Russian Versions of the Scandinavian Criminal TV Series: A Remake in the Context of Foreign Culture

The article dwells on the Russian television detectives based on the popular Scandinavian TV series Murder (Forbrydelsen, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, 2007) and The Bridge (Bron, Sweden, Denmark, 2011). The Russian version of Murder entitled Crime was released in 2016; the version of The Bridge, retaining its precedent name, in 2018. The changes made by Russian scenarists seem quite relevant in the context of the conversation about the specificity of the national picture of the world. According to the author's hypothesis, the difference in the embodiment of the criminal plot is “tied” to different systems of ideas about certain aspects of social life - European and Russian. First, these are ideas about gender behaviour and the norm of intra-familial relations. In Crime, such representations entail fundamental changes in the motives of the crime. The murderer of the girl in the Scandinavian original is depicted as a substitute father, who appropriated the right to punish the child out of the patriarchal considerations on the norms of parent-child relations. The creators of the Russian film change the motives of the criminal: from a paranoid obsessed with serving the family, he turns into a cold-blooded and cynical avenger, acting for reasons of self-assertion. Answering the question why in the final of the Russian version the criminal has unconvincing motives that contradict the original concept of his image, the author turns to the methodology of the American anthropologist Harold Garfinkel and concludes that the Scandinavian version contradicts the ideas of intra-familial interaction, normative within the framework of the Russian culture. Therefore, Russian scriptwriters reduce the meanings associated with the accentuation of parental guilt. The same conclusion is drawn from the comparison of the Scandinavian The Bridge and its Russian version. In this case, the subject of comparison is the concept of the protagonist's character who conducts the investigation. In the precedent film, Detective Saga Noren's inability to interact with other people is associated with her and her sister being victims of maternal arbitrariness and mental distress. In the Russian version, her strange behavior is explained not by her childhood trauma, but by her belonging to European culture. Thus, both Russian versions get rid of the motives that do not correspond to the cultural norms of parent-child relations, within which parents are never condemned (even in a situation of overt abuse). In Crime, it leads to an altered concept of the murder, in The Bridge - to an altered concept of the protagonist.

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