The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

1,276 words

For a review of the English-language remake, click here

For several years now, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels have been among the world’s best-selling works of fiction. Of course, I have no time or taste for contemporary popular fiction, so it completely escaped me.

Around last Christmas, however, a friend mentioned the movie version in the context of a conversation about travel in Scandinavia. (The movie was produced and shot in Sweden.) By chance, shortly after that, Netflix included it in a list of movies I might like. On a whim, I added it to my queue, then forgot about it until it showed up in my mailbox a month later.

All of this, of course, is a necessary alibi, because this movie is so stupid, so politically correct, and so downright evil that I never would have watched it if I had known anything about it, aside from where it was filmed.

Stieg Larsson (1954–2004) was a Swedish Communist journalist and activist. He was also a fervent feminist. In his work, he portrays Sweden as a society rife with violence and sadism against women. No, he is not writing about the violence committed by the Muslim and black immigrants that Communists like himself have been inflicting upon Sweden. He is writing about Swedish men.

Now the Vikings did their share of roving and raping and pillaging a millennium ago. I have the blue eyes to prove it. But today, Nordic men are among the most peaceable and law-abiding in the world, and by all objective measures, Nordic women are some of the best off women in the world, although they are now being subjected to increased levels of rape and sexual exploitation by non-white immigrants. (In Stieg Larsson’s world, the only immigrants are women, who are raped and murdered by sadistic Swedes.)

But it gets worse. Sweden is, of course, one of Europe’s most left-wing countries. Stieg Larsson’s Sweden, however, is menaced by powerful Nazis. That’s right. Nazis. Larssen himself claimed that his life was constantly threatened by powerful Nazis. He refused to marry his long-time girlfriend, telling her, “Sorry baby, if we get hitched, the Nazis might get you too.” A gallant defender of women to the end, that Stieg Larssen.

Larssen’s books were published after his death, and under Swedish law, his mistress gets nothing. He wanted his estate to go to the Communist Party, but his will was legally invalid, so all of his royalties go to his father and brother. Surely they could not be worse recipients of a vast fortune than Stieg, his mistress, or the Communist Party.

These Nazis are, moreover, some of Sweden’s leading industrialists. And there’s more. One of these families of Nazi industrialists, the Vangers, is about the worst clan since Sawney Beane. There is incest, parricide, and a father-son team of serial rapists and murderers.

To make matters worse, the father, Gottfried Vanger, seems to be a Christian religious enthusiast (in about the least religious country in Europe).

But what is truly unforgivable is his anti-Semitism. His victims are Jews. Including a Jewish farm wife. (Perhaps her family fled Hans Landa’s WW II roundup of Jewish dairy farmers in France depicted in Inglourious Basterds.) When the Jewish angle is revealed, the good guys — already hip deep in death — react with a special horror that reveals that their deepest sympathies lie with Jews. The whole atmosphere of the movie darkens. Now, the audience is to understand, this evil is really serious.

Thus Stieg Larsson is mentally indistinguishable from a Jew in regarding Jewish lives as more valuable than non-Jewish lives, including, presumably, his own. Normal people reserve their deepest horror for the deaths of the people who are closest to them. It is more horrible to lose a friend or family member than a stranger, more horrible to lose a countryman than a foreigner.

But Larsson’s characters — who are merely projections of his character — are horrified when they discover that the victims are not their fellow Swedes, but Jews. In Guillaume Faye’s terms, they are textbook ethnomasochists and xenophiles. They would prefer their own people to be murdered rather than Jews (Jews above all) and assorted totemic “others.”  Sick, sick people.

Gottfried, the sick bastard, teaches his son Martin to be a rapist and serial killer too. The son, however, is rather pleased that he has grown beyond his father’s racial and religious views. Martin is modern. He is emancipated from prejudice. He just kills for pleasure.

Sweden did have some prominent Nazis, including the great explorer Sven Hedin (who was part Jewish, but that did not prevent him from befriending Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and other top Nazis). As a young man, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden’s greatest filmmaker, was an enthusiastic admirer of Hitler. Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA and one of the world’s richest men, was a follower of Swedish fascist Per Engdahl (who was not a Nazi but a follower of Mussolini). Sweden also has younger generations of neo-Nazis, but they are few, marginalized, powerless, and far less prone to violence than non-white immigrants or left-wing anti-fascists.

The “good guys” in this movie are the “girl with the dragon tattoo” herself Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Norén, who is half Swedish and half Spanish-Gypsy) and Mikael Bomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist), a left-wing journalist and defender of women clearly modeled on Larssen himself.

Lisbeth is an emotionally damaged woman who has been mentally hospitalized. She has mutilated her body with multiple piercings and extensive tattoos. Her hair is bottle black. (Even without the ink and hardware, her body is repulsively lean, muscular, and titless.) She works as a hacker: a criminal who snoops in people’s private data. She has Asperger’s syndrome and has a hard time maintaining personal relationships. She is a lesbian. Oh, and when she was 12 years old, she set her father on fire.

Larssen had the face to claim that Lisbeth is Pippi Longstocking all grown up, which is a pretty good description of the agenda of every leftist defender of women. Pippi Longstocking was a cute, adventurous little girl with superhuman strength who was the subject of a highly popular series of wholesome Swedish childrens’ books and movies. The feminist idea of progress apparently means turning every bright, spunky, adventurous Pippi Longstocking into a hard, cold, emotionally repressed, alienated, criminal, tattooed, lesbian freak with a face full of hardware.

Of course the modern publishing industry turns out this kind of repulsive, politically correct swill all the time. The reason that Larssen’s books are so popular is that—if the movie is any indication—he is actually a good storyteller. The movie is also a very well-made, directed by the Dane Niels Arden Oplev, with a uniformly excellent cast. The character of Martin Vanger is genuinely terrifying in ways never approached by more flamboyant serial killers like Hannibal Lecter.

But it is impossible to recommend such a relentlessly dishonest and stupidly P.C. movie. At least abominations like The Matrix Reloaded, Inglourious Basterds, and Machete can be turned to our advantage with a clever review. But this movie has nothing positive to offer.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is long gone from the theaters. But you have not dodged the bullet yet. Hollywood could not pass up a steaming pile of anti-Nazi, anti-white, pro-feminist propaganda like this. So Jewish director David Fincher (Fight Club) is working on an English-language version starring Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist. They are aiming for a December 2011 release. Happy Hannukah!