"The fear of offending": empowerment vs. exploitation in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Recently I’ve been giving thought to a trend in movies that I’ve written about before on this blog — namely, stories about women who endure abuse from men and then exact revenge on their attackers. Last year, Where the Crawdads Sing, based upon the bestselling novel by Delia Owens, portrayed a social outcast’s murder of a man who sexually assaulted her. The year before, Last Night in Soho spun the spectral case of a victimized sex worker in Swinging Sixties’ London on its head by revealing that, in fact, it was the sex worker who murdered her johns.
Prior to these films, we had Promising Young Woman (‘20), The Girl on the Train (‘18), and Gone Girl (‘14), as well as the TV shows Sharp Objects (‘18 — in which it’s a Munchausen mama who’s doing the abusing, but still) and Big Little Lies (‘17-’19).
Where did this tradition come from? It isn’t merely a product of the #MeToo movement, which only gained widespread media coverage in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein case. And it’s curious to realize that most of these films and shows are based on books: Owens, Liane Moriarty, and especially Gillian Flynn stand at the crest of a tidal wave in popular fiction about badass antiheroines who, when the going gets tough, have a habit of turning slightly murderous.
I tried my best to pinpoint an origin story, if you will, for this influx, and found my way back to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Originally an international hit novel by Stieg Larsson, it was subsequently adapted into two different movies — first, in its native Sweden, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, in ‘09, and then in Hollywood, directed by David Fincher, two years later.
I was sixteen years old when this second version was released, too young to see it in the theaters unaccompanied by a chaperone. In reviews I read at the time, there was much chattering about a few scenes that contained sexual violence, so I made the conservative yet sensible choice to wait to see it without my parents.
That solo viewing never happened until this week — and I must say, I was struck by how little I’d been missing. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is coarse, ill-paced and queasily voyeuristic in its obsessive interest in Lisbeth Salander’s (a suitably alien-like Rooney Mara) experiences with sexual violence. The film contains a pair of rape scenes (not to mention a sequence where Salander turns the tables on Bjurman, played by Yorick van Wageningen, her abuser and legal guardian, with unsettling ferocity) that are harrowing in their detail, indulgent to a degree that approaches sadomasochistic eroticism.
Rape should never be remotely erotic in film, and the amount of time that Fincher and cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth spend lingering on Salander’s fully nude body, watching her flail and scream as Bjurman leers over her, is repulsive — especially given how briskly the rest of their film skips along.
Granted, things start to get interesting once Salander becomes involved in a murder case that’s being co-investigated by Mikael Blomkvist (the stylish Daniel Craig). Their respective processes of elimination are riveting to watch unfold, as journalist and hacker work in tandem to resolve what led to a sixteen-year-old girl’s disappearance forty years earlier.
“I want you to help me catch a killer of women,” Blomkvist tells Salander when he’s first seeking her help. Her eyes flash in excitement. This is my chance, you almost hear her thinking. My chance to right some of the wrongs that’ve been done to me.
In the end, the guilty party is a little too obvious, and then there’s a whole string of anticlimactic escapades where the missing girl is found, Salander helps Blomkvist get out of hot water in a previous libel case, etc. But the most compelling idea in Girl with a Dragon Tattoo is that of a victim of sexual assault tracking down someone else’s abuser. The prey becomes predator. It’s just wildly unfortunate that we have to witness Salander’s trauma for ourselves; would we have been at a loss in understanding her motivation if we’d simply learned about what she’s endured?
If, indeed, this film and its source material served as kick-off points whence a whole saga of revenging women have charged across media screens, big and small, then I think it’s worth noting how thoroughly confused its (male) authors were as to where to draw the line between empowerment and exploitation. Dragon Tattoo may desire to liberate Lisbeth Salander, but at what cost? Both to her, and to her audience?
