Finland's enduring love-affair with "larger-than-life" bums

The Finnish media and the readers coddle life's losers, because they are felt to burn brighter than us mere ordinary mortals

print this

By Heikki Hellman
     
      Why is it that women always seem to fall for them? And not just women, either, but the men, too.
      Matti Nykänen, a serial wife-beater, is molly-coddled in the media from one year to the next. When Nykänen lashed out for the umpteenth time after a skinful, the news faithfully reported the events and showed the bruised features of his wife Mervi.
      In a couple of weeks' time the same papers will probably be telling us that Our Matti has once again come back to take part in a veterans' song contest. The public want to understand their hero, or anti-hero.
      Nykänen is, after all, former ski-jumping royalty. Matti is Matti, when all's said and done.
     
And Tony was Tony. The media understood Tony Halme's difficulties back in the days when he was screwing up with illegal firearms and uppers & downers during his days as a True Finns Member of Parliament, but it was not until he had shuffled off this mortal coil that the real canonisation procedure got up a decent head of steam.
      "Hero of the streets died alone".
      "A damned fine and honest bloke".
      "A great boxer and show-wrestler".
      Why is it that nobody tells it like it is?
     
"Right now we are marking a quiet moment beside the bier of the deceased", says Markku Koski, a researcher into popular culture.
      Koski believes Halme will henceforth be made into an iconic figure - "everybody's mate and the king of the lads".
      Koski has been studying the tabloid fliers, the celebs, and the public image of politicians, and will be presenting his doctoral dissertation in Tampere in February.
     
When the newspaper articles and columns have gone over the story of the late Tony Halme, they certainly have not forgotten the shooting incidents or the hell he had with alcohol and drugs.
      No, far from it.
      "But it is precisely these weaknesses that are morphed into strengths in the case of heroes like this", says Koski.
      In his view the weaknesses are expressed as signals of a bohemian approach to life that borders upon art, no less.
      A mumbling drunk is described as "lonely" and "shy" or "retiring".
      If the bum-de-jour lives a life on the fringes of crime, he is said to have "drifted into the wrong company". A violent individual who settles matters with his fists is "a discordant personality", within whose troubled breast there nevertheless beats "a warm heart".
     
Bums and wastrels are semi-mythical, universal figures, regardless of geography or society.
      Think, for instance, of the "charming rogues" of different Hollywood eras - from Humphrey Bogart to Mickey Rourke.
      However, there is a difference.
      The sort of self-pitying anti-heroes as portrayed by Samuli Edelmann or Jasper Pääkkönen in practically any of those movies put together by producer Markus Selin, in which Finnish sh*ts of the first order are shamelessly romanticised - these are found only here in Finland.
      Characters who drink, cheat, punch people out, and commit crimes - but who are fundamentally good people and therefore intrinsically lovable.
     
In the popular song Rentun ruusu (1988), an alcoholic prodigal son picks for his long-suffering mother some rosebay willowherb (Am. "fireweed"; Epilobium angustifolium) that was growing in the ditch where he spent the previous night.
      Touching stuff, for all that the last line of the song reveals that the flowers will wither just as all his 'I'll change my ways' promises to Mum have faded before now.
      And at the same time, the song is a page straight from the life of its singer, the ultimate bum and poète maudit of Finnish pop music, Irwin Goodman (born Antti Yrjö Hammarberg, 1943-1991).
     
"Irwin is the classic of the genre, a model prodigal", says Koski.
      "He actively constructed the role of the lovable bum for himself, but the mask stuck to his face and turned into reality."
      Koski argues that the prodigal myth has a rich and strong tradition in our culture, and it becomes topical every now and then.
      But why does it seem to be so much on the surface right now?
      "Now there appears to be a demand for a strong male type with street-cred. This is a counterblast to all the softer "inner female", paternity-leave, empathetic, "caring and sharing" role-definition that has been going on, because the "caring male" seems so dreadfully dull and boring. He literally flesh and blood, literally as well as figuratively."
     
It has been claimed often enough that bums and people who are perpetually on the skids appeal to the maternal instincts in some women, but why is it that men, too, want to understand the human flotsam?
      "Envy, possibly. The prodigal type is believed to live life more vibrantly, to be more alive, somehow. He carries off the biological and the purely physical aspects of our human condition better than the rest of us dry-stick ordinary Joes."
     
And can one call a spade a spade on this subject in the Finnish experience?
      No, apparently not.
      The Iltalehti columnist Kaarina Hazard tried last week, but the readers were angered by her ruthless writing on the late Tony Halme and the media adulation that followed his demise.
      A Facebook group demanding that Iltalehti be boycotted until Kaarina Hazard was given the boot produced more than a hundred complaints to the Council for Mass Media in the space of a couple of days.
      In his own autobiography, Jumala armahtaa - minä en (roughly: "God is Merciful - I am Not", 2002), Tony Halme confessed: "To those who ask what lies beneath this exterior [of mine], I tell you that you really do not want to know."
     
Finally, a bit of good news: the publishers Minerva Kustannus have withdrawn the planned
      Matti Nykänen couples-counselling guide and aphorism collection Myötä- ja vastamäessä ("For Better or For Worse") from their Spring 2010 catalogue.
      What with the restraining order and all, the joke had become more than a little stale.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.1.2010
     


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Former ski-jumping star Matti Nykänen facing charges of aggravated assault (31.12.2009)
  Kaarina Hazard column on Tony Halme provokes more than 100 complaints to Council for Mass Media (15.1.2010)

See also:
  Everyone wants a piece of Matti (10.8.2004)
  Tabloid suspends journalist over Halme story; caller ID reveals sham phone call (15.8.2003)
  Tony Halme´s success in Finnish parliamentary elections came as no surprise to some (25.3.2003)

Links:
  Tony Halme (Wikipedia)
  Matti Nykänen (Wikipedia)
  Irwin Goodman (Wikipedia)

HEIKKI HELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
heikki.hellman@hs.fi