This last winter I finished watching the Scandi noir series Modus on BBC4, based on Norwegian author, Anne Holt’s novel (she served as Norway’s Minister for Justice between 1996 and 1997). I am not an avid TV watcher but I am partial to foreign detective films like Inspector Montalbano and Wallander, especially when the cinematography is so hauntingly rich as in Modus, with stunning aerial views of Stockholm in winter (and it’s got to be around Christmas time!) and vehicles arrowing through frozen forest and tundra. I missed the beginning of the series, but was sufficiently hooked to catch the last three weeks, especially as in my case you are wallowing in a massive and incredibly comfortable new sofa.
What struck me as I watched it was how powerful a parable it was of our time, perhaps trying a bit too hard to be so. In the old days you had the good guys fighting the bad guys, cowboys and Indians, Robin Hood against the Sheriff of Nottingham, the Brits v the Nazis. Now you have the the exaggerated bogey men of the cultural Marxists or hard left out to destroy the shibboleths of the new politically correct orthodoxy i.e. Such groups as homosexuals, immigrants and Moslems. In the case of Modus, a shadowy extreme right wing fundamentalist Christian sect in America is involved in a bizarre plot to murder homosexuals in Sweden. They send an ex marine who goes by the name of Richard Forrester to do the dirty work in cahoots with a woman who is working for a wealthy Swedish businessman who is of course a homosexual in a same sex relationship with another privileged and pampered male. Together with a lesbian couple they seem to be the parents of a young lad, Noah. The ex-marine is of course clean cut, athletic and good looking but with a suitably hard enough steely gaze to look like a sinister serial killer every time he hovers on the edge of a snowy Swedish scene.
Was there any ‘traditional’ relationship apparent in the programme? Yes there was actually. One of the main characters, Inger, a female criminal psychologist and profiler who ends up working with the police, is a mother of two daughters, one of whom is Stina, an autistic child who has caught a glimpse of the killer at the beginning of the series and so lives under the threat of the serial killer appearing at her bedroom door. However, even the mother is divorced or split from her partner with whom she shares the kids, and as the story develops she is getting closer to one of her work colleagues, detective Ingvar Nyman, a leading investigator in the story, but a ‘classic tormented cop’ with a divorce and dead child behind him. Eventually the two become intimate.
The serial killer who hates homosexuals appears in the programme introduction as a tattooed, bare – backed ‘agent of Satan’ type figure, and his menacing persona is richly massaged by his continual retreat to a small caravan deep in the heart of the Swedish forest, where he skypes or tunes in to his extreme fundamentalist handler, Jacob Lindstrum, who preaches to his ‘hill billy’ congregation somewhere in red neck America and then turns round to speak into a microphone directly connecting to our homosexual hating maniac. Now and again he flips down a roof compartment in the caravan to select a mobile phone from his collection to give or receive another message.
So the story progresses as one homosexual/lesbian after another is bumped off and a plot is revealed by the police to remove six of them violently from this mortal coil. I missed at least one murder coming late to the show (apparently the first victim, a celebrity chef, was strangled ruthlessly) but witnessed the killer stabbing in the neck a ‘right on’ female bishop in the snow on Christmas Eve in the Upsalla area. It seems her mistake was that she had been in a relationship with another female in the past, although now married. She had also argued for gender neutral weddings, not something that would have endeared her to the caravan man.
Then the story swings to a sophisticated urban arty scene, in fact a decidedly dodgy exhibition with a posing naked older man, where a creative type by the name of Niclas is done away with, made to look like a heroin overdose. But steely eyed caravan man is not finished yet. Next we find that the rather louche, down and out son Robin, of Swedish mum, Gunhilla, who is the nanny and housekeeper for Marcus and Rolf, his partner, is a target. She is pretty despairing of his decadent behaviour, eventually he is stalked and has his head smashed against a wall by our friendly local serial killer. He manages to escape but dies later in bed at home.
Meanwhile, a raid by the Feds in the US of A on the highly caricatured church of hating homophobes where everyone looks so weird and out of a zombie film from the some mid west horror film, ends with the killing of our serial killer’s ‘minder.’ Of course this strange preacher looks as weird and ‘out there’ as it’s possible to be. Now there may be church congregations in scattered American rural locations where some of the folk in the pews do look like that, but most if not all of of the evangelicals I have known have been perfectly pleasant and reasonable people who bear no ill will to homosexuals at all.
The story switches to the subterranean world of the Stockholm underground, where we are introduced to a streetwise female artist who paints on walls in some underground den and is friendly with Hawre Ghani, a good looking young man of Afghan migrant appearance who has witnessed terrible suffering where he came from but happens to be a gay prostitute. So now we have two favoured victim groups combined into one, and of course he’s the next target. As he tries to seduce the killer he finds himself swiftly bundled into the afterlife. Inger spills the beans on the ‘right on’ credentials of this series when she concludes about the killer ‘He comes from a Conservative background in which gender roles have remained fixed.’ It sounds like a diversity seminar at the Home Office.
Mr Big, Marcus, the homosexual businessman is found out in the end, as it transpires that he got the ball rolling on this bizarre tale by ordering the assassination in New York of Niclas, one of the victims, the arty one, but the whole thing got out of hand when the homosexual hating extremist group got in on the act and started a vendetta. So it was all to do with Marcus discovering a half brother who was going to inherit the family shipping fortune because his father didn’t like gays. The half brother became the victim. So Mr Big hated his father who didn’t like homosexuals, but loved his grandfather. Realising the enormity of what he has done, including discovering the body of the immigrant prostitute, he shares his secret with his partner, who insists they go to the police, but he bumps himself off with a bullet to the head.
You might be forgiven a yawn here, because Mr Evil personified cannot stop killing people. This time he bumps off Marianne, his accomplice, because she is pressuring him to return home. He is obviously having a bad hair day, as he tells her to shut the … up,and proceeds to strangle her. The body count now resembles Midsomer levels, will anyone at all now survive in Sweden?
Eventually the killer is dealt with of course, but in a suitably scary final scene where he tracks down the psychological profiler female cop to bump her off. He jumps her in the kitchen and proceeds to strangle her, but she has the presence of mind to poke him in the eye (a guaranteed way of giving him a bad day) and manages to grab a kitchen knife to stab him to death after a breathless struggle.
However you interpret the film, although it was undoubtedly entertaining, the use of counterfeits and stereotypes to push a subtle message is clear. Dealing with ‘hate crimes’ of course is at the core of the message. Opposition to homosexuality is grossly caricatured in relation to real life. It is hard not to think that the message that comes over is that opposing homosexuality is wrong, that if you in any way disagree with the practice of homosexuality you are a hater and a bigot. Those practicing LGBT lifestyles are seen in the programmes as good looking, compassionate, prosperous and enlightened, whereas the killer and his acolytes are seen as utterly evil. Even a senior police officer with contempt for gays is the representative of the old guard. Again the patron saint of modernity, or political correctness is the immigrant from an alien culture that is also a gay prostitute. To be ‘tuned in’ we must of course always be compassionate to migrants and pay little heed to their culture or lifestyle. If you are out of tune with this song you are a racist and zenophobe, regardless of whether you have the discernment to see that you must protect your culture from evil or danger from without.
The programme unfortunately reflects a state of thinking that afflicts western society like a disease, a mindset that has perhaps gone further in Sweden than any other country. Sweden seems to represent the vanguard of the liberal progressive bulldozer. However, even in Sweden there are signs that people have had enough, a pushback is arising, particularly on the question of immigration. The programme is especially prescient for 2016 with the turmoil surrounding Brexit and Trump, the first time the liberal progressive cause has received a major setback. But, hey, it was still entertaining TV and I enjoyed it, although the plot was as unlikely as Vladimir Putin running a Sunday School.
Brexit and Trump can only be positively influences for the rescuing of Swedish culture from a morass of institutionalised foolishness inflicted upon it by the last generation of its leaders. Will people watch Modus in fifty years time and think what a strange place Sweden was in 2016, or will they think it another step in the long march to Nirvana?