11 October 2010
The Girl Who Played with Fire
(Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander. Photo Copyright 2009 Music Box Films.)
I rose this morning to discover that two Americans, and a third man, a holder of British and Cypriot passports, have won the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. It continues a streak of awards for this cycle for accomplishment in things I do not understand.
This one was for “analysis of markets with search frictions." The one in chemistry was conferred for most excellent accomplishment in “the development of palladium-catalyzed cross coupling,” and some other guys- Physicists?- got the nod for experiments with graphene, which is apparently the thinnest and strongest material known to the Swedes.
Which is another source of confusion for me. I am positively addled these days. Alfred Nobel was a Swede, and the inventor of dynamite and owner of the Bofors arms concern whose legacy founded a Peace Prize awarded by the Norwegians.
The last thing that came out of Scandinavia that I have a reasonable claim to understand is the Millennium Trilogy, the crime story that had, by early this year, sold almost thirty million copies.
I was so hot to get the last volume translated in English that I ordered it from the UK.
People are still reading the things. They were hot reading at poolside through the summer, and have displayed an astonishing demonstration of shelf life in this age of digital attention deficit. It is not for everyone, of course. My older boy hated the Millennium Trilogy- I loaned him the lead book in the series and he literally hurled it back at me.
“What the hell are you thinking?” he said. “This is boring. Everyone sits around drinking coffee. No point. And a magazine? You have got to be kidding me.”
He had a point. Of course, I grew up in Michigan, which in many ways is just like Sweden, only less hilly and with fewer leggy blonds. I have my own prejudices about Scandinavia, most of them acquired in a summer semester abroad working on a Norwegian farm. My host family, the Thorensons, had nothing but contempt for their more prosperous neighbors to the East, and from whom they had wrested their independence in 1905.
It goes back further, of course, to the times when the Norse were the scourge of Europe, and whose swords and seed helped to populate all the coastal and riparian cities all the way to Constantinople. If my Irish great-grandfather was bluff and blonde, it was not because he was a Celt, after all.
So maybe there is a connection to the Northland that my son lacks, and which drew me in. He was born in Hawaii, after all, and may not consider brooding Nordic types that attractive. The first book in the trilogy grabbed me and wouldn’t let me go. Lisbeth Salander, the "Girl" of the title is one of the more gripping characters I have run into lately, and coupled with the sudden and early demise of the author, lends a certain poignancy to the whole enterprise.
Stieg Larrson is an unlikely author to have so captivated me. He came out of a decisively socialist background. His early affiliation was with science fiction and the Swedish Communist Workers League (Kommunistiska Arbetarförbundet), which are almost the same thing. By the conclusion of the trilogy (spoiler alert) he dismantles the anti-commie Swedish National Security Police.
But what the hell. I have let communism go as a boogieman, except for the elections next month, and thankfully we still have them.
Anyway, I watched the first of the Swedish movies to bring the trilogy to life on DVD. Subtitles, just like an art house. I understand Hollywood is going to do the thing in English, which may provide additional context for the storytelling for North Americans beyond the five or six word subtitles. I have to tell you the presence of Noomi Rapace as Lizbeth is so mesmerizing that I doubt I will be able to bring myself to go see Patricia Rooney Mara try it out in the re-make.
I discovered that my smart phone can tell me when movies are on, and that the second film was actually playing only twenty minutes away right here in Ballston. I had a free pass courtesy of Moral and Welfare languishing in my wallet, and why not? Freedom and Sunday’s pure laziness combined to deliver my to a near-empty theater. The alternative was the Deadskins, and I have given up on the Burgundy and Gold already this season.
The other incentive was that a pal of mine married into Sweden a couple decades ago, and actually lives and works in Stockholm, where the Norwegians should award the Peace Prize founded by Alfred Nobel, the Swede.
Course, Mr. Nobel died a decade before the falling out between the Vikings, and the end of the one-king, two-kingdom system up there. I guess that is the ultimate source of my confusion.
Oh, I think I have this straight, and I am sure I will get corrected if I am wrong. The step-son of my pal is a gifted artist on skin, and he is the one who did the astonishing dragon on Noomi’s back. There are several versions of Lizbeth’s tattoo. The ones on the Sedish language version of the books are fairly tame and Oriental in theme.
The one in the movie is gigantic, with claws appearing to burst through Nooni’s skin on either side of her spine, and a fierce glowering face bursting through just between her shoulderblades. Lisbeth is a traumatized survivor of a deranged psychotherapist and lawyer-guardian who wreaks her revenge on them as a punk avenging angel with kick-boxing skills and a photographic memory.
There were some missing links in the film, or maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Crusading journalist and sometime lover of Lisbeth, Mikael Blomkvist drives direct to the farm of the mysterious K. Axel Bodin, the alias of the evil ex-Soviet officer “Zala.”
He is the father of both Lisbeth and the hulking German monster Niedermann, of course.
The real K.A. Bodin was born in Karlstad, Sweden, and eventually moved to Sundsvall. He went to Nazi-occupied Norway to join the Waffen-SS despite Sweden’s ostensibly strict neutrality and was attached to Gestapo there at the end of things. When Germany surrendered, Bodin and another Swedish volunteer stole a car in an attempted escape to Sweden. The car owner saw the theft and a gunfight followed in which the car owner and Bodin's friend was shot. Bodin left his friend behind and crossed the border, where apparently he disappeared into Steig Larsson’s considerable imagination.
Fabulous work. The take-aways I found most interesting is that the Police in Sweden are no longer required to tuck in their shirts and that absolutely no one has to wear a tie.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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