After I saw the American film with Rooney Mara and Daniel
Craig, I immediately checked out the book which I saw I had needlessly avoided.
Only two people recommended it to me, both men, and one of them, my son, said
he wasn't sure I would like it because of the sexual violence; both
circumstances added to my discomfort with the title which was a turn-off to my feminist self. A book written by a man about a "girl"—this
is a bad start. Then the title
distinguishes "which" girl by
her tattoo, especially when the particular tattoo—a Dragon!-- seems baited with
erotic pull. Not my world. Well, I was wrong, my son was wrong, and my
friend was in this case right. Great
book: good thrilling mystery, great
gender reversals, solid counter-culture political grounds of feminism, class
consciousness, and ethical appraisal of neo-conservatism's financial
speculators.
I ran across—oh, well, all right, I saw it on Wikipedia--a
great article by Laurie Penny in New Statesman (9/5/2010) entitled
"Girls, Tattoos and Men Who Hate Women" which more articulately echoed
my reaction to the title, and which pointed out that the Swedish title, Män
som hatar Kvinnor, would translate to Men Who Hate Women. Definitely a less sexy title, and definitely
less sexist in implication but therefore truer to the spirit of the book, which
is subversive and outfront, "simplistically," about the
ubiquitousness and hideousness of misogyny's crimes. Penny also expressed regret that the book didn't deal enough with ordinary
social misogyny, or maybe that's the problem with gender hatred and
objectification—it's not all that dramatic most of the time. She manages a savage little quip about the
English title too:
[M]ost men
who see women as objects don't dismember them
and stuff
them into rucksacks. They visit strip
clubs. They watch
degrading
pornography. If they work, for instance, in publishing, they
might reject a book title that draws
attention to violence against women
and replace it with one that
infantilises the female protagonist and focuses
on a trivial feature of her
appearance. [emph. mine]
I disagree with her complaint that the book doesn't deal
with ordinary misogyny; that's like saying that a book about the Holocaust is
problematic because it doesn't deal with mundane anti-Semitism, or that the
Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site can be criticized for not talking
about everyday racism toward Native Americans.
But her point is valid that it is hard to make people clearly see the
link between "ordinary" prejudices and their ugliest expressions. All
in all, however, her essay is
entertaining and intelligent and her site worth visiting.
Of course, there is sexual violence in the book, as charged,
and quite graphic sexual violence in the movie, but if a writer's intention
(and a director's in the case of the film) is to make such violence repugnant,
rather than erotic and entertaining, then I have no qualms about it and don't
see any moral or ethical grounds for objection. Especially when both writer and
director have the skill to make their work serve their intentions. There are some relevant objections to
particular kinds of graphic presentation of suffering, but I think they are
mostly not applicable to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
For example, the scene portraying Lisbeth's rape by her
"guardian" attorney avoids all the subtle cues that can eroticize and
make literary and cinematic sexual violence pornographic: for one thing, Salander's hostile resistance,
kicking, pounding and shrieking into the
gag is quite the opposite of the deer-in-the-headlights white-eyed distress of
an eroticized victim. Screaming in rage is not empowering to the aggressor. Her
response is not "girlish" in the least, or–in the context of The
Hunger Games—perhaps I should say that it redefines
"girlish." And a later scene in a cellar, with its unexpected and
anti-stereotypical "victim," subverts and overprints the
"expected" with grim grotesqueness.
Trust me on this, which is all I can say without "spoiling"
the climactic hunt for a murderer.
Lisbeth Salander's refusal of victimhood, her strong agency in her life, stunned me: it's so
unusual in a script that an "oppressed" character takes charge
realistically and without emotional drama, a true turning of the tables. She doesn't become the oppressor: she uses
his oppression as a step towards greater control of her own life. That section
of the book is entitled, by the way, "Analyzing the Consequences," a
title that further lays out the strategy of self-empowerment. Some might see her actions as vengeance; I saw
them as self-defense, the one area in which I am not a pacifist. She also uses the attacker's criminality to
protect his future victims. Gruesome it
is. So is biting off someone's tongue or
gouging out their eye, or crushing testicles: but in self-defense against a
violent attacker, it's "by any means necessary."
It's also noteworthy that both the book and the film avoid
the kind of sexualizing or salaciousness
or even melodrama that could quickly condemn these scenes to "Adult
Entertainment" category. Look for
the words that are not there, the camera's careful masking, and the subtly
sophisticated choices of shots: book and
movie aimed for realism, not for sensationalism, and there is a world of
difference.
I saw Director David Fincher's movie first, so I admit that
my thoughts about the book are inherently contaminated
with images from the film and its altered plot lines. Most particularly film actress Rooney Mara played
the role of Lisbeth Salander so
vividly and with such eccentric, such visceral realism that any discrepancies
between the cinematic Salander and the book version are in my mind resolved in
favor of Mara's performance. In other
words, where the book Lisbeth differed from the film Lisbeth, the book was just
plain "wrong." (I overstate
the case for emphasis, but my memory insists on retaining the movie's images.)
The plot hinges on the conviction of reporter Mikael Blomkvist
on libel charges for an exposé he and co-editor Ericka Berger publish at their
magazine Millennium. Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is sentenced to a hefty
fine and a short prison term, besides having his reputation seriously tarnished
and the magazine itself embarrassed.
Coincidentally, it seems, he is invited to a meeting with Henrik
Vanger, the retired CEO of once-mighty
Vanger Industries. A job offer is made: a search for the murderer
of Vanger's young niece forty years ago, a seemingly impossible goal. Blomkvist's sleuthing is to be masked under
the pretext of writing a biography of the 80-year-old millionaire, for he is
assured that the murderer must have been someone in the family. He is lured by a dazzling salary for a year,
and above all, with documented information incriminating the financier who had
won the libel case, Hans-Erik Wennerström.
Blomkvist accepts, partly to make it seem that he has left
his magazine in shame and defeat to induce Wennerström to lighten his attack on
their advertisers. Mostly, however, it's
the temptation to get material on Wennerström with which to redeem his career
and reputation. It's also true that he
is exhausted and depressed after the proceedings, and not looking forward to
prison. "Let it look like running away," he suggests to co-editor
Ericka; in a sense, it is.
What Blomkvist learns about the Vanger family empire in
interviews with Henrik, a widower with no children of his own, is the kind of
information that relates to Stieg Larsson's background as "a leading expert on antidemocratic
right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations" (blurb). Vanger's family is a rat's nest, by Henrik's
own account; two of his three brothers were in the vanguard of the Nazi
movement in Sweden,
one having early on joined the Swedish National Socialist Freedom League.
Henrik (played beautifully by Christopher Plummer in the movie) remarks drily:
"Isn't it fascinating that Nazis always manage to adopt the word freedom?" Further, he says, he detests most of his
family: "They are for the most part thieves, misers, bullies, and
incompetents." This is consistent
with Larsson's minimal respect for the upper class; he is guilty as charged of writing about
"the moral bankruptcy of big capital," although his main target will be unveiled in the
final showndown with the Wennerström Group.
When Blomkvist uncovers enough intriguing leads in the
Vanger family research, he asks for a research assistant. His employer suggests
they turn to the person who did the background on Blomkvist himself before
Vanger hired him. Blomkvist reads the
report, sees that it is flawless and expert, and knows that the only way the
researcher could get some of the material was by hacking his computer. Instead of being angry, he secures her
assistance by asking for her help
"finding a murderer who kills women."
She is Lisbeth Salander. She has
a photographic memory, investigative intelligence, computer savvy and "undercover" contacts who
provide her with equipment even beyond the arsenal of the Security company she
works for. She is twenty-four, and only the English title of the book/movie and
those characters who judge appearances wrongly refer to her as a
"girl." She is neither naive
nor innocent, and certainly not flirtatious and sweet. She is not infantile, in other words. To go much further gets into the unfolding of the plot which
is wickedly convoluted and sinister.
I read somewhere a justification for altering the title from
its original with the excuse that the title seems to "oversimplify"
the book. I don't think it is an
oversimplification to find the book explicitly feminist in many regards. Background biographical information intimates
that Larsson witnessed a young woman gang-raped when he was young, and that he never
got over his sense of guilt for not intervening. The woman's name was Lisbeth. I don't think we oversimplify to see Män
Som Hatar Kvinnor as a gesture of atonement and an expression of his
personal revulsion toward sexual violence.
Certainly the book's four "preface" statistics about the
prevalence of violence against women and sexual violence explicitly as well as
its underreporting emphasize the feminist intentions of the text. The statistics are
from Sweden,
of course.
1) Eighteen
percent of Swedish women have been threatened by a man.
2)
Forty-six percent have been subjected to violence by a man.
3) Thirteen
percent have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside
of
a sexual relationship.
4)
Ninety-two percent who have experienced sexual assault have not reported
the
most recent violent incident.
I cannot fully account for the way in which these epigraphs
function to alter the perspective from which the novel is read, but they do.
They also should be an early cue to a reader in search of entertaining
sexuality (I mean, after all, Dragon Tattoos!!) that he [sic] has come to the
wrong place. The statistics introduce
the hovering presence of a political and moral fable in the story. Moreover, the perpetrators here, I think I
can say without giving much away, are not lone psychopaths of the underworld,
homeless tramps or obsessive loners but socially respected and amiable
professionals and businessmen.
In fact everything in the story subverts U.S.
Media-Ideology about criminality: who is heroic and why; who is a victim and why;
and above all what "they" look like.
The smartest, bravest, most cool-headed characters are not the handsome
male investigative journalist and not even the magazine editor Ericka, a tall,
sleek blood, wealthy and intelligent and sexually liberated. In other words, not Bond and not Charlie's
Angels either.
The film visuals, by the way, are brilliantly suited to the
primary thrust of the book, which is subversion. Reviewer R. Dessaix in a Sydney newspaper,
2008, succinctly wrote that Larsson's "targets
are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative
reporters, the moral bankruptcy of big capital, and the virulent strain of
Nazism still festering. . . in Swedish society." Toward the end of the book, a reporter asks
Mikael Blomkvist (Craig) if his exposé of a financier was worth driving the
Swedish economy toward a crash.
"The idea that Sweden's
economy is headed for a crash is nonsense," Blomkvist says. "You have
to distinguish between two things—the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock
market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are
produced in this country every day. . . The Stock Exchange is something very
different." But doesn't it matter,
the reporter urges, "if the Stock Exchange drops like a rock?"
"No,
it doesn't matter at all . . . It only means that a bunch of heavy
speculators
are moving their shareholdings from
Swedish companies
to German
ones. They're the ones who are
systematically and perhaps
deliberately
damaging the Swedish economy in order to satisfy the
profit
interests of their client."
Refreshingly, and sanely, the rich and middle class are not
under threat from sinister foreign agents or underclass discontents. Women are the victims of misogynist insanity,
true, but they are not merely victims.
We never once have to endure the annoying and ubiquitous scene in which
a terrified heroine runs, stumbling, tripping and falling as she flees the
pursuing villain. The movie takes this
even further in reversal, with heroic Daniel Craig (a faint trace of James Bond ambience floating
about him) in the clumsy flight role.
Salander's role in the climactic challenge to the
financier/speculator Hans-Erik
Wennerström is essential for Blomkvist's victory, and then she goes one step
further on her own. Her shrewd maneuvers to bring the Wennerström Group
down completely are impressively intelligent, shrewd, and gutsy. Moreover, the visual power in the film of
Salander's transformation from sullen punk rocker (or is it Goth?) to a
masquerade as a million-dollar moll is a stunning reminder that Rooney Mara is
an actress, not just someone who "happens to look like" Salander's
usual self.
All in all, I thought the book much less outré than the
buzz, and at the same time a better mystery, more subversive of genre and crime
ideology, more feminist, than I expected.
The movie, however, was the knock-out; it read the tone of
class clash and gender-bender in the book and translated that tone to a
brilliant handling of standard class and gender cinematic codes. The cast was uniformly wonderful; kudos to
director David Fincher. The book, however, is what enabled that movie and I look
forward to reading the next two in the Millennium trilogy.
It is sad that Larsson died without seeing the impact of
what he wrote, and before he could write more.
I did find myself wondering about Stieg Larsson personally and how in
the world a man wrote this book. There
has been bruited about recently unconfirmed rumors that Larsson's
mistress/lover/companion claims some amount of authorship. It might explain how this book developed its quality
of being equally masculine and feminine—or, better, of coming from a mind both
male and female, as Virginia Woolf suggested was necessary for a powerful writer. She saw Shakespeare as one such writer; I
would suggest Toni Morrison and David Foster Wallace. And—although the Larsson Girl trilogy
is "merely" a complex take on the mystery genre, perhaps Stieg
Larsson, or Larsson and the woman he loved. Or in retrospect, considering the story about the girl he failed to save from gang-rape,
perhaps that girl, also named Lisbeth, was the female component, the woman in the
man's mind.
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