The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I’m late to the bandwagon of Stieg Larrson, but I can see why so many people are reading this translated Swedish thriller trilogy. I just finished the first novel, I’m 50 pages into The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second, and I’ve been promised a lend on the third.

Part of the appeal is that Larrson respects his reader’s intelligence and creates characters that are intellectually, as well as politically and sexually, motivated. Mikael Blomkvist, the crusading journalist and editor of a scrappy investigative magazine called Millennium, is one of genre fiction’s more appealing heroes, in part because his masculinity is surprisingly unconventional. I usually read mysteries or thrillers with women gumshoes or protagonists, because I find the hardboiled masculine variety predictable and sometimes offensive.

But Blomkvist is compromised from the start of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as he’s been indicted and sentenced to prison for libeling a powerful industrialist named Wennerstrom. When we first meet him, then, he’s already flawed, although his journey follows the archetypal trajectory of the wronged hero who’s vindicated after he survives a series of trials that prove his righteousness. I’m not spoiling anything with this description—this is one of the rules of the genre, and watching it play out with so many relatively progressive (politically) twists is what makes this kind of novel so pleasurable and compelling.

Blomkvist restores himself to favor in the course of a labyrinthine plot that takes him north of Stockholm to a small, frozen island in the Norrland where he’s persuaded to spend a year in the employ of another powerful corporate mogul, the worthy Henrik Vanger. In his declining years, the melancholy elderly man is desperate to solve the mystery of his niece Harriet’s disappearance from the island 40-odd years earlier.

Hedeby Island’s population teems with Vangers, a family dynasty with plenty of skeletons rattling in terribly sordid closets. Because Henrik Vanger doesn’t want his family to know that he’s hired Blomkvist to continue investigating the unsolved mystery of what most presume is Harriet’s murder (though her body was never found), Henrik assigns Blomkvist to write the older man’s biography as a cover. As the shrewd journalist combs through the family patriarch’s extensive archive of materials on Harriet’s disappearance, Blomkvist pieces together a story about perversion and corruption that Larrson makes both plausible and harrowing.

Much of the book describes Blomkvist poring over evidence and interviewing likely suspects or people whose lives in one way or another touched Harriet’s before she disappeared in 1966. Research and interviews are staple tools of the mystery/thriller genre, but Blomkvist’s character is set off by the fact that his stock in trade is journalism, rather than police or detective work, which gives him a slightly different cast from the genre’s typical heroes. Blomkvist’s motives start as personal; Vanger promises him that if he gets to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance, he has information about Blomkvist’s nemesis, Wennerstrom, which will prove Blomkvist’s innocence.

But before that happens, Blomkvist actually does his time in jail, even if it seems a very cushy, decidedly white collar stint in the slammer, during which Blomkvist continues his investigation for Vanger examining files and photographs in between his mandatory work assignments and exercise.

And before he’s given the carrot Vanger promises, Blomkvist finds himself committing to his investigation for more personal reasons. He begins a casual affair with another one of Vanger’s nieces, Cecilia, whose father is a Nazi sympathizer, along with at least one of his other brothers. Cecilia proves one of the book’s several interesting women characters, and one of the three with whom Blomkvist has sex through the story.

Cecilia is in her mid-50s (about 10 years older than Blomkvist), long divorced, admits that she hasn’t had sex in some time, and chooses to seduce Blomkvist within minutes of meeting him. But because she’s wary of emotional involvement, and because sex seems to send her into frenzies completely incompatible with her more reserved daily emotional exterior, she keeps reeling him in only to cut bait and run.

The “man on a yo-yo” theme is typical of Blomkvist’s relationships with the women in Dragon Tattoo, a refreshing change for a genre in which the heroes are more typically men who phone in their relationships with women, seeking bed companions on their own terms and leaving the women to wait for their call. Larsson’s hero rarely passes up a sexual opportunity, but I don’t believe he ever actually initiates one.

Blomkvist’s long-term occasional sexual companion is also his smart, competent business partner, Erika Berger, a woman he’s known since they were both young journalists. Berger is married to another man. Gregor, Erika’s husband, knows all about her relationship with Blomkvist—the arrangement seems to suit everyone just fine. Erika and Blomkvist truly love one another, and their work together on Millennium, the political muck-raking magazine they own and co-edit, sets off intellectual and political sparks that fuels their sexual commitment.

That they aren’t married to one another, however, is a nice touch; that no one minds their unusual arrangement is also kind of cool. Erika walks in on Blomkvist with other women several times throughout the story, and while she’s always embarrassed at what she’s interrupted, she’s never jealous or angry. As usual, in Dragon Tattoo, the women in his life control the enactment of Blomkvist’s desire. And none of them are eager to haul him down the aisle.

To call his third sexual partner, the series co-anchor Lizbeth Salander, Blomkvist’s side-kick would diminish her importance to the story and its action and fail to describe her relevance and appeal. The genre’s conventions typically require one hero or heroine who, although he or she might frequent likely people for support or companionship, typically goes it alone to solve the mystery and unmask the murderer. In Dragon Tattoo, Larsson writes Blomkvist and Salander as an odd-couple who complement one another and contribute equally to the resolution of the plot—in fact, they simultaneously but separately realize the villain’s identity.

The two don’t actually team up until halfway into the story, although Larsson keeps their activities on parallel tracks until they intersect. Salander, a brilliant computer hacker, works freelance for a security firm and is assigned to background-check Blomkvist by Henrik Vanger’s lawyer before the old man hires him to find Harriet. In the course of investigating the journalist, Salander comes to her own conclusions about the Wennerstrom affair, which prove relevant as the story unfolds.

But it’s only when Blomkvist realizes he’s been investigated and reads her report that he seeks Salander out and proposes that she work with him. And it’s only because her work is so extensive and impressive—even if she’s uncovered things about him that he knows she obtained by illegally hacking into his computer—that he pursues her as a work partner. Their relationship, in other words, is professional and mutually admiring; they’re both whip smart, driven, curious, and skilled.

Salander is one of the most compelling, unusual characters I’ve come across in genre fiction. She’s a young woman with her own mysterious back-story, one that Larsson hasn’t fully revealed by the end of Dragon Tattoo. She’s a ward of the state, legally determined incompetent to govern her own affairs, even though she’s by now twenty-five-years-old. Her relationship with her new guardian, a slimy lawyer named Bjurman, taps into old traumas, as he tries to manipulate her and wield his state-derived power over her ugly in ways she can’t accommodate. How Salander gets her revenge is one of the book’s most satisfying—and surprisingly feminist—chapters.

In fact, to complement Blomkvist’s equitable way with women, the unusual Salander is the book’s feminist heroine. She’s young and troubled, but she’s enormously smart and wily. Her photographic memory and quick curiosity makes her a gifted investigator, but her social awkwardness, which clearly stems from her dark personal history, keeps her an iconoclastic loner.

She lives in a messy hovel, dependent on Bjurman to dole out her finances; she chooses her sexual partners based on fleeting desires for physical connection, with little regard for emotional commitment, which she assiduously avoids; she reveals nothing of her inner life (Larsson consistently describes her eyes and demeanor as “expressionless”); and she’s particularly wary of men, even as she chooses them (as well as the occasional woman) as sexual partners.

When she and Blomkvist become lovers, it’s Salander who seduces him (in a typical mystery with a male hero, this would inevitably be vice versa). And although he protests that co-workers shouldn’t sleep together, she points out that he and Berger have an on-going affair that doesn’t seem to hamper their professional relationship. But once Blomkvist and Salander have sex, and even though they live together in the small cottage Vanger provides for their work on Hedeby Island, they don’t adopt the conventional routines of coupledom.

She keeps her own counsel, and bristles when Blomkvist tries to draw her out about her past (and even when he compliments her on her brilliance, which she thinks makes her a freak). She retains her right to be enigmatic and antisocial, often refusing to answer Blomkvist’s questions and leaving town without a word, avoiding her cell phone to prevent being tracked down. Salander is a cipher, even to the reader—through the first novel, we never find out the root of her exceedingly guarded relationship to her own life.

That mystery makes her exceptionally compelling, alongside her prodigious intelligence and commanding savvy. She dons leather chaps to ride her motorbike; she drinks heavily when appropriate, and smokes cigarettes freely; she’s hedonistic in unusual, fascinating ways. Salander understands, as the evidence unfolds, that the seamy underside of the Vanger empire is built on a profound hatred of women—she diagnoses and explicitly names misogyny in ways rarely seen in a genre that’s famous for building its plots on the backs of exploited women.

But at the same time, for reasons Larsson doesn’t fully describe, she’s deemed “incompetent” by the state, has been institutionalized for too much of her life, and is now controlled by a corrupt guardian who exercises more power over her affairs than any theoretically free person should be forced to withstand. Salander’s contradictions and the character’s ambiguities propel the narrative as much as the central plot.

I’ll avoid spoilers here, but suffice it to say that many of the book’s crises and resolutions are among the best I’ve read in the genre, and twist the typical gender politics in feminist ways. Watch for Lizbeth’s revenge over Bjurman, which enacts a kind of feminist fantasy; watch for the scene in which the villain is revealed and entraps one of the two protagonists, forcing the other to the rescue; and watch for continuing twists and turns, as one portion of the mystery is solved only to propel you into another, as each of the plot's strands click together by the end. Even the resolution provides a kind of feminist triumph, with smart, emotionally cool new characters appearing to vindicate the proceedings.

I’ll risk one spoiler to lodge my only complaint: That Lisbeth Salander would find herself in love with Blomkvist by the book’s end seems completely out of character. Without understanding her life story, Larsson doesn’t give us enough reasons to believe that she’d allow herself the luxury of such emotion, even though he presents her feelings as a surprise even to herself. Although now that I’ve started the second book, it seems her realization could have been a plot device to set in motion The Girl Who Played with Fire, at the end of Dragon Tattoo, her however uncomfortable admission of love cheapens a relationship in which Salander has been refreshingly unsentimental and in control.

That said, I’m hooked enough to continue into The Girl Who Played with Fire, and to give Larsson the benefit of the doubt.

A Swedish film version of the first book has been released, which I’m eager to see, and press speculation circulates about casting for the English-language film. I’ve heard Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart both mentioned for the Salander role, among other young actors. Stewart’s more sinewy frame and her sulking, emotionally guarded sexuality makes her my pick for the role.

In another world, Salander would be played by Shane, from The L Word. I don’t think Kate Moenning, the actor who played the hard-living, non-monogamous lesbian hair stylist character, is up to the task, but the look would certainly work.

A girl can dream. But in the meantime, I’m going to burrow back into The Girl Who Played with Fire.

The Feminist Spectator

This Wide Night

Edie Falco (photo: Carol Rosegg)

As she says in the program notes, playwright Chloe Moss based This Wide Night on women she met during a volunteering stint at Her Majesty’s Prison in the UK. Performed stories by or about women in prison have become their own genre, popularized in the US by Rhodessa Jones’s The Medea Project, for only one example, which has been studied by many scholars interested in how theatre and performance can be used to empower those without prospects or agency.

Fictionalized dramatic treatments of women presently or recently incarcerated include Marsha Norman’s play, Getting Out (1977). Norman’s pre-‘night, Mother drama concerns a young woman named Arlene's excruciating attempt at life post-rehabilitation. Her alter-ego, Arlie, haunts her life, representing her lack of constraint and conformity as a pre-reform hellion. Much of the play pivots around Arlie’s relationship with a prison guard determined to continue seeing her on the outside when Arlie/Arlene is released, which keeps her story tied to her life inside.

This Wide Night is different in kind. This elegant two-hander, produced by Naked Angels and mounted at Playwrights Horizons, is crafted as a drama that intends to use prison more metaphorically than plays like Norman's or devised performance like Jones's. In Moss's play, their stint as cellmates binds Lorraine (Edie Falco) and Marie (Allison Pill), but the story of their lives inside is revealed only glancingly, rather than becoming the play’s central focus, as it does in Getting Out. With this choice, Moss avoids the voyeurism that often propels plays (or films or television, for that matter—think of HBO’s Oz) about people in prison.

Instead, Moss uses the women’s reunion on the outside to think about the meaning of freedom, not just for those who’ve suffered its loss, but for anyone stymied by how to navigate a world they’re ill-equipped to survive. Lorraine and Marie’s differences provide much of the play’s conflict. Lorraine, middle-aged and determined to be optimistic, speaks a continuous patter of happy talk, taking to heart the adage that looking on the bright side lets you somehow live there. And yet the pain of what she’s lost, before and during her twelve-year prison sentence, creeps up on her and colors her expressions.

In Falco’s brilliant rendering, Lorraine’s face becomes practically transparent. Longing, doubt, and confusion cloud her aspect. Falco (famous from HBO’s The Soprano’s and now Showtime’s Nurse Jackie) is nearly unrecognizable in a wig of drab long hair of indistinguishable color, over-sized glasses whose ears she pushes over her hair instead of under, and a faded navy sweat shirt and baggy gray sweat pants. (The costumes, by designer Emily Rebholz, provide perfect punctuation to both actors’ performances.)

Marie looks as under-fed spiritually as she seems physically. Younger than Lorraine but more world-wise and world-weary, she appears to have already given up, an acquiescence to loss and despair that shows in her disheveled studio apartment and her slouching posture. Pill is a tall, willowy woman, but in the guise of Marie, her posture appears pock-marked, as though she’s already taken one hit too many to all the places that count.

The intense 80-minute, intermission-less play is set in a room that epitomizes the kind of existential despair the two women confront throughout This Wide Night. In set designer Rachel Hauck’s conception, the walls’ paint peels, its grimy color long since faded. The never-made bed sags when either of the women lie in it. The sink is filled with grimy dishes and the small square of mirror above it is clouded and chipped. The garbage underneath the sink spills out of the box in which Marie collects it and empty Marlboro packets lie crumpled nearby, as though Marie’s aim invariably fails.

The threadbare carpet offers no warmth or comfort. The single swiveling “easy” chair has long since lost its upholstery. And the ancient television set that sits in a corner of the floor gets only intermittent, fuzzy, rolling reception. The rusty bathroom, glimpsed through a door at the upper stage right quadrant of the set, throws a cold light that cuts angles of unflattering, unwelcomed illumination into the studio’s living space (Matt Frey’s lighting deftly makes visible the interrogatory nature of Lorraine and Marie’s lives). In such an environment, the designers and director Anne Kauffman seem to suggest, no one could thrive.

The play tracks Lorraine’s arrival at Marie’s apartment for an afternoon’s visit that winds up lasting for weeks or months through to her actual physical attempt to move out and on. Lorraine never really chooses to move in with her friend but can’t beat the inertia or find the agency required to leave. What happens between these women is less about action than it is about an arc of emotion that the actors trace with empathy and nuance, finding in these two characters the most universal themes in the most specific details of their lives.

Lorraine’s release from prison compels her to find Marie, the younger woman with whom she shared a cell during part of her longer sentence. Marie is diffident at first, her ambivalence about seeing Lorraine making her jumpy and reticent. She eventually admits that after her release, she stopped coming back to prison to visit Lorraine, even though she missed the older woman, because Marie realized during those meetings that she also missed prison. These brief direct confessions are few in This Wide Night; usually, the characters reveal their feelings and motivations through non-action, a clear choice to do and say almost nothing.

Eventually, Marie warms again to Lorraine, whose insistent ministrations are determined to recreate the intimacy they clearly shared behind bars. But here, in the supposedly free world, the women’s relationship remains syncopated—they can’t find a new groove, and the old one stays elusive and situation-dependent, bound to their common history of imprisonment.

The two women can’t really pull themselves back together. Instead of starting over, their lives have stopped. They feel most comfortable still confined, now to this studio bed-sit that’s clearly a lot like the prison cell they shared. They eat pizza and drink Budweiser, a menu that comes easily to hand for people who can’t afford real nourishment and survive on as little as possible. The room doesn’t even have a table; Marie and Lorraine share their pizza out of a box left on the floor and their beer directly from the can. You can practically see the roaches crawling through this apartment and the grit in the colorless carpet on which they often sit.

This Wide Night is in many ways a tone play. Moss envelopes Lorraine and Marie in a thick miasma of despair and indecision that they can’t see their way through. Lorraine medicates herself with an unnamed psychotropic drug. When she first downs a beer or two with Marie, her sensitive system can’t handle it and she vomits the pills and alcohol all over the already-stained carpet.

Lorraine’s constitution is weak, despite the bravado of her physical presence. In Falco’s virtuosic performance, Lorraine boasts a scatter-shot bodily bravado. Falco’s physical gesture has her sitting back on her pelvis and splaying her legs, hooking her thumbs up along the elastic waist of her sweat pants.

With this fabricated, hopeful but somehow pitiful stance, Lorraine tries to fill the new space around her, trying physically to inhabit her freedom. That she looks only gawky and awkward is part of the character’s supreme pathos. In one scene, Marie, who tends toward manic-depressive extremes of energy and emotion, suggests that they dance to the radio, and Lorraine, after hesitating for a short, embarrassed moment, throws herself into a gangly, goofy imitation of free-style movement, forcing her limbs to look loose and relaxed when they’re only stiff and stilted. The moment gets Falco a laugh, but it’s also incredibly painful, a physical demonstration of Lorraine’s inability to meet the challenges presented by being free.

Neither woman really fits into her now free body. Marie curls herself into the room’s single chair, her knees under her chin and her feet tucked into her bottom, peering out like a turtle debating if it’s safe to leave its shell. Marie can’t judge her relative safety. In fact, although she tells Lorraine that she works in a pub, over the course of the play it seems that Marie is turning tricks to survive. She services the landlord (an action intimated when she returns to the apartment to feverishly wipe her face and gargle with water over the sink) and eventually gets beat up, presumably by a trick. That Pill’s prettiness shows through Marie’s prematurely stooped and self-protective stance only makes the character’s despair that much more wrenching.

Inertia inspires Lorraine and Marie to settle into the uneasy, bumpy rhythm of an undefined life. As Marie eventually remarks, when she’s trying to hurt Lorraine by throwing her out of the flat, they’re not mother and daughter and they’re not lovers (Lorraine cringes when Marie uses the word). Their intimacy comes from being forced to share space, which fostered a connection between them that they can’t even describe or name. On the outside, Marie wields the power of the space and the lease, but Lorraine holds the power to care, an obscure notion on which Marie clearly can’t depend. She’s waiting to be abandoned again, as it appears her mother left her earlier in her life.

The women’s back-stories remain murky throughout the play, as if Moss insists that the details of their histories, their crimes, and their rehabilitation don’t really matter to how they’ll go forward in their lives. Moss does reveal that Lorraine killed someone, possibly her husband, and once out, she tries to connect with her now-grown son, Brian, who agrees to see her only once, out of curiosity, but refuses let her back into his life.

Time has closed over Lorraine. She tries to burrow back to the past—she carries around a worn sheet of children’s handwriting practice paper, on which six-year-old Brian wrote her a note. The message represents a shred of a past from which her own action forever separates her. The two women gradually realize that although their sentences have ended, time has stopped for them. There is no now, only a then that continues to entrap them.

Outside the studio’s window, Lorraine and Marie watch their neighbor comb the street with a Geiger counter. Although they don’t know what he’s looking for, they’re mesmerized by his determination to find something, to continue his quest. They watch him studiously, curious about what makes him strive. He becomes their only external example in a world that refuses to ease their way back in.

Kauffman’s direction honors Moss’s text by unobtrusively but decisively guiding these two fine actors through each moment. She doesn’t push the play to reveal more than it can, but allows each moment to find its shape in the characters’ inability to mold their lives back into place. The play’s transitions are marked by dissonant music by sound designer Rob Kaplowitz that comes to sound like the screech of time as it passes, regardless of what Marie or Lorraine do or don’t do.

Because the women don’t have the emotional or social or financial resources to propel themselves elsewhere, the room becomes an existential “no exit,” in which they’re bound to one another through fear as well as through longing for a future neither one of them can really imagine. Even the television, their only benign connection to the world, doesn’t get a good signal. Propped against the stage left wall, the small old fashioned cathode-ray tube set broadcasts a picture that rolls, full of static and barely discernible images in blurred colors with hints of words scrolling across the screen. Although Lorraine eventually remarks that she’s getting good at watching without sound or a coherent picture, even the solace of escape or fantasy that television normally provides isn’t available to these women.

The one-room apartment becomes just a slightly enlarged version of the prison cell Lorraine and Marie shared. More is at hand to fill the space, but they don’t know what to do with all these objects. The detritus piles up around them—they have no sense of “out” (as in take out the garbage or throw out what you’ve used and no longer need). Everything accumulates within, both emotionally and physically. The women have no outlet for their fear, their anger, or their frustrations.

Instead, the world enacts its violence on them. Marie leaves the studio physically but never emotionally. She doesn’t bring anything back with her until the end, when she returns cut and bruised, wearing the external marks of the outside. Lorraine understands that Marie knows the person who beat her up. And Moss implies that Marie was in an abusive relationship before her prison stint. But nothing can be done to protect her, because even free, Marie is at the mercy of a system that imprisons her much as she was in jail.

Even Lorraine, whose awkward, jerking movements represent a woman desperately trying to embody what she thinks freedom means, hasn’t a clue how to remake her life. Lorraine is so accustomed to the regimentation of prison life that she gets hungry precisely at 5:30, when dinner was served inside. Marie is her life preserver, but she clings to her only to float through still-perilous waters. Neither woman will be able to reach land, nor will they be rescued by some passing form of virtue or understanding. Lorraine and Marie are among the forgotten, formerly institutionalized women for whom a world not bound by four confining walls is impenetrable, unreadable, and utterly uninhabitable.

How nice to see a play written, directed, and performed by women. How nice to see a play that doesn’t need to be framed or redeemed by a heterosexual love story. How nice to see a middle-aged woman in a complex, compelling leading role. How nice to see a play that doesn’t wrap up its story with colored paper and a bow, but instead leaves you thoughtful, wondering what it means to be free and aware of the word’s the innumerable definitions.

How nice to watch a production in Playwrights Horizon’s Peter Sharp Theatre, where the house’s intimacy brings you physically close to This Wide Night’s performers and emotionally close to the characters. How provoking to watch a production that depicts so viscerally the wages of poverty and the lack of options for women like Lorraine and Marie.

This Wide Night is at once excruciating in the finitude of Lorraine and Marie’s prospects, and strangely hopeful, as you leave the play wanting to believe that at least these women have one another. Still, as they end the play staring out the window at the man with his Geiger counter, they’re framed within the window’s bars as imprisoned as they ever were and, sadly, probably, always will be.

The Feminist Spectator