and went to Engrid Beregman movies -Cries and Whispers- onwaard. dark, kinda sick even. Mostly cop and detective stuff but even ourside of these two genres everyting I watch to date has been dark. Maybe its a ying yang thing.