Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.
The death of Swedish journalist Kim Wall, who disappeared from the submarine of male inventor Peter Madsen. This man later made increasingly egregious claims about the cause of her death. He says that she was hit in the head by some heavy hatch on the boat but neglects to explain how or why Ms. Wall’s torso, legs, and head were found separately, particularly if, as he claims, she was only hit in the head with a heavy object. There is no proof of a fracture on her skull. Also unexplained are the 15 stab wounds to her torso. Madsen continues to maintain his innocence.
This is absolutely horrific and difficult to fathom. It’s certainly a haunting story, but that’s not what caught my attention. Instead, I was fascinated by the articles in response to the story’s coverage—outraged, disheartened, and bewildered responses in turn. BBC Radio 4 described it as a “real life case of Scandi noir.” BBC 2 called it “a story straight out of a Nordic drama.” The New York Times reached out to the creator of the Scandinavian crime show The Bridge for a comment on Ms. Wall’s death.
There seems to be an almost gleeful conflation between fiction and reality here – in yet another instance of gendered violence there is a massive pivot into the violent narratives we tell about death, gender, and crime. Why do we turn to fiction for answers about our own grim realities? There seems to be some sort of feedback loop at play here.
Is it that our stories help us to better access her death as a very real, very scary thing that happened? Or that her death helps us to better access our stories, to give us new forms of intervention and understanding into them? I don’t know that the issue is about access at all. Indeed, the convoluted comparisons to Swedish crime dramas seem to move us further and further away from the facts of this woman’s life—as well as the gruesome reality of her death.
So much of what I want to say in this project is about what kinds of truths, meanings, and experiences we can access through generic forms (of which the Scandinavian noir is certainly one). But what kinds of experiences, meanings, and truths do they dull for us? How do they dull these things for us, and why?