ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 compares a Danish detective thriller, produced for Danish public broadcasting, to its commercial American adaptation. The comparison assesses the impact of different cultural contexts in constructing the character of the working mother. Despite strong feminist input or direct authorship at key creative points of production for both programs, and similar narrative and aesthetic strategies that center a strong female protagonist, female agency is undermined in The Killing through the postfeminist “bad mother” trope, which supplants Forbrydelsen’s left-wing critique of global capitalism and gender issues. The Killing’s reliance on the bad mother trope demonstrates the power of postfeminism and neoliberalism as interpretive grids, or elements of indirect authorship, that limit feminist progress in the US. Forbrydelsen constructs a more forgiving image of the working mother, emanating as it does from a society that implemented universal childcare in the 1970s to minimize the gender gap, while the US relegated childcare to personal market solutions. Post¬feminism’s discourse of choice fails to recognize that universal childcare is necessary for women’s full labor market participation on equal terms with men. This analysis indicates that the larger egalitarian cultural context of Scandinavia brings indirect feminist creative influence to bear on Forbrydelsen, an influence that counterintuitively outweighs The Killing’s greater direct female creative control in the context of neoliberal and postfeminist American imperatives.
