Framing Scandinavian guilt

Abstract

The Scandinavian countries are known as being wealthy, egalitarian, and “happy”. Since the first publication in 2012 of the United Nations’ World Happiness Reports, for instance, the Scandinavians have been ranked as the happiest nations in the world. This high level of self-reported life satisfaction is generally understood as caused by the social democratic welfare-state model. Emotionally, however, happiness is not necessarily the most dominant affect characterizing Scandinavians. In fact, the first Happiness Report shows that while Danes ranked no. 1 worldwide when it came to evaluative happiness, they ranked no. 100 when it came to affective happiness (answering the question of how they felt yesterday) (Helliwell et al. 2012). A dark side of happiness and privilege is guilt. Time and again, we encounter narratives in which Scandinavians are confronted with an unhappy, less privileged global other. Additionally, we also see representations of the ostracized self—“one of us”—a fellow Scandinavian who does not fit the image and status of the “happy” Scandinavian. Often, these external and internal others evoke guilt feelings based on a realization that one’s own happiness and privileges are, or have been, attained at the expense of suffering others. Also, in cases where one does not see a direct connection between one’s own privileges and the suffering of others, one may still feel responsible for alleviating the suffering of others—and guilty when not succeeding in doing so. These feelings of guilt may in turn be 1) foregrounded, debated, and attempted dealt with in order to promote social change, or 2) covered up, repressed, and redirected in order to maintain an image of individual and/or national coherence and innocence. In this volume, scholars from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden critically explore how such guilt is framed in contemporary Scandinavian film, television, and other visual media, including factual and fictional visual narratives, popular and art house genres. How are notions of guilt and guilt feelings evoked in and by narratives of privilege and lack? What does guilt do? How does guilt travel? How do gender, race, ethnicity, class, health, and age play into such narratives? How, overall, do such narratives reflect Scandinavian societies and set a moral compass for Scandinavian spectators (or not)? How does guilt serve to create affective communities? This special issue explores the visual narratives aesthetically and culturally by, on the one hand, close-reading the works, tending to the medium and genre specificity of film, television, and social media and, on the other hand, by situating the works in a particular Scandinavian context and further tracing guilt, guilt feeling, and guilt aversion across production processes and reception. This contextualization allows us to explore how guilt is redirected, reframed, and coopted for new ideological and rhetorical purposes in the Scandinavian welfare state and beyond. Framing guilt remains a matter of political power struggles. The title “Framing Scandinavian Guilt” is chosen as the verb “to frame” pertains 1) to the visual media —to camera angles and cropping—as one arranges images to a certain end, and 2) to (falsely) pinning people down as guilty. Our interest, as indicated above, is not in clear-cut (court and crime) cases and verdicts. Rather we are interested in an emotional landscape in which various forms of Scandinavian guilt circulate and in which film, TV, and social media at given points frame particular people, nations, and institutions as guilty of global and national ills. In order to understand this guilt better, we analyze not only how the films, TV-series, and social media frame people and institutions as guilty in a process already indicating ambivalence, but also turn to their production and reception to see how the people and institutions framed as guilty may accept, reject, or in other ways deflect guilt, maintaining that they are in fact innocent. Historically, guilt has been theorized as individual and collective, as bystander guilt, white guilt, liberal guilt, existential guilt, etc. Its effects, too, have been theorized as constructive and reparative on the one hand, and destructive and paralyzing on the other. 2 While one tends to distinguish between guilt and shame—with guilt pertaining to doing and shame pertaining to being—guilt and shame often converge. What one does reflects who one is. In addition, what was previously considered guilt, now tends to be regarded as shame. Hence, in the context of Scandinavian guilt, the articles also in several instances discuss shame. The third word of the title, the adjective “Scandinavian,” refers both to the origin of the audiovisual narratives examined, and to the abovementioned sense of guilt pertaining to Scandinavians. JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS & CULTURE, 2018 VOL. 10, NO. S1, 1–5 https://doi.org/10.1080/20004214.2018.1438725