I May Have Been the Wrong Audience for the Ethics of "Nisser" ("Elves")
Bobby and I just finished the new Danish-language Netflix series Nisser (Elves) last night. It is a Christmas-themed horror series about a family taking a Christmas vacation on a remote island with a populations of ravenous elves walled behind a sinister fence. These are not curly-toed Christmas elves; they're not even hack-happy Noldorin Elves. No, these are the old-school creepy-as-fuck elves of Nordic tradition.
There was a lot I liked about the series. (Which I suspect Bobby suggested specifically for me and as a kinda-sorta-homeopathy for the seasonal affective disorder that is raging through my brain right now. I do love dark fiction, whereas the spun-sugar pop cultural confections of this time of year, perhaps counterintuitively, often make me feel like I have a sliver lodged in my corpus callosum.) The atmosphere was creepy and dark. The creatures themselves--at least the adult ones*--were unusual: They humped up from the earth itself and weren't jump-scare ugly with bulging eyes and clawed hands but bizarre in the way of a twisted root that, if you look long enough, begins to bear resemblance to a face. You found yourself peering into the landscape, trying to tease out a texture or movement out of place. The worldbuilding contributed to a theme of humankind vs. nature--perhaps the oldest literary theme there is. The locals do not cut Christmas trees because they believe trees belong in the ground. Details like this make one wonder if this isn't a sort of appeasement to the supernatural beings populating the earth around them. At the center of the fenced area is a sawmill, apparently so swiftly deserted (presumably because of the elves, angered at the felling of the forest) that the carcasses of long-slain trees still lie under inert blades.
* The "baby elf" that the girl Josephine steals, setting off the events of the story, falls into a different category: in the aesthetic style of Baby Yoda but too cutesy all the same and prone to one of my biggest pet peeves when shows and films feature an animal: the constant burbling noises that script writers or directors or someone decides that animals make. Animals are actually quite quiet, by necessity. Except Hermione, when she yawns. She squeaks when she yawns.
Then there is the wall itself. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wall upon which Gilgamesh stands and scribes his story symbolizes civilization and the triumph of humankind over nature, a literal division between the civilized and wild. (I like to say that everything is Gilgamesh fanfiction.) The wall here is less grand. It is ugly, utilitarian, brutal, frail. But it plays the same role. It is the uneasy coexistence of humankind and the natural world.
This is where the ethics become tenuous to me. As the family drives to their rented cabin, they strike something with their car that leaves a strange ichor on the fender. They are confronted by a local man, who unequivocally tells them that they are on a private road and need to get out. The wall, at this point at a mysterious distance, is in sight. Nonetheless, the girl, Josephine, later returns to the area and finds her family's car has wounded a baby elf, which she decides to take and nurse back to health in a barn behind the family's cabin. When the locals try to return the baby behind the wall, Josephine pursues it, setting loose the adult elves that normally feast on whole cows upon unsuspecting people.
The result is the deaths of several local residents. As Josephine clings to her mother, feeling an appropriate guilt for what she's done, the mother insists, IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT.
Horror films often characterize rural settings and especially rural people as frightening. To an extent, this plays on archetypes likely as deep-rooted as story itself, such as sinister forests. I remember first becoming cognizant of this as a young adult, when The Blair Witch Project eclipsed cult status into mainstream fame. So much of the terror of that film hinged on fear of the forest, but the forest was home to me. I'd lived on its edges since I was born and played in its shade throughout childhood. Rural people, too, are often depicted as aberrant and terrifying. Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all vilify people who are not just rural but whose ruralness is understood as aberrant. The isolation of people who choose otherwise than constantly butting elbow to elbow with their fellow human beings is understood as what allows their deviance to fester and grow. Elves is no exception. Karen, a grandmother who is something of the island's wisdom keeper, eventually attempts to use Josephine to bait the escaped elves back into their enclosure. Before this, she challenges Josephine's mother that the girl wasn't to blame. We are supposed to believe that Karen has gone unacceptably far, that her ruralness has produced a kind of justice that follows that of nature, always verging on cruelty.
Karen suffers, gruesomely, for her transgression. Josephine and her family escape unharmed, last seen on the ferry back to Copenhagen.
This ethical stance is where the show lost me. I am a rural person and a heathen--ripe fodder as a horror villain, in other words--and I would like to see horror stories and films assume the perspective of people like me. Because declarations of IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT seem pretty common among people who gleefully assert that they can't differentiate between a tomato and a weed and who would die without supermarkets and the gas and electric company yet gulp down more than their share of resources (but they always vote Democrat!). These are the people who come to places like where I live, trespass where they don't belong (so that they can get Instagram-worthy pictures, most likely), feed and interact with wildlife that now poses a threat to humans and often dies as a result, and leave people and places damaged by their presence. They are the Josephines who have gotten their ideas about nature from animated Disney films and who assume that their lofty ideals will supersede the realities of nature. They are Joesphine, declaring to a baby animal that she has stolen--unthinking of what it will grow into--that they just wanted it to be free. As though freedom, in nature, is measured in the same terms as in the heart of Copenhagen.
I want to see horror from the perspective of someone who has achieved a tenuous harmony with nature only to see it trampled by those convinced of their superiority: They have, they think, much like Gilgamesh on his wall, conquered nature. The perspective of someone who only fades into existence when the tourist arrives and who disappears once more when they leave: the horror of knowing you matter so little that a girl can set bloodthirsty monsters upon people like you and be coddled and reassured because she just felt sorry for them. She just wanted the monsters to be free. This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/450175.html
There was a lot I liked about the series. (Which I suspect Bobby suggested specifically for me and as a kinda-sorta-homeopathy for the seasonal affective disorder that is raging through my brain right now. I do love dark fiction, whereas the spun-sugar pop cultural confections of this time of year, perhaps counterintuitively, often make me feel like I have a sliver lodged in my corpus callosum.) The atmosphere was creepy and dark. The creatures themselves--at least the adult ones*--were unusual: They humped up from the earth itself and weren't jump-scare ugly with bulging eyes and clawed hands but bizarre in the way of a twisted root that, if you look long enough, begins to bear resemblance to a face. You found yourself peering into the landscape, trying to tease out a texture or movement out of place. The worldbuilding contributed to a theme of humankind vs. nature--perhaps the oldest literary theme there is. The locals do not cut Christmas trees because they believe trees belong in the ground. Details like this make one wonder if this isn't a sort of appeasement to the supernatural beings populating the earth around them. At the center of the fenced area is a sawmill, apparently so swiftly deserted (presumably because of the elves, angered at the felling of the forest) that the carcasses of long-slain trees still lie under inert blades.
* The "baby elf" that the girl Josephine steals, setting off the events of the story, falls into a different category: in the aesthetic style of Baby Yoda but too cutesy all the same and prone to one of my biggest pet peeves when shows and films feature an animal: the constant burbling noises that script writers or directors or someone decides that animals make. Animals are actually quite quiet, by necessity. Except Hermione, when she yawns. She squeaks when she yawns.
Then there is the wall itself. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wall upon which Gilgamesh stands and scribes his story symbolizes civilization and the triumph of humankind over nature, a literal division between the civilized and wild. (I like to say that everything is Gilgamesh fanfiction.) The wall here is less grand. It is ugly, utilitarian, brutal, frail. But it plays the same role. It is the uneasy coexistence of humankind and the natural world.
This is where the ethics become tenuous to me. As the family drives to their rented cabin, they strike something with their car that leaves a strange ichor on the fender. They are confronted by a local man, who unequivocally tells them that they are on a private road and need to get out. The wall, at this point at a mysterious distance, is in sight. Nonetheless, the girl, Josephine, later returns to the area and finds her family's car has wounded a baby elf, which she decides to take and nurse back to health in a barn behind the family's cabin. When the locals try to return the baby behind the wall, Josephine pursues it, setting loose the adult elves that normally feast on whole cows upon unsuspecting people.
The result is the deaths of several local residents. As Josephine clings to her mother, feeling an appropriate guilt for what she's done, the mother insists, IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT.
Horror films often characterize rural settings and especially rural people as frightening. To an extent, this plays on archetypes likely as deep-rooted as story itself, such as sinister forests. I remember first becoming cognizant of this as a young adult, when The Blair Witch Project eclipsed cult status into mainstream fame. So much of the terror of that film hinged on fear of the forest, but the forest was home to me. I'd lived on its edges since I was born and played in its shade throughout childhood. Rural people, too, are often depicted as aberrant and terrifying. Deliverance, The Hills Have Eyes, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre all vilify people who are not just rural but whose ruralness is understood as aberrant. The isolation of people who choose otherwise than constantly butting elbow to elbow with their fellow human beings is understood as what allows their deviance to fester and grow. Elves is no exception. Karen, a grandmother who is something of the island's wisdom keeper, eventually attempts to use Josephine to bait the escaped elves back into their enclosure. Before this, she challenges Josephine's mother that the girl wasn't to blame. We are supposed to believe that Karen has gone unacceptably far, that her ruralness has produced a kind of justice that follows that of nature, always verging on cruelty.
Karen suffers, gruesomely, for her transgression. Josephine and her family escape unharmed, last seen on the ferry back to Copenhagen.
This ethical stance is where the show lost me. I am a rural person and a heathen--ripe fodder as a horror villain, in other words--and I would like to see horror stories and films assume the perspective of people like me. Because declarations of IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT seem pretty common among people who gleefully assert that they can't differentiate between a tomato and a weed and who would die without supermarkets and the gas and electric company yet gulp down more than their share of resources (but they always vote Democrat!). These are the people who come to places like where I live, trespass where they don't belong (so that they can get Instagram-worthy pictures, most likely), feed and interact with wildlife that now poses a threat to humans and often dies as a result, and leave people and places damaged by their presence. They are the Josephines who have gotten their ideas about nature from animated Disney films and who assume that their lofty ideals will supersede the realities of nature. They are Joesphine, declaring to a baby animal that she has stolen--unthinking of what it will grow into--that they just wanted it to be free. As though freedom, in nature, is measured in the same terms as in the heart of Copenhagen.
I want to see horror from the perspective of someone who has achieved a tenuous harmony with nature only to see it trampled by those convinced of their superiority: They have, they think, much like Gilgamesh on his wall, conquered nature. The perspective of someone who only fades into existence when the tourist arrives and who disappears once more when they leave: the horror of knowing you matter so little that a girl can set bloodthirsty monsters upon people like you and be coddled and reassured because she just felt sorry for them. She just wanted the monsters to be free. This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/450175.html