the girl with the dragon tattoo
“Oy! Film spoilers, right ahead!” - Titanic
The other night I went with my brother and his girlfriend to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo up here in Po’Town ($7 a ticket! Hot damn). I really didn’t know anything about it or the European films or the book series, I just thought the trailer looked fun and I still like David Fincher enough to see his movies. I thought it was an action movie, and at the last minute my brother claimed that “no, I don’t think it’s an action movie, it’s supposed to be about rape.” I was a little apprehensive after that comment - maybe this wasn’t the ideal Christmas movie - but I’ve been feeling pretty down and I figured I generally enjoy a lot worse in film, so what harm could there be?
Well, there was some harm, turns out. The movie is over 2 and a half hours and I was interested in the story, impressed by the direction, the performances, the twists & turns, etc. etc. etc. But we all left the theater feeling miserable, and I had images flickering behind my eyelids that I wished I could unsee. My brother said it felt unsatisfying because ultimately the story had “vengeance but no justice” and I have to agree - it was hard to take away anything from the movie other than horrible things happen all the time and there’s little we can do about it.
I recently saw Antichrist for the first time and I actually really liked it, and that has all sorts of awful things happening in it - children dying, genital mutilation. But I didn’t feel that bad after watching it, maybe because it was decidedly a horror movie which provides a degree of emotional distance, maybe because the characters weren’t people you could really sympathize with… or take a film like Funny Games (original version, obv), which is one of my all time favorites. That has a similarly negative view toward the world - there is no happy ending for our protagonists, and that 8 minute shot of a woman dragging herself to her feet after her little boy has had his head blown off is no picnic - and yet I left that film feeling motivated, excited, horrified but inspired.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was just… I’ve been dwelling on this, I can’t shake the awful feeling that rape scene gave me. It was so graphic. It takes you through every god damn moment of it. There is obviously a point to that, it’s not something you can just sweep under the rug. But I found the experience traumatizing. That’s the word that came to mind today, days later, after I still find myself thinking of that scene and feeling sad and small (granted, my state of mind these days has not been equipped to handle stuff like this, but when is it really?). It makes me sick, really sick, which I guess rape scenes should do, but I almost feel as if I went through it, and I didn’t ask for that.
Maybe I wasn’t as bothered by the child murder in Funny Games because I didn’t see the actual violence, just had to deal with the unsettling emotional aftermath of the parents. Being dragged through the chaining down of a small girl around my age, the beating, the stripping, the screaming, the tears, the anal rape, the terrible familiarity of the attacker (looking like any average bearded, middle aged white man) - it was like going through it myself. I understand that the author of the books was haunted by a gang rape he witnessed and devoted his work to writing about sexual abuse against women, and I appreciate that, but in the end of this film I was taught that the best I could do if this happened to me is react violently, make him pay, do the same thing back to him.
There is an entire genre of filmmaking that encompasses this idea, rape —> revenge, each one different from the last. I have never seen Irreversible but I’ve read a little about it and it seems to deal more with the subject matter of how everyone responds to something like that happening in their lives. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo simplifies the aftermath - girl is already insane, keeps it to herself, tortures her assailant, dedicates herself to solving mysteries about other rape victims, falls in love - and I think the emotional distress of witnessing the act combined with little if any real, emotional coping made my brain feel violated. I want my $7 back.
