Yesterday I watched this great interview with Forbrydelsen’s (The Killing) Sofie Gråbøl:
While the interview focused mostly on how she assumes different roles (and I’ve never been as interested in acting as in narrative),
two feminist things stuck out in particular:
1) Women sometimes have a hard time being present
Two times Gråbøl mentions that too often in party settings,
women busy themselves as hostesses: preparing aperitifs, checking on guests,
making sure glasses are filled. Men, however, tend to be more still.
She believes the difference lies in the fact that women put others above
themselves, while men are more able to let people come to them. It’s the divide
between moving and being, and perhaps I can learn from this.
I’m not suggesting a gender-role overhaul, but rather a bit
of deeper awareness for my own life, at least. When I’m attending to guests and
bouncing from conversation to conversation, I only punctuate the surface of the
relationships with people at the party, whereas people who sit and talk can dig
deeper. In my continual desire for excitement, maybe it’s actually better to really talk to someone at a party
instead of hop-hop-hopping to feel like I’ve fulfilled my hostess duties and
gained the instant high of talking to a lot of people.
2) Sarah Lund needed to be conceptualized as a man before she could be acted as a
woman
Gråbøl tends to play characters who give everything,
emotionally. They cry, they scream, they run, they laugh to the full extent of
their being. With Sarah Lund, it’s the opposite. She gives nothing, and
instead viewers come crawling to her, wanting to peer inside her and unearth those emotions.
When it came to Sarah Lund, Gråbøl apparently had a hard
time digesting the character at the beginning, even though the role was created
mostly for her. She seemed impenetrable – the bridge from character in the
written screenplay to the physically acted personnage
was too vast. It wasn’t until she started observing some of the physical
movements of some of the men on set that she could envision Sarah Lund
realistically. The jerky arm movements, the angled walking, the
clenched hands – these were all things Gråbøl needed to absorb before Sarah
Lund could become a complete character. However, the character, in Gråbøl’s
mind, is definitely not a man. The
acting process, though, required her to move through a masculine mode in order
to arrive at the complexity of playing a female detective whose dedication to
her job, familial fuck-ups, and accepted loneliness resemble masculine
characters.
This gender-bending deep character is what’s important to
me in Forbrydelsen, because Sarah Lund is so problematic, both as a woman and
as a detective. She’s
incredibly unconventional in both regards, which makes her fascinating to
watch. Søren Sveistrup writes the plot points especially to draw attention to the
battle between personal and professional life. For example, how many times do
we see Lund answer her cell phone when she’s trying to connect with her
son, and thus ruins the moment?
Such is the modern woman’s plight in a man’s world (and the
police force, with its hyper-masculinity, is one of the worst of these places), and
I’m thankful that female characters like Lund are accurately portraying that
never-ending paradox: when women try to have it all, we give something up. I
think we ultimately have faith in Lund, however, because she’s unconventional; this is what causes her to take the
risks needed to catch the criminals, even at the expense of her family or
romantic life.
I hope other women can be similarly inspired by Lund to test
out the waters of unconventionality.
Note: much of the inspiration for these thoughts comes from
Gunhild Agger’s article “Emotion, Gender and Genre: Investigating The Killing.”