Orig­i­nally pub­lished at Ms. mag­a­zine on Decem­ber 26.

I dreaded see­ing David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

In par­tic­u­lar, I dreaded sit­ting through another graphic rape scene like the one in Swedish direc­tor Niels Arden Oplev‘s 2009 ver­sion of the film–a scene I described in my review as dis­qui­et­ing, intense and vicious. Hol­ly­wood being Hol­ly­wood, I expected the Amer­i­can ver­sion to take the dis­turb­ing mate­r­ial to a new extreme. But when my edi­tor asked me to review it, my curios­ity over­pow­ered my dread. In the the­ater I waited for the scene tensely, but when it came, I found I was able to stay in my seat through­out (unlike dur­ing Oplev’s)–though I did cover my eyes at points, because there are some things that we just don’t need to see.

From what I did see, it was graphic. But not as graphic nor as dis­turb­ing as in the Swedish film. And in the end the scene was, remark­ably, the least remark­able aspect of the movie.

More note­wor­thy was the film’s inter­pre­ta­tion of Lis­beth Salan­der, the famously fem­i­nist pro­tag­o­nist of Stieg Larsson’s best­selling nov­els. Many movie­go­ers, myself included, believed Noomi Rapace’s sharp inter­pre­ta­tion of the seething, cun­ning Salan­der in the Swedish adap­ta­tion left lit­tle room for improve­ment. Her Salan­dar was pitiable and strong by turns, and always unap­proach­ably cool. How­ever, direc­tor David Fincher, writer Steven Zail­lian and–especially–actor Rooney Mara cre­ated a much fuller ver­sion of Salan­der, one more com­plex and truer (I’m told) to the char­ac­ter in Larsson’s novels.

In fact, many of Fincher’s char­ac­ters feel more devel­oped than Niels Arden Oplev’s cut-and-dry ver­sions. In Oplev’s hands, pro­tag­o­nist Mikael Blomkvist was stern and in charge, Salan­der con­fi­dent and deter­mined, while Salander’s sadis­tic guardian Nils Bjur­man exuded vil­lainy throughout.

In the Amer­i­can ver­sion, every­one is a lit­tle more human and a lit­tle more flawed. Blomkvist, as played by Daniel Craig, can be a bit bum­bling and pas­sive, let­ting the women in his life steer its course. It makes sense that this Blomkvist, in a bun­gled effort to solve the mys­tery he’s been work­ing on, sends him­self into into the villain’s clutches and requires res­cue. Bjur­man, the guardian who beats and rapes Salan­der (in the scene I dreaded watch­ing), seems mild-mannered and harm­less in some con­texts and sadis­tic in oth­ers, like many real-life vil­lains. He viciously assaults Salan­der, but does so with an enti­tled non­cha­lance, and after­wards acts gen­tle, almost apolo­getic. This is the real­ity of abusers: They are pathetic, vac­il­lat­ing between vio­lence and ten­der­ness in an ugly cycle that can con­found and entrap their victims.

Salander’s char­ac­ter is by far the most devel­oped, not least because Fincher gives her more on-screen time than Oplev and makes a point of explain­ing her his­tory. At the film’s out­set, she’s a ner­vous, inse­cure young woman with a rage prob­lem. Shoul­ders hunched, she avoids eye con­tact and acci­den­tal touch, and when she knows that she’ll have to inter­act with someone—say, at work—she care­fully crafts her appear­ance to intim­i­date and dis­tance. When a man in the sub­way steals her back­pack, she doesn’t react imme­di­ately, seem­ingly afraid of con­fronta­tion. When she does decide to go after him, hit­ting and kick­ing him on an esca­la­tor and snatch­ing her bag, she then runs away—fast—into a train car. Rather than rel­ish­ing the vio­lence, she appears upset and fright­ened by it.

She changes after she gets her revenge on Bjur­man, the guardian. (She sodom­izes him with a dildo and tat­toos “I am a rapist pig” on his chest and stom­ach.) After this, her aver­sion to eye con­tact slowly dimin­ishes and her appear­ance thaws. When she once relied exclu­sively on com­put­ers and other tech­nol­ogy to do her research, she now opts for face-to-face interviews.

I won’t argue, as some might, that she is empow­ered by rap­ing her attacker. Rather, I imag­ine that her increas­ing con­fi­dence derives from the real­iza­tion that, if the men in her soci­ety can so eas­ily get away with vic­tim­iz­ing women, women can just as eas­ily get away with pun­ish­ing those men. In a sick way, the play­ing field is leveled.

This lends all the more poignancy to Blomkvist’s first request of her: “I want you to help me catch a killer of women,” he says. Judg­ing from Salander’s expres­sion, it’s a “click” moment.

As their rela­tion­ship devel­ops, Salan­der grows increas­ingly self-assured and con­fi­dent. By the end of the film, she acknowl­edges, her­self, that she’s a dif­fer­ent per­son than she was in the beginning—even as Blomkvist remains the charm­ingly clumsy man he’s always been. This is per­haps the biggest dif­fer­ence between the Swedish and Amer­i­can adap­tions. In the for­mer, Oplev paints Salan­der as a sort of super­hero figure—an enigma with a mys­te­ri­ous, check­ered past who has finally found an out­let for her rage. Fincher, by con­trast, gives us a Salan­der in transformation—a woman whose per­sonal tragedies and retal­i­a­tions have set her on a road to real­iz­ing her human poten­tial. Like many real-world fem­i­nists, she’s still fig­ur­ing out how to trans­late her rage into con­struc­tive change and, as she does so, she begins to under­stand herself.

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