MTFLM: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

When I was in elementary school, I did a research project on Bigfoot. I’d never seen one (still haven’t), but for a while, I deeply believed they were out there. My project sought to prove they were real, or a the very least, make a case dismissing their status as “myth”.

That’s a generous description of the tri-fold board I turned in, but still, it was my first real exposure into the ideas of research, evidence, and investigation. Don’t get me wrong, my “investigation” was probably checking my backyard fence for Bigfoot DNA, but my time working on this project established the idea of “big unknowns” existing outside the realm of what I knew, both geographically and conceptually.

Few films in recent memory have elicited that anxiety about the unknown in me like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). Fight Club director David Fincher’s lesser known book adaptation uses exaggerated coloration to present easily identifiable locations and activities with an atmosphere of mystery and hidden evil.

The result: a movie that feels like a movie.

Location, Location, Location

Excluding a few exceptions, every scene maintains some element of familiarity. Even for an American audience member like myself, I can easily recognize all the locations on a conceptual level. I’ve never been to Stockholm, but I understand all the elements that comprise a city.

There’s a bridge, there’s both expensive and cheap apartments, there’s a busy downtown center with its offices and coffee shops, there’s a stretch of mansions outside the city which can only be procured through generational wealth. Stockholm has these places, but so do most cities. This allows you to sink further into the plot because your understanding of “what” is happening does not hinge on your ability to understand “where” it is happening.

For most of the film, you are whizzing through these familiar locations in a series of jump cuts. The characters are constantly traveling. Your eye becomes numb, almost expectant of these changes. That’s why the most horrific moments in the film (the social worker’s bedroom and then the secret basement) feel so different. The locations stop changing. You as the viewer are ripped from the pattern and placed in those rooms with Lisbeth and Mikael for what feels like hours. There’s no more scenery to explore, only evil to witness.

Color Codes

The same house appears multiple times throughout the film.

The first image, with a deep chilling blue, is our introduction to a key location. It’s the inverse of cozy. The world is hostile and uninviting in this moment. If the lights weren’t on, we’d be forgiven for thinking this scene takes place underwater.

These colors emerge during a warped flashback. The character whose mind we explore in this sequence has obsessed over the events that happened for years. The colors may have, at one point, been a truer and more luscious yellow in their mind, but a constant fixation on replaying this memory has made the cerebral celluloid wear out. Even the edges of the frame are blurring. All that remains is a tormented fossil buried in the character’s mind.

Effective as they are, the color choices are not all meant to feel off balance. Further along in the story, in present day, is a procedural exchange between a journalist (left) and one of his subjects (right). There’s a lot of names to keep track of in this movie, and most of them are introduced here. The pad of paper has the same shade of white as the snowy roof. The tones are balanced and the scene maintains symmetry; this gives the dialogue room to get heavy on the details. Looking is not always comprehending, so shots like these allow the viewer to quickly establish themselves in the context of a scene.

Composition and Movement

Dragon Tattoo explores multiple definitions of powerlessness. How do you visually describe such a concept? Even if you haven’t seen the film, you, as a fellow resident of the modern world, can quickly interpret what’s happening here and what it can imply about a character’s safety - psychological or otherwise. Even if the character wasn’t checking for cellular coverage, the angle and distance from which we are viewing him feels voyeuristic. We think he’s being watched, so we feel we’re being watched.

To its credit, the film doesn’t shy away from the use of modern technology. In fact, the ambient use of technology makes the characters real. The crime within the story is solved because of technology and how the characters wield it, but that doesn’t mean anything unless there’s a baseline understanding of the relationship between the people and their devices.

At several points throughout the film, characters do mundane things like make phone calls, park cars, and visit computer repair stores. They walk in and out of doorways and ride up escalators and walk down the stairs. You are seeing all these activities as they happen. These aren’t exciting events, but what’s important is that they are real things that happen to both the characters on screen and to ourselves. We can relate to what we’re seeing. We can be let in.

As you can see…

Suspension of disbelief can only get you so far in a contemporary thriller like Dragon Tattoo. Stories like these require an audience to “buy in” to the world that’s been created. The plot needs to progress organically in a real world, which also happens to be full of imperfect people. This film balances its dark subject matter and often surrealist color choices effectively because the world feels approachable.

Even if it’s for a second, we’ve all felt disenfranchised by fate, or by circumstance, or worst of all, by our own choices. It’s easy to hope for redemption, but Dragon Tattoo suggests that maybe there isn’t any to be found out there in the big unknown. Maybe all that searching is just putting time and distance between us and that which caused our ruin - taking the shattered pieces and spreading them far and wide so we forget the shape of the thing we lost.

Thank you for your time.

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Stills for MTFLM by FilmGrab