Did the new Girl with a Dragon Tattoo film miss the #MeToo memo?
- In The Girl in the Spider’s Web, series heroine Lisbeth Salander is more action spy than the female avenger who hurts men who hurt women
- She is the main character now though, rather than sidekick to Blomkvist
The girl with the dragon tattoo is back. It’s been seven years since the late Stieg Larsson’s literary heroine Lisbeth Salander last led a movie – and perhaps the biggest surprise is just how long it’s taken for this antisocial computer-hacking Goth to return.
“[She’s] one of the best fiction characters of the last few years,” remarks Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan director orchestrating her return in The Girl in the Spider’s Web.
Published posthumously in the mid-2000s, Larsson’s original trilogy became a phenomenon, having sold 80 million copies across 50 countries. All three books were adapted into successful Swedish-language films, starring Noomi Rapace as Salander. Then in came Hollywood, with Larsson’s first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, taken on by David Fincher in 2011, with an all-in-black Rooney Mara in the title role.
Audiences could not get enough of Salander, the moral crusader abused in her childhood who seeks vengeance on those who hurt women. As the first story so viscerally showed, she is not afraid of extreme and gruesome retaliation, notably when she ties up her guardian and tattoos “I am a sadistic pig and rapist” on his torso. Such elements came from Larsson’s own personal experiences; as a teenager, he witnessed a brutal rape but did not intervene.
Fincher’s film made US$232 million worldwide and won Mara an Oscar nomination, but it wasn’t enough to convince studio backers Sony to fork out for a sequel.