'Clark' Shows What We’ve Been Getting Wrong About Stockholm Syndrome
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Spoilers for the final episode of Clark below.
In the autumn of 1973, Sweden was left shocked when a bank robber, Jan-Erik Olsson, planned a heist of the Sveriges Kreditbanken, Stockholm, and took four hostages (three women and one man) and then asked for his prison mate, Clark Olofsson, to be delivered to the scene. For six days the hostages were forced to stay in the bank vault while the police unsuccessfully attempted to end the escalating crisis.
But on day four, something even more remarkable happened. One of the hostages, 23-year-old Kristin Enmark, phoned the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, and told him she was scared the police were going to harm them and asked to be allowed to escape with the robbers, Clark Olofsson and Jan-Erik Olsson: “I fully trust Clark and the robber. I am not desperate. They haven’t done a thing to us. On the contrary, they have been very nice. But, you know, Olof, what I am scared of is that the police will attack and cause us to die.”
The siege eventually ended with the police bombarding the bank with tear gas, and all the hostages got out alive. Then things got even more peculiar. History.com notes that the “convicts and hostages embraced, kissed and shook hands” and Enmark yelled out: “Don’t hurt them—they didn’t harm us… Clark, I will see you again!”. None of the hostages went on to testify against either captor in court, and instead, they apparently raised money for their defense case instead.
It was such a strange sequence of events, that the Swedish police turned to psychology to try and explain it. A Swedish psychiatrist and criminologist Nils Bejerot called it ‘the Norrmalmstorg syndrome’, after the square in Stockholm where the bank was, but outside of Sweden, it became known as Stockholm Syndrome, a phrase that’s very much worked its way into common parlance and popular culture.
At the heart of it, it’s when a victim/hostage has positive or even romantic feelings for their captors, and supports or helps them, while feeling that the captors are ‘kind’ to them or care about them. It’s been the fodder for many action flicks and TV shows over the years, so much so it’s even got its own page on TVTropes.com.
The latest TV show to use this phenomenon is the new Netflix story, Clark, which is actually (semi) based on the real life events of the Norrmalmstorg heist, with Clark Olofsson (played by Pennywise in It’s Bill Skarsgård) as the central character. Directed by Jonas Åkerlund (best known for his music videos, Madonna’s Ray of Light, and Beyonce’s Hold Up). Clark is portrayed as a happy-go-lucky career criminal, who by being a ladies man, can’t help but charm the women he pulls into his illegal activities.
During the siege, we see him bonding with ‘Kicki’ in the vault - her name has been changed for the series - telling her that he loves her, almost kissing her a few times, and it all seems to be reciprocated. But Clark only serves to remind us that when we really examine Stockholm Syndrome, not all is quite as straightforward as we’ve been led to believe.
The theory from the one psychiatrist, Bejerot, at the time hasn’t been widely accepted by the rest of his profession. The syndrome has never been added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM 5), used by the American Psychiatric Association.
Stockholm Syndrome is something that’s since been propagated by the media, or used as a short-hand way of explaining a highly complex situation that can also include issues like PTSD, brainwashing and survival techniques. It’s also incredibly rare, so little research has gone into the subject, as a 2008 research group Namnyak stated: “What little research has been done is often contradictory and does not always agree on what Stockholm syndrome is. The term has grown beyond kidnappings to all definitions of abuse. There is no clear definition of symptoms to diagnose the syndrome.”
While the Norrmalmstorg heist was a bizarre, standalone event, Stockholm syndrome has since been applied to several other high-profile cases incorrectly, such as the kidnapping and rape of Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, who was taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a year later in 1974.
Hearst later went on to work with the SLA to rob banks in San Francisco and after her 1975 arrest, she pleaded in court that she was suffering from Stockholm syndrome. It failed and she was handed seven years in prison. But as the podcast hosts of You’re Wrong About… Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes discuss in an episode on the phenomenon, this is actually a case about coercive abuse. Hearst was forced into this criminal activity as she feared for her life, which is an incredibly different scenario from bonding with your captor out of a subconscious action. Hobbes commented: “It’s pretty obvious now, looking back, that if someone is holding you and raping you in terrible conditions, that you’d do anything to get out of that, including robbing a bank. Why was it so hard for people to see that at the time?”. As a result, Stockholm syndrome has been labelled as a form of victim blaming by critics.
Theconversation.com said that especially when applied to wider cases of general abuse: “Stockholm syndrome, co-dependence or traumatic bonding, learned helplessness has entered our vernacular. It has swallowed up socially accurate explanations for violence, until nothing is left but to blame the victim.” While in a 2019 book, See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, Jess Hill describes the syndrome as a a “dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria”, and stated that it is “riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie”; and noted that “most diagnoses [of Stockholm syndrome] are made by the media, not by psychologists or psychiatrists.” In fact, Bejerot never even treated Enmark during or after the siege, but felt qualified to make the statements on her mental health and behavior during an intensely traumatic experience anyway.
Clark ends with his autobiographer turning pop-psychology back on Clark. “You take advantage of people, Clark. In the name of crime, validation and sex. When you have no use for them anymore, you kick them to the curb and move on. You never bother to ask them how they feel. And they feel like crap, because of you.” Any sense of victim-shaming in this case is removed, and put firmly back on the perpetrator instead.
Clark is streaming on Netflix now.
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