The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is to sexism what Kathryn Stockett's The Help is to racism. Both work less as attempts to grapple with serious topics than shallow wish-fulfillment fantasies by those unaffected by the subject matter. For Stockett, a white woman, it was the harshness of the Jim Crow era as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not racist that black people not only trust her but risk their lives to secure her book deal. For Larsson, who helplessly witnessed a gang rape as a teenager, it is Sweden's startling patterns of sexual abuse as catalogued by an author stand-in so emphatically not sexist that the avenging fury of violated Woman herself not only trusts him but screws him. Furthermore, as it was written while Larsson was in hiding over his reporting, the book also addresses his longstanding issues with toothless investigative journalism and Sweden's lingering extreme-right element.

Yet David Fincher's adaptation is not really about any of those things. Tossing out Larsson's self-righteousness entirely, the film also reduces protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's almost comically active sex life—it's amusing that the novel's version of Blomkvist gets laid as much as James Bond, and he's played here by the man himself, Daniel Craig. But Fincher even hacks out the questionable feminist empowerment of Lisbeth Salander, presenting her violence with a coldness that robs her vengeance of its bloodlust. Instead, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo acts as a retroactive bridge between several of Fincher's films: it links the religion-tinged carnage of Se7en with the analytical anti-whodunit of Zodiac, as well as that film's painstakingly slow-going, interpersonal analog with The Social Network's ultra-fast, beyond-humanity digital. If Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is about the late author's preoccupations, then Fincher's is about his own.