Which lead me to another great review which helped clear up why I have a lot of affection for this movie, which I think is Fincher’s best since Zodiac.
A film about how the internet, the literal internet and the thought technology of the internet, has liquefied the gap between reality and context. Or maybe, because I spend too much time on the internet, it’s a movie about what David Fincher thinks about how you think, by applying the thought technology of the internet to the actual internet, the internet has liquefied the gap between reality and context. Listen: it’s a good movie.
I don’t like the idea of “digital natives” but people who mold themselves entirely through the internet from an early age do have certain personality traits, expectations and understandings. I think this movie is about how annoying it is to write these people to seem human in the traditional genre fiction sense
Detective fiction has a hard time with the internet. I don’t think this is necessarily just because it has made investigating too easy or too boring to look at. It has also made the moment of hanging on the cusp of a revelation totally perfunctory. This feeling, the almost-knowing with which good crime fiction tantalizes and great crime fiction brutalizes, is how people who have always had the internet feel all the time. It’s not that the moment of connecting the dots isn’t there, it’s that it happens so often.
There isn’t any excitement or revelation in seeing the world through a million different formats, screens and overlays. That’s what the world looks like. Girl With The Dragon Tattoo inverts Manhunter, old technology cracking a fundamentally digital case. The revelation at the end of Manhunter is Lisabeth’s understanding right from the start: can I see what you can see?
You don’t get better at the internet, you get more aware it makes you banal, omniscient god over what you can access. This is deeply, deeply cheesy and I am extremely sorry but: you see the matrix. What the Red Pill men get wrong is that this analogy does not work as some moral victory or great necessary awakening. Like the internet, this ability is not bad or good. It is totally, unnaturally neutral and so short circuits anything supposedly conceived in a moral, social universe
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo underlines its observation of the internet as a thought technology when a violent sexual predator is discovered after smashing the data together finally unwhorles his face, just like an infamous real life case. No wincing human or bullied confession, it is the plucking of specific points from a data set that ends in taking a piece of arrogance and running it backwards.
This is what Lisabeth’s simultaneous time, using a different dataset to come to an identical conclusion, in the archive explains: she’s not staying late out of some dedication. She is applying the thought technology of the internet, deeply aware of the tables of data to which she has and hasn’t been given access, cross referencing the way efficient computers do. When she discovers the information it’s a joyless relief, it’s not revelation. That’s why Fincher constructs a compelling mystery while casting an actor so obvious(and so compelling) in the role of killer he may as well be the special guest on an episode of CSI:Cyber. It’s right there, you have to input the correct command.
Lisabeth’s a-social hyper-competency, and how it frustrates everyone around her, is an internet person trait that makes a lot more sense than modern takes on Holmes. Often the internet/programming appears in detective and thriller fiction, to extend or speed up the traditional detective modes. It often needs to be combined with traditional gumshoe gumption to make everything clear. That’s not what the internet does. The internet is a thought technology and it is incompatible with empathy or hunches. This is why “hackers” are resigned to goofy weirdos with the one detail. Because their min/max data-driven way of seeing the world doesn’t just make them anti-social (skipping past the mundane, clumsy details of real life), it changes the way they see a problem and changes the problem too.
Several times in the film we are dragged into the worlds rapists and nazis create for themselves, how totally they allow themselves to be intoxicated by these worlds and therefore to let their guard down. The default mode of the internet is to wallow in your own self-involved filth, creating a world of solely of your own interests. The only thing that changes is the skill with which you conceal it. Really understanding the internet is seeing how these different worlds interact and seeing the totality with which they can be imploded on someone.
When a Human Hunch Meets Big Data moment comes at the end of Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, it’s an inversion. Someone’s interior world is exposed, directly this time, via watching what they see on their screen. And there’s no data. It’s extremely Normal People internet stuff. Instead of noticing an accent or some other human touch
Lisabeth’s power, what damages her, is that she has omnipotence over any antagonists private world. By short circuiting language and expectations as simple as where to sit, by having combed through people’s heads, she has everyone in this movie surrounded.
Lisabeth asking “can I kill him?” is the best line in a superhero movie in the 21st century. Four words solidifying both the super power and the weakness. Highlighting that a calculation has already taken place and that emotional questions will always feel perfunctory. How people are occasionally not computers.
Rooney Marra towers over Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as Lisabeth. There is a physicality of someone who has had to invent themselves online, a confidence you grow into and an uncertainty that eventually becomes calculation. The fight on the escalator, the bike, torturing her rapist all contain this sense of seeing a command run through its actions after being imputed.
Three great stray Fincher moments in this: the supreme force with which I felt Lisabeth’s immediate rage at Mikael ineffectually clicking at Macbook mouse while standing. This totally encapsulates the gap between those who are used to technology and people who grew up with it.
The second is a brief clip of a tv news report that, although it fills the frame, has just enough inflection of a particular spectrum of light to let you know it’s a recorded screen.
The third is Enya.
