Watching the Detectives

 “Trapped” and Detective Series in General…

If you watch enough detective series – or are encouraged to watch them by your partner – you will see certain patterns, almost like a long ‘pick and choose’ list of conventions tacked to the wall in a writers’ conference room come to life.  Trapped is a series set in Iceland with two seasons on Amazon Prime.   While generally believable, the characters likable – especially the lead bear-like detective Andri – the setting exotic for most, the artifice wears thin.

Andri and Hinrika in "Trapped."

One of the leading staples of the genre is the angry, stupid or obnoxious teen-aged daughter.  Season Two has this is spades. Andri's daughter Thorhildur seems to have a grudge about nothing. And, per usual, the kids soon learn the rules of reality as they are put in jeopardy. Another staple is that the lead detective has a bad home-life or better yet, is divorced.  He’s got a job to do!  In this case Andri is divorced and even lives at his ex-wife’s parent’s house for awhile, like some sad, temporarily homeless man.

Then there is the exotic location, which provides a vicarious tourist jolt for those who go nowhere.  Who wants to have a murder happen in your boring back yard? Usually it is in a small town or city where in reality, no murders would ever happen.  But in Nordic detective series and others, killings are routine in these places - even if the motives seem especially weak, as it does here.  The small fishing port in Trapped, Siglufjörður, is in the far north of Iceland, nestled in a fjord with mountains, sheep farms, rattle-trap fishing boats and snow.  The weather is also malevolent, as a storm isolates the town in the first season.  The town becomes the murder capital of Iceland, much to the consternation of the fictional residents.

Another thing that happens time and time again is that everyone who talks to a cop on these shows lies or hides something.  And it is always obvious to the audience.  Witnesses are many times of no help, busy themselves doing something else as if the cops aren't there.  In Trapped, there are so many secrets, lies and cover-ups, it seems only the police are straight-forward.  Mis or non-communication is standard as well.  The lead detective usually has a somewhat troubled relationship with liquor, his temper or some horrible past event, but he’s always a genius.  Yup.  Andri figures nearly everything out quickly, pays attention to facts, psychology and detail and rarely fucks up.  But he’s running from some failure in Reykjavik, which is why he is the police chief in tiny Siglufjörður for the first season.

In these shows the crime has to be especially gruesome, or the body has to be found in the woods or sea, decomposing or somehow unrecognizable.  Here it is a headless and armless torso.  And in too many shows, it is a woman.  The ‘dead woman’ thing never ends, which is both a reflection of reality and perhaps a suggestion.  Yet these series never deal with male chauvinism or 'femicide.'  The murders in Trapped are especially horrid.  It seems burning to death is a thing that many Icelander’s fear the most. Can’t you just shoot someone?

There are always several red herrings dragged in front of the audience. Most are obvious and eventually the ‘bad guy’ appears at the end, sometimes dropped from the sky to be taken down. But throwing suspicion on as many people as possible is consistent, as everyone seems guilty or stupid in some way.  In this series the perpetrators are neatly caught after 10 episodes, with so many plot twists that the writers themselves have to be laughing in their conference room.  The more convoluted the plot, the more the police seem like geniuses for following through to the end.  Another convention is that people in deadly peril never act like it.  They remain pathetically oblivious and complacent until the criminal shows up with his gun.  And he always does.  “Your life is in danger!”  “Duh... whaaaat?”

Evidently people got tired of murders in the tropics

 Politicians uniformly seem suspicious, as do rich people.  The head cop is many times a bureaucratic obstructionist.  Environmental or political themes play a role if the show is trying to reflect reality. In both Icelandic series I’ve seen (The Cliff is the other...) the environmental issue of building in rural areas was key.  In the first season of Trapped, human smuggling (yes, even in this micro-dot town which somehow has a ferry from Denmark every week) and arson for profit play a role.  In the second season, rural Thor-like fascists, a gay relationship, imported workers and environmental pollution are all involved.  So the shows always have a bit of politics, but the shows never take a position.  The only permanent position is the decency of the police and ‘the law.'

The flood of detective stories and police procedurals from country after country seems to reflect anxiety about the real role of policing in the world.  In reality, many crimes are not solved, though ‘murder’ has one of the best resolution rates in the States according to statistics.  If that is true, other countries might be even better.  Yet every day we watch on TV or the internet police attacking or killing protesters all over the world, or police crimes (especially in the U.S.) being exposed.  But on streaming series they are the most decent and smartest people on the planet. Perhaps in Iceland and other Nordics the police truly are this overly competent - though they didn't solve the murder of Olaf Palme, the biggest murder in recent Swedish history.  Given they have less unequal societies, less violence and less rapacious capitalism, that could be true.  But for those of us in the U.S., these shows are a clear ideological prop to the state.

Other prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Meta-Meaning of Ridiculous Cop Shows” “Bad Cops,” “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” “Defund, Disband or Abolish the Police?” “Notes From Minneapolis,” “Who Killed Olaf Palme?” “Detroit,” “Fear of a Black Rebellion,” “It Was Only a Matter of Time,” “The Wire,” “Ferguson Facts,”  or “Viking Economics,” “Independent People,” “The Vikings,” “The Cliff,” “Redbreast,” “Bordertown.”  

The Cultural Marxist

March 14, 2021