feihong wrote:The book and both movies are full of the kind of scenes of violence against women that arouse justifiable, righteous anger; the very kind of situation an investigative journalist can alight upon and publish, drawing in a large readership and sending magazine sales through the roof (or better yet, publish it as a novel; tie it all together with a twisty murder mystery and some vivid-seeming characters...in fact, Larrson's partner Eva Gabrielsson claims that every incident from the book is from something Larsson encountered as a journalist).
This is off topic (I haven't tackled Dragon Tattoo in book or either film version as yet), but feihong's comment reminded me that if anyone wants a counter argument to the idea of the crusading investigative journalist, I would probably recommend (though only to the most hardy and least offended viewers!) the third film in the
Angel Guts series, Nami, in which our intrepid reporter decides to do a (rather bad taste!) series of articles for the women's magazine for which she works which involve interviews with rape victims, most of whom are unwilling and/or destroyed by her casual exposes.
For what is primarily a sex work, Angel Guts: Nami touches on some surprisingly complex issues - for example in one scene the journalist 'heroine' visits yet another rape victim, who naturally seems unwilling to dredge up horrible events of her past for wide publication. The reporter is in the process of cajoling her target into giving an interview for her magazine by saying that the way that the lady has been able to overcome this to become a functioning member of society again will stand as an inspiration to women in a similar position, when suddenly the doorbell rings. In a strange scene that plays a little like the closet scene from Blue Velvet seven years before the Lynch film, the journalist finds herself trapped in the apartment only able to watch as the woman is assaulted by the same attacker again (as she presumably had been throughout the years since she had supposedly 'recovered' from the first attack), with the worst moment being the angry, almost-defiant, eye contact made between the woman and the journalist in mid-assault.
Unfortunately the journalist does not seem to learn any lessons from her (many) encounters with abused women, so things inevitably lead to a firsthand experience in one of the most bizarre last acts of a film that I can remember.
Here's the NSFW trailer