The Killing: The Gender Politics of the Nordic Noir Crime Drama and Its American Remake

Abstract

How does the depiction of female subjectivity and agency change when a Danish public broadcasting serial is adapted for an American commercial network? I compare Forbrydelsen (DR1, 2007–2012) with its remake, The Killing (AMC 2011–2013, Netflix 2014), to draw out the significance of postfeminism and neoliberalism as interpretive grids that limit feminist progress in the United States. Despite similar narrative and aesthetic strategies that center a strong female protagonist, female agency is undermined in The Killing through the postfeminist “bad mother” trope, which supplants Forbrydelsen’s Nordic noir left-wing critique of global capitalism and gender issues. This analysis illustrates that the cultural milieux of societies that are as egalitarian as Scandinavian states convey indirect feminist creative influence on cultural production, even when there is limited direct female creative input, an influence that may outweigh greater direct female creative control in the anti-egalitarian cultural context of a neoliberal and postfeminist United States.