I hope you
have had a good holiday folks! I also hope that it has led you to crave more
blog posts about satire (I don't know what kind of vacation would cause you to
crave more blog posts about satire, but never mind). Let me go straight back to
business.
Here in
Sweden, there are a few movies that have become famous due to their ability to
(rather) accurately portray Swedish society. One of these movies is Sällskapsresan
- Suntrip, a real classic to us Swedes. The movie is about Stig-Helmer, who
is what we would call a true "toffel" (someone who is easily pushed
around) in Swedish. The movie is set in the late seventies/ early eighties and
follows Stig-Helmer as he ventures on his first charter trip ever. The movie
satirizes the typical charter travelling Swede to no end. It shows how Swedish
people tend to build their own small cities and communities wherever they go,
with Swedish coffee, Swedish bread and Swedish alcohol. The characters in the
movie stay in a Spanish town called Nueva Estocolmo (New Stockholm for you who
don't know Spanish that well), which is just one of many examples of how the
makers of the movie satirize this Swedish behavior. Furthermore, the characters
Berra and Robban are excellent examples of satire in the movie. They are real
parodies of Swedish behavior; throughout their stay in Spain they have only got
one thought on their minds: to find a place that sells cheap alcohol. They are
truly insufferable; they laugh at things that are not funny, they are almost
always drunk and they treat women... well bad (in an exaggerative way, of
course). If you speak Swedish, you can see examples of this below:
An
interesting (and kind of sad) fact about this movie is that many people do not
regard it as satire of Swedish vacation habits, but see it as an accurate
portrayal of Swedish behavior, at least during the charter era of the seventies
and eighties. Of this I cannot say much, since I was not alive back then to see
for myself, but I can say that if this is the case then Swedes are much weirder
than what I have given them credit for.
Amen.
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