Intarasuwan 1 Karnkamol Intarasuwan Stephen Charbonneau FIL 3808_001 April 25, 2012 The Girl with the Dragon

Tattoo The representation of the world -or in this particular case, women- through film is a creation of men from their point of view in which they confuse with reality. It is argued that ones culture and society shapes the way one experiences a film, and the worlds patriarchal culture greatly affects that experience. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argues that in Hollywood narrative cinema, women are used as a visual pleasure for the audience, to satisfy the spectators scopophilic desire. Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to tackle the fascination and obsession with women and their sexuality. She believes that the unconscious of the patriarchal society has structured film form. While many hold her theory to be true, more and more Hollywood narrative films are depicting women in different ways. Such as David Finchers feature film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the character Lisbeth Salander is far from Hollywoods usual image of a woman. The story revolves around a Swedish journalist after being sued for libel, Mikael Blomkvist, who got an offer to investigate a 40-year-old disappearance of a wealthy patrons niece. He met Lisbeth Salander, a researcher and a computer hacker who worked for a security company and did background search on Blomkvist before he was hired for the investigation. Salander was extremely smart and had great attention to details. She usually dressed in dark clothing, her hair was dyed pitch black and it was always peculiarly styled. She had many ears and facial piercings and her eyebrows were bleached white. It is fair to

Intarasuwan 2 say that Salanders role in David Finchers The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo defies Laura Mulveys view of the typical female role in Hollywood cinema from the way she looked, the way she acted, and the way people treated her. Within the patriarchal structured film form, woman becomes a marionette at the end of the strings control by a male other. As Laura Mulvey suggests that the male is the signifier, while the female is the signified. The male is the maker of meaning and the female is the bearer of meaning. The character Lisbeth Salander goes against the patriarchal form by not letting it affect her. She became the maker of meaning to the people around her, as well as to the audience. Salander did not play by the rules, by what is deemed acceptable in the society, and she made up her own. When the client who hired someone to investigate Blomkvist asked her boss to meet her, her boss described her as different () in every way. Salander dressed in her own way, a way that deviates from what most of the society would consider normal. In the scene where she made her way into the office of her job, people were staring at her and whispering things about her but she did not exhibit any attention or care. The way she look made people think. Her appearance made an impact on the people around her, making her meaning, while the crowd had no impact on her because they have no effect on who she was or chose to be; reversely, the crowd became the bearer of the meaning. Mulveys challenge is to fight the unconscious structure of language while still stuck in within the language of patriarchy. Lisbeth Salander stepped up to the challenge by redefining the typical female image and by not letting the patriarchal culture define her. In psychoanalysis, the pleasure in looking is associated with scopophilia and it relates to the fascination with the human body. According to Mulvey, this fascination grows into sexual stimulation through sight. This function in psychoanalysis centers around ones curiosity about

Intarasuwan 3 other peoples bodily functions, their differences from ones own such as the penis or lack thereof. Although this concept of psychoanalysis applies to Lisbeth Salander, the roles in which it applies to her are reversed. When the protagonist, as well as the audience, looked at Salander, she did not become an object of sexual desire because her appearance broke the pattern of social normality. The voyeuristic phantasy (714) is incomplete because her image did not fit what the mind is used to seeing in the mainstream film. To Blomvkist, at first sight Salander was a computer genius who knew more about his personal life than any of his closest friends and he simply wanted her help on the disappearance case. Her intellectuality outweighs what mainstream cinema considers important of women, their appearance and sexuality. When Salander was perceived as sexual pleasure, it was not because she appeared or behaved in the conventional Hollywood way. Nils Bjurman, Salanders new guardian, took control of her finances and forced her to give him sexual favors. His scopophilia was so active and it existed in the patriarchal society as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as object (713). He knew that Salander had no family and no friends. He saw her behavior and appearance as abnormal. He asked her if she thinks her piercings make her look attractive because he lived in a cultural valuing beauty above other things. His frustration with her deviant whole resulted in him in trying to control her the only way he knows how, by forcing sexual acts on her whenever she needed to use her money. Although she was not a portrayal of usual Hollywood female, she still falls prey to the phallocentric society. Within the sight obsessed society, the woman becomes an image for man to look at. Because of the patriarchal society, human sexuality becomes imbalance between male and female. Mulvey believes that the pleasure in looking for male is active while the female is passive, such as the male holding his gaze on the female image. This can be observed in

Intarasuwan 4 mainstream Hollywood cinema. Unlike other mainstream Hollywood women, Lisbeth Salander is not an image that people are used to gazing upon. Nonetheless, everyone still looks at her because she looks different from everybody else, simply not in a sexualizing way. In this film, Salander showed a powerful gaze that is usually present in male. She was always cautious of her surroundings but she was not afraid of being looked at. When Blomkvist first discovered her and entered her home, her eyes never for a moment left Blomkvist. He did not gaze at her in a way that is frequent in conventional Hollywood, even though she was not wearing pants at the time. Salander was the bearer of the look. As well as in the scene in the elevator where she confronted Bjurman to leave her alone, she did not stop looking at him until the very last moment as she left the elevator. He was under control of her look, which does not occur very often in a normal narrative film. Even in the scene when Bjurman had raped her and after when Salander was showering, her to-be-looked-at-ness was present under an uncomfortable situation but her image was never fragmented to create an object of eroticism. As the bearer of the gaze, the audience got the image of Salander as a whole, un-objectifiable person. The male/female sexuality almost becomes irrelevant because Salander displayed sexual interest in both sexes. The structure of normative narrative cinema of heteronormativity would not apply to her at all if she did not have a sexual relationship with Blomkvist. Even so, she defies the active/passive relationship between male and female. She took the active role and initiated the sex upon Blomkvist to calm him down after he had been shot. In another scene, Blomkvist wanted to discuss the disappearance case and Salander told him to be quiet for a moment until she was sexually satisfied. The roles are clearly reversed from what is normal in Hollywood. Women in Hollywood seem to always be stuck in some kind of dichotomy. They need to be sexy but not sexual. They are important to the film but not important enough. Laura Mulvey

Intarasuwan 5 argues that although the presence of a woman is essential to the narrative film, her existent does not move the storyline forward and often holds it back with her eroticism. However, that is not the case for Lisbeth Salander. Her sexual relationship with Blomkvist only helped push the story further. To him, she was not a distraction but she was his companion of equal status. She may have been a distraction to Bjurman but what he forced upon only motivates to help Blomkvist with his case even more. Without her, Blomkvist may have never figured out the clues that led to the murder of many young women that eventually led to their murderer. Even if he did figure everything else on his own, he would have died under the hands of the murdered because he was caught. Salander also figured out who the murderer was and rescued Blomkvist in time. If this were to occur in the mainstream Hollywood narrative, their roles would be exchanged. Also thanks to Salander, Blomkvists libel case was resolved because she could get the information he never could, closing his loose ends after helping him solve the murders and finding the patrons niece after 40 years. In spite of Lisbeth Salanders idiosyncratic character in the Hollywood film narrative, women are still constantly being depicted as an object in a patriarchal culture. They are still being represented as simply a visual pleasure for the male in a phallocentric society and being seen as a distraction and have little importance to the narrative. This creates a false notion that women are men are supposed to look a certain way, behave in a certain way, and talk a certain way; certain ways that are completely different from one another, creating an imbalance. What the character Lisbeth Salander does is bringing something distinctive into the mix of mainstream women. She shows that not everyone has to conform to normalcy. There are numerous types of women out there that are not being represented as they are. Lisbeth Salander is a step into transforming mainstream Hollywood film its patriarchal structure.