Firewall:

Finished Wallander novel Firewall and found myself moved by the ending to a surprising depth.  It was a sustained elegiac meditation of considerable poignancy and pith, feeling that this penultimate novel was the true ending of the series arc, not the formal exit penned some 10 years later, though the final image of Wallander vanishing into the silent darkness of Alzheimer's was a fitting and apt final curtain. The ending of the novel has also been helpful in solidifying my understanding, at this preliminary point, of the flawed welfare state in Sweden, and beyond.  As Wallander reflects on his experience and the current state of affairs, he brings a bifocal perspective.  A society, despite its pretensions about itself, or perhaps because of these pretensions have brutally pushed a significant number of its citizens to the margins of society, and  in ghettoizing them, has in effect created a series of societal firewalls, preventing integration and harmony...and leaving these "citizens" adrift in a world of drugs, unemployment and societal indifference.  But at the same time, technology has brought people closer together, yet creating a social matrix that is highly vulnerable to sabotage and terrorism.  Probably worth noting the book was published in 1998 with YK2 looming large, and despite the failure of any of its dire predictions to find fruition, the ratcheted up anxiety engendered by this anticipated international meltdown, profoundly helped to shape the mood of the new century.  Even before 9/11 we were possessed by a deepening sense of dread and insecurity.  Since YK2 we were waiting for 9/11 to materialize and compel the realization that the world had changed forever.

Getting back to the book and nordic noir, these works would have us believe, as Zizek and numerous other cultural critics never tire of proclaiming, the Swedish model, and related models within other nordic nations, to secularly design utopian models for post WWII resurgence is a failed experiment.  Surmising from a variety of nordic crime writers the ultimate source of evil (to use an old fashioned word) is seen as resting within the very social structured long admired and attacked as welfare statehood.  At times, the state appears to have inadequate laws to inhibit crime, particularly on the global, financial level.  At other times, and this also applies to corporate, privileged criminal activity, the corrupting influence of neoliberalism, and its inherent exploitation of the vulnerable and less powerful, becomes the focal point.  But it is never a simple, cut-and-dry situation.  At times though perhaps on a secondary tier of significance, the attempt by the state to assume such vast responsibility for the welfare of the citizenry, in areas once seen the province the family, the neighborhood, the church, the drive to nationalize so many activities and institutions, including that of the police, creates, paradoxically, not contentment, but a type of entropy or malaise.  One one hand the state often seems defined by an unsettling mixture of incompetency and corruption, and the sense that a variety of traditional institutions, including the family have  been undermined or weakened. So without these personal connections, once you become marginalized by the state, you are lost and lost within a crime environment impossible to overcome.   Ironically, then, the left critique of the welfare state, at least superficially overlaps portions of right wing critique in conveying a state exerting a stultifying influence on the individual consciousness.  But this impact does not result from frustrating the entrepreneurial spirit, as often claimed by free market advocates, but rather the preeminence of capitalism enterprise, particularly within Sweden, undermines the potential for authentic social engagement .

Of course, it's easy to lose oneself in such ruminations, so  lets choose a very simple incident involving individuals who are neither victims or perpetrators of crime.  A variety of authors within both the arts and even the legal or judicial establishment have commented how the tendency to decriminalize certain transgressions against society provokes a sensibility that "justice" as a traditional and cohesive concept ceases to exist.  If some transgressions aren't punished, or some transgressors treated with extreme leniency then justice no longer exists, and thus past understandings of society becomes,, in some minds, inoperative. But at the same time a lack of faith in the new state creates another level of uncertainty, a sort of limbo between past and present-becoming future. Not coincidently, this parallels the fracturing of time in classic noir.