Copenhagen Cowboy by NWF doesn't seem set in Copenhagen and has no cowboys. The name is arbitrary, a phrase that intrigued the show's creator Nicholas Winding Refn, a bad boy director from Scandinavia. I suppose the title for this Netflix limited series (six episodes) is better than a name descriptive of the show -- that is, Miu, the extremely skinny and small woman with no expression who acts completely indifferent except when she is killing everyone. No doubt invoking cowboys and Copenhagen with a stylish trademark (NWF) of the kind you might see on designer jeans is a better title.
As was once said, "something is rotten in the State of Denmark." This doesn't begin to describe the wretched conduct shown in Copenhagen Cowboy. On the evidence of the show, Denmark is filled with gangsters, sex-traffickers of the most vicious kind, Serbian brothels, Chinese restaurants that feed people to pigs, and, even, pale and handsome nobility that are apparently bloodsucking vampires or, at the very least, phallocentric serial murderers. The level of depravity depicted in CC is so ridiculously exaggerated that any account of the show's sordid plot will read as comical parody -- the whole thing is totally cartoonish, an impression off-set by the director's extremely pretentious and abstract style; Refn's camera moves implacably in slow pointless circles swooning over blasts of super-saturated color. Everything occurs as if in ultra-slow motion -- most of the characters look on impassively and stand still as statues as all sorts of mayhem occurs. The program's characteristic shot slowly tracks a thug through a shadowy subterranean space blazing with inexplicable blue and red highlights, the gangster strutting past people who are beating each other to death for no good reason. The program's opening sequence is indicative and diagnostic: the camera slowly pans at floor level past a dozen or so confinement crates in which big, slobbering hogs are trapped; the pens are so tight that the animals can't turn around and, predictably, about half of them seem to be deranged. At the end of the sixty-second tracking shot, the camera angle changes to show a handsome, if somewhat porcine, youth strangling a beautiful young woman to death -- the two characters are motionless, posed like mannequins in front of the metal hog crates full of suffering porkers. (Apparently, the level of animal cruelty in the first shot was so extreme that even a brutish director like Refn couldn't tolerate it -- in later scenes, the pigs are running free, some of them even described as "free-range.") The alienating element in this opening scene is that we sympathize with the hogs in their horrifically confining metal crates but don't feel one iota of emotion with respect to the human characters who are killing one another.
Miu, the series' protagonist, is a tiny, rail-thin woman with a boyish haircut, big emotionless eyes with a thousand-yard stare. She's reputedly good luck and people pass her around as a sort of talisman. At the outset of the film, the semi-catatonic heroine is brought into a Serbian brothel, operated by a crime family whose scion is a shaven-headed thug notable for his resemblance to Andrew Tate, the British -American kickboxer recently busted by Greta Thunberg and, now, charged with sex trafficking in Romania. Miu is supposed to use her magical talents to make the thug's sister pregnant. The Serbian crooks are flamboyantly loathsome, torturing their captive prostitutes (who are all as beautiful as fashion models or the girlfriends of NBA stars), and beating up their host, Sven, who is unhappily married to the gangster's sister. (When Sven is beaten, he squeals like a pig; his wife whips him with a belt and it's not clear that he doesn't enjoy this abuse -- Sven gets what he deserves because he periodically rapes the hapless super-models held prisoner in this house of ill-repute.) Miu's magic is negotiable -- she gives and takes away. When the gangster's sister (Sven's wife) has a miscarriage, Miu is dragged into the basement for rape and torture -- she's forced to record a video promoting her sexual services. Miu remains completely catatonic until she buys time by informing (I was about to say "squealing") on the thug's daughter who is having an affair with some of the henchmen. Then, she stabs a burly strong man bodyguard (the other prostitutes enthusiastically join in the murder) and escapes. Previously, Miu's only friend among the captive prostitutes has fled the compound. She accepts a ride with a serial killer (and possibly vampire) and ends up getting strangled in a hog house. Miu, who may have the ability to bilocate, goes to sleep in a Chinese restaurant while simultaneously burning down the whorehouse, roasting everyone in it. At the Chinese restaurant, Miu again demonstrates her magical powers by bringing to life an infant who seems to have been still-born. (Refn doesn't bother to explain why a young woman has to give birth in a weird, strangely lit Chinese restaurant -- maybe this sort of thing is common in Denmark.) As it turns out, the Chinese restaurant, an inexplicably vast enterprise with a sort of murky jail attached, is operated by -- you guessed it! -- Chinese gangsters and sex-traffickers led by the formidable brute Mr. Chiang. Chiang has kidnapped the proprietor's small daughter for some inexplicable reason. Miu makes a deal with the Chinese crime-lord to get the little girl back. But she has to pay him a huge sum of money and massage his shaven head to help him with migraines. Simultaneously, she visits the castle where the serial killer vampire lives with his phallocentric (literally) parents, both of whom are movie-star gorgeous. Miu, who turns out to be a skilled kickboxer herself, kicks the shit out of the vampire youth and leaves him to be devoured by his own hogs. (Since pigs are the film's totem animal and its theme, of course, the Chinese restaurant comes equipped with a herd of porkers to whom the proprietress morosely feeds human heads and limbs of the dismembered victims of the Triad, the Chinese gang.) In order to fund her deal with Mr. Chiang apropos the child hostage, Miu becomes a drug mule working for a Black dealer. This gives Miu the chance to mingle with picturesquely vicious criminals whom she periodically savages by beating them up. (No one expects to get their ass kicked by an eighty-pound autistic woman.) Back at the gothic castle, Niklas, the vampire, has somehow survived getting about 30 percent of his body and face eaten by the pigs. The porkers devoured his penis and so his phallocentric vampire dad hires a bunch of scientists to create a majestic super-phallus for the unfortunate youth. Miu tells people that she was abducted by aliens when she was seven, an event that explains her magical powers and bizarre catatonic demeanor. At this point, she's living in the elaborate mausoleum-style office suite of a Serbian lawyer, Mr. Miroslav, who seems to be the head of all the Balkan crime cartels operating in Denmark. Miroslav and his gangster buddies are very tired, probably exhausted by their nefarious behavior, and they seem to spend most of their time snoring away the hours in leather recliners in the lawyer's enormous and mostly empty luxury office. A gang war ensues shown in archaic 30's montage -- close-ups of guns firing intercut with people dropping dead in splashes of red and orange neon. The cause of this gang war and its stakes are never explained and the violence is presented as a fait accompli -- this is how gangsters act. Miu gets to kill a half-dozen crooks in a showy battle on a dark Copenhagen street; this fight leaves her mentor in the drug business, the Afro-Dane Danny, dead on the street. Meanwhile back at the vampire castle, Niklas (now in disco get-up and wearing a stylish Phantom of the Opera mask) hobbles around, more or less completely disabled since the pigs have eaten most of him. He spends his afternoons tending to a casket in the basement of the castle. Using a samurai sword, Niklas apparently beheads his beautiful mother, who seems enthusiastic about the act, catches her blood in a goblet and, then, opens the casket to drizzle gore on the mouth of the dead princess sleeping therein. She is Niklas' sister and, immediately, revives. (This stuff, elaborately staged, is right out of a forties Universal picture like The Bride of Dracula.) This sister, also a Nordic goddess, intuits that Niklas has killed lots of girls and says he's been a "very bad boy." Mr. Chiang keeps moving the goalposts on his agreement with Miu to restore Mor Hulda's daughter to her mother -- he dumps Miu's tribute of 8 kilos of cocaine down the toilet and, ultimately, demands that Miu sleep with him. (Ultimately, he does release the eight-year old girl who, we learn, is actually his daughter; Mor Hulda is revealed to be some kind of serpent woman and, so, it's not clear that Miu has done the child any favors by putting her in the custody of Dragon Restaurant's proprietress.) Niklas engages the family's huntsman, a new character, to gather human prey for his sister to devour. The huntsman, who has worked for Niklas' family for hundreds of years, uses a high-powered rifle to murder some poor Englishman who has inexplicably gone into the vampire family's woods to make an annoying (business) cell-phone call. The huntsman sautees the dead Englishman's heart and serves it to the Niklas' vampire daughter. (The preparation of the heart seems implausible -- it would be impossible to effectively sautee a big chunk of muscle tissue in a small frying pan, the meat would be overdone on its surface and raw inside; rather the heart should be slow-cooked with beef broth in a crock pot until tender or possibly roasted with au jus sauce and root vegetables; at least, this is the way that I've always cooked human hearts.) In any event, the heart, as eaten by the vampire girl, has a revivifying effect on her and she goes into her wardrobe to select a spectacular red jumpsuit, suitable for vigorous exercise as well as formal occasions -- her wardrobe seems to be filled with corpses or very lifelike mannequins wearing party costumes (although it's hard to tell due to the pervasive glowing neon fog in the room). Mr. Chiang had demanded that Miu sleep with him, something meant literally since the two of them don't have sex but just slumber and enjoy a communal dream together -- Miu and Mr. Chiang are in the Vampire's Forest where they make rococo gestures at one another. Awaking, Mr. Chiang, inexplicably decides to beat Miu to death -- this is bad mistake because she thrashes him, of course, and, then, kills him by delivering about forty punches to the heart. Miu goes into the Vampire Forest where either she multiplies into six more skinny girls in blue jump suits or, in the alternative, encounters more of her tribe. The Vampire girl in her resplendent red jumpsuit goes on her verandah and utters an imposing, terrifying roar that Miu hears and that causes her great pain. Back in the perpetually dark office suite above Copenhagen, poor Miroslav, the Serbian gangleader, learns that Miu has killed Dusan his friend (oy vay!) and that Miu is on the loose. He's chatting with a Japanese Yakuza who cheerily admonishes him: "Off to the Giants!" The Vampire girl is now blasting lasers out of her eyes. Obviously, the show comes to its end without any plot resolution, although one questions how this kind of idiocy could ever be resolved, and the show is set up for Copenhagen Cowboy by NWF redux, presumably a battle between the blue jumpsuit girls and the red jumpsuit vampire.
The show is casually xenophobic to an astonishing degree implying that Denmark is infested with foreigners who are all engaged in hideous crimes. There's a funny scene at one point in which the Black drug dealer says: "I'm trying not to be prejudiced against Balkan people. I'm sure some of them are okay" -- although on the evidence of the show, Denmark's green and pleasant land is completely dominated by Chinese and Serbian and Albanian criminals. Refn, apparently, thinks he can refute charges of xenophobic bigotry by making his most spectacular bad guy a depraved representative of Danish nobility. (These vampire folks live in an iconic structure that looks like a smaller version of the famous Fredericksborg Castle, a place shot in luminous twilight so that it mimics Christian Kobke's fa,pis painting of that estate -- the place even seems to have a moat.) The show lags after its first two episodes -- in the beginning of the series, we're intrigued by Miu's bizarre passivity (and her strange behavior -- at one point, she amuses herself by trying to open her mouth so widely as to dislocate her jaw.) Miu turns her strange impassiveness into a weapon and manages to outwit the bad guys in a minimalist way by simply doing nothing at all. This is interesting and clever. But once we know that Miu is also a world-class kick-boxer and has other mysterious powers, the show becomes markedly less interesting. For instance, we see her kowtowing to Mr. Chiang, the Chinese gangster -- why? She could get her way with him by massaging migraine headaches back into his skull (she's been shown treating his migraine with some kind of Reiki therapy) and, if that fails, of course, she has the capacity to simply beat him into submission. Once a character is established as having, more or less, limitless magical powers, the energy leaches out of the plot -- there's no menace; the heroine can simply kick-box and enchant her way out of danger.
The program is static and tedious although it's lurid subject matter kept me from falling asleep more than a couple times during the six hour course of Copenhagen Cowboy. Although the slow circular tracking shots look great, the effect is repeated so often that it becomes profoundly irritating -- it's as if the director is simply buying time by rotating the camera 360 degrees through interiors bathed in unmotivated swaths of glowing neon light. It's clear that the show's narrative is wholly improvised. Pervasive pig imagery in the first three episodes is completely abandoned after the porkers eat Niklas' penis. The fact that Niklas is tending to his sister's casket, a key element of the last two episodes, is never revealed in the first four parts of the show. The elaborately operatic mise-en-scene disguises the fact that Refn and his screenwriter are just making this stuff up as they go. The quasi-realistic, if stylized content of the first three episodes, is, more or less, abandoned in the second part of the show. The Serbian brothel is remotely plausible as rooted in some kind of reality -- the second part of Copenhagen Cowboy with its inexplicable kick-boxing battles and utterly bizarre settings (the Chinese gangsters seem to inhabit some sort of subterranean bowling alley that encompasses acres of empty space) can't be normalized into any sort of plausible narration. It's all effect for effect's sake. And it's very repetitive -- for instance, when someone has a vision of Niklas' murder victim (the blonde escapee from the brothel) submerged in a forest pond, we see the corpse from three or four different angles, each time suffused in a different color in the green murky water -- it's very pretty but pointlessly so and, of course, the shot makes no sense in any realistic way -- how deep is this pond? it looks like a bottomless abyss; and why does the color change radically between different shots?) In general, Copenhagen Cowboy demonstrates the extraordinary effect of David Lynch's second Twin Peaks series. Film-makers who watched that program are inevitably influenced by it and Refn's series recycles many thematic and stylistic motifs in Lynch's series. (It's now widely understood that Lynch's Twin Peaks, at least, in its second iteration, was a lavish underground experimental film masquerading as a crime drama.) But Refn is completely humorless, while Lynch, even at his most extreme, is wry, funny, even satirical with the bizarre contrast between his "aw shucks!" Norman Rockwell scenarios and the most outlandish horror keeping the audience in a state of radical disequilibrium. The intriguing critical dilemma here is to work out why Lynch's brand of this stuff succeeds and seems, even, visionary, while Refn's version of the same material is unpersuasive and annoying. This is probably an important crux to explore since I suspect that Lynch's second Twin Peaks series will have a continuing and massive impact on younger filmmakers -- just as Raging Bull was a definitive (if much concealed) influence for the thirty years or so after its release, I suspect that Twin Peaks II will be similarly influential in the coming decades. Refn isn't providing us with anything new -- he's just recycling standard movie material (gangsters, serial killers, a waif-like girl assassin, vampires), presenting these cliches in a spectacular, if hollow, package. The show often seems like a barren episode in style. But Refn has real talent, albeit perverse, and it could be that a second series of Copenhagen Cowboy might just be a masterpiece.
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