A considerable contrast

between Carl Morck as we see him in the Department Q novels and the same detective as we see him in the Danish TV movies made from some of them.

He is in both presentations a socially inept nihilist very good and dogged at the job.

But the author, Jussi Adler-Olsen, mocks his leading character and makes him a selfish, clownish boor.

Fortunately, none of that comes through in the films.

Reading The Hanging Girl, 2015.

Faith and nihilism

Assad finds Morck's nihilism (q.v.) unendurable, and fallaciously qualifies it, a matter of belief as is physics or economics or anything at all, including religion, as a faith in competition with his own Islam.

Assad complains, as believers in their childish self-centeredness do, that Carl's unbelief is arrogant and insulting to him personally, not at all seeing that historically and globally, and even in his own intrusive and demanding relationship to Carl, the shoe is and has nearly (but not quite) always been on quite the other foot.

Department Q.

Department Q

Netflix has three Danish TV movies made of three of Jussi Adler-Olsen's novels.

They are excellent, not least because they lean toward the darkness.

In the novels, the curmudgeonly character Carl Morck seems too clownishly like Backstrom.

Not at all in these films.

Netflix has several fine foreign polars, subtitled in English.

Nice to see life can exist in countries that lack a divine mission to lead the world.

Putting an end to evil-doers and making the world safe for democracy, and all that.

To hear our politicians talk, the American people would have no idea what to make of politics, or even life, without American exceptionalism, our divine mission, and our unique status as the indispensable nation, the world's only superpower.

Or maybe it's just they who would have no idea.