The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Rape, revenge, and victimhood in cinematic translation

Towards the end of the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Oplev, Sweden, 2009), Harriet Vanger is reunited with her great-uncle Henrik and the loose threads of her mysterious disappearance 40 years earlier are tied up. She tells the story of how her father and brother raped her from the age of 14, and how one day she knocked her drunken father into the water with an oar and held him under until he drowned. This classic rape-revenge scene is presented in an overexposed slow-motion flashback. The teenage Harriet flees from the cabin with blood on her face and bruises on her arms, and is chased down to the jetty by her topless, lumbering father. A close-up shot of the swinging oar anticipates the vengeful act of violence Harriet now confesses to. As she holds Gottfried under the water with the oar, the reverse shot shows her distressed yet determined expression and her wild blonde hair backlit by the sun. This flashback is the text’s originary scene in two ways: narratively, as the event which initiates the primary mystery of Harriet’s disappearance; and generically, in terms of locating it within cinema’s rape-revenge genre. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo pays retro-tribute to the genre with Harriet’s backstory, but also presents a contemporary alternative to this rape-avenger figure in Lisbeth Salander — Stieg Larsson’s vision of the ultimate victim/avenger in a corrupt welfare state.