Tattoo You

[bryant]

Briefly: Fincher’s directing and Rooney Mara’s acting make it painfully clear that Lisbeth Salander doesn’t make any sense next to Mikael Blomkvist. There are two potentially awesome thrillers in both the book and the movies: one stars Blomkvist, and it’s a story about an awesome journalist who’s pretty much an auctorial stand in. The other is a somewhat more interesting story about Swedish traditional culture and the horrible things it does to women, as personified by both Harriet Vanger and Lisbeth Salander. When you mash them together, however, you get a wish-fulfillment piece in which the awesome journalist is just another man using a woman. Blomkvist and Salander should never have met.

I don’t think Steig Larsson realized this. David Fincher might. (Edit: Fincher has mentioned Blomkvist’s misogyny a couple of times.) Either way, the clarity of Fincher’s directing strips away all the awkwardness of the English translation, and it’s hard to pretend that Salander belongs with Blomkvist at all. You can’t hide the incongruity by making up your own images when they’re right up there on the screen. The parallel tracks of the two central female characters become really obvious. Consider disguises — I wonder, in fact, if that’s part of why Fincher kept the extensive coda. Larsson thought his hero was a different class of father figure, but Fincher lets the darkness through.

Worth seeing. Tremendously disturbing.

Mirrored from Population: One.

Comments

[alex-victory.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify, is that "Worth seeing even if you've already seen the Swedish version"?

I mean not that it matters to *me*, Fincher could film an abandoned set for 20 minutes and I'd probably still pay to see it.

[bryant]

Yep, definitely.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

In Larsson's minor defense, if I'm remembering the second two movies (I've never read any of the books), Salander herself seems tremendously ambivalent about the concept of being in a relationship with Blomkvist, and they spend fairly huge amounts of the films completely apart, or communicating sporadically electronically about the case, each with other lovers even. I mean, I fundamentally agree with you, but the way it's handled is still more interesting and aware of the problematic aspects than anything equivalent of American 9or British) origin.

[bryant]

Yeah, but Blomkvist is depicted as being right about everything. Salander's disturbed at the end of the first book because she can't handle Blomkvist's admirably adult polyamorous relationship with his co-worker. Larsson never considers the idea that Blomkvist is using Salander in an unhealthy manner.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Ah. I never got that from the movies. I should rewatch.

Also, Clusters worked out nicely (though I'm thinking they should probably be allowed their basic melee attack as a burst 1, to reflect the multiple people in a squad thing. They can't pile a huge amount of damage into one target, but if they get surrounded they can ping multiple enemies).

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

I think that the other (still weak) defense that can be raised for Larsson is that we are quite literally reading his first drafts. He died before the books could ever known the loving touch of an editor. There's a wide line between "OMG here's this Very Important Idea that I Must get onto paper Right Now" and "whew, that's over, now let's look at that again and...jesus, what was I thinking?" and he basically never got to do that part.

[bryant]

Good point.