Book and Film Reviews: An Essay on Abuse - A Juxtaposition of Media

An Essay on Abuse: A Juxtaposition of Media
by Martha K. Baker



    Movies: “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1974,” “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980,” “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1983” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
    Books: The End of the World As We Know It: Scenes from a Life by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin, 2007) and The Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage, 2009, $14.95), The Girl Who Played with Fire (Borzoi, 2009, $25.95), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson (Maclehose, 2010, £7.99).   
   
    This odd collection of books and movies, which just happened to be ones I’ve read or watched recently, ran along two common threads: abuse and hatred. I didn’t plan for this to happen. I didn’t pick these movies and books to shadow newspaper headlines.

    Generally, I avoid sensational books and films out to exploit women and children, but these titles -- Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy of books, the movie based on the first novel, the “Red Riding” trilogy of films, and Robert Goolrick’s memoir -- are not pot-boilers or cheap thrills. They are well written and well made, more art than commerce. The result -- besides an arching of the eyebrows at life’s little constellations -- is that theme of abuse and hatred that ties them together. Whether sexual, pedophiliac, and domestic abuse, whether intentional or accidental, abuse is always traumatic and life-hacking. I picked the books for reasons other than scenes of personal violence; the movies are happenstance, too, just the result of their Midwest release dates.

    Of course, I have read books before about child abuse (the first half of Jane Eyre, for example) and seen movies about child abuse (such as “The Magdalene Sisters” in 2002). But last month’s collection hauntingly echoed for me the current, sadly-unshocking news stories of abuse and denial in the Roman Catholic Church. I offer here reviews of these books and movies, couched in a personal essay.
   
THE MILLENNIUM TRILOGY

    Men Who Hate Women. That’s the transliteraton of Larsson’s Swedish title for the first book of his three magnificent thrillers. That the English-language translations all begin with “The Girl” says at least two things. 1) Even though the title character, Lisbeth Salander, is 26 years old in the first book, 27 by the third, “woman” is infantilized to “girl” for the traditional reason: men do not like the thought of a revengeful woman. The nominal shift from adult to child follows the traditional recipe for a boorish and powerful, even Biblical, cocktail of ageism and sexism. 2) The publishing community, like most others, does not like to own up to the fact that men, indeed, do hate women. Yeah, I know: not all men hate women just like not all whites hate blacks or all Christians hate Jews, but historically and politically, laws and behavior exploited one group’s hatred of the other.

    No one who has read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy can get away from the character of Lisbeth Salander. Rarely has a more intriguing character been penned, a character just as radical in the 21st century as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in the 19th. Salander is tiny, bright, devious, tattooed; she is a loner, a computer hacker, an angry woman, whose character and history are revealed throughout the trilogy. She refuses to be a victim although she has been victimized, time and again, for years and years, by men in power. Larsson did not make her aggressive to raise a reader’s pulse; he shaped her as a fire-spitter to protect her mother and fight her father and the political and medical communities. Everything she does devolves from her abuse at her father’s hands and the filthy paws of government and medical authorities.

    Larsson died in 2004 after handing his publisher the three manuscripts of international intrigue and personal survival. He had been an investigative journalist, flashing light against Nazis in Sweden and against sex-trafficking of girls and women between Russia and Sweden. He takes strong feminist and chauvinistic stands, and his reputation as a journalist underwrites his integrity as a novelist. He’s not in the game of fiction for sensationalism alone.

    He peoples the books with multifoliate characters, including the journalist Michael Blomkvist, equal in intelligence, if not age, to Lisbeth, his nemesis and lover; a crack editor, who loves her husband and Michael; an unfeeling giant; a dear guardian; and a security officer named Monica. Larsson is such a crafty writer that he does not even imperil the integrity of his stories by introducing people in the middle or end although the sheers numbers of (always intriguing) characters mean that it’s sometimes hard to know who’s who.

    Complex, too, are his plots: he networks intriguing subplots beneath the main plot shooting like an iron bolt through the three books. He wrote the three as one, and they need to be read in sequence. The second book,The Girl Who Played with Fire, is even better than the first, and the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (after a slow exposition on Swedish government) gallops, fires, knifes, connives, hacks and thinks its way to a most satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy. I rarely read thrillers, but even after reading 2,000 pages, translated by Reg Keeland, I found it hard to leave Larsson’s world. Maybe I don’t have to entirely, and not just because of the Swedish films or the planned American versions: Larsson left a draft of a fourth book in his computer, so we may find out where Lisbeth’s twin sister went. Did their father abuse her, too?

“THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO”

    The Swedish film, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” directed by Niels Arden Oplev, was the most popular film in all of Europe in 2009 -- and for good reason. It reveals a bit of plot from the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, but mostly it remains true to the first book. Lisbeth Salander works with -- if “with” is the proper preposition for someone who trusts no one --  journalist Michael Blomqvist to find the long-missing niece of a wealthy and aging Swede. The scriptwriters, Nicolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, admirably transcribed the novel to the screen -- no mean feat! They rejected the usual Hollywood pacing of introducing peaks and vales just to keep the juices flowing in the attention-deficient American audience. Something is definitely lost, however, between book and movie because, in the movie, we’re not in the fascinating minds of Salander and Blomkvist. As pulse-pumping as their actions prove, it is their intelligent thinking that signifies.  The movie stars non-pretty people in almost all roles, including the credible and affecting Noomi Rapace as Salander and Michael Nykvist as Blomkvist.

    “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” runs more than two and a half hours, but I never looked at my watch. See the movie first to gain an overview of the tricky story, then read the book for the delicious details and points of view; or see the film after reading the book in order to watch the story unfold but, this time, knowing what cairns to follow. Either way, be prepared to be colossally angry at the injustices against humanity, the hatred against women.

“RED RIDING”
   
    The Red Riding trilogy, based on a quartet of novels by David Peace, also hangs by a rope of abuse against females. The films are based on the true case of the Yorkshire “Ripper.” If you did not keep up with the headlines in the Eighties, you still probably won’t be shocked by the killer, given today’s headlines. The movies’ catchphrase  is, “All innocence is lost here.”

     Each movie is set in a different year of the siege in Yorkshire County, 100 miles north of London. Each is directed by a different man: “1974” is directed by Julian Jarrold (whose directorial work includes the recent, flaccid “Brideshead Revisited” and the delightful “Kinky Boots”), “1980” by James Marsh (“Man on Wire”), and “1983” by Anand Tucker (“Girl with the Pearl Earring”). The sum is definitely greater than the parts although each of the three films stands on its own merits. 

    Each film also has a different protagonist: “1974” stars Andrew Garfield as a journalist; “1980” stars Paddy Considine, a Manchester cop called in to figure out why the Yorkshire police have not solved the case; and “1983” stars David Morrissey as a police officer and Mark Addy as a mediocre solicitor, and they finally i.d. the perp. The three films have the same antagonists, including a developer, a corrupt police force and a clergyman. The films mount in intrigue as more and more innocent Little Red Riding Hoods are tortured and killed.

    “Red Riding” is dark in color, mood and lighting. The films slide and slither and slink as they peer at hatred and criminal natures. All three films peek through murk, and even if you know what’s happening procedurally, it’s hard to see. Or hear: the characters mumble, plus their Yorkshire accent is impenetrable (some British movies need English subtitles!). Still, and this says something for the directors’ exploitation of atmosphere, there’s something wildly intriguing about “Red Riding,” and it ain’t just whodunit.

    Hint: Get hold of the “special roadshow edition” booklet published by the producer, IFC Films. It helps.

THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT

    “In a life, in any life, bad things happen,” writes Robert Goolrick in his memoir, The End of the World As We Know It.

    I came to Goolrick’s memoir from his first novel, A Reliable Wife, a book whose story and style grabbed me from head to gut unlike any book has for a long, long time.  The richest man in a small Wisconsin town advertises for “a reliable wife,” in part to send her to St. Louis to find his son. Or the child he’d thought was his, the boy he beat, time and again, after his mother ran off with her lover. Goolrick’s plot is ingenious, his characters complex (read: human), his style stunning, and his setting evocative.

    At the end of the novel, Goolrick writes that he is beholden for the atmosphere in the Wisconsin town to Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, published in 1973. Lesy’s book is, mostly, a collection of newspaper reports by a father and son and photographs by a commercial “shooter” in frontier Wisconsin in the 1890s.

    [As often happens, once started, coincidences continue. For one, A Reliable Wife is partially set in St. Louis, where I live. Here’s another unexpected connection: James Marsh, who directed “Red Riding: In the Year of Our Lord 1980,” also directed the 1999 film version of “Wisconsin Death Trip,” every bit as disconcerting as Lesy’s book.]
   
    Because I was so haunted by A Reliable Wife, I wanted to stay with Goolrick awhile longer, so I read his only other book,The End of the World As We Know It. And there it was again: the theme of abuse, this time not starting in hatred but ending in a lifetime of hatred between father and son, abuser and victim. “It wasn’t even what happened. That was bad enough,” Goolrick writes. “It was what happened after. That was worse.”

    The book begins with his father’s death from drink. For the first few chapters, Goolrick writes from the cocoon of mores and manners of Virginia in the Fifties. For all the humor inherent in his remembering that time and that place, it’s painfully obvious, given the book’s title and the clank of hints, that Goolrick is avoiding something (kind of like Kurt Vonnegut avoids his own title, Slaughterhouse Five, in his book about Dresden 1945). That “something” came to Goolrick on Sept. 9, 1952, when he was four years old, and it came from his father. In the chapter entitled “Such Charming Hands,” Goolrick writes about father-rape with a style that transcends True Confessions magazine’s. His style turns his story from vomit into art. His memory of the end of his world focuses on the victim, not on an institution or a parent or a perp in denial. It focuses on the boy himself. “And now I will be that person forever,” he writes.

    Two chapters earlier, before he describes the night his world ended, before we readers know what happened, Goolrick had asked, “How did they go on?” His mother had witnessed the crime, and he’d told his grandmother. So how, he asks “did they go on,” “Knowing what they knew, and knowing that each knew the thing the other knew...?” Robert Goolrick’s story is so profoundly affecting. Multiply that trauma a thousandfold for each victim of abuse by a priest, and the church could beg for forgiveness for ever and ever, world without end.

    There’s no rhyme, no reason why these movies and these books fell into my purview within the same month, but they have given me a perspective on abuse by their very juxtaposition. I am grateful for the exposure. I am grateful for the insights wrought by good writers and directors in two media from several countries on one theme. Abuse is not easy to look at, but we can no longer look away.