Tonight my roommates and I watched “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and spent the majority of the movie yelling at the characters on screen and repeating the mantra “Something bad’s gonna happen, ohshitsomethingbad’sgonnahappen!” For those of you who haven’t seen it the movie follows a disgraced journalist (the delicious Daniel Craig) who is asked by the aging patriarch of a prominent mega-corporation-owning-family to solve the 40-year-old mystery of his beloved granddaughter Harriet’s disappearance. The journalist eventually teams up with Lisbeth (Mara Rooney), a legally insane, goth/punk/androgynous computer-hacking genius and together they uncover an extremely disturbing set of murders that Harriet was attempting to solve herself. The plot involves a great deal of a violence/sexuality combo—suggestions of Lisbeth’s childhood abuse, sexual abuse as part of the murders, and a particularly difficult to watch rape scene. Lisbeth’s state-appointed “warden” of sorts, with whom she has to have monthly meetings to ensure that her “insanity” is monitored, is an utterly disgusting man who demands sexual favors from her in exchange for access to her own money. It starts with a blowjob and, on the second occasion, wildly escalates into a rape scenario where he chains Lisbeth to his bed and violently rapes her—the audience sees the aftermath when she showers off and is covered in bruises and blood. In later scenes, Lisbeth is at a random club, takes drugs, and ends up bringing a woman back to her house for (presumably) sex. Even later in the movie, Lisbeth basically jumps on top of Daniel Craig and they have sex a few times during their investigation.
I mention these three events because they brought to mind some contradictions with, first of all, Ivory’s (et al) article about gendered relationships on television where they discuss traditional gender roles, namely that women generally follow the submissive traits—self-doubt, timid, meek, unbold, etc. (2009, p. 173). This movie is interesting because Lisbeth is anything but submissive; even while being brutalized, she screams and wildly struggles against her chains, she pushes the woman in the club up against the wall and kisses her, and she gets naked in front of Daniel Craig and hops on top of him. Ivory et al categorize “being on top during sexual activity” as dominance, and during the sexual scenes in which Lisbeth consented, she was always depicted on top (2009, p. 181). Obviously this study was for television and is taken a bit out of context here, but the idea of gender roles remains pretty static throughout film as well. Another interesting parallel that came to mind was Markle’s Sex and the City study, how she discusses “second wave feminism” validating “women’s desire for sexual pleasure beyond the confines of a monogamous heterosexual relationship” (2008, p. 49). Lisbeth certainly fits this category as she sees what she wants (the woman in the club, Daniel Craig—can you blame her?) and takes it for her own pleasure.
There’s a lot to say in terms of sexuality in this movie, but I thought it was refreshing to show such a dominant and frankly badass female character comfortable in her own ambiguous sexuality. That being said, it might be argued that this is problematic because Lisbeth is in no way your “average” woman. She wears grungy black clothes, has weird hair and dozens of piercings and tattoos, and drives a motorcycle. She’s really kind of butch and this bothers me because it’s almost as if the movie is acknowledging her feminine sexual power and “toning it back” by making her less conventionally desirable. BUT, if she were to be beautiful, I bet you a million bucks she would have been sexualized with tighter clothes and makeup and big bouncy hair. It’s kind of a Catch-22.
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