"We're not making any money off these Stieg Larsson novels, so here's my plan: Let's attach an intriguing director and an all-star cast to their movie adaptations so we can disregard Sweden's seminal film interpretations of those same novels and make zillions of dollars."
This conversation (or one like it) had to have taken place in some producer's Los Angeles board room, possibly accompanied by maniacal laughter, lightning bolt. And now that we Yanks have seen fit to make a version of our own, the English language Inter-tubes are aflutter with excitement.
A lot of this critical chaff zeros in on Lisabeth Salander, the trilogy's anti-heroine and feminist stocking-stuffer. The women's studies implications of Salander are voluminous: She's a battered woman with an interesting sex life who hates (and exacts revenge upon) men who hate women. She may or may not have the ladies studies merits of Pippi Longstocking.
Katie Roiphe's recent Slate post hints that there may be more to Salander than the armchair feminists and literary critics give her credit for. At the organs of right-thinking feminist prose, "you will hear the assumption of victimization…and the simultaneous assertion of power." What's more, this character has come to the forefront of our collective imagination on the eve of The Good Men Project and The End of Men. Coincidence? Roiphe thinks not.
Roiphe doesn't go so far as to explain what it is about Salander that makes her more than grease on the literati's gears. This is because critics are stuck on the woman-ness of Lisabeth Salander, and haven't broadened their scope beyond feminist cause celebre: that she's an archangel of democratic values.
Consider what she's up against in the novels. Her nemeses are misogynists, yes, but also the barrage of confusions of the rote application of the law and the pursuit of justice. Salander was committed to a mental institution at an early age because of the political significance of her father, and her further adventures are inhibited by her status as an invalid.
Like the cases of Solzhenitsyn and Ai Wei Wei (as I indicated in an earlier post), the label of mental illness haunts the footsteps of political dissidents, even in a place as genuinely concerned with the wellbeing of its citizenry as Salander's Sweden.
At one point in the first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander's caseworker explains that based on Salander's history of antisocial behavior no-one would think twice about his revoking certain of her privileges: Everything would be Ordnung on paper. Much ado derives from how things look in official documents and reports, and the problem Larsson identifies in his novels is the disconnect between those documents and the values of truth, justice and compassion.
On the subject of paper, consider also the role of the press in Salander's life. Mikael Blomkvist is Salander's staunchest ally throughout the Millennium series, and in his capacity as muckraker he's freed to pursue Salander's twisted case down the most unlikely avenues. His investigations reveal more than Sweden's underbelly of corruption––they reveal precisely what is hidden from the police. In other words, the investigative reporter can dig where the detective cannot because Blomkvist remains forever outside the system.
Now consider where democratic values come from. Isn't, say, freedom of speech most important to people who say unpopular things? And surely the presumption of innocence is most valuable to the innocent man who just happens to appear guilty, so it makes sense that Lisabeth Salander embodies these things in series of novels about why those values require our eternal vigilance.
The significance of all this is that if critics merely see Salander as a stand-in for feminist values, the Millennium series becomes nothing more than a revenge tale in the mold of Inglourious Basterds. Yes, Lisabeth Salander is interesting from a feminist point of view, but Larsson's novels are a defense of the whole philosophical framework that makes feminist thought possible.
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