The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo:

A Movie Review by John David Ebert

I’m going to assume that anyone who has had any pressing need to see this film or read the book that it is based on has already done so by now, so that I can proceed to discuss the plot in detail without ruining anyone’s jouissance.

First, let me just say that I am a big fan of Swedish noir in general and an avid reader of the novels of Henning Mankell in particular, and that this film was indeed true to the generally bleak spirit of such narratives. And at two and half hours, the fact that I never got up out of my seat to use the restroom once should speak for itself.

On the other hand, if I were pressed to say whether I thought the film was any better than previous examples of its type, such as Silence of the Lambs or the 1980s thriller Jagged Edge (remember when that one was all the rage, playing for weeks and weeks?) then I would have to say, “No, it’s not. It’s exactly the same as those films. In fact, you’re simply watching the modern incarnation of those very same movies.” It’s amazing to me sometimes how little changes in cinema and how afflicted is the general public with short term memory.

But in the present instance, the plot goes something like this: a reporter named Mikael Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger to find out what happened to a family member by the name of Harriet Vanger, who went missing in 1966. She used to send him embroidered flowers every year, but the puzzling thing is that year after year he has still been receiving embroidered flowers, sent, presumably by her killer.

Blomkvist is due to serve some jail time in six months for libelling a corporate tycoon, and so it is ironic that Henrik is the head of a corporation called The Vanger Group (Stieg Larsson didn’t think much, apparently, of corporations). Henrik suspects that some member of his family is responsible for the killing of Harriet, but he has no idea who. Some of his relatives, however, were members of the Nazi party during World War II, which is important because this will later turn up as a plot point.

Blomkvist takes the assignment but soon realizes that someone is hacking into his computer and following his research. That someone turns out to be a 24 year old computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander, who has a huge tattoo of a dragon on her back. The two soon join forces and gradually begin to unravel a string of serial killings that took place beginning in 1949 and went on all through the 1950s and 1960s. The murders were all girls and they were all Jewish. It’s not too difficult, once this is learned, to figure out who in the Vanger familly was responsible for the killings, although it turns out that these killings did not involve Harriet Vanger at all.

Blomkvist is a typical Swedish noir investigator. He is middle-aged, divorced, burnt out and quickly turned off by violence (in this latter respect, the Swedish hero differs from his American counterpart). It is his sidekick, Lisbeth, however, who is the interesting character: as a young child, she had lit her own father on fire for abusing her mother, and early on in the film, we see how well she handles herself when her “guardian” tries to blackmail her for sex. Needless to say, at the end of the film, it is she, the girl with the dragon tattooed on her back, and not Blomkvist, who disposes of the villain. In fact, she saves Blomkvist’s life.

In ancient myth, it was often the case that when a hero killed a monster, he made the monster his vahana, that is to say, his vehicle upon which, in Oriental art, he or she is normally depicted as standing. Thus, the dragon king that Kuan-yin saves in the form of a fish is often depicted below her feet in Buddhist sculpture.

The archetype of the female dragon slayer, which is relatively rare in myth, nevertheless does occur: we think of Durga, for instance, or the Japanese Tokoyo. In the history of Western iconography, her appearance is almost non-existent until Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie Alien and the woman in the last story of the Heavy Metal animated movie of the early 1980s. She has been appearing with ever greater frequency in the following decades until she has now reached the point of being so common–Laura Croft, Xena, Elektra, etc.–that we take her for granted.

And now here she is turning up in Swedish noir with the dragon that she used to slay now incorporated as her own vahana on her back. Having assimilated the dangerous powers of the dragon into her essence, Lisbeth Salander (which sounds like “salamander”) makes one very nervous indeed. She has no trouble dispatching male sadists, rapists and serial killers. In fact, where the Swedish noir hero is totally nonfunctional, she saves the day.

And the significance of this motif?

To be honest, I can’t say for certain, although I find it interesting that the woman as dragon slayer now making her appearance in Western pop mythology finds its analogue in both Hindu and Chinese female dragon slayers, but is a pattern utterly absent from the Islamic world, where women wear burkas and in Africa submit to having their clitorises sliced off. No one would ever say that the Hindu and Chinese societies aren’t patriarchal, they are. Yet: there was one Chinese empress by the name of Wu Zeitan, and the goddess, as is well known, is one of India’s most sacred deities. No such figures turn up anywhere in the entire history of Islam.

So surely we can conclude that the presence of the female dragon slayer is an indicator of the esteem which a particular society holds for its women.

But the fact that, before the coming of Mohammad, the shrine of the Ka’aba was ruled over by three goddesses may be a clue to the reason why she is so fanatically repressed in that religion. Perhaps there is a fear that one day the Arabic psyche might, if the genie is let out of the bottle, find itself submitting to her wishes?

Who knows?

But suffice it to say for now that I enjoyed The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and look forward to its sequel.