ABSTRACT
News of the broadcast of “Tango Finlandia” in the United States spread quickly around Finland. When first shown in the United States on February 3, 1993, the first author was in Finland doing field work. While he heard about the broadcast immediately via e-mail from friends and family in the United States, he also heard about the US broadcast from friends and colleagues in Finland within hours. Common knowledge in Finland is that Finns care deeply, perhaps too deeply, about what others think of them (Sajavaara and Lehtonen, 1997). Thus, a broadcast of this kind was bound to touch a Finnish cultural nerve. What we explore here are some of those nerves being exposed by this episode of 60 Minutes. What we find, eventually, is not so much that this television text created a national discussion, but that the televised report was given a particular Finnish shape and meaning through a Finnish discourse, quite unlike the one we heard in the previous chapters. In particular, we find that the Finnish discourse about first impressions includes a complex set of emotions, at times a sequence of emotions. The discourse also, for some, frames the televisual text as a unique form of Finnish satire, which is both funny and serious, and is ambivalent about this form of humor, especially when used with foreigners, with the emotions and the satire saying much to Finns about Finnishness and their relations with others.
