sweden – Bad Reputation

At The Movies: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Oh God I Am So Sorry I Watched The Remake First

Markgraf — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:00:31 +0000

Oh, by the way? There’s spoilers in this, too, if, like me, you were/are a complete Millenium Trilogy virgin.

I’ve turned over different ways to start this review in my head, and really the best way I can think of is with an apology. I’m sorry. I did a bad thing. I watched the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo before I saw the original Swedish. I haven’t even read the books, either. When my own revolution comes, I’ll be first against the wall. And then my revolution will end.

I am often ferociously anti-Americanised-remakes, as the remake trend can assume, on the part of their Western, English-speaking audience, a certain level of can’t-be-bothered-with-anything-not-in-their-own-language.¹ It also assumes that anything not English-language isn’t really worth seeing, and this is fully gross. That said, I avoided Stieg Larsson’s critically-acclaimed Millenium Trilogy until the remake came out, and let me tell you why. It’s quite simple, really.

Rape scenes. That’s why. There’s some notoriously graphic sexual assault in these films. So I avoided them. I avoided them very well until I heard Trent Reznor² was doing the soundtrack for the remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and then, three days ago, I found myself with a spare few hours and a fiver in my pocket, and went, “Hey, I’ll go and see a film that I know will trigger the fuck out of me on my own! What could go wrong with that?”

Nothing went wrong at all. I mean, yes, both rape scenes are absolutely atrocious and I actually felt sick and cried, and if you’re at all disturbed by the portrayal of sexual assault, stay the fuck clear of this film, BUT I saw it again the next day and bought all three of the original Swedish films (well, the extended versions that were two-parters for televised release), and watched the original TGWTDT that very evening. I was going to, in fact, write a comparison piece on the films and talk about how the remake does things differently in terms of the plot and all that, but something magic happened when I went to see the film the first time around and I found myself incapable of doing so.

Have you ever fallen in love with a fictional character? Everyone says it’s impossible to fall in love at first sight, and while that may be true of people you meet in the street, it’s totally possible to fall in love with a character the moment they appear in the story.

I have fallen in love with Lisbeth Salander. So, this review is going to compare the original Lisbeth (played by the divine Noomi Rapace) and the remake Lisbeth (an unrecognisable Rooney Mara), and how her character varies across the films, in part because of some very small design decisions. It’s also a good excuse for me to do some proper fanart of her. I fully accept that my opinion of Lisbeth was shaped by the version of her I saw first.

In Niels Arden Oplev’s original films, Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth is withdrawn and quite brusque, but perceptive and vengeful. She makes eye contact with people, she touches them, asks questions – she’s pretty easy to relate to, and in the however-many hours of sprawling investigative plot you get, she undergoes a lot of development, morphing beautifully from a quietly damaged, pained creature to this fully-fledged angel of justice. In the final scenes, where she hunts down killer Martin Vanger on her motorbike, she doesn’t ask for permission to do so; she just watches him burn to death, deaf to his pleas for mercy. It’s a beautiful scene. There’s steel in her eyes and mouth. It explicitly echoes her own setting alight of her father – a parallel only hinted at in the remake – and her associate Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) is amazed and disgusted with her when he learns of her actions, which allows Lisbeth to give her gorgeous “Don’t make him into a victim” speech.

Original Lisbeth is a human. Plenty of design decisions have lead to this: she has eyebrows, for a start, which do a lot to shape her face and give her expression. She has make-up that looks like a professional taught her how. She wears colours other than black. Her skin is unblemished, and her nails are short and neat. She carries herself with quiet pride, and her eyes are alive with Noomi Rapace’s trademark razor-sharp observational glare. Her hair lies flat a lot of the time.

She’s as brusque and vicious as you’d expect, but she shakes people’s hands. She makes eye contact and says things. And all this fleshes her out as a character in more explicit ways that a viewer can relate to – it’s easier to form an empathic bond with a character who has dialogue, obviously – but she’s a lot more human. And yes, I do actually count that as a bad thing.

Remake Lisbeth, in David Fincher’s film (co-starring Daniel Craig) is a tiny, vicious monster. She is easily the greatest thing about the film, with Rooney Mara effortlessly stealing every scene she so much as breathes on, but unlike Original Lisbeth, she starts out as being so viscerally damaged, so visibly broken and so fucking furious with the world around her, that it feels as though she remains quiet just to barely contain the thrashing, clawing monster that she constantly keeps under skin. Where Original Lisbeth becomes more overtly monstrous, the character development with Remake Lisbeth is that she becomes more human, almost – she seeks out Mikael because she has, as she says in a one-sided conversation with her former guardian, “made a friend”.

Everything Remake Lisbeth does and says is carefully tailored to make her as cold as possible – fitting perfectly into what is visually an ice fucking cold film, all in blue, black and white. “I have a high metabolism, I can’t put on weight,” she deadpans, as though she’s said it a thousand times before, when she’s asked when she last ate, even though that wasn’t the intention of the question. Her make-up is sloppily crayoned-on as if she simply couldn’t care less. She doesn’t care. She prowls through the film as though everyone she meets couldn’t affect her life if their own lives depended on it, and if they tried, she’d literally bite them to death. Her eyes are wild, fiery and bestial. In the last shot of her face, when she watches Mikael walk off with his lover, Erika (the painfully hot Robin Wright), she honestly looks like a wolf. Her eyes are almost red. It really does feel as though in everything she does – including sex – Lisbeth performs only the very basics of what she needs to be received at all in society, because that’s in her best interests. Everything else can burn.

And that, my friends, is why I liked the remake better than the original: because Lisbeth is a werewolf. Also because she gets better consensual sex scenes and her revenge upon her rapist isn’t filmed to be a precise echo of her own rape. Perhaps I’ll write a second Lisbeth Salander Please Can I Be Your Friend Why Are You Biting Please Stop Biting Me essay comparing all the sex she has.

But for now, here’s a potted summary of why you need to see the remake, honest.

YOU SHOULD SEE THE REMAKE BECAUSE:

It’s bleak, disgusting, savage and beautiful all at once
It’s very nicely paced
The acting is superb, and it contains predominantly European/Swedish actors!
It doesn’t feel very Americanised, product placement aside (why do I suddenly want an Epsom printer?)
LISBETH LISBETH SHE’S AMAZING LISBETH I LOVE YOU LISBETH
I literally do not have the words for how perfect Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s ethereal, terrifying soundtrack is

YOU SHOULD SEE THE ORIGINAL BECAUSE:

It plumbs into the mechanics of the story with more depth
Lisbeth has more dialogue, particularly showing her social politics
The sex scenes (as opposed to the sexual assault scenes), particularly between Erika and Mikael, are more loving and personable
You get more backstory to the characters in general
It’s a lot less bleak and disgusting-feeling than the remake (although the endless shots of dead women’s faces at the end is horrendous)

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THESE FILMS BECAUSE:

I am not joking when I say that, between them, both films contain two of the most personally painful rape scenes I have ever seen (Rape 1 is worse in the original, Rape 2 is worse in the remake, but that’s obviously completely subjective!)
A cat is mangled in the remake (but not the original)
Seriously, it’s actually quite horrible in its violence, both portrayed and alluded to, so steer clear if that ain’t your bag

Did you know they’re making a Hollywood remake of Troll Hunter? I know, I know, I set everyone around me on fire, too. It’s okay. It’s a natural reaction.
I would crawl through fire to get to this man’s trousers.

“Be Your Own Hero”: BadRep talks to illustrator Tiitu Takalo

Miranda — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:00:31 +0000

The moment I find her website, linked by a reader who’s posted some of her illustrations for a feminist textbook on Tumblr, I’m in love with her work. She’s not widely known here in the UK, and works mainly in Finnish (with some translation, mainly into Swedish). Her website bio identifies her as a feminist before everything else. And her illustrations are so arresting, so real, that I have to learn more.

Her name is Tiitu Takalo. You might not know it yet, but she’s your new favourite illustrator. You’re welcome.

So much stuff is available to English-speaking markets that I reckon the vast majority of us here in BadRep Country have a lot of inertia about discovering non-English language media, from the music of Rammstein through to subtitled films, even.¹ It’s a shame. We’re missing out. And though I’m not currently able to read Tiitu’s books in the obvious sense, her art is that kickass that I just don’t care. I’m willing to muddle through. Muddling is how a great deal of important learning Gets Done. And if you’re interested in feminist art and media from places outside the UK/US over a language barrier, then comic books are, for obvious reasons, an excellent place to have a go at climbing over said language barrier.

If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that at least three of Team BadRep, me included, are budding illustrators ourselves, so I was fascinated to hear how Tiitu approaches her work.

When did you first realise you were a feminist?
“I think I have always been a feminist. Or all the conflicts with the rest of the world have made me one. It started when I was a child. My mother was a career woman in the metal industry. Most of her co-workers and colleagues were men. She drove the car and also fixed it herself and one of her hobbies was carpentry. And my father did cooking, and he did our carpets by hand – I don’t know the word for it, in Finnish it’s same as knitting, knitting carpets – and he still does that as a hobby. He also did some sewing. And my parents never told us (me and my sister) that we couldn’t do something because we were girls, or that we should behave a certain way based on our gender. I never heard anything like “nice girls do not act like that”. Before I went to school I didn’t know that our family was somehow different. I didn’t know that people think there are some jobs for women and others for men. I didn’t know that men and women are not equal in this world.

“When I was six years old in school I noticed that girls and boys are treated differently. Expectations are different for boys and girls. Even as a child I knew it was not OK. I also noticed that all my friends didn’t share this opinion. They were already brainwashed to think that girls are nice and quiet and tidy, and boys are not, and that this was some kind of natural law.

“I started calling myself a feminist when I met other girls and women who were using that word and were proud to be feminists. Before that, I thought that feminism was a dirty word. (That’s what they want you to think!) And yet, still, I was thinking and acting like a feminist.”

I’m in no doubt that some readers will be asking this, so despite my earlier sentiments on it not being a must-do in any way: are there any plans to translate any of your comics into English? (I really love the look of Kehä (The Ring) as I’m really into boxing, and the blurb reminds me of Girlfight, which is one of my favourite films.)

“Kehä has been published in Sweden, but I don’t have the energy to contact more publishers. There was one small press comic publisher in England which was interested, but nothing happened. I have English translations on a leaflet for Kehä and also for Jää… but it’s sold out in Finnish.”

Who are your heroes and what inspires you?

“I get inspired by other people who do stuff, other zine makers and artists. And it’s inspiring to do things together. Organise a gig, or festivals, or protests, or an art exhibition. I don’t have any heroes or idols. Everyone should try to be one’s own hero.”

What are you working on at the moment?

“I just finished a graphic novel about the history of my hometown, Tampere. It’s a collaboration with a scriptwriter and the Museum of Tampere, so it’s different from what I have done before. Maybe more mainstream. But I like the idea. There are nine stories from different periods. For example the 1850s story is about a 14-year-old girl working in a cotton factory – not the story of the factory owner like it usually is in the history books. The book is also published in English as Foster Sons and Cotton Girls. And now I’m trying to start a new comic project about a community living project I’m involved in.”

We’ve had some artists decide they don’t fancy being interviewed on our site because they didn’t want to be identified with a “feminist” site. Have you ever had difficulty getting work because of your feminist reputation?

“No, I don’t think so. Or I just don’t know if it has been an issue somewhere. In Sweden, where my comics have also been published, it’s actually really cool to be a feminist. They have a really cool feminist comic collective called Dotterbolaget (“daughter company”), and the most popular comic artists in Sweden are women and feminists. I have heard that it’s so fashionable to be a feminist comic artist in Sweden that some male artists who are not feminists are calling themselves feminists in order to be cool or increase the sales of their books.

“We certainly don’t have that problem in Finland. The F-word is still something people don’t want to be associated with. I think it’s important that more people are calling themselves feminists. It is not something to be quiet about. We should be proud and we should be loud! After all, we are making this world a better place for everyone. For women and men and children and sisters and brothers around the globe. Feminism is not just smashing patriarchy: it’s making everyone equal.”

How much do you use digital tools to produce/edit your work (if at all!)? Mine is mainly hand done with barely any digital editing because I like marker pens and am still really getting to grips with digital at all! How is it for you?

“I don’t like computers, and I’d rather spend my time painting with watercolours than staring at a screen. I love to see how the colours blend with water or how ink spreads on the wet paper. It’s like magic! If it’s possible, I don’t do anything with digital tools. I don’t even want to scan my work myself. Someone else can do it better, or even find that interesting. Why should I do it? The answer is, unfortunately, money. When I do my own zines or other publications, I don’t have money to pay anyone to do computer stuff for me.”

You created Hyena Publishing to help get your work out there. Being arty types, we have a fair few friends who are often trying to launch self-published projects, and it’s often a lot of work to stay afloat. What advice would you give to young artists starting out?

“Take a small edition of your book or zine. It’s more fun to have sold out than to find 500 copies of unsold books under your bed when you’re cleaning up your place. Try to do something small first. Twenty copies with your home printer or copy machine at your school or workplace.

“Do something together with your friends. It’s more fun and you can split the work and expenses. Do not try to do your best book first. It seems like people have massive ideas for the first book or zine, but they get exhausted by all the work and get nothing done. Don’t think you will get rich by doing zines or even comics. It’s hard work and underpaid.

“Try to contact other self-publishers or small press people. Find out where they are printing and selling and share your knowledge with them too. Go to zine festivals and events. The best thing about being your own publisher is that no one can tell you that your comics aren’t good enough, or that they are too political, feministic, personal or emotional. Do comics you would like to read yourself. Not the comics you think other people want to read!”

Warm thanks to Tiitu for talking to us. Head to tiitutakalo.net and order her books by email – if you ask nicely you might be able to get a translation leaflet…

I have never understood this one. It’s BEEN translated! What’s with the anglocentric excuse-making complex? It’s just embarrassing.