The Girl With The Ghost Protocol
Jan. 6th, 2012 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousfic1. 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.
There is the fact that she basically gets her revenge midway through the movie and then she’s just kinda “Okay, I’m good” and helping out. There’s nothing really wrong with that, writing-wise, but it seems a little lazy that her arc wraps up so easily. I mean, it isn’t like Simon Pegg or any of the villains have a huge arc either, but whatever.
Shit, I should probably actually review this movie and not just talk about female characters. Right. Mission: Impossible 4 is that official moment where the imitator eclipses the obvious inspiration. Kinda like how The Mummy is a better Indiana Jones movie than Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull (go on, sell me on how Mac or Ox or Shia LeBeouf is a better supporting character than Evie or Jonathan. And no, don’t bring Marion into this, she had nothing to do). Well, MI4 is a better James Bond movie than Quantum of Solace. And it’s not like the previous MI movies were bad—I even have a soft spot for Mission: Impossible 2. But 4 is where they out-Bond Bond.
Somewhere down the line, the Bond people forgot that they were about spies going to exotic locations and doing crazy stunts. I mean, Casino Royale had it right—they did spend most of the movie at a casino, but the director insisted on mostly practical stunts. Then Quantum of Solace came along and not only does Bond occasionally turn into a CGI cartoon for stunts (I’ll never get how a ‘seamless’ CGI insert of the real actor is supposedly more impressive than an actual non-Daniel-Craig person really risking his life for a stunt), but they spend the entire movie hanging out in Bolivia. Do you know anyone who would want to go see the exotic vistas of Bolivia? No. They want to go to Dubai with Tom Cruise and fight bad guys in giant fucking sandstorms that I’m not sure anyone would really live there if those actually happened with any regularity.
Also, it’s true that Tom Cruise doesn’t have the cache of James Bond, but here they work the ensemble better than they did in Mission: Impossible 3 (I’m getting sick of colons. Can’t they just call it Impossible Mission? Whatever). Everyone has their own little story and something to do. If a Bond movie had this kind of ensemble, it’d be a Blade: Trinity situation where you wonder why Bond needs these other jerks to do his job.
Oh, and 4 does the “disavowed agent” that both Bond and M:I have been doing for years in a creative way. The IMF doesn’t believe that Tom Cruise has turned evil, since he’s been framed for being evil like six times now, so the boss is like “yeah, we know that’s bullshit, here’s a bunch of weapons and your badass team with Simon Pegg and a hot mixed-race chick and the dude from The Hurt Locker.” Plus, here going rogue means their equipment’s shitty and they don’t have any support, so there’s actual consequences instead of people just NOT PLAYING BY YOUR RULES, MACGARRET!
M:I4 is basically the Fast Five of spy movies. It’s just a pure action movie, not as pretentious as the Bourne movies or as character-driven as the Bond films have become. But the interesting thing is the end, which actually really elevated the movie for me.
Now, throughout the movie, people have been wondering why Tom Cruise was in jail and what’s the deal with his wife. I mean, wasn’t that a thing in the third movie, he got married? Simon Pegg has a line about them not working out and you’re like “oh, really movie, you made us sit through all that ‘Tom Cruise is really, really in love’ stuff and now you’re hitting the reset button so Tom can cruise on the hot mixed-race chick?” But no, TWIST, it turns out that some terrorists killed his wife and Tom was in jail for killing them. And Hurt Locker Dude was the guy who was assigned to protect the wife and failed, and that’s his deal. So now you’re like “oh, really movie, Tom Cruise has man-pain because his chick died? Quantum of Solace much?” Because hey, who cares if Tom Cruise has a wife? It’s not like it’s going to have any bearing on his spying. He can still hang from really high up places and shoot people if he has a wife, or if he’s gay, or if he’s asexual, or if he watches Torchwood.
But theeeen, DOUBLE TWIST, it turns out he faked his wife’s death and killed her would-be killers and used that as an excuse to go to jail and get close to this guy. That came off a little gay. So now he can be married to her and save the world from nuclear holocaust. Although this does retroactively make Cruise kind of a punk. Not only did he traumatize Renner, but when Jane Carter was mourning her boytoy, he was all “I know what you’re going through.” Yeah, sure you do, lover-boy. I mean, his chick did die in the first one and we never did find out what happened to Thandie Newton from the second, but that still seems a little awkward. What would his wife think if she knew he was hanging out with this hot mixed-race chick who thought they had both lost someone and was kinda digging on him? I think for the good of the team, Tom has to go “yeah, I think I might be gay” and let Renner or Pegg take that bullet.
That hot, hot, mixed-race bullet.
So anyway, I really liked this ending because not only does Ving Rhames cameo, and it’s nice to see that even if he and Tom weren’t on the same mission this time, they still get beers after work, but also they let Tom keep his girl without doing a “nagging wife” storyline (“Tom Cruise, how can you be out there saving the world when it’s our relationship that’s in danger!?”) like The Legend of Zorro or putting her in danger over and over again like the Spider-Man movies. I mean, by the third one, they should’ve realized that there was more drama in the danger of MJ losing Spider-Man and even possibly watching him die than in the more overt danger of getting killed by an alien space monster plot device. It’s easy to be gung-ho about the occasional kidnapping, not so much knowing that your lover is in danger all the time.
So, maybe in the fifth M:I movie, they can just have a brief scene of Tom Cruise and his wife going through their morning routine before Tom gets the paper and the headline is YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT. I don’t need an entire ‘human interest’ storyline, I just don’t want to see the reset button pressed and Tom either getting a new girl (too James Bond) or having to re-romance the same woman all over again.
By the way… what ever did happen to Thandie Newton from the second movie? They spent that whole movie falling in love, then in the third movie Tom Cruise is getting married—you think they’d at least try to make that stuff sync up. I know part of the third plot was that his wife doesn’t know about the spying and has to pick up a gun for the first time, but maybe people would’ve been a bit more invested in the storyline if we already knew this wonderful, amazing woman Tom Cruise was marrying instead of being told “Hey, Tom Cruise loves her, and so should you!” I don’t know, maybe Thandie Newton was busy. *checks IMDB* Nope!
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?
And Fincher doesn’t do that. He’s almost insipidly faithful to the novel, including subplots that balloon the runtime up to two and a half hours. This movie ends more times than Return of the King. First, they find out who the killer is. Then, Lisbeth exposes the guy who gave Daniel Craig trouble in the opening. Then, she gives him a double-comeuppance! Is he going to be super-important later on? Is he going to show up in the third movie with a robot hand, swearing vengeance? He’s a corrupt businessman in a movie about Nazi rape-murderers. His just desserts seem like they should be kinda low on the honey-do list.
Here’s my principle issue with the movie—the little changes they do make. They seem really focused on doing a faithful adaptation, yet for all the graphic violence, sexual explicitness, and downright gratuitous rape scenes, they soften up the character of Lisbeth Salander. Despite the fact that she calls herself a crazy person, the movie wants you to know that she has a heart of gold and really just wants a hug.
Her sexual relationship with Daniel Craig becomes more romantic. Just before she chases the killer, she asks Bond “May I kill him?” and gets a weary nod -- the movie really hasn’t earned her seeking his approval. Maybe if she’d said “Mind if I kill him?” as in “This guy’s dead, but I don’t want to hear you bitching later that you weren’t included in the decision-making process, so here’s your shot at getting your objection down on the log.” She doesn’t even kill him; he gets nuked in a convenient explosion before she can. The big expression of her “weirdness” becomes her sex scenes, where she enthusiastically gets orgasms from Daniel Craig. Put down one in the male fantasy column.
The movie even ends with Lisbeth getting her heart broken and slinking off like one-half of the Will-They-Or-Won’t-They couple on a sitcom. Aww, she really does care. Will you two crazy kids ever get together?
By the way, why would this sexually liberated, bisexual, fuckbuddy-having character be so thrown by an open relationship? Wouldn’t she know Daniel Craig was in one? That seems a bit reactionary, for the film to toy with polygamy through her character and then decide that if she can’t have him all to herself, she doesn’t want him at all. He’s James Bond! There’s enough to go around!
Getting into those rape scenes, we actually see more of Lisbeth being raped than we do of her vengeful scarring. I guess because seeing Lisbeth torture a guy, even one who the film makes it painstakingly clear has it coming, would make her too ‘unsympathetic’. I feel like in the book, we were meant to see Lisbeth as fucked up, but understand and sympathize with her. Here, we’re meant to straight-up like her and approve of everything she does. Forget about male fantasy or female fantasy, she’s meant to be a heroine. And that’s not a bad thing, but a male hero would be able to get away with dark behavior, even without the hedges of having suffered so much. In the end, Dragon Tattoo doesn’t put Lisbeth on equal ground with a male hero, it just pushes her in that direction.
Speaking of rape… oh, that sentence again… why are those scenes in the movie? I know, I know, sexism, violence against women, raising awareness. I’m asking, if the movie is making a point about rape culture and even criticizing Daniel Craig’s character by putting him on a spectrum of misogyny with the social worker and the killer… well, you’d think they’d be saying that the killer and the social worker are different facets of the same problem. But then it turns out they’re both crazed rapists. The endresult is saying “Yeah, Daniel Craig cheated on his wife and led on a girl young enough to be his daughter, but he isn’t that bad.” I mean, he never rape-murdered anyone.
Moreover, is it really necessary to show the actual raping? If someone we know is a rapist handcuffs Lisbeth and the scene ends, I think we can assume bad stuff. Do we really need to see him saying “Up the butt!” Now, I know, you’re going to say “That’s so the audience can get really outraged at his actions and really want Lisbeth to get her vengeance on him. The actors and director are working together to get that response, they want it to be gruesome and evil.” And I just don’t think it takes that much talent to make a rape scene look awful. “Hey, man, who are you to want to censor David Fincher? If he wants to show rape scenes to get an emotional reaction from the audience, that’s his choice!” Yes, it is, but if you’re doing an explicitly feminist movie explicitly revolving around a strong female character, shouldn’t you be obliged to do it in a way that’s a little tasteful?
It’s like, if there were a black joke in a Die Hard movie, you’d roll your eyes and move on. If there were a black joke in a movie about the Civil Rights Movement, you’d be wondering why the filmmakers thought they could put that on the group they’re supposed to be supporting.
And if there are people out there who can’t sympathize with a rape victim and want to see a rapist punished unless they actually see someone being horribly assaulted, they should probably fuck off and die.
Maybe in the end, the reason for Lisbeth’s popularity is that she blends the uncompromising badass nature of a Milla Jovovich or Angelina Jolie heroine (who are themselves often watered-down) with the caveat that her awesomeness is a freak occurrence, a lightning strike, a crazed set of circumstances that drove a woman to the unnatural length of being a hero. And whether you want to blame that on Larsson or not, a heroine who is both incredibly badass while having a readymade excuse for that badassery is the kind of thing the world is just ready to embrace. But as for fandom, well… we’re over it. We don’t need a heroine who’s been raped to justify her heroism. We need one that hasn’t been.
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.
There is the fact that she basically gets her revenge midway through the movie and then she’s just kinda “Okay, I’m good” and helping out. There’s nothing really wrong with that, writing-wise, but it seems a little lazy that her arc wraps up so easily. I mean, it isn’t like Simon Pegg or any of the villains have a huge arc either, but whatever.
Shit, I should probably actually review this movie and not just talk about female characters. Right. Mission: Impossible 4 is that official moment where the imitator eclipses the obvious inspiration. Kinda like how The Mummy is a better Indiana Jones movie than Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull (go on, sell me on how Mac or Ox or Shia LeBeouf is a better supporting character than Evie or Jonathan. And no, don’t bring Marion into this, she had nothing to do). Well, MI4 is a better James Bond movie than Quantum of Solace. And it’s not like the previous MI movies were bad—I even have a soft spot for Mission: Impossible 2. But 4 is where they out-Bond Bond.
Somewhere down the line, the Bond people forgot that they were about spies going to exotic locations and doing crazy stunts. I mean, Casino Royale had it right—they did spend most of the movie at a casino, but the director insisted on mostly practical stunts. Then Quantum of Solace came along and not only does Bond occasionally turn into a CGI cartoon for stunts (I’ll never get how a ‘seamless’ CGI insert of the real actor is supposedly more impressive than an actual non-Daniel-Craig person really risking his life for a stunt), but they spend the entire movie hanging out in Bolivia. Do you know anyone who would want to go see the exotic vistas of Bolivia? No. They want to go to Dubai with Tom Cruise and fight bad guys in giant fucking sandstorms that I’m not sure anyone would really live there if those actually happened with any regularity.
Also, it’s true that Tom Cruise doesn’t have the cache of James Bond, but here they work the ensemble better than they did in Mission: Impossible 3 (I’m getting sick of colons. Can’t they just call it Impossible Mission? Whatever). Everyone has their own little story and something to do. If a Bond movie had this kind of ensemble, it’d be a Blade: Trinity situation where you wonder why Bond needs these other jerks to do his job.
Oh, and 4 does the “disavowed agent” that both Bond and M:I have been doing for years in a creative way. The IMF doesn’t believe that Tom Cruise has turned evil, since he’s been framed for being evil like six times now, so the boss is like “yeah, we know that’s bullshit, here’s a bunch of weapons and your badass team with Simon Pegg and a hot mixed-race chick and the dude from The Hurt Locker.” Plus, here going rogue means their equipment’s shitty and they don’t have any support, so there’s actual consequences instead of people just NOT PLAYING BY YOUR RULES, MACGARRET!
M:I4 is basically the Fast Five of spy movies. It’s just a pure action movie, not as pretentious as the Bourne movies or as character-driven as the Bond films have become. But the interesting thing is the end, which actually really elevated the movie for me.
Now, throughout the movie, people have been wondering why Tom Cruise was in jail and what’s the deal with his wife. I mean, wasn’t that a thing in the third movie, he got married? Simon Pegg has a line about them not working out and you’re like “oh, really movie, you made us sit through all that ‘Tom Cruise is really, really in love’ stuff and now you’re hitting the reset button so Tom can cruise on the hot mixed-race chick?” But no, TWIST, it turns out that some terrorists killed his wife and Tom was in jail for killing them. And Hurt Locker Dude was the guy who was assigned to protect the wife and failed, and that’s his deal. So now you’re like “oh, really movie, Tom Cruise has man-pain because his chick died? Quantum of Solace much?” Because hey, who cares if Tom Cruise has a wife? It’s not like it’s going to have any bearing on his spying. He can still hang from really high up places and shoot people if he has a wife, or if he’s gay, or if he’s asexual, or if he watches Torchwood.
But theeeen, DOUBLE TWIST, it turns out he faked his wife’s death and killed her would-be killers and used that as an excuse to go to jail and get close to this guy. That came off a little gay. So now he can be married to her and save the world from nuclear holocaust. Although this does retroactively make Cruise kind of a punk. Not only did he traumatize Renner, but when Jane Carter was mourning her boytoy, he was all “I know what you’re going through.” Yeah, sure you do, lover-boy. I mean, his chick did die in the first one and we never did find out what happened to Thandie Newton from the second, but that still seems a little awkward. What would his wife think if she knew he was hanging out with this hot mixed-race chick who thought they had both lost someone and was kinda digging on him? I think for the good of the team, Tom has to go “yeah, I think I might be gay” and let Renner or Pegg take that bullet.
That hot, hot, mixed-race bullet.
So anyway, I really liked this ending because not only does Ving Rhames cameo, and it’s nice to see that even if he and Tom weren’t on the same mission this time, they still get beers after work, but also they let Tom keep his girl without doing a “nagging wife” storyline (“Tom Cruise, how can you be out there saving the world when it’s our relationship that’s in danger!?”) like The Legend of Zorro or putting her in danger over and over again like the Spider-Man movies. I mean, by the third one, they should’ve realized that there was more drama in the danger of MJ losing Spider-Man and even possibly watching him die than in the more overt danger of getting killed by an alien space monster plot device. It’s easy to be gung-ho about the occasional kidnapping, not so much knowing that your lover is in danger all the time.
So, maybe in the fifth M:I movie, they can just have a brief scene of Tom Cruise and his wife going through their morning routine before Tom gets the paper and the headline is YOUR MISSION, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT. I don’t need an entire ‘human interest’ storyline, I just don’t want to see the reset button pressed and Tom either getting a new girl (too James Bond) or having to re-romance the same woman all over again.
By the way… what ever did happen to Thandie Newton from the second movie? They spent that whole movie falling in love, then in the third movie Tom Cruise is getting married—you think they’d at least try to make that stuff sync up. I know part of the third plot was that his wife doesn’t know about the spying and has to pick up a gun for the first time, but maybe people would’ve been a bit more invested in the storyline if we already knew this wonderful, amazing woman Tom Cruise was marrying instead of being told “Hey, Tom Cruise loves her, and so should you!” I don’t know, maybe Thandie Newton was busy. *checks IMDB* Nope!
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?
And Fincher doesn’t do that. He’s almost insipidly faithful to the novel, including subplots that balloon the runtime up to two and a half hours. This movie ends more times than Return of the King. First, they find out who the killer is. Then, Lisbeth exposes the guy who gave Daniel Craig trouble in the opening. Then, she gives him a double-comeuppance! Is he going to be super-important later on? Is he going to show up in the third movie with a robot hand, swearing vengeance? He’s a corrupt businessman in a movie about Nazi rape-murderers. His just desserts seem like they should be kinda low on the honey-do list.
Here’s my principle issue with the movie—the little changes they do make. They seem really focused on doing a faithful adaptation, yet for all the graphic violence, sexual explicitness, and downright gratuitous rape scenes, they soften up the character of Lisbeth Salander. Despite the fact that she calls herself a crazy person, the movie wants you to know that she has a heart of gold and really just wants a hug.
Her sexual relationship with Daniel Craig becomes more romantic. Just before she chases the killer, she asks Bond “May I kill him?” and gets a weary nod -- the movie really hasn’t earned her seeking his approval. Maybe if she’d said “Mind if I kill him?” as in “This guy’s dead, but I don’t want to hear you bitching later that you weren’t included in the decision-making process, so here’s your shot at getting your objection down on the log.” She doesn’t even kill him; he gets nuked in a convenient explosion before she can. The big expression of her “weirdness” becomes her sex scenes, where she enthusiastically gets orgasms from Daniel Craig. Put down one in the male fantasy column.
The movie even ends with Lisbeth getting her heart broken and slinking off like one-half of the Will-They-Or-Won’t-They couple on a sitcom. Aww, she really does care. Will you two crazy kids ever get together?
By the way, why would this sexually liberated, bisexual, fuckbuddy-having character be so thrown by an open relationship? Wouldn’t she know Daniel Craig was in one? That seems a bit reactionary, for the film to toy with polygamy through her character and then decide that if she can’t have him all to herself, she doesn’t want him at all. He’s James Bond! There’s enough to go around!
Getting into those rape scenes, we actually see more of Lisbeth being raped than we do of her vengeful scarring. I guess because seeing Lisbeth torture a guy, even one who the film makes it painstakingly clear has it coming, would make her too ‘unsympathetic’. I feel like in the book, we were meant to see Lisbeth as fucked up, but understand and sympathize with her. Here, we’re meant to straight-up like her and approve of everything she does. Forget about male fantasy or female fantasy, she’s meant to be a heroine. And that’s not a bad thing, but a male hero would be able to get away with dark behavior, even without the hedges of having suffered so much. In the end, Dragon Tattoo doesn’t put Lisbeth on equal ground with a male hero, it just pushes her in that direction.
Speaking of rape… oh, that sentence again… why are those scenes in the movie? I know, I know, sexism, violence against women, raising awareness. I’m asking, if the movie is making a point about rape culture and even criticizing Daniel Craig’s character by putting him on a spectrum of misogyny with the social worker and the killer… well, you’d think they’d be saying that the killer and the social worker are different facets of the same problem. But then it turns out they’re both crazed rapists. The endresult is saying “Yeah, Daniel Craig cheated on his wife and led on a girl young enough to be his daughter, but he isn’t that bad.” I mean, he never rape-murdered anyone.
Moreover, is it really necessary to show the actual raping? If someone we know is a rapist handcuffs Lisbeth and the scene ends, I think we can assume bad stuff. Do we really need to see him saying “Up the butt!” Now, I know, you’re going to say “That’s so the audience can get really outraged at his actions and really want Lisbeth to get her vengeance on him. The actors and director are working together to get that response, they want it to be gruesome and evil.” And I just don’t think it takes that much talent to make a rape scene look awful. “Hey, man, who are you to want to censor David Fincher? If he wants to show rape scenes to get an emotional reaction from the audience, that’s his choice!” Yes, it is, but if you’re doing an explicitly feminist movie explicitly revolving around a strong female character, shouldn’t you be obliged to do it in a way that’s a little tasteful?
It’s like, if there were a black joke in a Die Hard movie, you’d roll your eyes and move on. If there were a black joke in a movie about the Civil Rights Movement, you’d be wondering why the filmmakers thought they could put that on the group they’re supposed to be supporting.
And if there are people out there who can’t sympathize with a rape victim and want to see a rapist punished unless they actually see someone being horribly assaulted, they should probably fuck off and die.
Maybe in the end, the reason for Lisbeth’s popularity is that she blends the uncompromising badass nature of a Milla Jovovich or Angelina Jolie heroine (who are themselves often watered-down) with the caveat that her awesomeness is a freak occurrence, a lightning strike, a crazed set of circumstances that drove a woman to the unnatural length of being a hero. And whether you want to blame that on Larsson or not, a heroine who is both incredibly badass while having a readymade excuse for that badassery is the kind of thing the world is just ready to embrace. But as for fandom, well… we’re over it. We don’t need a heroine who’s been raped to justify her heroism. We need one that hasn’t been.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 11:21 pm (UTC)Never has a truer word been said, it was a very enjoyable piece of entertainment though.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 05:19 am (UTC)I don't really think this is true. Johnny Depp has always been positioned as a female fantasy figure, moreso than a male figure. He rarely if ever plays conventionally macho and he's always been considered on the "pretty" end of male beauty. Jack Sparrow may be clever and a pirate, he's also cowardly and kind of queeny. He hangs out with Kiera Knightly but never seriously tries to romance her, making him safely available for female fans to project personal or slashy fantasies onto.