Burn all the rapists
In February, with the arrival of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the end of 2011 staring us in the face, and having never read the books, I took home the Swedish version of the movie trilogy to warm myself up to the material. There was always so much fuss about these things – for a year or so, they replaced Harry Potter and Twilight as the book at least one person is always reading on every subway car or in every Starbucks. Thanks, at least in part, to those films, I finally started to get it. It was never about Stieg Larsson or “the Millennium Trilogy” or whatever you want to call it. It was always about the Girl.
The Girl in question – so significant that they renamed the series of stories after her for the English versions – is Lisbeth Salander, and wow, she’s a treat: the least likeable, and maybe most loveable, franchise heroine… ever? But first let’s clear something up. Yes, she has a dragon tattoo; yes, she played with fire; and at five feet tall with nary a trace of welcoming fat anywhere on her body, the mistake could be made easily, but lookit: in no way imaginable does Lisbeth Salander deserve the diminutive noun “girl.”
It’s a fine distinction that might get lost on youth-obsessed American audiences. Even though Lisbeth was incarcerated at age 12 and has been declared legally incompetent by the state – forcing her to cleave to a series of “daddy” custodians and lawyers – the Lisbeth Salander of the Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie trilogy is a fully-evolved, complex adult. The fact that she is a hacker, bisexual, and one hell of a punk should not unnecessarily evoke some notion of youthful rebellion. Lisbeth works outside the system because she has no compelling reason to work within it.
Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth to the nines. This is a rare, perfect coagulation of actor and role, and the result is an icon. (Rapace has been cast in Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s follow-up to Alien? No shit.) Even though Lisbeth is, in a sense, a walking fetish piece – head-to-toe black leather, spikes, chains, bangles, spiked hair, black lips and eyes – she is delightfully unglamourous. If the clothing suggests some kind of aesthetic urge (do you have any idea how much time it takes to look like that?!), the personality says something else. Lisbeth reminds me of someone similar I once knew, her skin dry and gritty, her leather gear creaking and moaning when she moved (seldom, if ever). She looked dirty even when she was clean, and one suspected that sex with her would be terrifying, brief, and exceptional, and would rather spoil the process with others for the rest of one’s life.
It is this wild, unquantifiable energy that Rapace has flawlessly captured. It is an exceedingly difficult role to play, given that Lisbeth emotes almost not at all, and is outwardly contemptuous and even cruel to all around her, and yet must draw in our sympathies, and our respect, and ultimately, our hope. It is in the moments where a glimmer of smile creeps out, or a half-second of genuine emotional connection takes place with the web of people in the film who have – like we, the audience – committed to Lisbeth’s well-being, that it all pays off. What surprised me most about the Dragon Tatrilogy is not that it was a solid series of movies, but just how compulsively watchable it became, because it had so completely pulled me into its heroine’s struggle – as though she was someone I knew in real life, and was invested in helping.
Does this make the films profound, meaningful work? Of course not. These are the moviegoing equivalent of beach reading, through and through. They take violence against women as their flagpole, and in their way are a millennial dress-up of the rape-revenge cycle of exploitation films of the ‘70s, albeit civilized and sanitized with the chilly look-and-feel of the Bourne trilogy (spy thriller tropes; permanently overcast Eastern European skies). At the core, though, the films take their guilty pleasure in seeing Lisbeth overcome the seemingly endless cadre of creepy old Swedish men who have violated and abused her, physically or emotionally (or both), over a period of decades. We witness both – the violence, and the retribution – and if we do not take pleasure in the former, our pleasure bubbles over in the latter. This confirms that the films are still just revenge fantasy, bringing just deserts to the wicked, toppling empires of patriarchy which, unfortunately, do not tumble in such pleasing ways in the real world. Oh well.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first film, is the best of the lot, a smooth, viciously enjoyable whodunit. It’s unspeakably violent at times, focusing as it does on a decades-old spree of serial rapes and murders. A seemingly offhand connection is made when Lisbeth, in the present day, is brutally raped by her legal guardian, and then comes back to turn the tables on her attacker (and do a bit of tattooing, pro bono). But Lisbeth is kept largely offscreen in Dragon Tattoo, accruing perhaps a third of the screen time of her male lead, Mikael Blomkvist (who apparently comes from a world where this is such a thing as a “celebrity journalist”). This, of course, only adds to Lisbeth’s mystical charm, as she solves multiple crimes simultaneously and refuses to get even slightly emotionally involved. (Her defining moment might well be when she saunters into Blomkvist’s bedroom, mounts him, gets herself off in a twenty-second rabbit-fuck, and walks away.) Blomkvist, meanwhile, is completely spun. Like Lisbeth, he’s a fully-formed adult character with a complex web of relationships, sexual and not, with the people in his life… but he’ll develop a bit of the schoolboy thing for Lisbeth, and spend the next two full films championing her aid, despite spending less than two minutes in her presence after the conclusion of film one.
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev, Dragon Tattoo is nicely staged with respect to composition and tone, and makes gorgeous use of its Scope frame in the brooding Scandinavian countryside, in spite of having been produced for Swedish television. As a director’s toybox, the storyline of the first novel is a treat for time-play: a decades-old murder unraveling via the vigorous use of flashbacks, revealing photography, and a slew of characters old enough to have been alive in both timelines. The mystery is a complex puzzle, arrived at meticulously. It’s giddily rewarding, and is made lively by strong actors in every principal role. (Ewa Froling even turns up at a surprising point, a welcome and wonderful addition.)
If the conclusion of Tattoo is a bit too much had-her-cake-and-ate-it-too for Lisbeth, we can forgive it. Lisbeth is at her most intriguing in Dragon Tattoo, where she is frosty and precise and hardly ever in the picture, even seeming to shift uncomfortably in the shots that frame her directly. Awkward attempts are made to humanize her in the second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire – necessary, perhaps, in refocusing the storyline squarely on the heroine, rather than the overarching mystery in film one, but poorly handled. The mysteries of the second and third films are entirely about Lisbeth and her complex backstory. The latter two films are very much a set, both directed by Daniel Alfredson, and framed and shot very differently from Tattoo. If the filmmakers decided that more warmth was needed to adhere the audience to their heroine, they needn’t have bothered, and there are tracts of Fire’s repatriation efforts which are weird and fit poorly with the established tone. Contrasting the hysterical, emotionless fuckin of Tattoo, Lisbeth even has a candlelit lesbian love scene early in Fire, an extension of the Sensitive Men Go Down Theory – now perhaps better expressed as Characters We Like Will Perform Oral Sex On Their Girlfriends.
This girlfriend, however, might as well be wearing a red shirt, given that she agrees to inhabit Lisbeth’s apartment in her place while all and sundry are out with murder on their minds. This kind of obviousness is, unfortunately, indicative of the grinding gears of The Girl Who Played With Fire. The murder conspiracy in Fire is set up so clumsily that we are literally fifteen minutes ahead of the characters, all the time – a far cry from the vexing, time-shifting conundrum of Tattoo. We catch people being dumber than they are – Lisbeth, who is quite clever, makes a mistake with a piece of evidence that most of us wouldn’t make having ever watched a single episode of television. The mistake’s importance is not helped any by the new director’s stage direction or blocking, and to extend the Bourne franchise analogy, Alfredson is no Paul Greengrass, lowering the material in the second two films, where Greengrass boosted the latter two Bourne movies to a new level.
As such, the Dragon Tatrilogy films are less and less interesting by turns, one by one. By the third film, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Lisbeth spends fully the first half of the film confined to a hospital room, guiding her troops by text message. (Really.) When she finally returns at the height of her renewed powers – signaled to the audience, of course, by the reemergence of her head-to-toe black-and-steel kit, and a rather excellent Mohawk – it is to attend her own murder trial. The film is run through with lots and lots and lots of sitting in rooms and talking. The trial component of the story, at least, is nicely done, even though we know all the answers before they come. (Of course Dr. Teleborian, the psychiatrist who committed 12-year-old Lisbeth to a mental institution on invented grounds, will turn out to be a pedophile with 8,000 pictures of naked children waiting to be discovered on his computer.)
Nonetheless, it’s nice to get the psychiatric theme into the picture at last. Dr. Teleborian stops short of ever accusing Lisbeth of “hysteria,” but it’s the same old impulse, made explicit in Hornet’s Nest: control the woman by insisting that her strength and intelligence are just manifestations of psychiatric illness. (She is described, repeatedly, as “fragile.” Lisbeth?!?)
Throughout the second and third films, Blomkvist tools around Stockholm trying to prove Lisbeth’s innocence, and publishes his counter-cultural exposé magazine, Millennium, apparently with a staff of four. After what they go through together in Dragon Tattoo, we can buy Blomkvist’s unfailing attachment to Lisbeth, but just barely, especially given that he never, ever, ever questions her role in the series of murders in which she is implicated. C’est l’amour, I guess. Thankfully, theirs is one of the least romantic romances ever, if it even is one. (Lisbeth and Blomkvist share no romantic scenes in the second or third story.) The trilogy concludes with a truly memorable, flatly unemotional final scene between the pair – two people muttering their way through meaningless pleasantries that say nothing and everything at the same time. And then the trilogy is done, out with neither a whimper nor a bang, just a “we’re done.” I’m sure Ms. Salander, wherever she is, would approve.
The American adaptation of the first book is arriving this week, and I’m sure allowances have been made for films two and three, should Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo prove lucrative. I don’t doubt Fincher’s ability to hang onto the Swedish film’s unapologetic violence and pragmatism, but Rooney Mara – as the new Lisbeth – has a tough row to hoe, in creating a screen icon as memorable and dynamic as Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth. Some roles are lightning in a bottle, and if the Swedish Dragon Tattootrilogy is worth seeing for no other reason, they remain cinematic standouts for their frustrating, beguiling, enthralling and iconic Lisbeth Salander.