The Boy With the Dragon Tattoo Crush

I'm in love with Lisbeth Salander. I'm unrepentantly coming out with this information, despite at least three reasons this is a stupid way to feel:

1.) Lisbeth Salander is a fictional character from the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy—a series of books I haven't read (I struggled through 10 pages of an Amazon.com preview before giving up on them)—and two movies I've seen for work that I'd call absolute shit. Salander is a better character than either franchise deserves. Furthermore, I’m assuredly not in love with Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth in the movies; she looks much cuter in character.

2.) As conceived, Salander isn't even "my type," nor is there anything really appealing about her personality. She’s a pretty good hacker, but aside from that suffers from Asperger's, is prone to (as Liz Phair said) "fuck and run," and doesn’t have a noticeable sense of humor. Her issues will keep a dedicated therapist in practice for decades, let alone any unlucky partner.

3.) Although some stone-cold shit is done to Salander, her violent retaliations would get an enthusiastic thumbs-up from the waifish sociopath from Audition. Just saying.

Despite all this, Lisbeth Salander is absolutely the most fascinating female protagonist I’ve encountered in a long time. She’s so good, it’s hard to conceive of her being dreamt up by the same mind that resorted to the hoary clichés of evil Nazis and ludicrously huge blonde guys built like Jaws from Moonraker. Salander reminds me of every unhappy girl from my middle school who inexplicably walked around wearing a spiked dog collar and combat boots, looking miserable about everything. The difference is that Salander definitely has her reasons: abused childhood, her autism, a generally lousy hand dealt in life. These are rote and knee-jerk explanations (why would a girl dress like this? Because she has been abused, of course!), and the spirit of the series is essentially a smugly socially conservative one—albeit one that shamelessly revels in all kinds of sadism and sexual violence, with the shrugging excuse of being "realistic" or "gritty." These are, still, explanations, and the movies actually attempt, in a clumsy way, to deal with an unprecedented new breed of hero.

Tank Girl may have paved the way for dog-collar-clad action heroines, but Salander is infinitely more popular. The books are subway-ubiquitous, and a friend who works at a law firm in Omaha says everyone there is reading them, which is about as widespread a demographic as the rights-holders could ask for. This presumably means that millions of Americans (and all of continental Europe in the bargain)—God-fearing airport thriller readers who normally celebrate righteous heroes—are now cheering on a weird-looking girl who would normally get strange looks in small towns where punk never broke.

Salander's sulky charisma may be unaccountable: she does nothing to earn it. She gets our sympathy as any abused person would, but she's one of the most baseline unlikable female protagonists in years. Yet, she's sullenly compelling like Jodie Foster often is, radiating a tightly self-contained core that explains more about her than all her clothing and accessories.

Let's face it: the movies (which are, to repeat, absolutely terrible) don’t give us more than that to work with. There's a lot of gratuitous nudity (if HBO had gotten the rights to this, they'd be going nuts), an exoticized fascination with Salandar's tattoos (which aren’t nearly as outlandish or colorful as anything I see on a daily New York City basis) and that’s about it. She’s a fetish object for the guiltily fascinated, and it’s no coincidence she ends up sleeping with a fit-but-hardly-dreamboat middle-aged man that represents one of the biggest demographics for the novels (and the most unlikely genre coupling since Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton in Code 46). She doesn't really develop or reward our patience, except for when it's discovered that she's a bad-ass pugilist.

But there's something about the mere fact that such a hero exists—and is widely popular—that's heartening. It's like Morrissey hadn't wasted all those years pleading the outcast's case in vain. Lisbeth Salandar is a true outsider protagonist: she's not misunderstood, she doesn't reveal hidden depths and sensitivities after a while, and she never adjusts into a normalized look the way Rachael Leigh Cook would. She's a less charismatic Julia Stiles trying harder to look fierce, and she doesn't loosen up and get with Heath Ledger at the end—she's impenetrable. That's heartening, and so it's too bad that the movies and books are dreck. However, Lisbeth Salander will outlive all of it, and at least audiences are trying to meet her on her own terms, if secretly pruriently.

Posted by ahillis at July 9, 2010 7:44 PM