Speaking images, race-less words: Play and the absence of race in contemporary Scandinavia

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JSCA 4 (1) pp. 61–76 Intellect Limited 2014

Journal of Scandinavian Cinema Volume 4 Number 1

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jsca.4.1.61_1

feature article

ElisabEth stubbErud and Priscilla ringrosENorwegian University of Science and Technology

speaking images, race-less

words: Play and the absence

of race in contemporary

scandinavia

abstract

What happens when a film that deals with issues of race and lived multiculture is released in a socio-political landscape where there is limited language to address lived experiences of racialization? This article examines the Swedish fiction film Play (Östlund, 2011) and a TV interview with its director. While mainstream reviews interpreted the film in terms of a non-racial dynamic, we argue that the film is not only about race, but that its racial dynamic is highly gendered. We suggest furthermore that Ruben Östlund’s ambiguous response to the question of the racist legacy of the film points to its failure to confront the prevailing racial hegemony.

KEywords

raceCritical Race TheoryCritical Whiteness

TheoryCritical Discourse

AnalysiswhitenessScandinavia

JSCA 4.1_Stubberund&Ringrose_61-76.indd 61 6/24/14 7:56:46 PM

Elisabeth Stubberud | Priscilla Ringrose

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1. Although the boy, John, is of Asian background, he will be referred to here as white. At times in the film he is racialized, yet his obvious middle-class background sets him apart from the black boys. In this sense John’s character illustrates well how racialization intersects with other categories such as class.

2. Elisabeth Sandersen, board member of the Tromsø International Film Festival’s Peace Film Fund (access to text gained via authors’ personal request 15 November 2012).

3. We have analysed reviews in Norwegian, Swedish and Danish newspapers. From Norway: Dagbladet, Morgenbladet, Adresseavisen, Nordlys, Fædrelandsvennen, VG, Aftenposten, Klassekampen. From Sweden: Aftonbladet, Expressen, Sydsvenskan, Göteborgs-Posten, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter. From Denmark: Informationen, Modkraft, Kristelig Dagblad, Berlingske, DR, Politiken.

Scandinavian society is and has always been multicultural, yet its shifting borders and diverse populations are often downplayed by those critical of immigration as well as racial, ethnic and religious diversity. A common fantasy is that of the ‘good, old Scandinavia’, a culturally homogenous, (gender) equal-ity-oriented region with liberal values, where racism is viewed as a non-do-mestic problem (Hübinette 2012; Hübinette and Lundström 2011). This fantasy is challenged by the lived experience of non-western immigrants who struggle in an increasingly class and race-segregated Scandinavian society that, despite the fantasy, continues to take part in postcolonial processes (Keskinen et al. 2009). However, the lure of the fantasy and the taboos attached to the idea of racism have created a socio-political landscape where there is no language to address experiences of gendered and classed racialization. What happens when an artefact of popular culture with an explicit racial dimension enters into this discursively race-less landscape? In this article we address Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s prize-winning fiction film Play (2011).

Set in central Göteborg, the film, which according to the director is based on a true story, features a group of five black Swedish boys who accost and then intimidate two white boys and a boy of Asian background.1 The black boys, portrayed throughout the film as violent, manipulative and threatening, force the white boys to follow them across the city, steal all their valuables and celebrate their stolen loot in a pizza joint while indulging in loud homo-phobic banter.

The film won numerous film festival prizes, including the Peace Film Prize at the Tromsø International Film Festival, where the jury stated that:

Casting a critical gaze at the spiralling sense of alienation that increas-ingly afflicts contemporary Scandinavian society, the film addresses some of the most urgent problems of our time head on: the dissolu-tion of individual responsibility, the failure of empathy, the descent into apathy and destructive indifference.2

While the story is clearly centred on racial dynamics, the verdict of the Peace Film Award jury dodged all references to race. The jury’s statements about social ills are mirrored in much, if not most, of the Scandinavian reception of the film, which similarly eschews race, drawing on a variety of different social crises to explain the film’s conflictual dynamics.3 The film is depicted in terms of the crisis of adolescence, as a lament on absentee parenthood, or alterna-tively as an example of class conflict. The exception was the debate in certain sections of the Swedish media, mainly centred around Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s emotional and conflicted response to the film based on his experience of racism in Sweden (Stigsdotter 2013).

In our study we look at the ways in which race, gender and class intersect in the film. What stories of racialized, gendered and classed Swedishness are being told by the film’s speaking images? Furthermore, given that the film forces questions of race and racism to the surface, we examine the strategies its director uses when interrogated about them. These in turn raise the further question of the legitimacy of artistic practices, and in the case of Play, of its role in maintaining or confronting the prevailing racial hegemony. In exam-ining these questions we turn to a theoretical framework that enables us to analyse the film and the statements made by the director as part of a larger social discourse embedded in, as well as (re-)creating hierarchies of power.


Speaking images, race-less words

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ExPloring racE

In this article we primarily draw on Critical Whiteness Theory (CWT), an offshoot of Critical Race Theory (CRT) (see e.g. Harris 1993; Crenshaw 1991; Davis 1999). CRT developed out of legal scholarship, providing a critical analysis of race and racism from a legal point of view, and has since spread to many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs, CRT views racism as systemic and rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy: ‘CRT identifies that […] power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetu-ates the marginalization of people of color […] CRT also recognizes that liber-alism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege’ (2009). In other words, CRT exposes the systemic inequalitites that institutional racism creates.

Intersectionality, a concept that largely derives from CRT, points to the multi-dimensional nature of oppression and recognizes that race alone cannot account for disenfranchisment. Kimberle Crenshaw, a legal scholar and key thinker within CRT, argued that other axes of identity, such as gender, class and sexual orientation, interact with processes of racialization on multiple levels to create social hierarchies (1991). Since then intersectional approaches have proliferated in a wide variety of disciplines, for example providing ‘tools for complicating our understanding of the systems and processes that defined the social [and] interrogating the institutional reproduction of inequality’ (Grabham et al. 2009: 1). Whilst intersectionality might be used as a method, it can also function as a ‘sensitising concept’ (Berg et al. 2010: 19). Rather than taking for granted the meaning of categories such as ‘race’ and ‘class’, we understand them as contextually performative, along the lines of Leslie McCall’s concept of an ‘anticategorical [intesectional] approach’ (2005: 1773) – which questions the very uses of categories.

The ‘critical’ in ‘critical race’ is also the guiding principle of CWT, implying that racialized categories are not conceived as reflecting real differences, but rather are made to matter in certain social contexts where racialized hierar-chies become significant. The concept of racialization thus takes for granted an understanding of race as an ongoing process of definition rather than as a pre-existing fact. ‘Whiteness’ is specifically addressed in order to challenge the widespread notion that race only concerns non-whites. Whiteness is commonly an unmarked category, a norm against which other categories are defined. Naming whiteness without re-centring on whiteness enables a critique of the workings of unearned privilege (Dyer 1997). Whiteness is considered to be both a site of domination and an ethnic identification (Frankenberg 1993). As such, it is not the property of any individual or group but is rather produced materially, for example through legislation, and symbolically, for example through literature, art or film, or affectively in everyday life.

In our study we thus look at the ways in which race and racism in its gendered and classed forms are produced symbolically both in the film and in an interview with the film’s director. In the analysis of the interview with Östlund, we draw on applied linguistics, and in particular use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a tool for investigating ‘opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power and control as manifested in language’ (Wodak and Meyer 2001: 10). In other words, CDA provides the mechanics for ‘investigat[ing] critically social inequality as it is expressed, signaled, constituted, and legitimized, and so on by language use’



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4. Text translated from Norwegian DVD cover.

(Wodak and Meyer 2001: 2). More specifically, we draw on Teun A. van Dijk’s work on the denial of racism in discourse and communication, in which he produces a typology of denials and mitigations of racism (1992).

The denial of race and racism in the Nordic context is addressed by two recent collections: Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012) and Complying with Colonialism: Gender, Race and Ethnicity (Keskinen et al. 2009). These volumes both point to and challenge the narrative that promotes the Nordic countries as ‘exceptions to the rule of western prejudice, racism and paternalism towards the non-white world’ and to the correspond-ing reluctance to acknowledge the genealogy of race in the region (Palmberg 2009: 35). They explore Nordic complicity in colonial processes and show that ‘racialisation is [still] alive and well at all levels of the culture and everyday life in Sweden in different gendered forms’ (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009a: 122). Colonial mentalities and structures ‘become recreated or projected onto differ-ent groups in the contemporary Nordic countries’ and the ‘border of white-ness, and notions of Nordic-ness become more reified’ (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012: 3). For example, in the Nordic states, where heteronormative ideologies are increasingly accompanied by homonormative ones, whiteness and Nordic-ness are associated with homo-tolerance, producing the enlightened, civilized white ‘proper homosexual’ and ‘proper heterosexual’ citizens against the intolerant and perversely sexualized and racialized (terrorist-like) Muslim Other (Puar 2007).

In Sweden, paradoxically, the mechanism of everyday and institutional racism (Hübinette and Tigervall 2009b; Burns et al. 2007; SOU 2005: 56) exists alongside a hegemonic anti-racist sameness-based ideology that denies difference (colour-blindness). As Crenshaw points out, colour-blindness is illogical in societies where specific groups have been treated differently and where the outcomes of this differential treatment prevail (1988: 229), yet pretending that race does not exist in a racist society is a dangerous game of ignorance (Ladson-Billings 2003). Colour-blind beliefs, even when well inten-tioned, tend to sustain existing power relations ‘benefiting the privileged and upholding racist ideas and practices embedded in institutions, ideologies, and interpersonal relationships’ (Smith 2013: 1). CWT and CRT serve as tools for analysing colour-blindness, drawing attention to the processes and effects of racialization imbricated in this and other forms of race thinking.

One striking example of Swedish colour-blindness is found in the formu-lation of the Swedish Discrimination Act (Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality 2008: 567) in which the category of race no longer appears. Section 1 of the Act states that its purpose is ‘to combat discrimination and in other ways promote equal rights and opportunities regardless of sex, transgender identity or expression, ethnicity, religion or other belief, disability, sexual orientation or age’. Although the intention of the Act was to draw a veil over the legacy of biological concepts of race, in practice it means that certain racist behaviours fall outside of legal redress and in principle it points to the fact that ‘the dangerous game of ignoring reality’ is more than just play (Ladson-Billings 2003: 15, emphasis added).

Play: sPEaKing racE

Distance and realism in Play

Play is marketed as a film ‘based on a true story’ – a case brought against ‘young boys of immigrant background who managed to pull off 40 robberies in Göteborg, targeted at children’.4 Non-professional actors played the roles of



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5. Theblackboysandadifferentgroupofwhiteboysalsoappearintheprologue,andAnasappearsagainintheepilogueofthefilm.Yetinbothinstancestheblackboysgetlessscreentimewheretheirfacesareshownin(medium-)close-ups,comparedtothewhitecharacters.

6. Intheprologueandtheepilogue,thecamerafocusesontheblackboysforaroundsixminutes,whileitstayswiththewhiteboysforaroundtenminutes.

the young boys, and all the actors kept their real names. The audio-visual quali-ties of the film highlight the realism. There is no extra-diegetic sound, only the sounds of the city and its suburbs, with its traffic, people talking, wind rustling in the trees, drawing attention to the city as a recognizable stage for the action. The camera, situated at actors’ eye-level, is largely either still or gently panning/zooming towards the action, promoting an illusion of neutrality. The actors move in and out of the frame, further emphasizing the stillness of the camera as well as the observing position of the viewer. The preponderance of medium long and long shots invites the audience to do a significant amount of interpretive work. Both the stillness and the distance between camera and actors suggest that we are watching something real that is happening right in front of our eyes.

Although Play cannot be mistaken for CCTV footage, its particular claim to realism evokes a notion of audio-visual eavesdropping similar to the experience of watching CCTV footage; we probably should not have been present and seen it, but we were. Moreover, we are familiar with its natural targets: ‘We recognise the […] migrant through a familiar lens […] The gaze through the CCTV natu-ralizes the kind of surveillance now regularly used against terror suspects, activ-ists, people on benefits, and anyone who looks suspicious’ (Haritaworn 2010: 7, original emphasis). CCTV produces its targets as objects of suspicion, but it also implies a viewer with the authority to interpret the images: ‘CCTV is about […] the power to watch and potentially intervene in a variety of situations, whether or not they be criminal’ (Norris and Amstrong 1999: 158). As is the case for CCTV, Play asks us to monitor the characters: are they the criminals? It then shows us a crime and seems to pose the question: what should we do about it? With this in mind we turn to the way racial stereotyping is used as a means of helping the audience identify the perpetrators.

Racialized stereotypes: Bad black youth

The film’s opening sequences features five black boys, Anas (Anas Abdirahman), Yannick (Yannick Diakité), Abdi (Abdiaziz Hilowle), Nana (Nana Manu) and Kevin (Kevin Vaz), aged around 10–15 years old, hanging out at a shop-ping centre looking for their next victims. Three white boys, Alex (Sebastian Hegmar), John (John Ortiz) and Sebastian (Sebastian Blyckert), all around 12–13 years old, are in the same shopping centre. While the black boys raucously fool around, the white boys respectfully ask store attendants for help.

The black youths in the film are instantly recognizable stereotypes. As swaggering young males wearing indistinguishable matching uniform-like dark hoodies and baseball caps, they become the typecast of ‘mal-integrated youth’ (Haritaworn 2010). The camera tends to stay further away from the black boys, rarely lingering on their faces, making it hard for the audience to get to know the characters or develop any sympathy for them. In the core narrative of the film where the two groups of boys appear together,5 (medium-)close-ups of the black boys’ faces take up less than four minutes. The white boys, on the other hand, appear in (medium-)close-ups for nearly ten minutes, drawing the audiences’ attention to the characters’ emotional reactions (Gaut 2010).6

The stereotype of the mal-integrated youth does not encourage the audi-ence to ask why the black kids misbehave. Instead of identifying or sympa-thizing with the characters, viewers can passively witness their anti-social and sometimes violent behaviour. There are ample examples: the black boys whistle suggestively at the young female attendant in a sports shop, coerce



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7. Hereandelsewhere,translationsofdialoguefromSwedishtoEnglishareourown.

8. Thisrecentlyledtoacampaigncalled‘TheBlackList’,launchedbytheSwedishassociationforblackculturalworkers,Tryck.TheblacklistwouldbedistributedamongdirectorsandcastingagentstopromotethecastingofblackSwedesinrolesunrelatedtotheirskincolour.TheleaderofTryck,EllenNyman,claimedthatitispracticallyimpossibleforblackSwedestobecastasa‘normal/neutral’Swede(Perdahl2013).

the white boys into following them across the city, beat up Nana for opting out of the game, force the white boys to swap their expensive clothes and indulge in raucous homophobic banter in a restaurant when celebrating their spoils. During this last incident, Anas is playing around with one of the stolen phones when the mother of its owner, Sebastian, calls. Anas answers, pretending to be Sebastian before passing the phone to Kevin, who acts the role of Sebastian’s boyfriend before sniggering, ‘Sebastian is at the toilet having a threesome’.7

Homophobic utterances take on a particular significance when attributed to a group of black boys playing a practical joke on the mother of a white boy they have just robbed. While ‘homo-negativism’ is understood as a sign of immaturity when expressed by young white boys, in the case of descendants of black or Muslim immigrants it is more likely to be interpreted as a cultural trait (Røthing 2008; Røthing and Svendsen 2011; Puar 2007). In this case, ‘their’ attitude towards homosexuality legitimates the racism of the suppos-edly tolerant majority, and the imagined dichotomy between the ‘tolerant majority’ and ‘intolerant minority’ means that the minority’s homophobia is always cultural whilst the majority’s is underplayed, personal and silenced. Thus, when the black boys appear homophobic, they still fit into the stereo-type: their conservative values appear incompatible with the self-proclaimed liberalism of contemporary Sweden.

Why do these characters seem so recognizable? Using stereotypes renders character development less important as well as economizing the narrative, and Play is no exception. Skin colour carries significance in Sweden, and the kinds of characters the black boys play feed into already existing racist precon-ceptions of the racialized ‘others’ as fundamentally different from ethnic white Swedes.8 As bell hooks writes, ‘negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves’ (2004b: x). Furthermore, hooks argues that black males in a US context are living up to these stereotypes, trying to become white patriarchs with consumer power. Incidentally, this is to a large extent the stereotype reproduced in Play.

Stuart Hall (2001) argues that reproducing stereotypes is a key element in exercising symbolic power. He points out that power, in broader cultural and symbolic terms, includes the ability ‘to represent someone or something in a certain way – within a certain “regime of representation”. It includes the exer-cise of symbolic power through representational practices. Stereotyping is a key element in this exercise of symbolic violence’ (Hall 2001: 228, original empha-sis).Stereotyping commonly produces a portrait of the ‘stranger who is not strange at all’ (Ahmed 2000): the figure onto whom danger is projected, simul-taneously strange and familiar. The black boys in Play are portrayed as playing within a highly recognizable regime of representation. The effect of portraying the black boys as homophobic and sexist against this backdrop is that they are ‘Othered’; represented by virtue of their (negative) difference from the white majority, as a stark contrast to the fantasy of ‘a good Sweden’ (Hübinette and Lundström 2011) that posits the white majority as oriented towards equality.

Visible whiteness: Trust, innocence, naïvety

In stark contrast to the black boys, the white boys are wearing different brightly coloured jackets that make them stand out from one another as well as from the dull background of Göteborg. The three boys convey a sense of



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middle-class habitus (Bourdieu 1994). One of their mothers is shown in an elegant modern office complex; they behave politely towards adults, turning to official sources for help when they realize they are in trouble, as a sign that they are on the same side as the law. They wear expensive clothes, and John is shown playing the clarinet. In short, they are well-behaved, trusting boys whom the audience is asked to identify and sympathize with.

The racial logic behind the black boys’ theft is made clear in the scene in the woods when, playing on the white boys’ fears, they stage a fake competi-tion designed to ensure that the white boys hand over their valuables. At one point when Sebastian tries to escape by climbing atop a tree, Kevin shouts up to him, ‘If you’re stupid enough to pull out your phone in front of five black kids, it’s your own bloody fault’. The black boys, who are used to being racial-ized, are now making the whiteness of the three boys visible; they are being made aware that their skin colour is not neutral but rather means something. In this sense, the film draws attention to the meaning of whiteness instead of leaving it neutral. The importance of drawing attention to whiteness is a point argued by Richard Dyer (1997) and later also by Hynek Pallas (2011) in the Swedish context, arguing that pointing to the shifting meanings of whiteness in film is a way of deconstructing the idea that whiteness is neutral (Pallas 2011: 154).

The white boys in Play are constructed as trusting, innocent and even naïve, in stark contrast to the black boys, who appear dangerous, violent and manipulative. The representation of the white boys’ loss of property and power in Play can be interpreted in several ways. One interpretation is to claim that the film turns racial hierarchy on its head in order to show the workings of racism in a different form. The problem with this interpretation is twofold. First, it expects a lot of from the audience in terms of being able to conceptualize the inversion, and second, it suggests that it takes white people to tell other white people what suffering from racism feels like. Another possi-ble interpretation is to read the story at face value. Here, the white boys lose their sense of trust through the robbery, and thus implicitly lose the belief in a well-functioning Swedish society – a belief that seems integrated with the fantasy of a homogeneity that used to be, but no longer is. This loss points to a wider social impulse, namely white Sweden’s generalized sense of mourn-ing for the past – for ‘good old Sweden’, the old homogenous Sweden, when racial discord was other people’s problem (Hübinette and Lundström 2011). Implicit in this interpretation is the understanding that it is the very presence of heterogeneity represented by the black boys that is the problem.

Sara Ahmed writes that the good citizen is the one who ‘suspects rather than is suspect’ (2000: 28). One of the lessons the initially naïve white boys learn is to be suspicious. As whiteness it is rendered visible, white subjects have to take responsibility for preserving their whiteness in relation to the danger-ous black ‘Other’. The implication of the narrative is that the white boys are being robbed of material possessions, but also of their innocence. However, although guilty, the black boys are also just kids. The trouble, it seems, is not only ascribed to them, but also to the female characters in the film.

Feminization of danger

In the film’s epilogue, two of the white boys’ fathers waylay and then violently confront one of the black boys, Anas, and his brother. As one of the fathers tries to wrestle a phone from Anas’ hands, a concerned female passer-by



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confronts him, threatening to report him to the police. The woman is sceptical about the men’s story of the stolen phone. She accuses them of unprovoked harassment and racism and defends Anas: ‘He’s in a doubly inferior position; he’s a child and he’s an immigrant’. To this, one of the fathers replies, ‘Do you want to group all immigrants together and say that no one can criticize what immigrants do? Then it’s you having fucking reversed racist opinions in your little head’. The woman’s protest that ‘those children don’t have the same opportunities as your children’ draws an angry rejoinder from the man, who refers to the ‘hell’ they have been living in over the last six months after the robbery.

This scene pits knowing white men against the naïve white woman, who fails to understand the situation. The black boys have already been established as criminals, yet the seemingly politically correct woman does not know this. Her argument that the men are discriminating against the black boys on the basis of race is thus implicitly redundant. As such, this scene can be inter-preted as staging the woman as wrong and perhaps also naïve in her reading of Anas and his brother, and the vigilante-style violence of the two fathers as the correct response to the situation.

This naivety is also represented as the problem with the other women who figure in Play: the cafe staff who refuse to call the police when the white boys ask for help and naïvely underestimate the ‘danger’ they are in, and the neglectful white career-mother, who is seen dispatching her son from her work place and not picking up the phone when he calls. All these women sin by omission – they miss the chance to rescue the children from the fate that awaits them because they do not understand how this new society works. The side story about an empty cradle with an unidentified/unidentifiable owner travelling on a train could be interpreted as further reinforcing the notion of the naïve white woman. During these train scenes, a white male conductor regularly calls for the cradle’s owner to come forward, while a white female conductor insists on keeping the cradle on board. While the man sees the ‘security risk’ the cradle represents and thus tries to get it removed, the woman is blind to that risk. Like the other women in the film, she is made aware of the security issue but fails to take it seriously and act. The cradle is eventually identified as destined for a black family that was not on the train.

Play’s gullible women evoke Ahmed’s discussion of the soft touch as the touch of women: ‘too emotional, too easily moved by the demands of others […]. To be a “soft touch nation” is to be taken in by the bogus: to “take in” is to be “taken in”’ (2004: 2). In other words, Play suggests that the cradle (full of immigrants) should be taken off the train. If retaining the cradle implies soft-ness and softness is proneness to injury, as Ahmed argues, then the ‘blame’ for the crime shown in Play is put on naïve white women who fail to see the danger and attempt to ‘take in’ the villains. The cradle is the prospective bed for the new generation of Anases, who will in turn repeat the injury that Anas has caused. To remove the cradle from the train is to break the cycle, to protect oneself from potential injury from the Other. The corollary to softness and inaction is the hardness and ability to act exemplified by the two men in the epilogue. Jin Haritaworn aptly describes what seems like the prevailing logic when the racialized Other has threatened ‘our values’: ‘multiculturalism and the welfare state haven’t worked, […] “they” have become a danger to “our” open and tolerant society’ (2010: 6). The idea that certain immigrants are undesirable has an ominous resonance in a recent Norwegian white paper, which argues that some immigrants are profitable in the economic



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sense, while others are not (NOU 2011: 7, Velferd og migrasjon). The implica-tion both there and here is that the welfare state is jeopardized by the wrong type of Other.

At the end of the epilogue, a young white girl appears on a school stage and dances to Zimbabwean gospel music. Within the logic of the narrative of Play, the young girl’s enthusiastic dance expresses a possible future marked by an uncritical celebration of multicultural Sweden, a position which has just been delegitimized by the white fathers’ ‘righteous’ violence, and the white woman’s naïve advocacy. Immediately after the girl’s appearance on stage, John, the boy of Asian background, enters playing a classical work by a Polish composer. In other words, young white boys, here represented by John, still have the chance to learn, to avoid the ‘softness’ embodied by women, and to re-enact the white cultural heritage, thanks to their rather privileged class background.

intErviEw with rubEn Östlund

So how did the white male director deal publicly with the issues of race in the film? Like us, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s Film Bonanza’s (Reistad, 2012) host Vegard Larsen was struck by the film’s un-nuanced stereotypical portrayal of black male youth. In his interview with Östlund, Larsen suggested that this stereotyping provided obvious bait for racists. Drawing on van Dijk’s study of strategies of self-presentation in the context of ‘talk about race’, we argue that Östlund’s evasive responses to this accusation can be interpreted as a form of race denial typical of colour-blind thinking.

According to van Dijk, when talking about race, ‘many white people follow a double strategy of positive self-presentation, on the one hand, and a strat-egy of expressing subtle, indirect or sometimes more blatant forms of negative other-presentation, on the other’ (1992: 89). Van Dijk considers the denial of racism to be one of the strategies of positive self-presentation, with reference to Michael Billig (1988):

Since general norms and values, if not the law prohibit (blatant) forms of ethnic prejudice and discrimination, and many if not most white group members are both aware of such social constraints and, up to a point even share and acknowledge them, even the most blatantly racist discourse regularly features denials or at least mitigations of racism.

(van Dijk 1992: 89)

Van Dijk categorizes denials into four types: ‘act-denial (I did not do/say that at all), control-denial (I did not do/say that on purpose), intention-denial (I did not mean that, you got me wrong) and goal denial (I did not do/say that, in order to …)’. Van Dijk then points to ‘cognitive and social strategies that are more or less closely related to denial’ such as mitigation, justifica-tion, referring to truth or the right to know, provocation, blaming and reversal (1992: 92–94).

In the interview with Östlund, Larsen alludes to the film’s critical acclaim before making inferences about its racist thrust:

Larsen: Many think that it [Play] creates stereotypes and xenophobic attitudes. There are instances where the far right has acclaimed your film, on websites …



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Östlund: I have not seen any examples of this. I would just love to see them. People have said that this is the case, but no one has given me any examples of this.

Rather than directly addressing Play’s potential to be appropriated by the far right or alternatively admitting that the film had the potential to be exploited in this way despite his intentions (intention-denial), Östlund simply uses a form of ‘act (outright) denial’, dismissing the idea of a right-wing hijacking of his film as mere media fantasy:

Östlund: Journalists say ‘I understand the film but aren’t you afraid that Sverigedemokraterna [the Sweden Democrats] will like it?’

Larsen: And are you?

Östlund: Well, that’s an interesting way to react to the film. The Sweden Democrats are seen as standing for racist attitudes in society, or for that view of the boys in society. But I want us to be confronted with how we look at the other group. There are the pan flute musicians who are in a scene. Their play is exotic, close to nature, something origi-nal, that we readily recognize as South-American features. At the same time the feathers they are wearing are Disney feathers, borrowed from several different tribes. They are just made up. They use that image to get money when they play. For me the most important thing has been to clarify how the boys play on stereotypical roles and how that limits their possibilities in society.

Östlund diverts the conversation to ‘Other-presentation’, pointing to the exotic Otherness of the South American street musicians who appear peri-odically in the film, playing in the town centre. He presents these perform-ers as staging stereotypical performances in order to exploit western cultural naïvety for financial gain. He then projects this narrative of exploitation from the performers onto the black kids, whom he considers to be making use of western stereotypes of blackness – also for financial reward.

While Östlund started the interview by denying that the film produced stereotypes that could be exploited by the far right, he now projects the production of stereotypes onto the characters in the film, and by implication onto the ‘real’ boys they represent – it is they who play on negative stereo-types for gain. Thus, rather than acknowledging that he as director draws on and reproduces stereotyped images that limit the possibilities of minorities, he implies that minorities do this perfectly well for themselves. In other words, a reversal is effected, and blame for reproducing stereotypes is transferred from film-maker to black Swedes. This strategy of what van Dijk calls ‘blame reversal’ effectively means that Östlund fails to acknowledge the structures that create the stereotypes available to the black boys. Östlund goes on to explain his further ambitions for his film:

Östlund: At the same time, I wanted the public to be confronted with its views. Why do we place some people below us, and why do we place the other victims as affluent, how much do we read into skin colour?

Östlund’s wish is that the film should confront members of the Swedish public with their sense of superiority and by implication help them understand its



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9. A view that has been challenged by, for example, Anders Ravik Jupskås (2012).

mechanisms. But who is this Swedish public, looking down on others who have a different skin colour? The implied Othering talk here posits the film’s Swedish audience as exclusively white and middle class; not only does being Swedish entail being white, but being non-white means being non-Swedish (Hübinette 2012). Östlund’s public excludes black Swedes by default. What is left unsaid here is that while white spectators may well be confronted with their views, the film is likely to confirm their (default) readings of skin colour. Moreover, Östlund’s generalized reference to ‘people’s skin colour’ can be interpreted as an example of the kind of generalized statements about not judging people on the basis of race (here skin colour) that Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tyrone A. Forman (2000) associate with colour-blind thinking and abstract notions of liberalism.

Östlund also hopes that the public’s confrontation with their views will serve as a corrective to the fears instilled by political correctness, which inhibit a ‘frank’ debate about multicultural society.

Östlund: No one dares speak critically about this. People are afraid of using the wrong words. They are afraid of being considered racist. Anything that opens this up and enables us to discuss it from several perspectives, I think is positive and nothing else.

According to van Dijk, writing in the context of the British press, the right wing media view accusations of racism as ‘more serious social infractions than racist attitudes or actions themselves’ (1992: 90). Such accusations are viewed as imposing taboos, preventing free speech and a ‘true’ assessment of the social situation. In other words, denials of racism often turn into counter-accusations of intolerant and intolerable anti-racism, ‘hypersensitive hysteria, extremist or conservative censorship, identity politics, “reverse racism” and, above all, political correctness’ (Hübinette 2012: 43). Political correctness is understood as a scapegoat which inhibits genuine debate, rather than as a set of informal social guidelines to prevent discrimination.

Rather than attributing Östlund’s desire to open up debate to a right wing aversion to political correctness, could it simply be understood as a genu-ine desire to bring race back into the mainstream agenda, namely to counter rather than perpetuate colour-blind race thinking? Following this alternative line of reasoning would place us as authors of this article in a position not dissimilar to the women in the film’s epilogue – as two naïve female witnesses who have just falsely accused a well-intentioned man (Östlund) of race-de-nial and racism and have misunderstood his need to (metaphorically) beat up black boys.

But could Östlund be beating up the black boys for a very good reason? Is he adopting a position that implicitly draws on the widespread notion that allowing racism to surface, for example through media debates, leads to decreased racist violence?9 Is Play to function as a safety valve, giving right-wing populists a voice so as to stem a potential build-up of social aggression? Or alternatively, but in a similar vein, is Östlund deliberately inflating racial conflict as part of an agonist critical–political–artistic prac-tice aimed at ‘foment[ing] dissensus’ and ‘mak[ing] visible what the domi-nant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate’ (Mouffe 2007) – in this case race? Far from being a colour-blind racist, then, can Östlund be viewed as an agonist artist bent on breaking the race taboo by exploding conflict onto the public sphere?



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Revisiting the interview in this light, Östlund’s refusal to engage with right-wing appropriations of his work no longer counts as race denial; it is merely an effect of his suspicion of any attempt to fix meaning to his work. Similarly, his comments on the South American musicians’ false exoticism can be read as an affirmation of an anti-essentialist view of culture, of the perfor-mative nature of cultural identity. The black boys ‘badness’ is by analogy an effect of the performative constitution of racial identity: Play’s boys are not essentially bad, they are merely playing up to the stereotypes, and Östlund is here to help us see this game for what it is: play.

But how can we understand racial identity other than as performative? It is not performativity that is at stake here, but rather the power dynamics and hierarchies that are the conditions for any type of performativity. Although Östlund might have had good intentions, his inability and/or unwillingness to address these power dynamics are revealed both in the interview and in the film through his naturalization of his Swedish audience as white, a positioning that means he is effectively confirming rather than challenging stereotypes. And while Östlund and other white middle-class boys and men can play whichever position they want in contemporary Sweden, including the ‘good guy’ who provokes debate, the black boys have a significantly narrower regis-ter of available roles to play. Neither the film nor its director challenge racial stereotypes – Play, as its reviews confirm, does not break the race silence.

conclusion

In this article we have argued, along with others, that in contemporary Scandinavia – as is the case in most of Europe – talking about issues of race has been rendered taboo (Goldberg 2006). Yet, as Stine Svendsen maintains, the shapes and forms of ‘race’ as a contemporary concept can be traced through observations and negotiations of difference in particular political and social contexts in spite of its denial (2014). In our analysis of Play and the interview with the director, we have shown the absence of a vocabulary for addressing race – in stark contrast to the film, which reproduces racist stereotypes through the richness of the audio-visual language. In the absence of a language to talk about race, the director’s intentions of creating debate can only be carried out according to the premises of those not racialized. The film can show us what we cannot put into words and not argue against, namely what is portrayed as the intolerable consequences of a multicultural society. In Play, those conse-quences – the breakdown of Swedish society – are mainly meditated through aggressive black masculinity and naïve and unsuspecting white femininity, while white masculinity is constructed in the film as initially trusting and inno-cent through the parts of the white boys, but also capable of learning to become suspicious. The latter category also resonates with the Swedish TV documen-tary Män som näthatar kvinnor/‘Men who online-hate women’ (Sunderborn, 2013), where white, liberal Swedish women who addressed issues of migra-tion, race and sexism received threats of rape, violence and murder from men online. One way of understanding these threats would be to see the ways in which the intersection of whiteness and femininity has to be understood as something that threatens the prevailing white, masculine hegemony.

Östlund’s evasion when confronted with the racist legacy of the film takes a subtle form. He does not position himself discursively as a racist or anti-racist, but rather evades the question of race by positing liberal values and the desire for an ‘open debate’ free of political correctness. Yet, drawing on



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Östlund’s logic on political correctness, it becomes difficult to take an anti-racist position without being accused of stifling the debate. It is possible to understand Östlund as the postmodern artist who refuses fixed meanings, and whose artistic merit allows him to use any means to create the supposedly desired open debate about controversial issues. As we have argued, however, this position is only available to those privileged enough to not be fully aware of their power. Our analysis has shown that Östlund’s implied audience is white, masculine and middle class – much like Östlund himself. This natural-ized position remains unchallenged, as does the racialization and stereotyping of black youth. The consequence is that an inherently innocent and suspicious masculine whiteness is allowed to flourish unchallenged alongside a naïve, guilty feminine whiteness, inhabiting our speechless imaginations of who and what we are in contemporary multicultural Scandinavia.

acKnowlEdgEmEnts

We would like to thank our colleagues at the Center for Gender Studies (NTNU) for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, Michael Nebeling Petersen for sending us Danish reviews of Play, and the helpful comments of the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors.

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suggEstEd citation

Stubberud, E. and Ringrose P. (2014), ‘Speaking images, race-less words: Play and the absence of race in contemporary Scandinavia’, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 4: 1, pp. 61–76, doi: 10.1386/jsca.4.1.61_1

contributor dEtails

Elisabeth Stubberud is a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Gender Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture. Her research areas and interests include migration, domestic work, cultural representations, feminist and postcolo-nial theory, and intimacy and affect. She is currently working on a project called ‘An Extra Pair of Hands: Ethnic Minority Women’s Work as Au Pairs in Norway’.

Contact: [email protected]

Priscilla Ringrose is Associate Professor at the Centre for Gender Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture. She has published in the areas of migra-tion, multiculturalism and feminist postcolonial theory. She is currently lead-ing a research project on ‘Buying and Selling (gender) Equality: Feminized Migration and Gender Equality in Contemporary Norway’.

Contact: [email protected]

Elisabeth Stubberud and Priscilla Ringrose have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


Speaking images, race-less words: Play and the absence of race in contemporary Scandinavia

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