Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (has spoilers)

[grinninfoole]

Watched girl with dragon tattoo over the weekend, and was totally hooked by it. I'll hide the rest for those of you who don't care about my film criticism or navel gazing.

It developed oddly, because the two main characters don't connect at first and the movie has a parallel structure for an hour.

 

The male lead Mikael Blomkvist is fine. His character is quiet, somewhat understated. We learn a lot about him by being told rather than shown.  He is that largely fictitious figure, a muck racking journalist who pursues the truth as a pure calling.  The movie opens with his humiliation. He's going to prison for libel because a story he published is a pack of lies created to snare him. (Which reminds me of a book I haven’t finished writing…)  And then Mikael is called on Christmas Day by Henrik Vanger, a very old and very rich man, and asked to find the guy’s niece, who disappeared 40 years before, almost certainly murdered.  Unemployed, with a few months to kill before prison, Mikael takes the job.

But the real lead of the film is Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace).  She’s a hacker and investigator for a private detective firm.  She wears a lot of black leather, spikes, many piercings, and other punk accoutrements, all of which set the table for her intense angry stare.  She’s sullen, often deliberately rude, but truly smart and capable of discovering the deepest secrets. 

She’s introduced simply as a the researcher who vetted Blomkvist for Vanger’s lawyer, and she’s the one who tells us that he’s neither corrupt nor incompetent, that he doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet, and that he isn’t guilty of libel, he was framed.

Mikael pokes around, learning the sordid history of the Vanger family, Nazi ties and all, while Lisbeth deals with her own problem: she’s on probation for some sort of violent crime, and has a legal guardian of some sort (even though she’s clearly of adult age).  She’s just been assigned a new guy, and he’s a sleaze who rapes her and dares her to report him. 

Lisbeth, who has the dragon tattoo for which the story is named (and it’s a huge, powerful beast literally ripping its way out of her body), responds with brutal efficiency, raping him in return, and showing him the hidden-camera footage she’d taken of his last assault, and telling him exactly what he must do to avoid prison. 

Lisbeth and Mikael finally meet because she secretly reads all his files, is caught up in the mystery, and emails him an explanation for his most cryptic clue.  From there, they become colleagues, an intrepid pair of investigators, and then lovers.

Still, I don't want to just regurgitate the plot.  What’s really compelling about it is a cocktail of triggers (or perhaps BPKs) for me:

Lisbeth is openly anti-social, flouting convention, yet still pretty.  Her sullen mien, her silence, the way she stalks about, all make it clear that she’s been hurt, and she’s on guard against human contact.  But she’s still engaging with the world, trying to take it by the throat and squeeze some fairness from it.  She has this way of bulling her way through the world, lurching as she walks or lunging to plant a kiss, that bespeaks of tremendous courage, of hope for a man's decency in the face of so much evidence to the contrary.  It just guts me, makes me angry, protective, aroused, scared, sad, and joyous all at once.

And that just absolutely grabs me.  The passionate intensity and clear sense of purpose and anger because the world is just so fucking mean to her for no good reason, all resonate for me.  She doesn’t apologize for who she is or the life she chooses to lead.  I can identify with that last from when I was a kid, and I wish I had her intensity.  I wish I lived my life so unapologetically.

So part of my wants to be her, and part of me wants to do her.  She’s a strong feminist figure, and she reaches out to and starts a relationship with an older man, basically because she can identify with him.  She’s had time to check him out without his knowing, and has decided that he’s bullshit free, committed to truth, driven by anger at injustice, and screwed over for something he didn’t do.

He’s someone I’d like to be: a guy my age who knows who he is and what he wants to do to make the world better, and has spent years doing it (however little it may have helped, however much trouble it may have gotten him.)  And for his decency, and for the person he has made himself into, this totally hot, ferocious, passionate, and wronged young woman chooses him. 

This pushes many of my buttons, like a need for validation, and wanting more passion (and more sex) in my life.  But more than anything, I want to be the… oh, let’s call it the Righteous Gentile.  I crave to be picked, as Blomqvist is picked, as different from other oppressors, to have my character recognized as truly exemplary.  To be able to let the guilt go, and accept myself for who I am.

It’s the same sort of emotional game many criticized James Cameron’s Avatar for playing, except for me, racism is something I have to look for, because people of color were never part of my life as a child.  Sexism, on the hand, was right there in front of me every day, and it affected the most important person AKA my mom.  I didn’t understand it when I was little, and I learned a lot in school, but one of my earliest memories was learning about the Declaration of Independence and its assertion that “All Men are created equal”, and wondering ‘what about women?’

Actually, maybe it’s more elemental; perhaps the central feminist issue is, and always has been, violence against women.  However, that clichéd phrase hides the truth: the problem isn’t violence against women; the problem is violence by men.  And that is something that scarred me from my earliest days.

Both Lisbeth and Mikael are survivors of male violence, a brutality so pervasive hardly anyone even sees it.  And I think I find their story so compelling because maybe I am, too.

 

EDIT: After I posted this, I watched the sequel, Girl Who Played With Fire. And, wow, it's all about the pervasiveness of male violence, especially as channeled sexually against women. I feel twitchy, and hyped up. Jesus, that woman almost is indestructible.

Comments

[rap541.livejournal.com]

I suggest reading the book series

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Yes, I shall be doing that.

[rap541.livejournal.com]

Good - because the book is really quite fun, and so is the series... to where I got to the end of the third and was sad when I realized that a) there was clearly more potential story and b) the author died about four years before these books were published

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Thanks. My plan is let more hang out on here in 2011.

I'm glad you like me. I have my virtues, but I haven't done anything to help the millions of people who need someone. It's like the new Abolitionism, and I feel like a jerk for not helping out.

[vizsludraugas.livejournal.com]

The books are well done-although it helps to keep in mind that the author is a Swedish radical and that the male hero has a bit of Mary Sue about him. There are all sorts of sly references and jokes-to the Martin Beck series (which is excellent), to The Dain Curse, and to various other classics of the crime/mystery genre.

I know many people who have been surprised by the Sweden depicted in the novels-they think of it as a bastion of sexual equality. Which it is, in part..but it's also the country where courts can reach a decision like this.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, Blomqvist is a total Mary Sue. I can see that. But, see, he's a Mary Sue I'd like to be, so it still works on me.

[anagramofbrat.livejournal.com]

It's on my Netflix queue, thanks for giving me an excuse to bump it up.

Edit for icon. ;)

[mole-underfield.livejournal.com]

Your review is well written. I am curious to see this movie.

[millari.livejournal.com]

This post told me a lot about you - much of which I understood already, but definitely some that I didn't quite absorb until now, especially the connection you make between your feelings about feminism and the way you saw your mom treated when you were young, and the insight about being a victim of male violence. I think there's something to that, and it's so complicated in your case because as a male, you were also given some chunks of male privilege. I think that must be confusing for boys. In a strange way, with girls and women, the oppression is really clear, and in certain societies anyway, a woman can have some pretty unequivocal anger about it. Maybe that's part of what you find so compelling about her too - that she gets to express her anger at her victimization, whereas if you do so, you're possibly going to be told that you're a white male and so you know nothing about it and should shut up. She may be a powerful outlet for some feelings you have difficulty expressing?

I guess really only you know for sure. I'm just guessing.

I'm both curious and a bit filled with dread to see those movies. They sound really angry in a way I could imagine being interesting, but also kind of exhausting for me.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

There's significant hypocrisy in complaining about the inequities of a social order, even as I continue to reap great benefits from it.

I think my general pattern of emotionally identifying with women stems from finding it easier to see them as both audience and model for emotional expression.

[millari.livejournal.com]

I think my general pattern of emotionally identifying with women stems from finding it easier to see them as both audience and model for emotional expression.

That makes sense. It's ironically interesting that you've come to discuss/have insight into this truth about yourself while watching a film about a woman who is neither. :P Maybe that just puts it all into sharper perspective.

I've said this before, I think, and I can be guilty of this too: The passion you have for helping others is one that would have an amazing impact on your life if you directed it towards yourself. :) I would be really happy to see you enjoy the benefits of that kind of passion, instead of spending it so often on others. You deserve it.

[daybreak777.livejournal.com]

all of which set the table for her intense angry stare.
Hee. I'm so glad you recced this movie! She does have that stare down too. :-)

I wish I lived my life so unapologetically.
So interesting you got that from this movie. I got this same thing the movie Black Swan, in fact I made a little pact with myself after seeing it not to say, "I'm sorry" unless I've actually done something wrong and feel remorse for it. It's hard, though!

Lisbeth is an awesome character. After watching the film I was still thinking about her. Worried about her, cheering for her, pissed off for her. I don't want to be her or even know her, but I do want women like her out there to win and win big.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do know women like her, and their constant, intense anger wears one down (when they don't turn it inward so it becomes depression.) But I want her to win big.