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The Girl With The Ghost Protocol
Jan. 6th, 2012 04:10 pm1. So the M:I franchise has reached the point where they stop numbering the movies and just give them subtitles in the hope you won't notice how many of these things you've watched. it took Friday the 13th nine movies to get to that point, then they just started saying shit like "Jason X."
2. Producer: Okay, we bought the rights to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It's about a serial killer who kills people according to the Biblical sins they commit.
Producer 2: Won't they accuse us of ripping off Seven? That's the plot of Seven.
Producer: Let’s just get the guy who directed Seven!
Producer 2: Yeah!
Okay, why am I reviewing these movies together? One’s a silly spy thriller and the other is what passes for a prestige pic these days. Well, I think how they both deal with female characters is worth discussion.
Obviously, M:I4 had Paula Patton playing Jane Carter, and somewhere there’s a joke about a mixed-race woman having the whitest name I’ve heard since Benedict Cumberbatch, but I ain’t going there. She plays Maggie Q from the third movie—okay, no, but she is the token girl badass and there isn’t much to discuss there. She has this revenge plotline—luckily, the offending baddie is another svelte female so it’s a fair fight. Imagine if some 350-pound wrestler dude had killed her beau. “No, Tom Cruise. This I have to do for myself.” Then she spends fifteen minutes hitting him with a baseball bat before he falls over. Might lead to some pacing issues.
( Now is the time for spoilers. )
Now, if Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is notable for how it tacitly sidelines an important female character, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (why do I pick now to review these movies with the super-long titles, when I’m still trying to get used to this fercrackening USB keyboard?) puts front and center a female character that actually doesn’t have much to do with the main plot. She’s kind of a third wheel—Daniel Craig gets involved in helping this guy so he can clear his name for a different thing, then Lisbeth gets involving helping him because she has a thing about people killing women. Both in general and because she was abused as a child and she was raped and she’s a lesbian, so a serial killer would not be good for the dating pool. Not a lot of reasons for her to stay home and watch Norwegian Idol there.
There’s been so much said about Dragon Tattoo that it’s hard to know where to start. I won’t try to be definitive, but it seems the principal discussion is over whether Lisbeth is a male fantasy or a female fantasy. Do men want to be with her or do women want to be her? And it’s a hard discussion to have because both can be true. For another example, take Jack Sparrow. He’s intended as a male fantasy figure—he’s clever, he’s a pirate, he spends the whole movie hanging out with hot chicks like Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom. Buuut, even though he wasn’t intended that way, he was received by women as a female fantasy figure. When the sequels rolled around, not only was our smelly, craven pirate in a love triangle with Keira Knightley, but then it turned out that his lost love was Penelope Cruz! What next? Did he lose his virginity to Paula Patton?
So maybe we should rely on authorial intent? Well, as many people have mentioned, Daniel Craig is playing Stieg Larrson’s kinda-sorta Gary Stu in this. So that’s odd. And, as someone who spends a lot of time in femslash fandom (which, in case you don’t know, is gay ladies writing about gay ladies), Lisbeth Salander does not get a lot of play. She’s appreciated, sure, but I don’t think fandom really engages with her the same way they do with, say, any given Jaime Murray character ever, Christ, that woman.
That isn’t necessarily a comment on Lisbeth Salander’s character—maybe it’s that she’s a canon bisexual and femslash fans prefer subtext (even Jaime Murray’s character in Warehouse 13 didn’t start out bisexual, that was revealed much later on and a relationship with Myka Bering still hasn’t been revealed, not that anyone’s bitter). Maybe it’s that she doesn’t have a lesbian relationship with as much facetime as her relationship to Daniel Craig. Maybe it’s just that she’s kinda funny-looking and even lesbians prefer women with great hair and rocking bods.
Like Paula Patton.
Speaking in more general terms, fandom (which tends toward female, straight or lesbian) doesn’t seem to have embraced Salander either. I had trouble finding a Lisbeth Salander-tagged post on tumblr with more than fifty notes; the only Livejournal community on her that I could find had about a hundred members. Even its section on Fanfanfiction.net has only twenty-six fics, one of which is a high school AU (Meet Lisbeth Salander. An 18 year old girl who's filled with tats and rings. When her principle, Mr. Blomqvist, assigns her a job to help him solve a case left open for 30 years, she takes the offer knowing demons from hell awaits.) People wrote 165 stories about Osmosis Jones.
There’s really no way to force a final judgment on such a subjective issue. There will always be those women who like Lisbeth Salander and those who don’t. Maybe in time, the consensus will shift fully in one direction or the other. Maybe she’ll just end up a footnote to less divisive female characters. As you will.
What we can discuss, much more fully, are the changes the American adaptation makes to the original novel and the Swedish film. Now, hearing about David Fincher and Steve Zailliam starting this project, I thought there was a tacit assumption that the source material wasn’t That Great and so they’d basically be taking an interesting premise and, as much better storytellers, going their own way; just using the popularity of the book to get a kickass movie made. That’s what Spielberg did with Jaws and Scorsese did with Godfather. They took pretty silly novels and elevated them. We already had one more-or-less faithful adaptation of the book; why not take it and run with it?
( Spoilers for a book that came out, like, ten years ago. NO ONE TELL ME HOW HARRY POTTER ENDS EITHER! )
2. Producer: Okay, we bought the rights to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It's about a serial killer who kills people according to the Biblical sins they commit.
Producer 2: Won't they accuse us of ripping off Seven? That's the plot of Seven.
Producer: Let’s just get the guy who directed Seven!
Producer 2: Yeah!
Okay, why am I reviewing these movies together? One’s a silly spy thriller and the other is what passes for a prestige pic these days. Well, I think how they both deal with female characters is worth discussion.
Obviously, M:I4 had Paula Patton playing Jane Carter, and somewhere there’s a joke about a mixed-race woman having the whitest name I’ve heard since Benedict Cumberbatch, but I ain’t going there. She plays Maggie Q from the third movie—okay, no, but she is the token girl badass and there isn’t much to discuss there. She has this revenge plotline—luckily, the offending baddie is another svelte female so it’s a fair fight. Imagine if some 350-pound wrestler dude had killed her beau. “No, Tom Cruise. This I have to do for myself.” Then she spends fifteen minutes hitting him with a baseball bat before he falls over. Might lead to some pacing issues.
( Now is the time for spoilers. )
Now, if Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is notable for how it tacitly sidelines an important female character, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (why do I pick now to review these movies with the super-long titles, when I’m still trying to get used to this fercrackening USB keyboard?) puts front and center a female character that actually doesn’t have much to do with the main plot. She’s kind of a third wheel—Daniel Craig gets involved in helping this guy so he can clear his name for a different thing, then Lisbeth gets involving helping him because she has a thing about people killing women. Both in general and because she was abused as a child and she was raped and she’s a lesbian, so a serial killer would not be good for the dating pool. Not a lot of reasons for her to stay home and watch Norwegian Idol there.
There’s been so much said about Dragon Tattoo that it’s hard to know where to start. I won’t try to be definitive, but it seems the principal discussion is over whether Lisbeth is a male fantasy or a female fantasy. Do men want to be with her or do women want to be her? And it’s a hard discussion to have because both can be true. For another example, take Jack Sparrow. He’s intended as a male fantasy figure—he’s clever, he’s a pirate, he spends the whole movie hanging out with hot chicks like Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom. Buuut, even though he wasn’t intended that way, he was received by women as a female fantasy figure. When the sequels rolled around, not only was our smelly, craven pirate in a love triangle with Keira Knightley, but then it turned out that his lost love was Penelope Cruz! What next? Did he lose his virginity to Paula Patton?
So maybe we should rely on authorial intent? Well, as many people have mentioned, Daniel Craig is playing Stieg Larrson’s kinda-sorta Gary Stu in this. So that’s odd. And, as someone who spends a lot of time in femslash fandom (which, in case you don’t know, is gay ladies writing about gay ladies), Lisbeth Salander does not get a lot of play. She’s appreciated, sure, but I don’t think fandom really engages with her the same way they do with, say, any given Jaime Murray character ever, Christ, that woman.
That isn’t necessarily a comment on Lisbeth Salander’s character—maybe it’s that she’s a canon bisexual and femslash fans prefer subtext (even Jaime Murray’s character in Warehouse 13 didn’t start out bisexual, that was revealed much later on and a relationship with Myka Bering still hasn’t been revealed, not that anyone’s bitter). Maybe it’s that she doesn’t have a lesbian relationship with as much facetime as her relationship to Daniel Craig. Maybe it’s just that she’s kinda funny-looking and even lesbians prefer women with great hair and rocking bods.
Like Paula Patton.
Speaking in more general terms, fandom (which tends toward female, straight or lesbian) doesn’t seem to have embraced Salander either. I had trouble finding a Lisbeth Salander-tagged post on tumblr with more than fifty notes; the only Livejournal community on her that I could find had about a hundred members. Even its section on Fanfanfiction.net has only twenty-six fics, one of which is a high school AU (Meet Lisbeth Salander. An 18 year old girl who's filled with tats and rings. When her principle, Mr. Blomqvist, assigns her a job to help him solve a case left open for 30 years, she takes the offer knowing demons from hell awaits.) People wrote 165 stories about Osmosis Jones.
There’s really no way to force a final judgment on such a subjective issue. There will always be those women who like Lisbeth Salander and those who don’t. Maybe in time, the consensus will shift fully in one direction or the other. Maybe she’ll just end up a footnote to less divisive female characters. As you will.
What we can discuss, much more fully, are the changes the American adaptation makes to the original novel and the Swedish film. Now, hearing about David Fincher and Steve Zailliam starting this project, I thought there was a tacit assumption that the source material wasn’t That Great and so they’d basically be taking an interesting premise and, as much better storytellers, going their own way; just using the popularity of the book to get a kickass movie made. That’s what Spielberg did with Jaws and Scorsese did with Godfather. They took pretty silly novels and elevated them. We already had one more-or-less faithful adaptation of the book; why not take it and run with it?
( Spoilers for a book that came out, like, ten years ago. NO ONE TELL ME HOW HARRY POTTER ENDS EITHER! )
