I didn't even like the book Girl With The Dragon Tatoo all that well, though it held my attention. Riding the thriller wave is not the only reason to read, right? Thinking, as opposed to consuming, is the operative word when reading. And, as we know, movies rarely live up to the books they spring from. Anyway, here's a link to IMDB on the movie of Dragon Tatoo (2009 Swedish version) .
And here comes the forthcoming Americanized version (2011), which according to online scuttlebutt will "kick up the A on adult," by request of director David Fincher. Rumors have it the script will depart from the book even more than the 2009 Swedish movie script did.
I'm not holding my breath. So quick to judge, eh? Well, maybe the tragedies of the recent week have me writing preemptively.
A friend of mine, a religion teacher actually, recently suggested, in a brief conversation about the book, that she worries about minds that are capable of imagining such things as occur in said book. Flummoxed at people who mainline those bowels of depravity, both brand and severity, she visibly bristled. There are an awful lot of those minds around, I shrugged.
If we can believe the Ropelato statistics--from the Utah-based research firm that produced widely publicized 2006 stats on porn (porn here by my own definition as graphic sex, portrayed for its own sake, titillation, or horrification, a word I've apparently just made up)....if we can believe them, porn, in 2006, was a $97 billion industry worldwide. So, first, please note that the porn dudes of the world are getting massively rich.
According to Ropelato's report, not only were a quarter of daily search engine requests, numbering 68 million in '06, porn related, 12-17 yr olds were the largest consumers of internet porn and 80% of 15-17 yr olds had had multiple exposures to hard core porn.
This doesn't sound like my usual movie review. I realize that. Call me getting older, but it seems to me like the world's going to hell in a handbasket. Porn consumption increases like the rate of epidemic cholera in aftermath to the recent earthquake, and tides swallow Queensland sending lives, land, and materials out to sea this week. Not hellish enough? A 9 yr old girl and 5 others get shot dead during an assassination attempt on the congresswoman from Arizona. Oh, and the rain in Rio is precipitating mud slides that are burying people alive.
Does anyone really actually like Stieg Larsson's character Liz Salander, the dragon tatoo girl of the Millennium series? It's hard for me to believe but maybe some people do empathize with her. Maybe some people admire her smarts. Dangerously though she seems to fascinate some while others appear to idolize, even consume her. Maybe she's the millennium version of Barbie. Okay, maybe a cross between Barbie and Ken.
But can this fictitious supersmart androgyous computer hacker par excellence sexual violence victim take back the night by becoming a perp herself? Is that going to help put things right in the world? Even a fictitious world? I fail to see how the fictional goth girl series is helping reality. Oh, excuse me, I forgot. Whoever said anything about helping? This is a thriller.
While I resist linking you to the MTV article on Ronney Mara (cast as Salandar in the 2011 film), as I'd like to refrain from spreading Salander fever, I cannot not include the link here. The MTV article with photos of young Mara as an indie movie star darling and now in her Salander makeover depict a kind of branding--and I am not speaking of tatoos--we are all familiar with by now.
On the recent W magazine cover, Mara is the tough, lean, mean new Sallandar with...what? what's that I see? Blood on her hands? Director David Fincher reportedly wanted her hands even bloodier for the photo shoot. Salandar is, after all, the embodiment of vengeance.
For the love of anything more meaningful than money, power, and fascination, er, compulsion for sex and violence, would you want your daughter, or your granddaughter, to grow up to be Salander? For that matter, your son, or grandson?
Let's sidestep Salander for a moment and consider the case of a real shooter, Jared Loughner, the 22 year old kid who failed attempt to assassinate Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford (D-Tuscon), but succeeded in killing a 9 yr-old girl, 5 others, and wounding an additional13 bystanders.
There's a lot of talk in the media these days suggesting partisan rancor and politically motivated vitriol incited Loughner. My theory since the git-go has been much stupider. The kid, who's crazy, wanted to be somebody, in a big way.
Yes, I am sketching this together; I admit it. And Liz Salander is only one version of the victimized young protagonist who copes with damaged and disturbed minds (hers and others) by playing with fire (to play with Larsson). However supersmart and rational Salander also is (it's fiction), when it comes to vengeance, it comes down to drawing blood.
It's just that in real life, mixed-up folks aren't as carefully constructed as fictional folks are, and neither are real life plots revised, so real folks that act like the fictional folks end up maiming and killing innocents.
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We might get the impression that the Larsson books are actually thrillers that make you think, because the characters and situations are fairly complicated. For example, you gotta ask yourself which is worse--the stupid systemic injustices and dubiously sanctioned violence that afflicts the young victimized protagonista, or the shockingly horrid acts of premeditated, indeed, calculated violence in which she's a free agent getting control back, as well as retribution.
Well, real life victims, or those who see themselves as such, and have access to automatic weapons and the like (bombs), commit shockingly horrid acts of premeditated, indeed, calculated violence in which they think they are acting as free agents gaining control and retribution, too. Only real life is even more complicated, not so carefully constructed as fiction, all helter-skelter, and nobody really has control of it, and lastly, it has real consequences for us, living here, on this planet.
Or, how about this one? Does the victim of cruelty have the right to become such a bad-ass? Real life imitators, I'm guessing, don't think about that one too hard; they just get off on it.
If you were to ask me, ultimately the Millennium trilogy movie making enterprise is one big bloody roiling cesspool with millions, nay, billions of dollars in it. If you buy into it, you throw your money into the pool. Hey, have you checked your investment portfolio lately? You might also want to check your hands. As for the people making this stuff up and putting it on screens the worldover, I have a hard time seeing those people for all the blood they're drenched in.
