In Order of Disappearance

Every country lives by its particular myths, even its borrowed ones. The American myth of The West — pioneers and solitary lawmen bringing civilization to the wilds, turning the desert into a garden — is a story as quintessential as the Eden of Genesis, which it reverses. It has grown from national legend into archetype. Now it’s universal. So Norway can claim and tell it too. Hey, replace the vast desert with a cinemascope snowscape and it’s a Western — mutatis mutandis, as we used to say in Dodge.

When Nils Dickman (and yes, his name provokes those jokes) receives his Citizen of the Year award in the small community where he runs the vital huge snow blower, he even modestly admits to preserving “a patch of civilization” in the wild. When his son dies in an apparent overdose, Nils’s first impulse is suicide. But when the son’s friend reveals he was killed by a drug gang, and the police won’t investigate, the Centrist Party’s potential candidate wreaks his one-man vigilante justice.

The Western spirit pervades the film without horses and sagebrush. It’s the atmosphere. There are allusions to the modern vigilante sheriffs Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The characters have colourful nicknames. e.g., "The Chinese" is a Japanese Dane. The score features Morricone strings and a C & W ballad. Fargo is evoked in the landscape and the finale, where a flier falls into a kind of chipper. The snowblower leads a convoy like the old wagon train. 

The plot gives us a vengeful outsider restoring justice with his gun and noble steed (the snowblower, whose headlights give it the eyes and smile of a sinister face). He has a brother, a gangster who’s now going straight, the reversal of this ideal citizen now going virtuously amok. The hero is quiet and steely but brutally effective, like every Shane. Like Shane Nils attracts the innocent, as the villain’s kidnapped son snuggles up to him and asks “Do you know about the Stockholm Syndrome?” The kid is as self-aware as the film's genre is.

Nils finds himself caught between two drug-dealing gangs, with opposite leaders. The locals are run by a Dan Duryea type, a cackling psychotic of mood extremes and violent outbreaks. He’s a fop, with an opulent modernist mansion and lavish contemporary art, including a wall of Fischli and Weiss hand sculptures and a huge fractured horse painting. He calls himself The Count, dotes on his young son and is locked in torment with his divorcing wife. Like the classic moustache, his layered ponytail makes him a comic villain. The other gang is Old School Serbs led by a Dock Tobin type played with a rasp by Bruno Ganz and named Papa. He lives in a warehouse crammed with chandeliers and antiques like an Easterner’s mansion. He’s the Old Testament father — “a son for a son” — pitted against the modern Nils, a man of peace who can turn on the violence when necessary (e.g., to cleanse the temple). After the final gunfight at the snowplow corral the two old men ride off together, survivors of a war they didn’t want but fell into. The old guys survive like the myth they relived.

     The title comes from the formal device of marking each death with a memorial title, the character’s name and a burial cross. The repetition recalls the John Ford line, “plantin’ and a-prayin’, plantin’ and a-prayin’.” That’s how justice comes to the frontier, civilization to the desert — any frontier, any desert.