Mission Impossible: Sinister Nordics
8 Aug 2018 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneSaving this here because it doesn't belong on Tumblr.
Mission Impossible, as a universe, is peculiarly fixated on Nordic and Scandinavian people going off the deep end and becoming international terrorists.
Obviously they’ve successfully avoided racism, but that’s like saying that because someone is allergic to chocolate you’re serving avocado mousse for dessert. Like, you CAN make a dessert out of avocado, arguably a good one, but it’s kind of strange, almost nobody has heard of it before, and there were a lot of other non-chocolate desserts that come to mind before it. Similarly the world is not only full of other countries and causes, but there are even other terrorists out there.
It looks more like they also didn’t want to stir up any political associations with any known [so-called] terrorist organizations, not even, like, “animal rights activists”, which have made a ludicrously oversized appearance in media in the past for such a small niche. But even though that cause isn’t explicitly ethnic, national, or related directly to any form of real-world oppression (if you don’t count colonialist ‘activists’ attempting to cut off indigenous peoples from their traditional foods and livelihoods), it’s still possibly going to offend someone, namely, animal rights activists and sympathizers, the latter of whom are pretty numerous.
And if you’ve eliminated extant terrorist causes, inventing a new one is… um… well… a thing that has happened before without ruining the movie.
But one might still ask, “Why is this series in the spy genre - previously considered quaintly antiquated since the Reagan years, yet now suddenly super relevant to our news cycle - suddenly all counter-terrorism, when you can get counter-terrorism anywhere from NCIS: Anaheim to CSI: Toronto?”
(It IS ironic that the wave of “terrorist” trope in crime and action fiction after 9/11 was almost entirely politically motivated, racist, and agenda-driven, and frequently literally supported by the US military-industrial complex - check how often procedural shows thank a branch of the US military in the credits! - but these movies couldn’t have less interest in that particular cause.)
Of course, there’ve always been plenty of diabolical scientists who wanted to blow up the world or whatever in spy fiction too, but there also used to be some actual state-vs-state international espionage.
In fact, they are probably avoiding any international espionage plots for the same reasons they can’t use plausible terrorism ones. The Cold War enemies of the US are once again its enemies (though Russia more so than the others right now for obvious reasons), which means fictionalizing that espionage would be too close to home, as well as alienating a lot of market share. (Historical spy fiction doesn’t have this problem, obviously, eg Atomic Blonde.) If they passed over these nations in favor of one that is not a real enemy of the US, there would still be risk of offense and they’d be up against a huge plausibility issue. Other spy media in the past has answered this problem by making up a fictional state, but in my experience, these still end up being racist, because they model them so obviously on real world history that they come out a mishmash of offensive stereotypes.
So they’re back at having to make up terrorists or organized crime organizations, but that’s not enough by itself, because those can still become offensive, since The Bad Guys are easily susceptible to becoming a bit two-dimensional. It could be argued that using only Western European countries as their candidate pool was the safest way to go, since that way they won’t risk punching down. (Russia and Eastern Europe out for obvious reasons; same with anything that could be associated with Islamophobia, i.e. Asia and much of Africa; South & Central America have glutted the international crime genre in recent decades, and are also the primary victims of the real CIA, which could be touchy.)
But the biggest terrorist movements in all these remaining countries are white supremacists. There’s plenty of organized crime in these countries, but organized crime isn’t typically interested in setting off nuclear bombs (just selling and buying them), so it might just be that they didn’t offer big enough world-ending stakes. This is why we keep getting vaguely Thanos-like motivations: people who just like death, or who think an apocalyptic event will somehow be a good thing, or who want to destroy all organized society - those are the reasons someone would want to create nuclear-cataclysm-comparable destruction outside the context of nuclear war. White supremacy is what you see if you look at Western Europe and say “What kinds of terrorist ideology are they gonna produce?” So to feel plausible, these bad guys just vaguely sound like past and present white ethnonationalists by reminding us of the discourse of eugenics (the explicit association with science, first of all, and then the vague feint at overpopulation) and, of course, the biggest thing they have in common with ethnonationalists: wanting to kill tremendous, massive numbers of people, which is outside the typical goals of international espionage.
All of that still doesn’t explain why they so obviously prefer the Nordic countries to England and the rest of Western Europe, but it could just be a desire to feel exotic - the Nordic countries being more geographically distant and generally smaller, hence less familiar and less often visited (to an extent) by the majority of inhabitants of the continent.
Mission Impossible, as a universe, is peculiarly fixated on Nordic and Scandinavian people going off the deep end and becoming international terrorists.
- MI: Fallout: Kristoffer Joner’s Nils Debruuk (Norwegian) thinks global cataclysm is the only way to destroy the ‘global order’ of evil organized governments (he doesn’t say anything about capitalism so he might just not like corruption… or the patriarchy??… or maybe he’s a libertarian). Bonus: random plutonium dealer “The European” played by Danish JFK-lookalike Caspar Phillipson
- MI: Rogue Nation: Jens Hulden’s rogue intelligence operative Janik Vinter (Swedish) wants to torture Tom Cruise (but fails) in the service of The Syndicate, a group dedicated to destroying the field of international espionage apparently.
- MI: Ghost Protocol: Michael Nyqvist’s Kurt Hendricks (Swedish), nuclear expert, decides that nuclear cataclysm will produce, uh, more… equality? Or something? His right-hand man is Samuli Edelman’s Wistrom (he’s Finnish, presumably playing Swedish).
Obviously they’ve successfully avoided racism, but that’s like saying that because someone is allergic to chocolate you’re serving avocado mousse for dessert. Like, you CAN make a dessert out of avocado, arguably a good one, but it’s kind of strange, almost nobody has heard of it before, and there were a lot of other non-chocolate desserts that come to mind before it. Similarly the world is not only full of other countries and causes, but there are even other terrorists out there.
It looks more like they also didn’t want to stir up any political associations with any known [so-called] terrorist organizations, not even, like, “animal rights activists”, which have made a ludicrously oversized appearance in media in the past for such a small niche. But even though that cause isn’t explicitly ethnic, national, or related directly to any form of real-world oppression (if you don’t count colonialist ‘activists’ attempting to cut off indigenous peoples from their traditional foods and livelihoods), it’s still possibly going to offend someone, namely, animal rights activists and sympathizers, the latter of whom are pretty numerous.
And if you’ve eliminated extant terrorist causes, inventing a new one is… um… well… a thing that has happened before without ruining the movie.
But one might still ask, “Why is this series in the spy genre - previously considered quaintly antiquated since the Reagan years, yet now suddenly super relevant to our news cycle - suddenly all counter-terrorism, when you can get counter-terrorism anywhere from NCIS: Anaheim to CSI: Toronto?”
(It IS ironic that the wave of “terrorist” trope in crime and action fiction after 9/11 was almost entirely politically motivated, racist, and agenda-driven, and frequently literally supported by the US military-industrial complex - check how often procedural shows thank a branch of the US military in the credits! - but these movies couldn’t have less interest in that particular cause.)
Of course, there’ve always been plenty of diabolical scientists who wanted to blow up the world or whatever in spy fiction too, but there also used to be some actual state-vs-state international espionage.
In fact, they are probably avoiding any international espionage plots for the same reasons they can’t use plausible terrorism ones. The Cold War enemies of the US are once again its enemies (though Russia more so than the others right now for obvious reasons), which means fictionalizing that espionage would be too close to home, as well as alienating a lot of market share. (Historical spy fiction doesn’t have this problem, obviously, eg Atomic Blonde.) If they passed over these nations in favor of one that is not a real enemy of the US, there would still be risk of offense and they’d be up against a huge plausibility issue. Other spy media in the past has answered this problem by making up a fictional state, but in my experience, these still end up being racist, because they model them so obviously on real world history that they come out a mishmash of offensive stereotypes.
So they’re back at having to make up terrorists or organized crime organizations, but that’s not enough by itself, because those can still become offensive, since The Bad Guys are easily susceptible to becoming a bit two-dimensional. It could be argued that using only Western European countries as their candidate pool was the safest way to go, since that way they won’t risk punching down. (Russia and Eastern Europe out for obvious reasons; same with anything that could be associated with Islamophobia, i.e. Asia and much of Africa; South & Central America have glutted the international crime genre in recent decades, and are also the primary victims of the real CIA, which could be touchy.)
But the biggest terrorist movements in all these remaining countries are white supremacists. There’s plenty of organized crime in these countries, but organized crime isn’t typically interested in setting off nuclear bombs (just selling and buying them), so it might just be that they didn’t offer big enough world-ending stakes. This is why we keep getting vaguely Thanos-like motivations: people who just like death, or who think an apocalyptic event will somehow be a good thing, or who want to destroy all organized society - those are the reasons someone would want to create nuclear-cataclysm-comparable destruction outside the context of nuclear war. White supremacy is what you see if you look at Western Europe and say “What kinds of terrorist ideology are they gonna produce?” So to feel plausible, these bad guys just vaguely sound like past and present white ethnonationalists by reminding us of the discourse of eugenics (the explicit association with science, first of all, and then the vague feint at overpopulation) and, of course, the biggest thing they have in common with ethnonationalists: wanting to kill tremendous, massive numbers of people, which is outside the typical goals of international espionage.
All of that still doesn’t explain why they so obviously prefer the Nordic countries to England and the rest of Western Europe, but it could just be a desire to feel exotic - the Nordic countries being more geographically distant and generally smaller, hence less familiar and less often visited (to an extent) by the majority of inhabitants of the continent.
(no subject)
Date: 8 Aug 2018 07:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 9 Aug 2018 04:30 pm (UTC)But OMG... I'd COMPLETELY forgotten about those until you said that.
I'm not sure if they're my favorite or if the ones where they never really bother to explain what the motive is at all are, though. It's kind of a tossup there, like my two favorite desserts.
(no subject)
Date: 9 Aug 2018 04:35 pm (UTC)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZQsVNZ3SE&t=4s
(no subject)
Date: 10 Aug 2018 02:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 10 Aug 2018 08:23 am (UTC)