A Sweater to Die for: Fair Isle and Fair Play in The Killing

Abstract

In Scandinavia there is a saying: “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.” This is a sentiment one could apply to Detective Sarah Lund's sweater, a garment so significant that it appears in the TV drama The Killing as a character in its own right. Using the language and literature of knitting, this article considers the significance of one garment in one television drama series as a means of expressing the contemporary sublime; a quest for truth and justice by a lone figure in a chaotic landscape, smothered by institutionalization. The sweater will thus be discussed as neither guise nor disguise, but representative of the internal self, externalized and as a tool for negotiating personal morality within impersonal systems of power. So, Sarah must untangle herself from the smothering sweater in order to complete her journey, and reveal both herself and the killer. Here, Sarah's sweater is not merely knitwear, but the materialization of immorality clothed in the knitted and moral; it is a cover-up. As The Killing implies, murder is the tip of the iceberg; we all need to recognize that our knitwear is killing us …

Keywords:

• knitting
• crime
• sweaters
• pattern
• Scandinavia
• Nordic noir