Séminaire Les Nords, 13 décembre 2022 - Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris

Bloodletting, as historian Richard Slotkin has masterfully shown in his works Regeneration Through Violence and Gunfighter Nation is at the core of American society and history. The murderer and criminal using violence as a first resort have always been prominent fixtures in media rhetoric and film. The killer himself becomes the focal point, the paroxystic vector of the “pornography of violence” in culture Arthur Schlesinger was highlighting in his book Violence: America in the Sixties (1968). 
The same type of violence largely defines the procedural cop show. In the Danish source series, Søren Sveistrup’s Forbrydelsen, and its American adaptation, The Killing, by Veena Sud, the northern environments of Denmark and Washington State become an integral part of the plotlines and visual grammar of the opuses. As full-fledged characters, they mobilize and foreground a fascinating anatomy of the murders at the heart of the serial narratives, enhancing the relationship between the rhetorical, technical and stylistic elements of the series and the broader sets of contexts and concerns they focus on. The bleak northern landscapes and urbanscapes always seem to be tied to the origins of human destructiveness.