With a spaceship at the end

Genre Hybridity, Post-Cinematic Affect, and Stillness in “Copenhagen Cowboy” by Nicolas Winding Refn

Copenhagen Cowboy (2023), the Netflix series co-created and solely directed by Danish auteur Nicolas Winding Refn, was pitched to the platform as a continuation of Refn’s Pusher trilogy, a series of grittily realistic gangster films set in Copenhagen’s criminal underworld. However, with the series Refn also wished to introduce elements of other genres, including science-fiction; as he told Netflix, the series would climax with ‘a spaceship at the end’.

Such genre hybridity is typical of Refn’s work since his third feature film (and first in English), Fear X (2003), a psychological thriller with elements of horror which marked a departure from the realism of his debut Pusher (1996) and his second movie Bleeder (1999) – a thriller set in a similar blue-collar milieu to Pusher - while also indicating the direction Refn wished to pursue as a filmmaker. However, the commercial failure of Fear X placed Refn in considerable financial difficulty, forcing him to make two sequels to Pusher to pay off his debts. These sequels – Pusher II (2004) and Pusher III (2005) – continued the first film’s realist style mostly while also introducing elements of the cinematic experimentation of Fear X which Refn would return to wholeheartedly for his future work, including Copenhagen Cowboy.

Although set in the same underworld milieu as the Pusher trilogy, Copenhagen Cowboy eschews the realism of those films to continue the highly stylised, hyperrealist aesthetic that has characterised Refn’s work since 2011’s Drive, a crime thriller which contains elements of both horror and the Western. Copenhagen Cowboy, as I discuss in this presentation, combines the crime elements of the Pusher trilogy with aspects of the horror, science fiction and superhero genres to produce a narrative which is both aesthetically unique and unmistakably Refn.

I also address the influence of video games on the aesthetics of Copenhagen Cowboy, comparing the series to Refn’s action film Only God Forgives (2013), which also displays a gaming influence, and drawing on Steven Shaviro’s concept of ‘post-cinematic effect’ as outlined in his book of that name (2010).

Finally, I discuss the ‘stillness’ of Copenhagen Cowboy comparing it to the work of the visual artists Jules Bastiem-Lepage and Pierre et Gilles as well as to Refn’s first streaming series, for Amazon Studios, Too Old to Die Young (2019).

Bio

Dr David Sweeney (b.1971) is a lecturer in the Glasgow School of Art’s Design History and Theory department where he specialises in popular culture. He is the author of the books The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn: Genre, Gender, Glamour (LUP, 2024), Scanned Clean: (Re)Reading Michael Marshall Smith in the Digital Age (Subterranean Press, 2022) and The OA (Auteur/LUP, 2022), a critical study of the Netflix Series of the same name, as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles.

Please contact Eva Novrup Redvall, if you would like to participate in the open guest lecture