Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.02.2010, Síða 30

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 02 — 2010
After the disaster that was Guð
blessi Ísland, one could be for-
given for approaching the latest
disaster movie with some repre-
hension. The former's f law lay in trying to
deal with the whole debacle from three dif-
ferent perspectives: the micro-history one of
focusing on various individuals; the macro-
history one of talking to bankers to get the
big picture; and the conventional history of
detailing event by event. It failed in all three.
Maybe I Should Have, however, manages to
succeed in all three. Partially, at least.
Right from the get-go the director, Gun-
nar Sigurðsson, presents himself as Icelan-
dic everyman. He participated in the boom,
if on a minor level. He bought a car with a
breadbasket loan and liked to believe, as most
people did, that everything was hunky dory.
The crash came as a shock, as did the fact
that his loan has now roughly tripled due to
the collapse of the króna. While this ploy is
somewhat narcissistic, it is nonetheless ef-
fective in anchoring the story in a main char-
acter. Guð blessi Ísland had three, all inter-
esting, but none of them provided cohesion.
The night before the day after
The film is roughly in three parts. The first
part deals with the mindset leading up to the
collapse. It goes some way towards showing
how virtually everyone, due either to blind
admiration or fear, supported the bankers in
the run up to the heist of the century. While
this is not made explicit, it also shows us that
some things have in fact changed. We are
more suspicious of the rich now. At least that
is something.
The collapse itself is, unlike the actual
event, rather well managed. The constant
intercutting of silent film comedians is a bit
redundant, since the reactions of our leaders
were farcical enough in themselves. The rev-
olution is effectively portrayed by shots that
manage to show the main narrative without
the aid of a tiresome narrator. Missing, how-
ever, is former PM Geir Haarde’s disastrous
outing on the BBC referenced in the film’s
title.
Gunnar’s subsequent involvement with
Borgarahreyfingin, which split up soon after
entering parliament, is quickly mentioned
without entering into a game of who-did-
what.
Money goes to money heaven
In the second part, Gunnar goes all Michael
Moore in trying to understand the collapse in
layman’s terms, although looking a bit less
tired than Mike did in his latest outing. Our
man even tries to find the missing money.
Much like Morgan Spurlock searching for
Osama, you know he won’t succeed, but it
would make a great ending if he did.
Like Guð blessi Ísland, he manages to
interview Björgólfur Thor, perhaps the main
culprit of the heist. Unlike that film, Björgól-
fur is here allowed to make his point and
sounds all the more sinister for it. His notion
of the money having gone to money heaven
is sure to enter the Icelandic language as a
stock phrase. Gunnar then sets off for Tor-
tola, where many of the formerly leading
companies of Iceland were registered. The
only evidence of them, however, is a mail-
box. He also goes to Guernsey, where senior
citizens were robbed of their life savings by
Iceland’s former leading citizens. This is one
of the more important aspects of the film, as
we rarely get to see the non-Icelandic victims
of the bankers’ excellent adventure turned
bogus journey. The most interesting, how-
ever, are the empty bank buildings in Lux-
emburg. These outposts were separated from
the mother companies in the days leading up
to the collapse. Gunnar makes an educated
guess that if money heaven is a place on
earth, this is where it is located.
Batman on ice
The last third is most problematic from a
narrative viewpoint, as the story itself is es-
sentially over. Much like the Da Vinci Code,
the mystery is (partially, at least) solved in the
middle rather than at the end. A bit of re-cut-
ting might be in order. Nevertheless, it is this
part that raises some of the most interesting
points. Gunnar manages to show (partly, at
least) how Iceland could be considered one of
the least corrupt countries on earth during
the boom. To paraphrase a Batman movie:
“In a town this bent, who is there to rat to?”
Interestingly, said Batman film was (partial-
ly) shot in Iceland.
Gunnar even goes so far as to dip into
the foundation of the Icelandic republic un-
der American protection and the auspices of
the Independence Party. Money that was un-
earned and came from neither hard work nor
exports came f lowing in to the country, com-
pliments of the US Army. A company was set
up to make sure this stayed in the hands of
the families who negotiated the deal and was
used to secure their mastery of the island. A
culture of political corruption funded with
easy money soon developed, leading all the
way from 1944 to 2008. Gunnar only implies
this, but it would be the basis for a very in-
teresting documentary, as is the money trail
to Luxemburg. Hopefully others will pick up
where Gunnar left off.
30
Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl’s third novel, Gæska (Kindness),
is out now on Mál & menning.
Most poetry’s pretty fucked up.
It tries hard to be hard. Not
only hard to understand, but
also hard to touch—hard to feel.
Sentiment isn’t really welcome in poetry any-
more, it’s been outlawed. Sentiment is bad
for poetry. It eats up the poetry and excretes
it as pure whiny mush.
As is usually the case, sentiment wasn’t
outlawed for just any old no-good-reason—it
was kicked out ‘cause it’d started to misbe-
have so badly as to not be considered tolerable
anymore. It had had too much to drink and
was creeping everybody out with its nonsen-
sical, overemotional whimpering. It was all
in your face with its “The depths of my pain/
the drip of my drugs / today’s the day / I die”
and it’s roughed-up, false bravado, driving
everybody nuts. So it got kicked out. Boot in
the ass and out the door.
It all started with the pleasant idea of rep-
resentation. Poetry was to become the voice
of the underprivileged, the huddled masses,
the proletariat—it was to become the voice of
the voiceless. This is North America in the
sixties and the seventies: beatniks, hippies,
black nationalists, anarcho-communists,
neo-Marxists, orgy-enthusiasts, feminists,
shock-artists and the like. Anybody who
wanted to be somebody was either under-
privileged or revolutionary enough to make
up for their lack of underprivilege. It was, in
many ways, a beautiful time.
But poetry was never a tool meant for rep-
resentation—never an archaic form of Pow-
erpoint, never a public diary. It was never a
tool, per se (although many poets, I’ll admit,
are in fact tools). And as often seems to be
the case, things escalated fast. By the late
seventies it was hardly enough to feel your-
self an outsider anymore, to speak on behalf
of your forgotten people or to project social
problems. It quickly turned from the social
to the personal, as poets realised that for pure
muscle the personal always beats the social,
hands down. Telling an audience that your
people had been raped had nothing on tell-
ing the audience that you yourself were the
survivor of your own personal holocaust, and
then proceeding on with the gritty details.
The lump in the throat beat the fist in the air.
By the mid eighties, surprisingly enough,
this turned into a competition. Literally.
Poets got up on stages all over the world to
espouse their clever, rhythmical rhymes for
sexual abuse, rape and whatever else could
keep the audience gasping. And the judges
picked a winner. Usually the one who’d fit
the most –ation rhymes into his or her poem.
“Due to complications with my castration,
and the depreciation of my f lagellation, I fell
victim to demonization without ejaculation.”
The victor was the one who got the most ap-
plause. The one whose authenticity seemed
most true. Whose pain ran deepest.
And so, embarrassed by all this senti-
mentality, most poetry worthy of the name
turned its back, turned cold and turned
hard. It intellectualized, codified and pecu-
liarised—it kicked back with a vengeance.
Sentiment, being an old tradition in poetry,
gets all the proper lip-service, of course, but
it’s not a card-carrying member anymore. On
those rare occasions that it gets invited to po-
etry’s shindigs, it’s kept thoroughly in check,
its punch is de-spiked and if it so much as
hints at having had a rough time recently,
poetry gets all like “so what, you gonna cry
now?” and boots it without further ado.
Which is a shame, I guess. But until sen-
timent learns how to behave itself, that’s just
how it’s gotta be.
Poetry | Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl
Film Review | Valur Gunnarsson
So What, You Gonna Cry Now?
Outmooring Michael: Maybe I Should have
Opinion | Bart Cameron
Not too many Americans wanted
to hear about Amanda Knox as
her year long trial played out.
Accused of murdering a British
flatmate while studying abroad in Perugia,
Italy, Knox fascinated Europeans. Based on
diary entries, made very public, that indicated
she had seven sexual conquests, testimony
that indicated she left a vibrator visible in
her shared bathroom, and the fact that she
kissed her boyfriend after her flatmate was
murdered, an Italian prosecutor was able
to concoct accusations first of murder by
“satanic rite,” then of murdering when a
Japanese manga inspired sex game went
awry, then a motive for murder based on envy
and, of course, finally murder under “the fog
of drugs and possibly alcohol.”
The stories told by prosecutor Giuliano
Mignini in the Amanda Knox trial are the
stuff of legend, built from coarse stereotypes
and pornographic fantasies. My guess is
Americans couldn't reconcile European treat-
ment of a seemingly average American girl.
We have a hard time assuming that someone
is a orgy-loving Satanist based on their pos-
session of a vibrator—that Europeans might
see us in this light, all a puff of pot away from
slitting throats, is a painful indicator of the our
rating as humans on the Euro-scale.
Knox was found guilty of murder, though
not of Satanism, this December. With decent
access to a range of reporting, it is under-
standable to me that she was found guilty:
yes, her prosecutor played on sexism, gross
ignorance, and fear in his storytelling, but
there were a couple pieces of evidence that
attached doubt to Knox's innocence. I do not
expect juries the world over to stand by the
American platitude of innocence until proven
guilty—we ourselves rarely live up to it—but
the buffoon Mignini has made a painful trial
look like a gross misstep of justice.
Painful as it is to see a person of power
fail in his office, sensationalizing a tragic
death, the Knox trial has given us something
very useful: a touchstone from which to
evaluate journalistic integrity.
Given sex and Satanism and conjecture,
we can see clearly, with this example in the
centre the ability of newspapers to report
actual facts, whether newspapers reprint
conjecture or analyze, whether newspapers
present the most pornographic terms are
presented as headlines, or whether logic and
humanity is applied.
So on December 4, 2009, when an aghast
Icelander forwarded me Morgunblaðið's
coverage of Knox, I understood the reaction.
The headline of a non-bylined article written
for Iceland's most revered newspaper said
simply “Satanistar fá langa dóma” – “Satanists
get long sentence.”
What followed was a brief summary of the
sentence Knox received, and a recounting of
the prosecutor's case. The American student
molested and slit the throat of an English-
woman, an “engill,” yes, an “angel.” Sources
are referred to in the article, the BBC, Vanity
Fair, the Telegraph, but none are quoted.
What we need to know is an American
Satanist brutally raped then murdered an
English angel. That's the official editorial opin-
ion of Iceland's most trusted news source.
There are a few points that are particular-
ly striking about this story. The description of
Knox as a Satanist is particularly gripping: for
the most part, the tone of the article closely
mirrors the conservative Rupert Murdoch
newspaper The
Times of Lon-
don—except the
Times uses facts
and quotes. But
no newspaper,
including the
Times, referred
to Knox as a
Satanist after
the prosecutor
himself aban-
doned that line
of thinking in
2008.
In the absence of facts, and with adjec-
tives of Satan and angel applied, we are
expected to figure out guilt based on, pre-
sumably, stereotype. To be fair, Morgunblaðið
did not mention sexual history to the degree
that English newspapers did. The only fact
we can base the tendency toward Satanism
or angelicalness on is nationality—is it more
likely for an American to be satanic? An Eng-
lishwoman to be angelic? This is not the way
you typically want your journalism to function.
It is possible that Morgunblaðið simply
flubbed a story that didn't seem important
to them. They presented the facts, messed
up on a headline, and nobody much cared.
If they played up a stereotype that American
women are somehow ruthless and lacking in
morals, it's hardly anything new: as I reviewed
the article at MBL.is, a banner advertisement
of “Sorority Row”, featuring scantily clad
American girls and the suggestion of horror,
blinked next to the Knox article.
This article, though, flies in the face of
two core Icelandic values. I could be wrong,
but in my time in Iceland I felt that the country
espoused equality among sexes and vigilance
against prejudices based on sexuality—the
idea that the number of partners a woman
might have could compromise her moral
fortitude is rejected in Iceland. The notion
of a fair trial, and a strong reaction against
over-rigorous prosecution, also seemed to
me to be central to Icelandic identity. I've
seen very thorough arguments of evidence
in foreign trials of sex offenders in the pages
of Morgunblaðið in the past, and successful
arguments to bar deportation of tax evaders
who received judgments deemed too harsh.
The Icelander who presented me the
Morgunblaðið article suggested that Icelandic
values are still the same. “What happened to
Mogginn? It's turned into Séð og Heyrt” was
her main observation. She had expected the
newspaper that represented Icelandic values.
She found a tabloid.
Americans aware of the Knox treatment
in the European press are quick to call out
anti-Americanism. I wouldn't go nearly so
far. I would call out sloppy journalism, which
brings to mind the many warnings I once re-
ceived about a future in Iceland dominated by
shoddy journalism. Davíð Oddsson, as Prime
Minister, complained via his advisers in 2004
that if media went unregulated, we would see
corrupt media along the lines of what passes
in Italy. That specific example was sited to me
as I attempted to cover Oddsson's failure to
pass a media bill for the Associated Press.
I can't help but see the irony that Davíð
Oddsson, in serving as editor of the once
revered Morgunblaðið, has recognized the
low promise of his warnings about
journalism.
Morgunblaðið And The
American Satanist