Response

The Journal of Popular and American Culture

Season one of Jordskott revolves around police detective Eva and the mysterious events that unfold upon her return home to the fictional Swedish town of Silverhöjd to take care of her late father’s will. In doing so, she uncovers the exploitative capitalist practices of her father’s company, Thörnblad Mineral & Cellulosa, a logging company intent on clearing the forest surrounding the community. The exploitative practises of her father’s company are closely linked to an investigation of several missing children including Eva’s daughter, Josefin, who has been missing and presumed dead for seven years. As the investigation unfolds, the characters and viewers are exposed to the spiritual workings of nature and the landscape. The characters encounter humanoid spiritual protectors of the Silverhöjd forest, one of whom has been holding the children hostage to force a halt to the logging process. The introduction of the spirits of the forest transforms the setting of Silverhöjd “into a living and evolving organism, endowed with personal history, psychological complexity, and agency.”¹ While we might immediately assume that the spirit’s act of kidnapping is the central crime typical of a television crime show season’s narrative arc, this role is, it emerges, occupied by Thörnblad Mineral & Cellulosa’s legalized practices of logging. The true criminal is capitalism: the kidnappings began as a reaction against Eva’s father breaking an ancestral treaty between the humans and the spiritual beings of the forest. This violation of the treaty propelled a human-driven genocide against the natural landscape and spiritual inhabitants. Humans would not only destroy the forest but bring about the extinction of the creatures that inhabit it. As a popular culture and literary art form that ties capitalist exploitation of nature and the spirit of nature, Jordskott negotiates “between the human and nonhuman.”² Ultimately, the narrative deconstructs the culturally-constructed divide between the natural and the human through its animistic representation of nature.

In its animistic representation of nature, Season One puts on display humanity’s “moral responsibility to the millions of other species who depend on us to get it right.”³ Helen Mäntymäki argues that Jordskott is an uncanny narrative, “challenging our knowledge of reality” by depicting nature as both a stranger and that which is familiar to us.⁴ While Mäntymäki’s use of the theory of the uncanny in her reading of Jordskott is useful, she neglects to account for the quintessential theorist of the uncanny, Sigmund Freud. To Freud, the uncanny means both the return of repressed psychological material, but also (and in this case, more importantly) the surmounting of an archaic attitude, the attitude of our ancestors, which was animistic. Freud argues that “the old, animistic conception of the universe, which was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings, and by the narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes” is a type of regression.⁵ More interested in the personal unconscious, Freud dismisses animism as unworthy of further discussion. My analysis of Jordskott Season One will expand upon Mäntymäki’s reading of nature in Season One by drawing on and questioning Freud’s foundational understanding of the animistic representation of objects.

Jordskott’s spiritual representation of nature, strongly suggests, contra Freud, that a return of the animistic worldview is not a regression, but a progression, a way for nature to gain subjectivity. In support of this argument, I will use two primary examples from Season One of Jordskott: (1) the animistic and uncanny representation of nature as both spirit and humanoid, and (2) the consumption of the parasite or symbiont organism (the “jordskott” of the show’s title) ⁶ by Eva and her primary nemesis, the bounty-hunter, Harry, as instances of the patriarchal capitalist exploitation of nature. In short, such an animistic worldview provides an anti-capitalist and posthumanist understanding of nature as a subject, as opposed to an object designed to be exploited. Jordskott uses the conventions of popular Nordic Noir detective fiction, investing the genre with spiritual elements to represent an animistic nature, in order to imagine and conceptualize the inherent intersubjective relationality of the human and the natural.

Nordic Noir and the Melancholic Environment

One of the reasons for detective fiction’s enduring appeal is the genre’s ability to address – often obliquely – a broad range of societal concerns (including gender, race and sexuality) that pertain to the period in which it is produced and consumed. Whether detective fiction authors are writing in the classic period, the golden age, the hard-boiled era, or contemporary times, the environment (landscape and setting) remains an important feature of the narrative. Coupled with other conventions of a detective text, the setting or environment addresses, as Swales puts it in his introduction to the genre, “our inborn sense of guilt” and “confirm[s] what we have always known—that we are sinful creatures, prone to choose the darkness rather than light.”⁷ Guilt is “a fundamental generic element” and it “gives expression to texts’ notions of the source of crime.”⁸ The environment embodies the guilt and darkness of humanity of a specific time. This may be generalized cultural/metaphorical guilt embodied in the society of a narrative, but in Jordskott it is the literal environment as represented through the visual motifs of Nordic Noir. In Jordskott, the environment is literally poisoned by human actions. Nordic Noir transforms the intrinsic guilt of detective narratives into a melancholic environment.

The term Nordic Noir was coined by the Scandinavian Department at the University College of London in 2010.⁹ Hansen and Waade trace the introduction of the “socially sensitive sleuth in the 1960s” to Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.¹⁰ This introduction sparked the Nordic regions’ interest in literary crime fiction. By the mid-1990s, distinctively dark-toned, contemporary Scandinavian crime fiction, film, and television gained “immense international success” thus re-branding this “cross-media trend … as Nordic Noir.”¹¹ While there are some fundamental conventions of Nordic Noir narratives that distinguish them from other crime and detective fiction texts, I will focus here on the depiction of anxieties around the landscape.

In Nordic Noir, the depiction of the “toxic” environment has changed from one that serves as a metaphor for moral, criminal corruption to the literal destruction and poisoning of the landscape. The pressing environmental issues that permeate the contemporary world have sparked an ecological movement that asks human beings to take into account the effects of our capitalist and exploitative actions on the natural landscape. Nordic Noir takes up such societal issues and, in focusing on environmentalism, emphasizes and attempts to draw out the sinister culpability of those who transgress against nature. Capitalist-driven “crimes against the environment point toward a significant source of Scandinavian guilt.”¹²

The specific crimes that result from human action in other forms of detective fiction transform into a sense of pervasive melancholy in Nordic Noir. Such melancholy is highlighted through “the dark streets, the dim lights, the naked trees and the dreary autumn atmosphere.”¹³ Specific characteristics include “winter darkness, midnight sun, and immense, desolate landscapes.”¹⁴ Nordic Noir’s melancholy “link[s] artistic work to Nordic nature, including the landscapes, flora, fauna and climate conditions.”¹⁵ The sub-genre expands upon darkness, guilt, and shame from other detective fiction, and adapts such conventions to suit Nordic culture and landscape. Guilt and shame translate into “eco-guilt” and “eco-shame.”¹⁶ To this purpose, the medium of TV is a useful tool to represent visually how melancholia manifests in the landscape. While in most earlier detective fiction nature is an objective correlative to the moral degeneration of humankind, in Nordic Noir, the depiction of nature is often a literal representation the degradation of the landscape by human occupation.¹⁷ The victim in Jordskott is thus nature and the landscape, and the criminal is not a person, but a system—patriarchal industrial capitalism.

More specifically, Jordskott relates the melancholy characteristic of Nordic Noir society and culture to catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. As already noted, the investigation of the missing children is closely linked to the exploitative capitalist practices of Thörnblad Mineral & Cellulosa which stem from Eva’s father’s actions. The damage her father wreaks is literally Eva’s legacy, and it has clear intergenerational ramifications going forward as well, since it impacts on her daughter’s fate. We can think of such capitalist motivations as examples of “total environmental callousness in the service of a get-rich-quick ethic that dominates all other considerations.”¹⁸ Ultimately, “a conventional closure is reached as the exploiters’ unsustainable aspirations are crushed and they are punished with death or a total loss of power.”¹⁹ Through the unfolding of the investigation, viewers are introduced to the humanoid spirits who are protecting the landscape against Thörnblad Mineral & Cellulosa’s industrial production. Or, in other words, the viewers are “made cognisant of the approaching catastrophe as a direct repercussion of Thörnblad company board’s decision to ignore the outcomes of the geophysical survey, according to which the continuation of mining operations in the Silverhöjd’s area would drastically augment the risks of land dislocation and earthquakes.”²⁰ Jordskott does not simply draw out ecological issues in a melancholy representation of the Swedish landscape. It incorporates the spiritual which makes it an “ecofantastic crime thriller,” blending a realistically rendered melancholic environment with fantasy elements, including spiritual humanoids and organisms, to disrupt the ecological imaginary of rational, capitalist subjects.²¹ The incorporation of the spiritual elements suggests “that the detective narrative may need to incorporate irrational, speculative and culturally specific elements in order to inspire care and concern on behalf of more-than-human nature.”²² The images of the landscape in the season and the spiritual creatures work together to draw out the deeper melancholia that results from a capitalist venture that exploits nature.

The Spiritual and Patriarchal in Jordskott

The Uncanny Rethought

The representation of nature in Season One of Jordskott is significant in understanding humankind’s relationship to climate change and the environment. Mäntymäki cites Tzvetan Todorov’s use of the uncanny, defining it as “a narrative drawing on simultaneous and ambiguous familiarity and unfamiliarity, thereby challenging our knowledge of reality.”²³ However, the idea of the uncanny is more commonly associated with Freud. In his essay, “The ‘Uncanny’ ” (1919), Freud argues that the uncanny “undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror.”²⁴ Furthermore, the uncanny is frightening “precisely because it is not known and familiar.”²⁵ Freud contends that the psychological uncanny as a return of the repressed is indicative of the modern rational mind, as opposed to the archaic animistic mind, which represents a type of regression: “the old, animistic conception of the universe, which was characterized by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings, and by the narcissistic overestimation of subjective mental processes” is a type of reversion.²⁶ Freud’s critique of animism depends upon his assumption that our archaic ancestors projected their own mental processes onto an unintelligent nature. But what if our forebears were better listeners and better analysts than Freud gives them credit for, rather than mere projectors? What if modern rationality has dulled our capacity to relate to and communicate with the nonhuman in mutual understanding? We should be taking Amitav Ghosh’s argument in The Great Derangement more seriously: “climate change events … are peculiarly resistant to the customary frames that literature has applied to ‘Nature’: they are too powerful, too grotesque, too dangerous and too accusatory” to understand how to represent them.²⁷ In this sense, an animistic representation is not a “regression.” Conventional or rational ways of representation may prevent us from hearing and understanding those accusations. Nature may be too powerful and difficult to represent coherently in any other way.

The Spiritual Protectors of Nature in Jordskott

In the narrative backstory of Jordskott, underground spirits have existed in Silverhöjd from time immemorial, protecting the wildlife, plants and waters. Throughout season one, Silverhöjd is “presented to viewers from a top-down bird’s eye view” which “conveys an impression of the wilderness as empty and readily exploitable.”²⁸ As noted, a treaty was established between these spirits and the pre-capitalist humans who eventually settled in the area. However, that peaceful and symbiotic relationship ended when Eva’s father broke the treaty and began logging the forest, consciously plotting the genocide of the forest dwellers. In episode seven, Ylva, an ally of the underground creatures protecting Silverhöjd forest, recounts witnessing Eva’s father killing the forest and the creatures therein. She explains to Eva:

As you probably understand now, Silverhöjd forest hides many secrets. In it there lives a people almost not quite like us. 350 years ago your ancestor Adolf Fredrik made an agreement with them. Peace would prevail if he promised to leave the northern forest untouched. But your father made himself an enemy of the forest. He wanted to restore Thörnblad’s wealth and prestige. He became obsessed with the riches that were rumoured to be in the forest.

These people are thus the very embodiment of Freud’s uncanny “almost not quite like us,” a fantastical element that emerges into the rational realist world. In that same scene, Ylva goes on to recount that after ignoring Ylva’s warnings, Eva’s father began to harvest the north woods and, in 1978, his company “sprayed the north woods with a deadly poison. The poison took all living plants, animals, and the underground people.” As she is recalling this incident in a flashback, toxic fog and smoke from the pesticide creates a melancholy environment. Ylva is seen covering her nose and mouth with a scarf as she witnesses the destruction of the forest.

Ylva was able to save one of the underground protectors of the forest. Ylva found “him” by listening to cries of a human baby. In the same scene, Ylva explains that she took care of him and “nursed him back to life.” She names him “Muns” which means “life” in the creatures’ language. Muns is the creature that has been kidnapping children. However, Ylva explains that he is “not out for revenge” but rather for a restoration of this “blood pact.” In other words, Muns “is not a monster.” The only time viewers see Muns is at the very end of the season. He is covered in leaves and dirt, with only his blurred humanoid shape visible. He is both human, evidenced by his human baby cries and by him being typed as a male, but he is also a spirit of the forest, a spirit of the voiceless trees, plants, flowers, animals and waters. The spirit of nature is manifested in physical beings who are human, animal and spirit.

Like Muns, there are other spiritual creatures that try to flourish after Eva’s father breaks the treaty. Throughout the season, we see werewolves and sea creatures being murdered by Harry Storm, who carries out his role as a bounty-hunter, a killer-for-hire in the capitalist environmental economy. These creatures are threatened by Gustaf Borén, current CEO of Eva’s father’s company, who employs Harry. Harry refers to the creatures as “predators” and “monsters,” demonizing and objectifying them to justify violent actions against nature. In fact, his actions are conceived of, not just as murder, but as genocide. As capitalism can only view nature in terms of its potential for exchange value, it requires a discourse to justify its compulsive destructiveness. In Gustaf’s all-consuming capitalist standpoint, and Harry’s desire for complete eradication of the creatures, nature becomes impossible to think about other than as an object or source of evil. As a product of instrumental rationality, the capitalist attitude indeed deems regressive any attempt to acknowledge the spiritual qualities of the nonhuman. However, “thinking of plants, animals, and elements not as objects to exploit and obstacles to remove, but as friendly or unfriendly neighbours, to visit or tolerate” is a kind of culture “which to coexist and from which to learn, without colonial domination, or special (as in species) eviction.”²⁹ Although Harry is successful in killing the creatures of the forest, Ylva’s instincts as a protector disrupt the patriarchal and capitalist antagonist by bringing back a sea creature from an unknown place to raise it in her bathtub, and, eventually to release it into the waters of Silverhöjd. Her hope is to bring life back to the forest. Such nurturing actions make Ylva a listener in “wild places” and part of “an audience” that tries to have conversations with nature through “a language not our own.”³⁰ Ylva listens to the landscape and the “language of plants” which has become a “second tongue” to her.³¹ As soon as she listens and saves the sea creature, we see leaves on trees beginning to sprout. As we will see below, this sea creature plays a critical role in the restoration of peace in the forest.

Consumption of The Organism Jordskott and Patriarchal Exploitation

“Jordskott” is a term invented by the creators of the series to describe an animistic parasitic or symbiotic organism. Loosely translated during the season, jordskott means “earth shot.” Although not a “moral entity itself,” jordskott “becomes a lens through which to regard the acts of the human and (non-) human characters.”³² Furthermore, jordskott “represents imprisonment, however, at the same time it highlights a connection with nature as a harbinger of expanded conceptualization and Life. The organism both gives and takes; it can heal and kill; it is beyond rationality, and in that sense it also emphasizes the polymorphism of the potentials of nature.”³³ Jordskott is consumed orally, and, in so doing, the human host merges with the organism, making “visible the boundary between the host and the unwanted, intruding other, while simultaneously emphasizing its role in the interconnectedness of all life.”³⁴ This is an example of how “the non-human is held as distinct and separate from the human, but then displaced on to the human while investigation of crimes against nature is put aside.”³⁵ In the final few episodes of the season, we see two characters ingesting jordskott: Eva and Harry. The effects are different on each character. (The following section will juxtapose the scenes of consumption of each character, specifically commenting on the intersections of gender and spirituality and furthering our discussion of both the capitalist exploitation and the animistic representation of nature. )

Both Eva and Harry consume jordskott to heal from deadly wounds. This consumption places them in a symbiotic and spiritual relationship with nature and comments on common, contemporary, religious beliefs. Eva and Harry become part of nature just as in Catholicism one consumes the transubstantiated bread and wine to become part of Jesus’ body. The added element of the uncanniness of the union gives the scenes of consumption a noir-ish twist on the religious and spiritual union between humans and nature. Jordskott is thus one of the central ways that the narrative represents the animistic qualities of nature beyond those imaginable by capitalist reason. The effects of ingestion on Eva and Harry are different. For example, for Eva, it is a ritualistic, spiritual and physically healing process. However, in retaliation for overconsuming the organism in his pursuit of power, jordskott becomes a physically destructive force for Harry.

In episode six, Eva suffers from a gunshot wound. In the next episode, Eva’s colleague, Rikskriminalen detective Göran Wass, brings her to Ylva’s house (a house that is surrounded by greenery and permeated by the sounds of insects) to remove the bullet from Eva. When removing the bullet fails, and Eva is assumed to have died, Göran attempts to revive her with electric pulses. After that also fails, and Eva has lost a lot of blood, Göran and Ylva force Eva to swallow jordskott. Both agree that if they do this, “there is no turning back.” Ylva then massages the organism down Eva’s throat. Eventually, the wound starts to heal and we see visible branches forming around Eva’s gunshot wound. When Eva awakens, she has numerous questions for Göran. Göran remains vague in his answers, indicating only that he and Ylva gave Eva something “alive” to heal Eva. The vagueness surrounding the characterization of jordskott does not limit the organism to a confined definition, easily classifiable and understandable, and thus more easily exploitable. Jordskott has two clear effects on Eva: heightened senses and strength. However, there is the risk of being completely overpowered by jordskott if Eva does not give it nourishment. An example of the latter effect can be seen with Eva’s daughter, Josefin. In the last episode of the series, Josefin is completely overcome by the parasite, and she merges with the landscape, becoming fully nature. Unlike the circumstances of Eva’s consumption of jordskott, when Josefin was exposed to the organism, she presumably had no knowledge of how to coexist symbiotically with it. Eva and Josefin are juxtaposed, with Eva being an example of what a symbiotic and successful relationship with jordskott is and Josefin with what can happen to a human/jordskott hybrid if the relationship is not well-preserved.

The same cannot be said of Harry. In episode nine, he breaks and enters into Ylva’s house and steals jordskott. Harry tries to make sense of the unclassifiable and mysterious jordskott, mistakenly believing from having read Ylva’s notebooks that the organism is not harmful and can provide him with physical and spiritual power. Like with Eva, Harry suffers a wound that cannot be cured by conventional means. However, unlike the greenery and insects that surround Ylva’s house and the room that Eva is in, Harry is in a cold and grey room. Moreover, unlike Eva, who was given the jordskott, Harry demands a young boy named Jörgen Olsson (who has been tricked by Harry into helping him kill off the creatures) feed him jordskott in order to heal. When the effects of the first jordskott subside, Harry asks for more, exploiting the organism and performing consumer desire. Eventually, Harry overdoses, and, in contrast to the branches we see healing Eva’s wound, Harry’s face is engulfed by roots and tree bark. He also becomes more physically powerful than Eva, punching items and throwing Jörgen across the room. He moves in a robotic and unnatural manner. With his newfound strength, Harry tries to kill Göran and Ylva only to be overtaken by the creature in the water that Ylva released earlier.

These two incidents, analyzed side-by-side, demonstrate how the representation of capitalism, patriarchy, and nature are mobilized in Nordic Noir to further an ecofeminist perspective. In other words, the two incidents address the intersections of social injustices stemming from patriarchal values to environmental relationality. While Eva is sensitive to what it means to be in a symbiotic relationship with jordskott, perhaps even questioning the religiously-constructed boundaries between humans and their environment, Harry is infatuated by the organism’s ability to give him inhuman strength. Eva nourishes jordskott and ensures that neither she nor the organism die, while Harry seeks to exploit jordskott. The last two episodes show Eva coexisting harmoniously with jordskott, using her heightened abilities to help find the missing children and put an end to Gustaf’s capitalist ventures. Conversely, Harry uses his newfound strength to try to kill Göran, Ylva, and others who stand in the way to eradicating “evil” creatures and sustaining Thörnblad Mineral & Cellulosa’s capitalist agenda.

The animistic characterizations of nature and the incidents involving Eva and Harry raise questions of subjectivity and gender and interrogate the culturally and religiously constructed divide between humans and nature. The season demonstrates the difficulty in drawing a line between good and evil actions and motives that contribute to environmental degradation. For example, there is the literalization of the evils of patriarchal capitalism since the absent villain of the series is Eva’s capitalist father. Furthermore, while there is the immediate and obvious white supremacist capitalist patriarchy of Gustaf, there is Harry’s weirdly conservative-religious mission (not a standard capitalist mission) to eradicate the evil spirits. Eva’s deceased father influences an array of actions that are performed by obviously capitalism-driven people like Gustaf and more complicated figures like Harry. Harry’s vigilante spirit blurs the line between determining what is good versus what is evil. Regardless of their motivations in determining good/evil, both Gustaf and Harry exploit nature and such acts are highly opposed to the relationship that Eva and others foster with nature. In so doing, Jordskott, as a popular culture phenomenon, reveals the intersections of gender, capitalism and nature in contemporary society.

Conclusion

In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Ghosh argues that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”³⁶ Taking the conventions of violence, guilt, and melancholia, and applying them to season one of Jordskott, we can see how detective fiction is an imaginative tool that helps us gain a better understanding of contemporary environmental concerns. The season tackles the climate crisis by using imaginative elements to deconstruct the culturally, socially and religiously created human/nature divide. The representation of the “full variety of human and nonhuman lifeforms” through the spirits of the landscape depict nature as “an agent with its own logic,” an agent that “therefore does not need to be incessantly mastered and controlled.”³⁷ Jordskott’s inclusion of the humanoid spirits of Silverhöjd is an example of how a return to an animistic representation of nature in a contemporary popular culture medium helps us better understand our relationship to nature and nature itself as a subject rather than an object to be exploited.

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Notes