In ‘The Millennium Trilogy’ (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest), Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander complete a multitude of excruciatingly complex tasks. Whether it be hunting down serial killers who target women, exposing sex-traffic rings, trying to prove the innocence of several people, or unravelling cold cases, it’s no secret that they have their hands full for most of the trilogy. However, who is assigned with the hardest task of all? It’s not Lisbeth, and it’s not Mikael. It’s you and I, the audience.
Whether you’re watching David Fincher’s brilliant version, Niels Arden Oplev’s original Swedish version, or reading Stieg Larsson’s book, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo introduces to us the most complex character probably ever written in contemporary fiction. Larsson brings to light several objective questions, and challenges us to see through the hard outer-shells of people, while also pulling a hood of disturbing content over our eyes. He does this all through one character: Lisbeth Salander.
“Who is she?” “What does she really want?” “Why is she doing this?”
These are questions that you’ll find yourself asking over and over again while reading, or watching the trilogy. Salander is the most enigmatic and mysterious character you’ll ever come across. Her appearance, her behavior, and her lifestyle make many people wonder whether she’s a hero, or an anti-hero. She shows complete disregard for societal norms and usually engages in activities that are against the law, and antisocial. She’s astoundingly smart, carries the burden of a photographic memory, and she doesn’t fear anything. She’s extremely vulnerable, but she’s also mentally strong. She dresses in a strange, gothic manner, but can be very loving. She’s a big bundle of contradictions. So, what is she really?
When describing her to people who haven’t read the book or seen the films, I usually say, “She’s kind of like Joan of Arc. Independent and headstrong. Only, at the same time, she’s the exact opposite of Joan of Arc. Joan ended up giving in to the torture she received, and was martyred, but Lisbeth relishes in her torture and strikes back viciously, coming out on top many times.” That’s probably not the best description, but it’s as close as I can pinpoint it.
Both film versions attempt to make Lisbeth as mysterious as possible without making the audience too lost. David Fincher’s version does this better than the Swedish version. It’s not often that this happens, but yes, in my opinion the American interpretation is better. I don’t know how many times I have to say this to people, but Fincher’s version is NOT a remake of the Swedish film. It’s a separate interpretation of the novel and does a better job of sticking with the book.
If ever you were to try and imagine what Lisbeth looked like, the person who should come to your head is Rooney Mara. It took nearly 6 months for Fincher to find who he wanted to play Lisbeth, and it ended up being Rooney Mara. Mara had previously worked with Fincher on The Social Network and had proven herself worthy of being chosen through several screen tests. Not to take anything from Noomi Rapace’s fantastic performance as Lisbeth in the Swedish version, but Mara essentially is Lisbeth Salander. Had Fincher settled on a different actress, I probably wouldn’t feel any of the passion for the film as I do now. As I stated in my review for Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Side Effects’, Rooney Mara is a force of acting. If you ask me, with her performances in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Social Network, she’s already one of the greatest actresses of contemporary cinema, and will probably go down in my book as one of the best of all time.
But I digress. Back to Salander.
In the books, Larsson sets us up with a challenge from the beginning: He makes us want to find out more about this woman, and doesn’t give away too much of her past until the second book. But even then we still don’t learn as much as we want to know. It’s ironic, though, because he sets us up wanting to do something that Lisbeth already does: We want to look more into her past and see behind the curtain; Lisbeth is a private investigator, and a hacker, who finds out people’s pasts and provides her boss with precise background checks. From the beginning we start analyzing and researching, wanting to find out more about what motivates Lisbeth, just as Lisbeth does to other people on the daily basis. So, in a certain sense, WE are Lisbeth.
We all have bits of Lisbeth inside of us. We spend our entire time reading the books and watching the films, wanting to find out more about her, when the whole time she’s really just little pieces of all of us put together in an odd way. Perhaps that’s the reason why just about everyone who reads the books, whether it be teenagers, men, women, or old women in book clubs, all find her so appealing. Although she may LOOK a little repulsive, we still can’t help but fall in love with her. However, here’s the thing that’s so interesting: we love Lisbeth in the books and in the films, but if ever we were to see a real Lisbeth Salander, we would be repulsed, and probably wouldn’t want to be anywhere near her. These are the contradictions that Larsson wanted to point out with his novels.
So, to sum it all up, we, in a sense, are Lisbeth, and we are absolutely fascinated by her, but if we ever really saw Lisbeth, we’d be repulsed. So, essentially we are repulsed by our own selves! That’s the magic of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Not only does it cause us to see ourselves in a different light, but it also points out the constant contradictions we make when we judge another person.
Being the mysterious, anti-social anti-hero who conjures up so many questions about ourselves, there shouldn’t be any doubt that Lisbeth Salander is one of the most important fictional characters ever written, and that David Fincher’s film version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the most important movie of the past 30 years, due to it’s solid depiction of her, and us.