How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark

by Kingsley, Patrick

  The first two series of The Killing ended up on BBC4, and I visited the set of the third while it was in post-production. Around half a million Brits watched each of the earlier instalments – a startling figure for such a moody, complex, subtitled piece of Scandi noir.

  “I thought: what is this?” says the show’s creator, Søren Sveistrup, who was sitting with his kids by a pool in Thailand when he first heard the British viewing figures. “We’re a very small country – five-point-something million – and it’s impossible to make people who don’t understand Danish watch our shows. It made me really proud. There were all these publishers writing to me. Could they buy The Killing? Was it a novel? It was kind of amazing.”

  Hot on the trail of The Killing (known in Denmark as Forbrydelsen, or The Crime) came Borgen, a show about a female prime minister. Odd as it may sound, this dramatisation of Scandinavian coalition politics proved an even bigger hit in Britain than The Killing, regularly pulling in three-quarters of a million viewers. And then there was The Bridge, which, with a staggering one million UK fans, was even more popular in Britain than it was in Denmark and Sweden. Each of them stars a strong woman in a position of authority – a reflection of Scandinavia’s slightly more enlightened attitude to gender equality.

  In The Killing, Sarah Lund wears the same clothes for days on end, doesn’t wear make-up, and puts her work before her fiancé, mother and son – behaviour which, says Bernth, wasn’t particularly surprising to a Danish audience.

  “We recognise that woman,” says Bernth. “She’s very obsessed with her work and she wants to make a difference. And I think we kind of like that.”

  Overseas, Bernth notes, audiences have reacted differently – and she cites the time the German distributors doctored a copy of the series poster, which shows Lund standing with her arms crossed, looking moody.

  “They thought: ‘Woah. God. She looks angry and boring. Ugly jumper. Woah, what do we do?’ And in Photoshop they changed her, and gave her a bra and a see-through shirt. I was like: ‘WHAT?’ And so I got on my email and stopped it immediately.”

  Britain took to these shows mainly because they are a) slightly exotic; and b) simply good television: gripping, well scripted, beautifully shot and brilliantly acted. But in Denmark, the reasons are more complex. These three shows are fictional, but they deal with issues that cut right to the heart of real-life Danish politics. Borgen, most obviously. Its portrayal of a female prime minister predicted the election, in 2011, of Helle Thorning-Schmidt. The show dared to imagine what the electorate – for all Denmark’s progressive attitudes to gender equality – had not been able to in 2007: a woman in charge. Meanwhile, the battle Birgitte Nyborg faces in Borgen to stay true to her family mirrors the real-life experiences of Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Thorning-Schmidt’s predecessor. Halfway through his tenure, realising that he had become estranged from his family, Rasmussen suddenly took two weeks off to be with his children – sparking a national debate about the responsibilities of the prime minister.

  Unlike Borgen, The Killing is not exclusively a political drama, but it is just as plugged into politics. The plot of the second season centres on a series of small-scale terrorist attacks, apparently carried out by Muslim extremists. At first, the series implicitly questions whether these events were sparked by Denmark’s aggressive role in Iraq and Afghanistan – the Danes’ first acts of overseas aggression since the national catastrophe of 1864. Then, even more provocatively, the show entertains the possibility that these attacks were perpetrated not by Muslims, but by ethnic Danes. It is a plotline that seemed eerily prophetic when, two years later, the far-right activist Anders Breivik slaughtered hundreds of young Norwegians across the Baltic in Oslo.

  The Killing’s first series did not deal with foreign policy, but is just as deft in its treatment of domestic issues. As a police procedural, it’s excellent – but the murder investigation is in many ways just a vehicle for exploring different aspects of Danish society. As old suspects prove their innocence and new ones emerge, The Killing moves from a portrayal of Danish family life to an analysis of Denmark’s education system, before finally reaching Copenhagen city hall, and a discussion of coalition politics.

  All the while, it questions Danish attitudes to immigration. One of the main characters is an Asian teacher called Rama. In a country where foreigners find it hard to fit in, Rama has done everything right: he married a Dane, he became a teacher and he fought against religious oppression. But it’s still not enough. When there is the slightest, unlikeliest hint that he may somehow be involved in the murder, Rama is immediately ostracised, even spat at by his students.

  “He was well integrated,” says Sveistrup. “He did what all the white guys told him to do. But when it came down to it, was he accepted? No. And that was a statement, of course. The Killing was a symptom of what society was. Here was a well-integrated young Asian man, who had a good job – but when hell broke loose, he got pointed at.”

  Airing only a year after the Muhammed cartoons crisis, Rama was right on the zeitgeist – but The Killing always avoided forcing a point.

  “Somebody spat at the teacher,” says Sveistrup. “But did that person do that because he was Asian, or because they suspected he killed the girl? I just wanted to raise the question.”

  For Farshad Kholghi, the actor who played Rama, the part was ground-breaking because for once it portrayed an immigrant as an engaged member of society, rather than as a gang member. Before The Killing, Kholghi had been so frustrated at the lack of interesting Asian parts that he wrote about the problem in his weekly column for Jyllands-Posten. “I said: ‘Okay, I accept that you don’t want me to play Hamlet or a guy called Peter or John – but why can’t I play an ordinary guy named Hassan or Ali, who’s a dentist, who’s got a normal life, who’s not a criminal?’ I don’t know about England, but many Iranians in Denmark are either doctors or dentists. So why I can’t play the dull dentist?”

  In The Killing, Rama was a teacher, not a dentist, but for Kholghi he was still refreshingly normal. “It was a very cool role.”

  But Rama wasn’t the only radical thing about The Killing. In fact, in production terms, the show marked a sea-change in the way that Danish television shows were made. Fifteen years ago, they simply weren’t very ambitious.

  “It was pretty average,” says Piv Bernth, sitting in the show’s studios just west of Copenhagen. “It was good for the local region but we never really made it internationally. We did a lot of plays – stage plays adapted for TV. They were very simple. They didn’t have the filmic look. They were often filmed with just three cameras, which made the lights pretty boring because you had to be able to shoot from all angles.” Then, in the mid-90s, Dogme happened. Championed by the likes of Lars von Trier and Thomas Winterberg, Dogme was the school of Danish cinema that focussed on narrative and pared-down aesthetics, rather than special effects. The films that were made according to Dogme’s rules won widespread acclaim. Suddenly, the eyes of the film world were on Denmark.

  The Øresund: the bridge from The Bridge

  Danish television producers were inspired – not necessarily by Dogme’s specific values, but by the way Dogme had made it on the world stage. Dogme showed that Denmark, small as it was, could be a cultural force.

  “We started to look at ourselves as less local and more international,” says Bernth. “We became more curious and ambitious. We started travelling to the US and asking: ‘Well, how do they do it?’ They were so excellent, and are still so excellent, at long-running TV series. And we weren’t, because we were quite new.”

  Bernth and her colleague Sven Clausen were at the forefront of the transition. They visited the sets of shows like LA Law, NYPD Blue and The West Wing, and learned about how script-writing worked for multi-episode dramas. “They had this machine going, and the ‘writers’ room’ which was quite new to us.”

  The pair of them set about creating a Scandinavian version of what they had found in America. The firs
t was Clausen’s Taxa – a 56-episode show about the travails of a taxi company that ran for three years from 1997. This was followed in 2002 by Bernth’s family drama Nikolaj og Julie. Both were radical for their time – but they didn’t make waves outside Denmark. They were, however, the two shows on which Søren Sveistrup cut his teeth – and by the end of Nikolaj og Julie his reputation was so great that DR invited him to create a 20-episode crime series, based on a concept of his choosing. DR expected him to come up with something a bit like CSI – a show that sees a new murder solved every episode.

  But Sveistrup wanted to do something a bit more ambitious – something with narrative arcs that spread over several episodes, like Twin Peaks, or 24.

  “I came up with the idea that the story all comes from one murder,” he says. “At first, people said it couldn’t be done. They said we couldn’t do a story like this in 20 episodes, because people would get bored after one episode if they didn’t know who the killer was.”

  But Sveistrup stuck to his guns, and The Killing was born. From the very beginning, he went about the project with the same newfound confidence that you can see in the work of other youngish Danes like Rene Redzepi, Bjarke Ingels and Claus Meyer.

  “It was my ambition from the very start to do the world’s best show,” says Sveistrup, not in a haughty way. Tall, pale, and softly-spoken, he communicates with a quiet authority that never approaches arrogance. “People laughed at me. They said, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, we’re only Danish.’ Which is typically Danish. We’re not boasting types. But I wanted to do something exceptional. I was fed up with people saying that television is just television. We all watch feature films on our television screens – and the same stuff that you tell in those feature films, you could also tell in a television show.”

  He achieved this not just through The Killing’s structure, but in the way it was shot. “Typical television is just close-ups. There would be a close-up with you and then a close-up with me. Talking heads. But I wanted to make it more epic – visually more epic. Larger pictures. Spaghetti western stuff. We often talked about westerns, actually. I’ve seen Clint Eastwood’s films many times. One man would arrive on a train. Another man would just look at him, and between them they’d create a moment. I still use that example to remind me not to get too busy with dialogue. Remember the pictures. Always the pictures. And the characters. Sarah Lund is the silent type. She didn’t need to say much. I hated detectives when they talked about their private lives. Clint Eastwood is the mysterious type. He doesn’t talk much. He’s silent – and because he’s silent, we have to imagine all kinds of stuff going on in his mind.”

  He may have had his doubters, but Sveistrup had the last laugh. It’s subjective, of course, but The Killing is considered one of the world’s best television shows since The Wire. Bernth says it paved the way for later Scandi series like The Bridge, which wasn’t made by DR, but follows a similar structure to The Killing, and features an introverted female lead who draws comparisons to Sarah Lund.

  “Everybody said we were crazy,” says Bernth. “They said we weren’t going to get the audience, because people wouldn’t want to sit there every Sunday and wait for 20 weeks to get the killer. But they did. It became an obsession. And I think The Bridge was very much inspired by that.”

  The Killing also broke ground simply through the size of its cast across the three seasons. The Danish acting community isn’t especially large – and you constantly see the same actors in different shows. On the wall of a room at The Killing studios, there’s a photo of Peter Mygind and Sofie Gråbøl. The photo is a still from Nicolai og Julie, in which the two actors starred. Tellingly, both of them would go on to play lead roles in, respectively, Borgen and The Killing. Søren Malling has big roles in both The Killing and Borgen, as do Bjarne Henriksen and Mikael Birkkjaer. Meanwhile, Kim Bodnia, who plays Martin Rohde in The Bridge, also has a part in The Killing. This list of crossovers goes on and on – and it prompted the Guardian to run a Venn diagram of them all under a headline that asked: “Has Denmark run out of actors?”

  Súsan Johansen: the woman who knitted that jumper

  Can this be true? I ask Bernth. Not quite, she laughs. But because she has a policy of not recycling actors, The Killing has got through 400 of them – “which is a lot for Denmark”. Mikael Birkkjaer, who plays Lund’s mysterious partner in the second series, very nearly didn’t get the part because he’d played such a different role as the prime minister’s academic husband in Borgen. “We originally said: ‘No, we don’t want Mikael, he’s just been a doctor for 20 episodes.’ But he was the best and he was the one who had the connection with Sofie.”

  By now Bernth and I are touring the set. First we pop through the editing suites, where – on a huge Apple screen – Sarah Lund has just woken up in a hotel bed in Jutland. “Episode six of the new series,” says Bernth. We move on, through a vast white hangar where once stood the home of Nanna Birk Larsen, the murdered schoolgirl, and then we’re suddenly inside a police station. We could be in a scene of The Killing 2 – after all, we just walked past the actor who plays Brix, Lund’s boss. But there’s one key difference: the place, so pristine in the earlier series, is now a tip. The mirrors are smashed; there’s debris everywhere. It’s a symptom of one of the themes for the third series: the financial crisis, and the effect it’s having on state institutions like the police force.

  Sveistrup says that once again he’s using the series to tap into current political debate. During the first two series, Denmark was consumed with a conversation about race and identity – and The Killing reflected that. Now the national debate has changed. It’s concerned with the economy, and, accordingly, so is The Killing.

  “Before the financial crisis, we had a fight of values,” he says. “Western values versus the foreigners, the immigrants. Is it okay to wear a scarf at work? There was a big discussion about that kind of thing. But not any more. The financial crisis has taken centre stage. Everything has turned into a conversation about money – and I’m going with it.”

  At the time of the interview, The Killing’s third and final series was yet to air – and Sveistrup was tight-lipped about what it would contain. But as we later found, its plot centred on a rich mogul whose child gets kidnapped. Is he based on Mærsk Mc-Kinney, the Danish shipping tycoon? “I can’t remember,” deadpanned a grinning Sveistrup. And what about the jumpers, I wondered at the time. Would Sarah Lund wear yet another bit of knitwear? Sveistrup just smiled.

  •

  Súsan Johansen knits with the nonchalance of a teenager sending a text. Her needles click furiously through the yarn heaped in her lap – but apart from the occasional downward glance, her gaze is directed elsewhere. At her coffee, at passing bikes, at me. A social worker by profession, the knitting is just something she does on her way to work. Which is unexpected, because for many people – particularly the millions who watch The Killing – her knitting has reached cult status. From the very first episode, Sarah Lund wears a feminised fisherman’s jumper – creamy white, skin-tight, and ringed with a row of large black snowflakes. Episode after episode, Lund never seems to take it off – and pretty soon viewers wanted to copy her. The Radio Times ran a feature called, “How to knit your own Sarah Lund jumper.” The Guardian had “Sarah Lund’s jumper – explained.” There’s even a website devoted to it: SarahLundSweater.com, which tells you both where to buy the original and where to head for cheaper knock-offs. The real thing is from the Faroes, a splattering of islands in the far north of the Atlantic that technically belong to Denmark. It was designed by the small fashion house Gudrun and Gudrun, and Johansen is the middle-aged Faroese woman who first knitted it. Sitting in front of me now, at a table outside Kalaset café in central Copenhagen, she is about to knit another one.

  “Nobody knew that this strange jumper would eventually get so much attention,” remembers Gudrun Rógvadóttir, the business half of Gudrun and Gudrun. In the mid-2000s, homespun knitwear was out of fashion. In
the Faroes, local wool was burnt as a waste product when the islands’ sheep were sent to slaughter. Horrified, Gudrun Rógvadóttir, a former consultant, joined forces with Gudrun Ludvig, a local designer, and the pair set out to revitalise the dying art of the Faroese fisherman’s jumper.

  The jumper goes back a long way in the Faroes, a place where fishing and sheep-herding still play a role in local life. There are similar jumpers in Iceland, but there the colours are brighter, and the patterns are rounder. In the 1800s, says Rógvadóttir, each Faroese village would have had their own unique designs.

  “At that time, all healthy men over 14 went to sea in the old boats,” she tells me, on the phone from the Faroese capital, Torshavn. “They all went away in springtime, and they didn’t come back until autumn, and in that time there was no communication between the fishermen and their families.” On their return, the villagers would gather on the shore to watch the boats sail in from the horizon – and to see which fishermen had returned safely. “Everybody knew that every year the sea would take some of the fishermen. And the story goes that the patterns on the sweaters were so special, and so clear, that even before the face of the man could be seen, you’d be able to identify them by the patterns on the sweater. So all of a sudden the patterns could tell the difference between life and death.”

  By the 1970s, the Faroese sweater carried a different symbolism. “It was really big in the hippy period,” says fashion designer Henrik Vibskov. “For some people, the sweater was a symbol of a day off. Nature. Walking at the beach. My brother and sister were hanging out in these sweaters, wearing the Palestinian scarf, with hippy long hair.”