Ritualistic Remembrance - Films and TV-series about resistance during World War Two and the construction of Norwegian identity

In this thesis, I apply insights from collective memory studies to poststructuralist IR in order to enhance understanding of how popular culture operates in processes of discursive identity construction. More specifically, I rely on Grant David Bollmer’s (2011) argument that repetition is key when attempting to keep certain memories from being forgotten. Using this theoretical framework, I analyze the following four films and TV-series on Norwegian resistance during World War Two as rituals of embodied movement: Operation Swallow: The Battle for Heavy Water (1948), Nine Lives (1957), Max Manus (2008) and The Heavy Water War (2015). The analysis demonstrates how these films and TV-series in large part reproduce and naturalize dominant representations of Norwegian identity by keeping certain memories of World War Two in Norway actualized. They represent wartime resistance and Norwegian identity along four main lines. These are: Norway as important for the outcome of the war, Norway as ‘not’ Germany, Norway as rural in its essence and Norway as cold hardy and beautiful. Interestingly, all four representational themes function to reinforce bedrock assumptions of Norwegian moral superiority, and as such, contribute to the perpetuation of the grand narratives of Norwegian identity. Importantly, arguing that Bollmer’s theory on collective memory and rituals of embodied movement should be used as a criterion for the selection of text when analyzing popular culture as discourse, I join the efforts of poststructuralists who advocate moderate methodological advances for the approach.