The Nordic noir brand

Abstract

Editing the volume Nordic Noir, Adaptation, Appropriation with Linda Badley and Jaakko Seppälä made evident historical changes in the role of adaptation in Nordic audio-visual culture. An earlier generation of auteurs such as Aki Kaurismäki used adaptation to align themselves with aesthetic and philosophical bodies of texts, what we might call ‘networks of similarity’, following Luis M. García Mainar. In the rise of Nordic noir since the millennium, Nordic cinema and television’s networks of similarity change. The auteurs used adaptation to establish modernist originality of vision. In the current moment, this quality has diminished, and adaptation increasingly figures in broader, more densely cross-referential networks of similarity, of which Nordic noir is arguably an instantiation. These are defined by aesthetic and sociopolitical associations, more so than originality. These associations figure in practitioners’ and textual consumers’ use of response to and replication of the noir texts and their networks in a variety of media. This activity can be understood as a type of branding that aligns with attempts at national and regional branding.