New Landscapes of Film and Media. Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb

1 Published in Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media. Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb. London: Wallflower Press, 2016. pp. 36–58. Traversing the Øresund: The Transnational Urban Region in Bron/Broen Pei-Sze Chow ‘OK, you have a bridge, but that does not make it a region unless it ends up in people’s minds.’ (Pedersen 2004: 86) In September 2011, the first episode of the crime series Bron/Broen (translation: The Bridge) was aired on Danish and Swedish television, transmitting grim images of the Øresund bridge bathed in the murkiness of the night into living rooms and onto laptop and mobile phone screens across the two countries. Over the course of the first two seasons, audiences have watched as Swedish detective Saga Norén and her Danish counterpart Martin Rohde traverse the bridge between Copenhagen and Malmö episode after episode in pursuit of murderers and criminal masterminds, while at the same time managing their fragile personal relationships on either end of the bridge. Their investigation takes them—and the viewer—to all manner of locations across the two cities: in one moment the detectives are in Denmark, and in the next scene they are already in Sweden. Bron/Broen is set in the Øresund region, a transnational conurbation comprising, in the main, the cities of Copenhagen in eastern Denmark and Malmö in southern Sweden.1 Lying between the two cities is the Øresund, also known as ‘the Sound’ in English, the marine strait from which the region derives its name. Supported by structural funds through the European Union Interreg programme, the 2 Øresund region formally and materially came into existence on 1 July 2000 with the opening of the fixed link between the two nations, known by its hybrid Danish- Swedish name, Øresundsbron (Øresund Bridge).2 The statement at the beginning of this essay, uttered by a representative from Wolff Olins, a consultancy tasked with managing the place-branding of the Øresund region, addresses a challenge faced by policy-makers and planners of the cross-border urban metropolis: to make the region economically and socially viable, Danes and Swedes have to subscribe to and internalise the idea of a new regional identity, specifically an Øresund identity. Indeed, a large part of the work that fell on regional planners at the beginning of the Øresund project was to engage in the processes of marketing the region – that is, to talk it into existence (Shotter 1993; Tangkjær 1999).3 With the physical infrastructure now in place, it remains the task of the cultural industries to coax the region’s inhabitants into identifying with and participating in a social dynamic similar to Benedict Anderson’s concept of an ‘imagined community’ (2006 [1991]). In other words, culture, especially audiovisual media, plays an important role in cultivating this new social identity. This set of circumstances raises the following questions: what does this new transnational community and space look like? And how is the new urban region imagined through an audiovisual lens? In exploring the ways in which a popular television series participates in the construction of the imagined space of the Øresund region, this chapter seeks to address how popular audiovisual texts and, in particular, the long-form television serial format, mediate the spatial and cultural complexities of the transnational Øresund imaginary. My argument is that Bron/Broen, while a tangible product of the political and 3 planned vision of a transnational region, is at the same time paradoxically critical of the Øresund imaginary of borderlessness and integration. On the one hand, the television series is a manifestation of a wider regional production context, a product of a bilateral coproduction venture that emerges from the rhetoric of transnational Danish-Swedish collaboration in the Øresund region. This rhetoric in the production conditions translates directly onto the plot of the series that mirrors the aspirations of the region. Yet, on the other hand, its representation of the region through the lens of ‘Nordic noir’ paradoxically and critically foregrounds the region’s fault lines and tensions in medium-specific ways.4 Through the episodic nature of the television drama format, Bron/Broen articulates images of the transnational urban region as a fractured place that is composed of fragmented, albeit imbricated, spaces that emphatically contest the euphoric utopian vision of binational collaboration and cross-border urban energy invoked by Øresund planners in the late 1990s (Löfgren 2000: 29). Furthermore, I contend that the series portrays a critical and prescient representation of the region’s current difficulties in sustaining this vision, especially in light of an announcement made by Copenhagen authorities that the Øresund region will be rebranded as ‘Greater Copenhagen and Skåne’ from January 2016 (Crouch 2015; Laasby 2015). As the lead Danish actor Kim Bodnia remarks in an interview, Bron/Broen is ‘a symptom of something real’ (Nimbus Film 2013). Developed and broadcast in the first ten years since the ‘birth’ of the region, Bron/Broen registers some of the anxieties of spatial transformation in the postindustrial region, where newfound mobilities across a transnational urban space are projected through the narrative lens of the Scandinavian television crime genre and infused with the audiovisual 4 aesthetics of the Nordic Noir wave that combines the subdued lighting, pronounced use of shadows typical of its American forebear with recognisably Nordic phenomena, climate and seasonal conditions, light, and language(s) (Waade and Jensen 2013: 192). Bron/Broen is the first major televisual production to specifically address, represent, and reimagine transnational, intercultural encounters in the Øresund region, as well as the implications of new spatial experiences initiated by the bridge. It is my contention that the series, at both the production and narrative levels, articulates the difficulties and contradictions in fostering a sense of a coherent Øresund identity. In this chapter, I first discuss the screen-industrial conditions in which the series was produced, a context in which both state-led and commercial interests work in tandem to foster audiovisual culture in the region. To this end, I briefly outline the constellation of policies, institutions, and transnational production funds that give rise to the conditions of what Mette Hjort calls ‘affinitive transnationalism’ in the Danish and Swedish audiovisual industries (2009). Following this, I show through a close reading of textual features how the series constructs the imagined space of the Øresund region and simultaneously articulates its fault lines in medium-specific ways. Finally, I address the funding and production contexts of Bron/Broen, detailing the material ways that that the region is performed on-screen (and off-screen) to domestic and international audiences and showing how aspects of production further complicate the projection of a transnational urban region. A postindustrial region: geography and economics 5 As a result of several wars between the two kingdoms in the seventeenth century, contact across the Øresund diminished and the body of water came to be perceived by politicians in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an iron curtain rather than a space to be traversed (Löfgren 2008: 198). This perspective has changed since the 1950s, and the strait, previously regarded by the populace as a ‘blue wall’ and a barrier representing the strict national borders and unused economic potential, is now a porous and liminal body that connects the two lands (Pedersen 2004: 81; OECD 2003: 76; Olshov 2010: 51). Linked by the iconic Øresundsbron, the economic and political activity of the region is centred on Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, and the former shipbuilding city of Malmö sitting on the periphery of Sweden.5 From the 1970s until the late 1980s, the two cities separately faced similar problems: widespread unemployment, a declining population, competition from abroad, and the demise of the manufacturing and shipping industries. In Europe, the late twentieth century saw the push for supra-national and inter-regional integration dominate the political and economic stage, reflected in the several cross-border development projects in the European Union, from which the Øresund project draws funding and political support. Prompted by stagnating economies on both sides, the plan to physically connect the two cities by the Øresund Bridge brought the assurance that the larger Øresund project and associated new infrastructure under the Trans-European Transport Network (TENs-T) initiative would open up the domestic, regional, and national markets to the wider European and consequently international market (Bucken-Knapp 2003: 66–68; Baeten 2012: 28). Since 1996, 6 structural funds have been made available through the EU Interreg programmes that focus on stimulating inter-regional cooperation. Malmö’s transition from an industrial to post-industrial city has been the more salient of the two cities. This transformation has happened within the larger context of the regionalisation of Swedish politics and governance since the 1990s and which continues into the present. Subsequent prestige-laden, ‘starchitectural’ (Ponzini and Natasi 2011) urban development projects such as the Turning Torso (completed in 2005), the tallest skyscraper in Scandinavia, and the complete overhaul and gentrification of the Västra Hamnen (Western Harbour) district

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