The Girl with the Blue Velvet Tattoo

I saw the Swedish film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo recently. It was clearer and more focused than the book but, distilled, was a bit less enjoyable. I was reminded of the old David Lynch film, Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet was well cast and well done but a painful film nonetheless. It is a story about sadism, masochism, gratuitous brutality and the people who enjoy that. Worse, inherent in the story is the belief that this kind of behavior is intertwined with the American culture and stains everyone in it. A story with that viewpoint is demanding on the audience; the audience must be at least open-minded enough to accept the generality as a possibility. Most mysteries and action stories treat such criminals and perverts as criminals and perverts, a subset of the culture; such stories rarely proclaim the criminals as an integral part of the culture and the pathology as a general characteristic unless, like The Godfather, the lens is very narrow. After all, not all Germans in the Second World War were Nazis and not every frenchman is a wine snob. Unless the accusation is close to the truth the filmmaker asks the audience to be a bigot and assume the worst of the people it describes. Blue Velvet did that and so does Dragon Tattoo.

In Dragon Tattoo Sweden is awash in misogynism, bigotry and cruelty. The good guy is like as pacifist in a Viking war camp. The other good guys are too old to be dangerous. The bad guys are sometimes too horrible to watch. But, like The Godfather, as the atmosphere and culture are consistently brutal, the behavior is somehow consistent and believable. Blue Velvet failed to sell the consistency and consequently the brutality seemed without context and pornographic.

There is a moment in Dragon Tattoo where Lisa Salander revenges herself on her abuser by raping him. It is said that the movie audience response to this scene is usually cheers.

On second thought, maybe Lynch was right.