The Conqueror

The Empress

On the Friday evening when, as part of its celebrated venture Thinking Big, NRK screened the programme on Gro Harlem Brundtland, Norway’s and Scandinavia’s first female prime minister, Jonas Wergeland was strolling along Bygdøy Allé, unconsciously humming the chorus of Jens Book Jenssen’s old favourite ‘When the Chestnuts Blossom on Bygdøy Allé’ because it happened to be just that time, and the chestnuts were in full bloom. Jonas had been to the Gimle Cinema to see a film starring Diane Keaton, had almost had the cinema to himself, and it was only as he was cutting across Solli plass that it occurred to him how few cars there were on the road, how few people at all: as if, while he had been sitting, all-unsuspecting, in the cinema, the city had been struck by some terrible catastrophe and only he and a handful of others had survived. Jonas Wergeland carried on down Drammensveien, then pulled up short, sensing that he was being watched; he turned and almost jumped out of his skin. He was staring straight into the face of another person. Or at least he thought it was that of another person. It took him several seconds to realize that he was standing face to face with himself. It always took him a while to recognize his own features on the television; it was as if the medium changed him, gave him a new identity. Jonas stood there watching close-ups of himself, the one constant in the series, alternating with close-ups of the prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland — as she was played, with great authority and uncanny accuracy, by Ella Strand, that is. It was a weird moment: Jonas Wergeland stopped in his tracks and held captive — or even, why not: seduced — by his own gaze. Suddenly he understood why the city seemed deserted: just at that moment the large majority of Norwegians were sitting at home in front of their TV screens, watching his programme.

Jonas went on standing in front of that shop window on Solli plass, could not tear himself away from his own opus on Gro Harlem Brundtland, in which the key scene — to many people’s surprise — took place in a Chinese home. Jonas had racked his brains for months before, with the deadline approaching for this, the last programme in the series, he figured out how to present a personage as overexposed as Gro Harlem Brundtland; everything fell into place when he got wind of an incident in China which, more or less indirectly, said more than anything else about this exceptionally strong-willed and ambitious Norwegian woman and her standing, one might almost say her clout and her reputation; the name Harlem Brundtland which, in the world at large had some of the same ring of quality and dynamism to it as Harley-Davidson.

In January 1988, in her capacity as Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland visited China, land of the dragon, where she was received with full honours: a point underscored by the meeting she had with Deng Xiaoping himself — a signal which did not go unnoticed in diplomatic circles, since Deng was still the most powerful figure in the world’s most populous country. The Chinese deliberately lionized Harlem Brundtland, a socialist and a woman who, by the standards of this country was, at just forty-eight years of age, very young to be a government leader. To Norwegian eyes, Gro Harlem Brundtland’s trip to China must have seemed like a modern-day Viking raid, a kind of peaceful conquest.

During her visit, Chinese television did a feature on the Norwegian politician, and it was around this event that Jonas built his programme: which is to say, the fact that the Chinese television station totally misread the material they had obtained. Some time earlier the prime minister’s office had produced a so-called Video Press Kit on Gro Harlem Brundtland for the use of foreign television stations, to save her from constantly having to attend film shoots. This video contained footage of Gro — the first politician to become known to Norwegians by her first name — in a variety of situations, so-called stock shots, together with an information sheet, so that the stations could choose for themselves which shots they wanted to run, either to illustrate some news item on Harlem Brundtland or to use as the background to some relevant commentary.

But the Chinese broadcast the entire video, with no commentary, to every home in China which owned a television, with the result that the viewers were treated to a total of eight different episodes in which the Norwegian prime minister played the lead, separated only by some blurb and a short title in English. For Jonas, this said everything there was to be said about communication, the divide, between Norway and China. Because to an ordinary Chinese this stream of images must have seemed nigh-on incomprehensible — a bit like a silent film about head-hunters in Borneo being screened in an igloo in Greenland. So Jonas reconstructed a typical Chinese room in the studio, and in this he showed a Chinese family sitting watching this television programme — he had been granted permission to use the actual video in this section of his dramatized documentary.

Thanks to some authentic exteriors — footage which Jonas had had taken of the hutongs, the narrow lanes and alleyways of Beijing — and thanks to the excellent Chinese extras he found among the citizens of Oslo, mainly in the restaurant trade, it looked to the viewers as though the whole sequence had been filmed in Beijing, that the scene they were witnessing here truly was taking place in one of the little houses in one of Beijing’s countless, labyrinthine hutongs in January 1988.

It was a sight which few viewers ever forgot: a Chinese family sitting round the table eating dinner and watching the Evening News on CCTV1, when suddenly a twenty-minute long video about Gro Harlem Brundtland starts to roll across the screen; the Chinese family are told only that this is a film about the Norwegian prime minister, no more than that, there is no voice-over: nothing, just one sequence after another, with a blank screen in between — like a series in which none of the episodes seems to follow on logically from the one before — and in which the only language spoken is Norwegian, except for the last shot, filmed at the UN Headquarters, although that doesn’t make any sense either since none of the family speaks English. Jonas showed the family chattering animatedly about the programme and occasionally laughing heartily and pointing at the TV screen with their chopsticks; the father and grandfather were particularly vocal, making loud comments in a form of Chinese few, if any, Norwegians would understand.

There they sat, all well wrapped up in a room in which, in winter, the temperature never rose above 59 degrees, over their frugal meal, stewed celeriac with sweet soy sauce and boiled rice, in a room dotted with those characteristic lace cloths; with portraits of their ancestors hanging on the walls next to a landscape of Guillin — a place which Harlem Brundtland also visited on her trip; a calendar on a red cord by the door, a sideboard holding thermos flasks for boiling water as well as some small statuettes of the Eight Immortals and, beside it, in the place of honour, a television, a Peon or possibly a Panda with the plush cloth pulled back, and on the screen: Gro Harlem Brundtland, as if she too were one of the immortals — making, as she did, a succession of ghostly appearances in such widely disparate situations: on the rostrum in Parliament, standing outside the palace with her new Cabinet — and here the female members of the family noted that eight of the government ministers were women — in her office, at her home on the island of Bygdøy and so on, in all sorts of roles, evincing the same dynamism in each, maintaining the same breakneck pace, as career woman and housewife, as grandmother and government leader, party chief, electioneer and, not least, European: as Margaret Thatcher’s hostess in Tromsø and as a visitor to Downing Street, this sequence clearly demonstrating Harlem Brundtland’s awareness of how these days foreign policy is also a crucial factor on the domestic front.

Here Jonas killed two birds with one stone. On the one hand he managed to show what an honour, what a compliment, what an invaluable advertisement for Norway this was: Gro Harlem Brundtland and her life shown in brief sequences interspersed with bits of blurb on — potentially at least — the 150 million televisions which were already to be found in China at that time. How proud that ought to make any Norwegian feel! How symbolic: the world’s most heavily populated country, now in the process of becoming a Great Power, of opening up — also via television — and there was Norway, and its prime minister, right in the thick of things.

And on the other hand, Jonas managed to show how fantastic the Norwegian premier must have seemed to Chinese eyes, what a bafflingly Utopian place Norway must seem; a country where half of the government ministers were women and where the country’s leaders walked the streets and talked to ordinary people, lived in perfectly normal houses — it was almost an insult to a nation that had only just put behind it a modern-day reign of tyranny which had cost possibly as many as fifty — some said eighty — million lives, in the name of a fanatical and mistaken political strategy, in a country where you still could not criticize anyone at all openly without being ruthlessly consigned to long-term imprisonment. And after the final shot on the video, in which Harlem Brundtland was seen speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, authoritatively and in her faultless English, in her capacity as chairman of the World Commission on Environment and Development, which is to say: as the world’s ambassador for the environment, the role which forged her eminent international standing and won her awards and distinctions left, right and centre, Jonas had cut to footage of heavily polluted Beijing exteriors, close-ups of gunge clinging to walls, the smoke from briquette fires hanging heavily over the hutongs in the cold January air, as if to say that from the viewpoint of the Beijing hutong, all of this, an awareness of the environment, this video, Norway in general — a small society wrestling with the luxury problem of how to shift the balance from prosperity to preservation — did not matter a jot; the Norwegian social-democracy, its queen, or empress, included, would never be anything other than an exotic postcard passing across the television screen, an almost nonexistent, picture-book idyll — a fact which is confirmed by a look at a Chinese map of the world, in which Norway appears as a bracket the size of a fly dropping tucked way up in the left-hand corner, or Chinese history or geography schoolbooks, in which Norway is barely mentioned and only then in the greater context of Scandinavia or Europe in general.

In a way all of this was rendered doubly strange for Jonas as he stood outside that shop window on Solli plass, gazing through it at his own programme, because he could not hear a single sound. He felt totally distanced from it, or as baffled as any Chinese viewer. It also seemed to him that she, the Mother of her Country, was trying to tell him something, although he did not know what, because no words reached his ears even though she was moving her lips.

The hypnotic effect of this was further enhanced by the fact that there was not just one television in the window; the programme was being run simultaneously on twelve different TVs set close together. Fabulous, thought Jonas. He could not help thinking of synchronized swimming: Gro Harlem Brundtland and eleven clones all mimicking her actions. Or that this duplication created a kind of pattern, a broadcasting network which also led to an accumulation of the programme’s effect. He remembered that someone had used the words ‘interwoven strands’ when speaking of the programmes shown so far. And it truly was as if this, the screens in front of him, enabled him to see the big picture, the one formed by the twelve small ones, as something else — and, most importantly, as something more complex, the sum of the individual, identical images. The figurative aspect, the pictures of Gro Harlem Brundtland, dissolved and something ornamental, abstract took its place. Like looking into a brain, he thought, seeing a way of thinking laid bare.

Where are the dark holes in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

Jonas Wergeland stood in the middle of an all but deserted Oslo, outside a shop window and saw again, on television, how he himself stepped onto the scene, into the room with the Chinese, in his regular spot, saw himself in a matrix of screens, divided into twelve, stood and stared, utterly captivated, at himself, twelve identical figures. I’m possessed by demons, he thought, unconsciously leaning so far forwards towards the window that he ended up bumping his forehead on the glass.