Zofia Kolbuszewska
Title: Anthropocene and Forensic Imagination: Crime, Arctic Gothic and the Nordic Ecological Uncanny in TV Crime series Jordscott and Fortitude
Abstract: The presentation juxtaposes the British TV series the Fortitude (2015-2018) and the Swedish/Finnish/British/Norwegian television series Jordskott (2015–17), which evince different strategies of representing crime investigations in the Nordic Crime genre as well as contrasting approaches to the ways the environment’s destruction contributes to the occurrence of crime. Also, the Anthropocene anxiety about the broken bonds of human actors with the environment plays out differently in the two TV series: the desolation of the Arctic milieu with its landscape tainted with the remains of the extractive industries in Fortitude is contrasted with the ecological resistance, unity with nature and the final acceptance of clandestine population of animal-human hybrids in Jordskott. The modernist attitude of objectification and commodification of nature is reflected in the paleontological discovery subplot in Fortitude, where it also harks back to the origins of forensics in, among other things, the nineteenth-century explosion of interest in peleontology and archaeology, whereas in Jordskott eco-symbiotic attitudes are necessary and indispensable for identifying crime, the perpetrators and the subsequent healing of the human-environment rift engendered by the capitalist relentless exploitation of human and environmental resources.
