Guest post by Gergana May.
I was deeply impressed when I first saw The Bothersome Man. I experienced it as a powerful artistic metaphor for the life of the privileged citizens of affluent Western European countries. It is a dystopic tale of spiritual displacement, detachment, loss of connection with our roots, our background, our elders, our stories… As I watched it, it increasingly got a firm grasp on my emotions. I found it intense and provocative – a metaphor of the perfect welfare state, in which there is relentless demand and expectation from each citizen to be “happy.” Indeed, the film can be seen as a somewhat poignant artifact especially nowadays, as we have just heard of the latest World Happiness Report which ranks Finland first and Norway second (down one place from last year).
While both countries can brag about their high quality of life, the main character in The Bothersome Man, Andreas Ramsfjell, appears to be resisting random forces in his life and is drifting with no guidance and no anchor. On the surface everything seems structured and orderly, yet in fact Andreas is “tricked” “out of meaning.” He is made a powerless puppet in a society which expects only fitting in and going with the flow. And this “flow” is supposedly perfect. In reality, saturated by mass production and pop culture, we are being served large portions of pre-packaged, prefabricated “meaning.” This saturation is so strong and so aggressive that complete life patterns, thought structures, and fixed attitudes are being superimposed on the individual with no opportunity to escape. This film brings clear and strong awareness about these processes through powerful, well-structured cinematic expression. It is like a breath of fresh air in a chaotic, superficial Western discourse, where lies and truth, significant and insignificant, are blended, indistinguishable from one another, an amalgam intended only to sell – no matter what, to whom, at what cost.
Something is wrong with the perfect Western societies and the perfect welfare states. Something doesn’t quite fit, something evades us in the perfect “people’s home” (as the Scandinavian welfare states refer to their social structure). Being taken care of “from cradle to grave” creates the demand for unquestioning and satisfied “happy” citizens, with no opportunity for dissent. The Bothersome Man is a powerful critique of the deafening and blinding forces that are freely permitted to govern the prosperous Western societies – forces whose epicenter is only and irrevocably monetary profit.
How is Andreas Ramsfjell going to resist?
The Bothersome Man will be shown at the IU Cinema on March 26. This screening is part of the film series Nordic Tales of Privilege and Anxiety, which is sponsored by the departments of Germanic Studies and Central Eurasian Studies, Institute for European Studies, Russian and East European Institute, Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center, and IU Cinema.
Gergana May is a Senior Lecturer in Germanic Studies and European Studies. She coordinates the Norwegian Program at Indiana University. Her scholarly fields of interest include Norwegian language, Scandinavian literature and theatre, Ibsen and Strindberg, literary theory and criticism, and translation for the theatre.