Steg Larsson's book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels are not for the feint of heart. The books challenge the idea of a female being helpless simply because she is weaker or smaller. From the moment the protagonist of our novels Mikael Blomkvist meets Lizbeth Salandar we the reader can tell she's different. She's brilliant, she's mysterious and she's strong. She's also physically smaller than even the average woman. So today I want to examine what the movie got right and ways in which it messed up in order to wrap everything up neatly.
The characterizations are pretty much spot on for most of the movie. That is, until our protagonist and Lizbeth sleep together. For whatever reason the movie decided that Lizbeth would bare her soul to Mikael after they slept together which she did not do in the books. This is completely out of character for her. In the book series it took lots of working together and him having her back and vice-versa before she revealed anything to him. She wouldn't have become vulnerable just because they had sex and that the movie changed this about her character is a little discomforting to me.
The movie only covers the first book of the series, at the end of which Mikael still knew very little about Lizbeth. He learned that she was a hacker (on his own) and confronted her about it, after which she admitted to it, but apart from that, she's still very mysterious. Even the reader doesn't know much about her character that Mikael doesn't. We do learn that she's resourceful, and that even when victimized, she finds a way to rise above. We also learn that she is willing to do a lot of morally ambiguous things to get where she has to be. After being raped (for instance) she does not kill her rapist, despite considering that as a possibility, because she knows the job of guardian will go to someone else and she sees an opportunity to control her guardian the way he intended to control her so that she finally has control over her own money. The movie did a good job at capturing this aspect of her personality and I love that she's still the one to save Mikael from the killer. I would have loathed the movie if they had made her a damsel in distress.
I also feel like the movie really glossed over the fact that Lizbeth is bi (or pan) sexual in favor of concentrating on her relationship with Mikael. While I believe it does show some of her relationship with the girl that had been her sex buddy before she started working with Mikael, the very act of her opening up to Mikael in the movie changed their relationship. In the books, she sleeps with him on a whim and it is made clear that the act meant more to Mikael than it did to her. She just likes sex. When she is accused of murder in a subsequent book, even Mikael doesn't know if she's innocent (though he wants to believe her and ends up working with her to help prove she wasn't involved). The movie wanted to resolve their relationship right away (presumably because they didn't intend on making the subsequent movies that explained more about her character).
So while I think the American movie adaptation was good. I would definitely say you need to read the books. I've heard that the Swedish movie series is better, that it does a good job of staying faithful to the books, but I don't think I've seen it to be able to make that analysis. For now, if you want the best version of Lizbeth Salander, stick to the books.
Thank you for reading. Tune in next time when I talk about the Anne of Green Gables book series vs. The first movie adaptation series and the series Anne with an E.
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