TV Cultures – Blog Post #2: Geographies – National to the Transnational
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Broadcast television has traditionally been linked to ideas of nationalism due to the role it plays as a cultural technology. By its very nature, broadcast television is localised by the airwaves that transmit its signal, geographically reaching only so far and thus limiting its influence to particular audiences.
While this has historically carried many affordances in developing specific public spheres, modern media practices and technologies have transformed broadcast television such that it has triggered a “deterritorialisation of the imagination” (Appadurai 1996) by expanding and diversifying the global television market. Cross-border satellite TV channels, international and regional news channels, joint ventures between production companies and adaptations of series have transformed television into a transnational medium.
The Bridge (or Broen/Bron as it is known in its countries of origin) is a perfect example of transnational television production and the affordances offered by this globalised medium. A Danish/Swedish coproduction, it encapsulates the ‘Scandinoir’ genre and represents a cultural cross-section of the two neighbouring countries. It also presents a political/crime genre and narrative format that has proven internationally translatable.
From the outset, the show is assigned a transnational identity as it opens with shots of the eponymous bridge at night, with flashes of seedy orange and blue lights. Long shots of the bridge are cut together with shots of Malmö and Copenhagen’s cityscapes and their most famous monuments. The opening credits include both Danish and Swedish languages and therein contextualise its transnational setting.
The night time shots and dark colour palette used in this opening sequence also establish the ‘Scandinoir’ genre of The Bridge. As a genre, Scandinoir depicts crime and detective stories with complex and imperfect protagonists who are “far from simply heroic” (Economist, 2010). They often deal with uncovering political issues in Scandinavia whereby seemingly idealistic social systems are used to mask injustice.
The opening sequence closes in on the bridge, where a body has been found and the two central detective characters meet. This frames the ‘whodunit’ procedural quality of the crime/detective/Scandinoir genre, and then plays with the narrative expectations that come with this generic code.
Throughout the episode, story information is revealed as the detectives uncover the mystery. The plot evolves as a series of questions whereby every answer raises a new question. As such, the series conforms to the characteristics of a complex narrative that is serial yet somewhat episodic in presenting issues particular to each episode.
The Bridge is a critically acclaimed and popular program, and its success can be largely attributed to its specific dealings with transnational issues between Denmark and Sweden – the bridge itself operates as a metaphor for issues in the show. However, it contains narrative and structural elements as a series that transcend cultural specificity and allow for adaptations in other countries.
US network FX has programmed an American version of The Bridge that adapts the story to focus on a similar crime at the American-Mexican border. Sister production companies Kudos and Shine France are also producing an adaptation called The Tunnel, which focuses on the murder of a French politician in the Channel Tunnel between France and the UK.
The international success of The Bridge as an original series and a format/franchise indicates a shift away from the proliferation of American media products across the globe. Once identified as having a “mediacentric capitalist cultural influence which emanated out to the rest of the world in the form of television programmes” (Sinclair Jacka & Cunningham 1996), the influence of American television programs is now balanced in a globalised media economy whereby “non-Western players also actively collaborate in the production and circulation of global media products” (Iwabuchi 2005).
Broen/Bron not only stands as a milestone for Scandinoir as a genre (which usually pertains to literature, such as Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy), but it has also been key in demonstrating the importance of locality and cultural appropriations of media products. As Nacify explains, “globalized culture provides a shared discursive space” wherein media products are localised, domesticated and indigenised according to culturally-specific uses. Thus, Broen/Bron as a media product demonstrates the ability of broadcast television to transcend cultural specificity and proliferate through transnational appropriation in a globalised market.
2010 ‘Inspector Norse’, The Economist, 22 March, viewed September 1 2013, <http://www.economist.com/node/15660846>
Sinclair, J, Jacka, E & Cunningham, S. 1996 ‘Peripheral Vision’, New Patterns in Global Television, Oxford UP
Iwabuchi, K (2005) ‘Discrepant Intimacy: Popular Culture Flows in East Asia’, in Erni, Nguyet & Chua, Keng (eds.) Asian Media studies: Politics of Subjectivity, Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, p.19-36.
Appadurai, A 1996, Modernity At Large, Minnesota UP