Arctic Bodies

Abstract

This chapter explores the use of Europe's northernmost reaches as a place to kill and a space to die, focusing specifically on the visual depiction of dead, dying, or moribund bodies in Nordic noir drama series. Critically interpreting depictions of deadly Arctic landscapes in televisual narratives, it provides a geopolitically informed case study that highlights the further north as a “kingdom of death” and a “place of extremes that is also a place of wonders”; this is accomplished through an interrogation of the visual rhetoric of Nordic noir programmes that employ septrional vistas as canvases for gruesome murders. The chapter provides an original contribution in its examination of ways in which the dead and the Arctic are combined and conflated on the small screen, therein inviting the viewer to gaze upon both the Far North and its corpses from various geographic scales, ideological perspectives, and virtual vantage points.