1 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a Meta- Remake By Christopher Heron for The Seventh Art The two most common types of film remakes at the moment are remakes of older films and remakes of recent foreign language films. The remakes of these foreign films aim to port the domestic success of a film to a North American market that has not seen the original. David Fincher s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is somewhat of an aberration because the original film had grossed a very healthy $10 million in the United States based, in part, on the success of the source novel. Compare that with the recent remake of Let the Right One In, another Swedish domestic success, which only accumulated $2.1 million in the U.S. ahead of its own American remake. It s fair to say that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a unique remake where a fair amount of the prospective audience is aware that it s a remake. The story of the film is especially interesting for this reason, since its explicitly concerned with components of Swedish history and culture, yet the remake by its very nature serves as a disavowal of its original national context. However many of these elements of the story are retained, there remains a distance from Sweden due to the change in language and the nationality of its actors. Coupled with the proximity to the original films and their success, it makes sense that the director remaking the film might tap into the fact that most people watching the film are aware of its status as a remake, whether they ve seen the original or not. Fincher s remake absolutely recognizes this circumstance, creating a meta- level that comments on the film s status as a remake. This quality tends to exist without comment
2 from audiences because it is somewhat closely connected to two aspects of the story that receive the least amount of attention: the anti- immigrant/nazi charges made against pockets of Sweden and the detective/procedural mode. Fincher locates his commentary on the film- as- remake at the formal level, which in turn reflects these components of the story. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo juggles several storylines that all intertwine at the site of the pursuit of Harriet Vanger, the missing and potentially dead member of a wealthy Swedish family, who also happen to control a significant national business. The relative that cared most about Harriet, her granduncle Henrik, is spurned by what he believes to be the clues sent by her killer or even captor, causing him to hire investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who has risen to media prominence for the legal battle surrounding his exposé of a corrupt businessman. This case eventually leads Mikael to hire the surveillance and computer hacking expert Lisbeth Salander, who he knows insofar as she was hired to gather information on him for Henrik. Harriet, it turns out, was conducting her own investigation before disappearing, which concerned the serial murder of Jewish girls across the country. When Mikael and Lisbeth determine that it was her father and, later, her brother Martin that was killing these girls, as Harriet had discovered herself, they also learn that he has been killing more women since Harriet disappeared. He describes one of these women in a specific manner that suggests something about the rest. Just another immigrant whore. Who misses them? The through line here is both anti- Semetic and generally xenophobic, drawing on a portion of the wealthy, old money family that was explicitly supporters of the Nazis. This quality is imbricated with their status in Sweden, endemic of a portion of the nation that supposedly persists to this day. This is a significant part of the story, but one that is mostly obfuscated by the other prominent component: the
3 violence towards women, which is also a sociological observation that is just as important to the story and has a direct impact on the protagonist Lisbeth in a way that the xenophobia and anti- Semetism do not. It s for this reason that the title of the original novel in Sweden translates to Men Who Hate Women. Fincher s creation of a meta- level that acknowledges the film s status as an American remake is more interconnected to the Nazi/immigration storyline, however, and this quality is conveyed almost explicitly in the film s title sequence, which acts as calibration for the viewer to recognize this aspect of the film. Fincher had two requirements for the sequence: that it include a cover of Led Zeppelin s Immigrant Song and that the cover be voiced by a woman. Let s count the ironies created by this: first, it is maybe the most recognizable song about the concept of immigration; two, that the immigrant narrator of the song is now understood to be a woman; three, the song s immigrants are Swedish; four, the song is about Swedish history, but from the English perspective of Led Zeppelin; and five, that this perspective is itself now being covered by Americans. The title sequence is completely symbolic, existing outside the story and therefore understood to be conveying themes, rather than plot points. The audience is then more attuned to considering why these sounds and visions are being used to introduce the film. A song as well known as this immediately presents the audience with the questions, Why is this song being used and why is it covered? When the immigrant storyline later surfaces, pertaining exclusively to women, it s a little more clear. There is a further irony when Martin reveals his killing of an immigrant woman to Enya s Orinoco Flow, which is at once an amusingly banal song that is necessary to calm this monster, as well as its
4 function as the Irish artist s international breakthrough song, which pointedly mentions a number of locations for one to sail away. Perhaps the most immediately understandable example of this self- aware approach to remaking a foreign film is the accents used. The film is English- language, but it does not change the primary location from Sweden. These are meant to be Swedish characters, but the film does not use a framing device like The Hunt for Red October to explain the change in language. Instead there is a deliberate hybridity, where Daniel Craig speaks mostly in his natural voice, while his co- star Rooney Mara employs an accent that is deliberately abstract as if she was born Swedish and speaking English with the accompanying accent. But she s not Swedish and we know that, especially when she says Tack! The killer is played by Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård a fact more or less clear to all due to his last name, but also serving as an intertext with a spate of European art films. These three, the most prominent three characters in the film s story, form a kind of trinity: the Swedish speaking English with a Swedish accent, the American speaking English as if she s a Swede speaking English, and the English speaking English as an Englishman. This deliberate intermingling of different languages takes away from the realism of the story, but adds a self- aware level pertaining to the remake process, which itself is a type of realism for our accelerated culture and the borderless exchange of information and culture. For this reason it is present beyond just the accents. Televisions frequently show news crawls that are in English, while products and storefronts retain their Swedish language. This deliberate category violation, obviously straddling the two in an unreal manner, also serves to reflect the exchange of culture in the global village. Take for example
5 the clearest gesture towards this hybridity, when Fincher chooses to include an insert shot of a book being thrown despite it having no importance to the story. Like the title sequence, the ironies pile up like the books themselves: first, the film is based on a book that owes its gigantic success to its runaway popularity outside of Sweden; second, the book that Mikael throws is a Swedish adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut s A Man Without a Country, reflecting the way Henrik and Mikael s overt opposition to xenophobia (and even Nazism) is out of sync with these aspects of Swedish culture that Larsson is identifying; third, it is on top of the original, English language version of Joan Didion s The Year of Magical Thinking, indicating whomever lived in this cabin can fluently read English; and finally the third book is the Swedish translation of the Spanish language novel, The Shadow of the Wind, which like the Millennium trilogy is an international success. All of these points convey how the remake further distances itself from the source of the story s commentary on Sweden and thereby needs to acknowledge this status as a remake to ensure the commentary is not completely lost. This approach ultimately meshes with the detective story mode that the film is operating within, where the investigation and discovery reverberates the audience s own discoveries about the topic of immigration in Sweden. David Fincher is no stranger to camera movements and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is no exception. However, I would like to isolate a few examples where camera movement can be read as a visual correlation to the probing quality of the story s investigation and the voyeurism of the audience. The common synecdoche for the original film and its remake is the rape scene and Lisbeth s revenge on the man who raped her. To this end, there is a tracking shot towards the site of both events: her guardian, Nils s room. Not unlike Reagan s room in The Exorcist, the suspense is built as the camera approaches
6 this site, which the audience understands to be the location for these shocking moments either through the context of the film or the discourse surrounding it. They are moments that are taken to be significant in the understanding of the Lisbeth character. Yet Fincher undercuts the arrogance of this presumption with another tracking shot, where the camera tracks into and over Lisbeth, literally inverting the frame and thereby the reading of Lisbeth. This also plays on the motif of following along behind the protagonists in their investigation, seemingly learning what they learn throughout the investigation. In this sense, after the rape, it is conveyed that there is actually very little known about Lisbeth and, especially, the experience she has had. This same visual trope exists for Mikael, where a tracking shot moves into the back of his head as he lies down, only to be consumed by the darkness of the couch and transitions to another shot. Mikael has notably put on his headphones, cutting himself off from his surroundings and, consequently, the probing of the camera and thereby the audience s understanding as well. Conversely, the probing camera during the research heavy moments late in the film, before Martin Vanger is discovered to be the killer, illustrate how this camera movement is intended to eventually result in our understanding. However, rather than the unsuccessful attempts at understanding the characters, it does yield results in the investigation itself. These camera movements culminate with the map of Sweden, which not only facilitates the comparison between Martin s travels with the locations of the murders, but also reinforces the systematic prevalence of this attitude across the nation. Sweden is literally marked by these xenophobic murders and the understanding of this is the culmination of the type of dramatic camera movements that were less successful in broaching an understanding of the protagonists.
7 This is not to say that the topic of immigration dominates the film. Fincher is arguably most interested in expanding upon the relationship between the two protagonists in his adaptation of the Swedish film. However, these are interventions that cannot be denied, recognizing the film s status as a remake of a Swedish film in order to ensure that local peculiarities of the book s social commentary are not lost in translation. In this sense, the self- awareness is present in two key areas: as a persistent filter, through the Swedish location and scattershot accents; and as an emphatic punctuation, found in the title sequence, oscillating between the use of Swedish words and translations, and the map s relationship to solving the crime. Through these techniques, Fincher has created a remake of a recent foreign language film that responds to some of the pitfalls that overtake films in this category: by acknowledging itself as an English language remake of a film that is rooted in a non- English speaking culture, while at the same time differentiating itself from that original film.