‘With a spaceship at the end’: Genre hybridity in Copenhagen Cowboy by Nicolas Winding Refn

While genre hybridity in television and cinema is nothing new, Copenhagen Cowboy (2023), the six-episode Netflix series co-created – with screenwriter Sara Isabella Jønsson Vedde – and directed by Danish auteur filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, is remarkable for the way its mixture of genres is both a continuation of the hybrid approach already established in Refn’s cinema work (and in his first streaming series, for Amazon Studios, Too Old to Die Young [2019]) and a kind of meta-commentary on it . Copenhagen Cowboy was pitched to Netflix as a continuation of Refn’s Pusher trilogy, a series of grittily realistic gangster films set in Copenhagen’s criminal underworld. However, with the series Refn also wished to introduce elements of other genres, including science fiction: as he told Netflix, the series would climax with ‘a spaceship at the end’. Although Refn has described his psychedelic Viking adventure Valhalla Rising (2009) as a ‘science fiction film’, this comment seems to reflect more the creative process involved in making it than the narrative presented on-screen; Copenhagen Cowboy represents his first explicit foray into the realm of science fiction. However, it is science fiction of a particular kind: superhero science fiction and I discuss the series here as, ultimately, a superhero narrative; ‘ultimately’ because its nature as a superhero text is only truly revealed in the final episode.