Don’t Look NowCan Norway reckon with the reality of right-wing extremists?

AGNETE BRUN / PARADOX FILM

A scene from Utøya–July 22

Erik Poppe’s film Utøya–July 22, which premiered at the International Biennale in Berlin earlier this year, opens with a shot of the main character, 18-year-old Kaja, played by the young Norwegian actress Andrea Berntzen, standing in a wood. She stares intensely into the camera and asserts: “You will never understand. This happened to me.” Kaja then leads us to a clearing full of tents and teenagers. Poppe’s film takes us back to the worst terrorist attack in modern Norwegian history, perpetrated in 2011 by the white Norwegian right-wing extremist and white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik. Except for a few split seconds in which we get a glimpse of a man in a black uniform standing on a cliff with a gun, Utøya–July 22 never shows Breivik. Instead, what we see over the course of 72 devastating minutes are defenseless teenagers fleeing and failing to escape a gunman hellbent on killing and maiming as many of them as possible. The film lasts for exactly the amount of time it took the then-32-year-old Breivik to kill 69 people at the annual youth summer camp of Norway’s then-governing social democratic Labor Party. The number of gunshots heard in the film is exactly the same as the number of shots fired by Breivik before he was arrested by a SWAT team from Oslo police headquarters. Through these choices, the film asserts: This happened. Poppe’s film, which premiered in Norway in March and has so far been seen by over 200,000 Norwegians out of a total population of more than 5 million, provides little context for non-Norwegian audiences. Only in scrolling text at the very end does Poppe make clear that what we have seen is a fictional reworking of the acts of a right-wing extremist terrorist; that in its report about that fateful day in 2011, the government-appointed July 22 commission concluded that a series of institutional and operational failures on the part of the Norwegian intelligence services and police before, during, and after Breivik’s attacks in effect meant the death of a number of teenagers; and that, contrary to what many Norwegians still believe in the aftermath of the attacks, right-wing extremism is on the rise not only in Norway and Scandinavia, but also in wider Europe.

Though I was fortunate not to have lost friends or family in Breivik’s terrorist attacks, I was gripped by a sense of utter despair and sorrow at the loss of so many zestful, brilliant, and promising young countrywomen and men, a feeling I worked through by writing a monograph about the July 22 attacks, Anders Breivik And The Rise Of Islamophobia, published by Zed Books in London in 2014. Among the more than 50 books on the attacks published in Norway, my monograph stood out for its emphasis on the wider societal and political currents that led to Breivik, and for addressing the imbrication of right-wing extremist and populist discourses on Islam and Muslims that preceded July 22, and has to a large extent continued unabated since then. In a country that in 2013 would bring to power the populist right-wing Progress Party (of which Breivik was a longstanding member until 2006) the book was bound not to be popular. Since 1987, the Progress Party has acted as a conduit for the mainstreaming of far-right tropes and ideas about Islam and Muslims in Norway. During this time, Muslims overtook Jews as the racialized “other” in Norwegian society, and biological racism was replaced by cultural racism. It quickly became taboo in Norwegian mainstream media to even make reference to Breivik’s one-time Progress Party membership, with ostensibly liberal editors taking it upon themselves to police any violations. The notion of “my country, right or wrong” plays a central role in even the most liberal political imaginaries in Norway, and guarding...