Spoiler alert for everything
One of the strengths of scandinoir show The Bridge is the depth and layering of the story. I watched the final series when it aired earlier this year, and then I went back and watched the entire run, finding a warmth and mystery to it that I had never realised. From episode one, we are introduced to a line-up of disparate characters that have only a tangential relationship with the case. They pursue their personal dramas independently of the murder investigation launched by detectives Saga and Martin. Writers of mysteries often use ‘red herring’ characters to keep the audience guessing and mask the identity of the true killer long enough for the big reveal. Most of the time, though, we can see the join. The characters look and act like red herrings.
Not in The Bridge. Everyone in this series matters. Sometimes that’s to illustrate the caprice of life (and the cruel fatalism of the show’s writers). A teenage girl argues with her mother and runs away from home. She approaches her father, but he’s separated and busy with an occasion for his new family and can’t help. Eventually the teenager is taken in by a paranoid schizophrenic. The madman is pleasant and harmless, no threat to the girl. But he has fallen under the thrall of the ‘Truth Terrorist’, a multiple murderer who kills people in baroque ways to draw attention to social problems in Denmark and Sweden. The schizophrenic is one of several mentally disordered people the TT has groomed for samurai suicide missions to kill psychiatrists around the city. ‘When I’m gone, you can keep the flat,’ this delusional man tells the adolescent. In the confrontation that ensues, the teenage girl becomes a witness, and the callous TT kills her too.
Sometimes these sub plots reveal the mystery of human motivation. In the opening scene Saga and Martin close the Øresund Bridge because there is a body on it – two bodies, in fact, top and tailed together exactly over the national line. No traffic is allowed through, but Martin waves past an ambulance on a life saving mission – a new heart for Göran Söringer, property developer. His wife Charlotte pulls every possible string to save him. Sadly Göran dies anyway – leaving evidence that he had a long term affair. Charlotte contacts the detectives again when the Truth Terrorist has pulled another stunt. The TT has kidnapped a homeless man and will bleed the indigent to death unless a ransom of millions is paid by the city’s property tycoons. Charlotte Söringer pays the full ransom, for her daughter, she says – who knew, and said nothing, and will now inherit millions less.
The story, and the Øresund Bridge, have a lot in common – full of bewildering switchbacks and facets, but all of it serving a solid purpose. Everything goes back to the beginning.
The show never officially diagnosed Saga Norén and that was a wise decision. The detective is striking for her strict fidelity to truth and procedure. She files a complaint against colleague Martin for letting the ambulance through. She files another against a shopkeeper who has illegal CCTV, even though his footage becomes vital evidence in the TT case. Outside the investigation room, every scene is an opportunity to demonstrate Saga’s profound lack of social skills. Eating with Martin’s family, she says casually that the cooking doesn’t appeal. An assistant’s young daughter, come to see her dad at the office, shows Saga a picture she’s drawn of the detectives. ‘You can’t tell,’ Saga replies, and moves on to the next order of business. Open up to Saga about your relationship troubles, and she’ll quote you statistics on divorces and the declining libido.
Saga was paired with Martin because the Danish cop is her opposite in personality – Martin is warm, sociable, emotional and sensual. Sometimes her frankness makes Martin laugh (‘What did you do last night, Saga?’ ‘I had casual sex’) and sometimes it enrages him. ‘Do you hear what you say to people?’ he yells at her in a lift. The obvious comic contrast between the two obscured Saga’s real problem, and it had nothing to do with autistic spectrum disorder.
Watch how she acts with the boss Hans. She replays confrontations repeatedly with him, asking Hans for reassurance that she made the right decisions. Saga is constantly asking: Have I done everything correctly? Hans is happy to give the reassurance, Saga gets results and he wants her happy and productive. A change of management in series three throws Saga into a tailspin. Kindly old Hans is replaced by seasoned public sector game player Linn Björkman. Björkman questions Saga’s decisions and gives her no benefit of the doubt. Saga’s thought processes go from ‘Have I done everything correctly?’ to ‘I’ve done something wrong’ and it contributes significantly to her meltdown in that series.
Every maverick cop has a secret back story and Saga explains hers with characteristic economy. Saga’s mother had Munchhausen’s syndrome and tortured her little sister Jennifer. The teenage Saga knew she would never be able to prove such a bizarre motive and instead framed both parents for child abuse. With her mother and father in prison, Saga was awarded custody of her sister – however the little girl, unable to live with her trauma, threw herself in front of a train. Around the time of series three, Saga’s mother Marie-Louise reaches out to her older daughter, then a Malmo detective struggling under Björkman’s management. Marie-Louise has a different take on the events of Saga’s childhood, and believes that Jennifer killed herself because she couldn’t feel loved under Saga’s emotionless guardianship. An appalled Saga declines all contact and Marie-Louise kills herself, but frames her suicide as a murder and sets Saga up for the crime. Saga is then packed off to prison herself, eventually released on appeal after a year behind bars.
‘We’ve got a bit to work with,’ Saga’s therapist says.
Law enforcement tends to attract people who have a sense of obligation. People want to ask ‘Have I done everything correctly?’ and be told: ‘Yes – you’re doing the right thing.’ It would certainly attract someone like Saga who is haunted by a sense of obligation unfulfilled. ‘Are you a police officer twenty-four seven?’ her therapist asks.
Obligation is not a good thing. It closes doors. It constrains our thinking. It inhibits our freedoms. It kills the spark in us. It murders our sleep. But obligation is of course a necessary thing because we obviously all have obligations – to our families, our loved ones, our employers, our friends, our countries, society in general, what academics call the social contract. It is how the world works.
But people suffer when obligations are imposed upon them (rather than being entered into with informed choice).
The poet Wendell Berry writes:
You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
For obligation has an evil twin, and its name is entitlement.
As we saw at the Kavanaugh hearings (and other recent times) entitlement is an ugly thing – particularly when it’s challenged. Worse is the sense of entitlement tied to a sense of obligation discharged. ‘I am entitled to hit a nurse because I’ve paid taxes and the nurse still won’t give me a script.’ ‘I am entitled to kill you because I work hard all day to put food on the table and you still won’t respect me.’ The villain, it’s said, doesn’t think of himself as the bad guy. He thinks of himself as the hero in a different movie.
A sense of entitlement can justify most crimes. The Truth Terrorist turns out to be an ex cop called Jens Hansen. He frames his murders as a political campaign on behalf of the dispossessed, but the crime scenes are carefully crafted ‘front stories’ to mask the real motive of personal grievance. ‘His wife and son died in a car accident. He feels that mistakes were made by the authorities,’ Saga explains to August, Martin’s son. ‘So all that stuff about raising awareness was… just talk?’ ‘Just talk,’ Saga confirms. Like Marie-Louise, Jens crafts narratives for strategic ends. Stories within stories. Crimes beyond crimes.
But The Bridge has a happy ending – Saga finally manages to work through her crushing weight of obligation and, her duty discharged, quits the police force. She tosses her police ID off the side of the Øresund Bridge and drives off in her classic vintage Jäger Grön Porsche to begin the rest of her life. She has understood the truth Wendell Berry expressed in his poem ‘Do Not Be Ashamed’:
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness.
They will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
‘I am not ashamed.’ A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.
Max Dunbar 