Phrack, a kickstarter video and romanticized farewells

As I said in my previous entry, I am taking a course in Ethnology this semester. I felt a need to broaden my perspective of the notion of culture that I hope to make a PhD in archaeology about one day. The course has proved to be very good even though the sort of shallow time frame of the subject has me confused from time to time. If you are used to thinking in a time frame that is often thousands of years, it is definitely a challenge to limit it to the last 200. I still love it though and the literature has given me inspiration for a lot of different blogposts. Unfortunately, it has also given me less time to write them.
Anyway, on 15 September Every Cloud Production, the production company behind Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries started a Kickstarter campaign to finance the upcoming Phryne film Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears. I have to say that I am more excited and positive towards it than I was back in November last year when I wrote a post about my thoughts and feelings about a continuation of the franchise. My worries are still intact, but I have faith in them to make it good, so I did pledge. Not least because seeing Nathan Page talk to Essie Davis in the video they made for the campaign made me realise just how much I miss seeing them together.

The video was awsome. I love how Nathan is both himself, Jack and the fans of the show in it. (And before you say anything: I actually love how he looks! I think he looks like a Viking!) It starts with him looking at the end of Death Do Us Part and then he berates Jack for letting her fly away from him. When Fiona Eager and Deb Cox tells him about their plans for the films including all the foreign lovers, he seems to get a bit offended until Fiona reassures him that Jack will go after her and that Phryne cannot do anything without him.

After explaining about the Kickstarter campaign, Nathan calls the director Tony Tilse who tells him he should really talk to the most important person of them all, so of course Nathan calls Essie too and I love to see them talking to one another. I have seriously missed seeing them together and it put a smile on my face when they said that they missed each other. Yes, I am so in love with both of them. Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is my biggest nerdiness at the time and I am proud of how nerdy I am!

Now you probably wonder what all of this has to do with my Ethnology class. Nothing at all, even though talking about the so famous Folkhemmet concept which the course has made me realise has been more influential to the Swedes than I think we often understand and want to admit, has had me thinking about Phryne and I have felt a need to compare what the course literature says about Sweden in "the Phryne era". However, my thoughts about Folkhemmet and how it all has me thinking about Phryne deserves its own blogpost soon, but not this one.

Instead I want to focus on something I read in one of my course books Kulturanalytiska verktyg by Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren (2012). In chapter 4, they describe an ethnological survey at a train station and brought up how they are often used in films for dramatizing farewells. This has created a romanticized version of those farewells and my mind immediately went to the end scene of Death Do Us Part.

I love how Nathan berates Jack for just letting Phryne fly away and it is very much a typical farewell scene (at an airfield instead of a train station though). However, I feel like there is a twist to the scene that a lot of other, similar ones lack.

"Come after me Jack Robinson!" 

~ Pryne Fisher

I cannot recall that I have talked about how Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries often takes a somewhat cliché subject and twist it a little before, but the last scene of Death Do Us Part belongs in that category. Phryne is about to leave which, from what we know about Phryne, is typical behaviour for her (I have talked about it here.). When Jack turns up to say goodbye however, Phryne immediately jumps out of the plane to run up to him.

To me her asking him to come after her is a testament to just how much her mismatched Melbourne family in general and Jack in particular has come to mean to her. He wants Jack in her life and their kiss seals the deal that he will obey her. The scene and the episode, end with Phryne flying away with her father. However, the scene is not as dramatical and Jack does not shed any tears. Instead he stands calmly on the ground looking at her as she disappears in the plane, a small smile lightening up his face. To me it is proof that he sees it as a beginning and not an end.

Nathan Page's autograph and me totally fangirling about it

I had to pospone my entry about the Tutankhamun exhibition I went to yesterday, because look what arrived in the post today!!! It is Nathan Page's autograph! I asked an Internet friend who was going to Nathan's High Tea on 4th March if she could ask for an autograph for me and he was kind enough to actually do it

Nathan Page, photo by Sam Mcadam-Cooper

Since Swedish postal service is really not what it has been (I do wonder from time to time what Axel Oxenstierna - who founded the Swedish post office - would say about it really...) and I have been somewhat worried it would get lost on the way across half the world really. This has made me quite secretive about it and only a select few have seen it up until now when I have it in my hand.

As I have said many times before, I went into Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries as a fan of Essie Davis. This because her film The Babadook,which I saw first, became extremely personal to me (I have written all about it here.) and I sort of looked up what more she had done (that I could watch through Swedish Netflix) and I totally fell in love with Miss Fiher's Murder Mysteries and Jack Robinson and Nathan Page came into my life as part of that.

The, by far, most popular entry to this blog is the one I wrote about Jack in November last year (It can be found here.) and I really think Nathan is a very good actor. Both he and Essie are phenomenal when it comes to making subtle emotions with their facial expressions. Nathan seems to be a kind and nice person in real life and he also seems perfectly fine taking a backseat to Essie/Phryne which is all too rare in male actors.

I am so fangirling over all of this. I know it is just a piece of paper and I am sure he forgot all about me the moment he had written it, but it is my piece of paper and he has written it for me!

I doubt you will ever see this Nathan, but thank you so very much for the autograph! It means a lot to me and you have totally made my day! Twice (Once when I got to know Debra had got it for me and today when it finally arrived.)! ❤️




Photo of Nathan used in this post was taken by Sam Mcadam-Cooper.

Nathan's Swedish Name day

Nathan Page as Jack Robinson in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

In the Swedish calendar almost all days have at least one name which celebrate its so called Name Day. Apparently this is a Greek-Orthodox and Roman-Catholic tradition going back to their tradition with Saint's days. Why it is left in Sweden which has been a protestant country since the 16th century, I have no idea.

Anyway, today the calendar says Natanael, which is a Swedish version of the name Nathan and of course I was thinking about Nathan Page who plays Jack Robinson in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. So I wanted to celebrate him with this post.

Apparently the name is Hebrew and means Gift from God.

Detective Inspector Jack Robinson

"You might as well call me Jack. Everyone else does."

~ Jack Robinson, Murder on the Ballarat Train, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Vemod is a Swedish word that is not exactly easy to translate into English. It can best be described as an underlying, longing sadness. A sadness that is actually rather positive how strangely as that sounds. The concept might not have an equivalent in English, but I still think it summarize the character of Detective Inspector Jack Robinson perfectly.

I have talked a little about Jack in most of my previous entries about Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and the Phryne Fisher books. However, I have long felt a need to give him an entry totally on his own.

To this date I have only read four of Kerry Greenwood's books about Phryne Fisher and even though I enjoy the books just fine, I really miss the Jack of the TV series while reading. In the latest one, Death at Victoria Dock he only gets a few mentions and, unlike in the TV series, has remained pretty much in the background in the other three as well.

From Murder on the Ballarat train

There are also som major differences between the TV and book characters as well. Book-Jack is happily married with children and has much easier time accepting Phryne's meddling in police work from the very beginning. TV-Jack is far more reserved and at first thinks Phryne is a stupid socialite in need of a hobby. However, as they continue to meet at different crime scenes, he starts to respect her more. This is as far as I will take the comparison between the two. This entry will henceforth be entirely about TV-Jack because he was the one I fell in love with in the first place.

"I see a very careful man, who professes to be cynical in the face of mysteries he can't explain, and claims to have no passion in spite of a heart that runs as deep as the Pacific Ocean"

~ Phryne Fisher, Death Comes Knocking, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

Jack is a very private man. Therefore we do not know much about his personal life or his background and we have never visited his home.The little we do know is that he was married to the Deputy Commisioner's daughter Rosie, but that their marriage got destroyed by his participation in the First World War and he tells Phryne that Rosie has been living with her sister for "quite some time". They get a divorce at the end of season one.
There is a lot to say about Rosie and Jack's relationship to the other women in his life, Concetta and last, but certainly not least Phryne. However I have noticed a tendency in the fandom on the internet to view Jack only through those relationships (Especially the one he has to Phryne.) and I do not think that is entirely fair to the character. Because of this, I will focus on him in this entry and only briefly go into his relationships.

"It'd be a tactical error to think you had me pegged just yet, Miss Fisher"

~ Jack Robinson, Death at Victoria Dock, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries

From Murder and the Maiden

In June this year, I wrote an entry in which I discussed the similarities between Phryne and the girls Astrid Lindgren (She would have turned 109 yesterday, 14th of November, by the way.) wrote about. The Astrid Lindgren parallel actually fits very well for Jack as well. He is more or less like a typical "Astrid boy". He is somewhat lonely, introverted and brooding and like them he needs to show himself worthy of the super hero title Phryne (and the "Astrid girls") have from the very beginning. The series is also extremely good at not showing all of him at once. This might be because the show is so focused on Phryne (Which it should be. It is her show!) and we get to know the other characters through her.

At first I thought he would be like so many male detectives in murder mystery franchises. Aloof and haughty and having trouble with their bosses and their women and using violence as a mean to enhance their position. But Jack is not at all like that. I actually appreciate how the series depicts him. He deals with his experiences both from his life as a policeman and from the war in a way that is quite unusual in pop-culture of today. Especially for a male character. He desperately wants to hide his emotions, but they more or less run straight off of him anyway. Nathan Page is also extremely good at showing them without saying a word. You see it in his face, usually in less than a second so you miss it if you blink. (Essie Davis, who plays Phryne, is just as good at this.)

From Dead Air

While Phryne is the super hero, Jack is totally human. He really feels compassion for both the victims and the criminals, not least shown through his special relationship with Elsie Tizzard that is revealed in Blood and Circuses. His way of dealing with violence is similarly refreshing. He does not, like for example the character Gunvald Larsson from the Swedish police film series Beck, do it to enhance his position at all. He limits it to when it is inevitable to use it to save himself or someone else and even then he seems to be unwilling to use it to kill someone.

From what I have gathered from fan discussions and fanfictions on the Internet, Jack is generally understood as "broken", but I do not really see that. I think he might have been broken when he got back to Australia after the war. He says the war changed him and he probably has suffered depression and/or PTSD. However, he is not broken when we meet him and this is actually where I think the vemod comes in because there really is a sad longing to him which is positive in nature and makes him a rather unique character. He is definitely the best depiction of how someone who has gone through a depression really is. There will always be a sadness left, but that sadness is not exactly negative and does not prevent you from having fun. I know. I have suffered from depression myself. Besides, the word vemod itself is poetic and beautiful. Just like Jack!

Jack and Phryne

Jonas Jonasson - Mördar-Anders och hans vänner (samt en och annan ovän)

This book was actually not something I would probably have looked into if it was not for the fact that Nathan Page (who plays Jack Robinson in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries) posted a picture on Instagram saying he was reading it. I have to say it was actually pretty much of a fun read. I have not read anything of Jonas Jonasson before, but of course I have heard about him.

Mördar-Anders och hans vänner (samt en och annan ovän) is about Johan Andersson known to everyone as Mördar-Anders (Killer-Anders), Per Persson (a receptionist) and Johanna Kjellander (a priest). Johanna and Per use Mördar-Anders to trick money from other people in a couple of different ways and that is really the plot line. It does not seem to be interesting, but I was really surprised by how absurd and funny it was.

There were however two things that I thought about that can be far-fetched, but something I wanted to share with you any way. Both are connected to the title character's name, but in different ways.

The first is about the nickname Mördar-Anders. Many Swedes is probably familiar with the song with the same name by Swedish singer Cornelis Vreeswijk. It tells the story of a man kalled Mördar-Anders who is about to be executed. This leads to my second reference for this book and it also has to do with Mördar-Anders's name, but his real one: Johan Andersson.

Police photo of Johan Alfred Andersson Ander 1910

Johan Alfred Andersson Ander was a man who had some troubles keeping himself on the right side of the law at the beginning of the 20th century. On January 5th 1910 he murdered a girl named Victoria Hellsten with a steelyard balance while trying to rob the bank she worked at. For this he was convicted for murder and sentenced to death. This is actually what he is mostly famous for. He was the last person to be executed in Sweden. The Swedish king, Gustav V, was really against the death penalty but to calm public opinion he realised he needed to kill Ander. So Ander was killed at 8AM on 23 November 1910 in the prison yard at Långholmen in Stockholm. It was both the first and last time in the history of Sweden a guillotine was used. A fun little anecdote about the execution weapon is that no one in customs knew how to handle it, so it was imported as an agricultural implement.


The picture of Johan Alfred Andersson Ander was borrowed at Stockholmskällan