dragon tattoo: duchamp and the de-idealized

Sexual fantasies for the sexually repressed. Like the alcoholic that has a “tolerance”, stronger doses are always required to get the buzz, the vicarious experience of  James Thurber’s Walter Mitty as potential psychopath. If misogyny is so appalling then why is it so crammed down our throats and pervasive? Films like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with an ostensibly proto-feminist subtext actually reinforce the worst elements of sexist misogyny and structural patriarchy. Insidiously, when the Left does it, its somehow made to seem more palatable, digestible, when it comes from the pen of a Stieg Larsson. This Left which is wholly capable of incarnating the sham morality of bourgeois ethics; a seething conservative and reactionary violence of proportions equal to its right wing counterpart. The identical one dimensional world where women are sex objects and men action heroes: it’s back to Barbie and Ken.

---Duchamp. Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors. http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/bride.html

Larsson is part of the classic bourgeois position that generates apparently opposed and contradictory views that are equally aggressively militant and destructive. The usual combination of materialism and idealism, resulting in a form of internal violence needed to maintain the system. In fact, Larsson’s socialist violence , in fact even establishes the post-modern brand of market capitalism in an even more entrenched and reinforced manner, under the guise of true aims and noble causes. Its obvious there is a violence at the heart of the bourgeois illusion that can seem to be reconciled without destroying itself.

The liberal in such cinematic representations, the classic trope, is a duped evolutionary force, hardly radical; the yearning for freedom and fairness ends up producing more social constraints that they are supposedly opposed to. They increase unfairness by trying to secure fairness. They seem to call into being the things they loathe; the illusions of freedom, the loosening of social ties, and then the grip of coercive social forces. Domination over people is immoral, but if people can be un-peopled, commodified, then domination over things, such as women, is legitimate. By a twisted irony, the so-called revolutionary liberal, haters of violence and coercion, become the agents of, forced by their own efforts to produce coercion and violence…

---Etants Donnes. Marcel Duchamp.---http://squarewhiteworld.com/category/detraque/point-to-point/

The biggest thing on the internet excluding cats? Its probably misogyny in all its varied form. Racism and homophobia seems to make charges for the lead, but sexism seems to rule the evil roost; basically unchecked, and even unnoticed. The girl with the Dragon Tattoo falls into this concoction; basically a perverted misogynous sexual fantasy. A twisted pathology of an old so-called leftist.

The male savior, the white knight, staggering from rescue to rescue, An old reporter writes about an old reporter who gets to emotionally save, and have sex of course, a young woman, a punk type, teaches her how to love again, salves her wounds from sexual assault, and like a good priest converts her away from lesbian impulses. Father knows best. What is really twisted is that that this figure, Lisbeth,was the real name of a woman he witnessed being gang-raped as a teenager. So, Larssen, gets to write a story, where in effect he participates in the crime by screwing her as well. Pretty revolting. But, hey, he’s helping her!

Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/15/girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo ---But not everyone agrees. This f-word blog rounds up the initial reviews of the book, concluding that Larsson's rape and murder fantasies are little more than sexist titillation. Melanie Newman concludes that she has "difficulty squaring Larsson's proclaimed distress at misogyny with his explicit descriptions of sexual violence, his breast-obsessed heroine and babe-magnet hero".---

…The debate has raged ever since Stieg Larsson’s bestselling thriller, the first in a trilogy, was published in Sweden in 2005, a year after the author’s death. The film, released in the UK last Friday – described by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw as “a forensic procedural with explicit violence” – seems to have muddied the waters further. Originally titled Men Who Hate Women, the book divided critics. Some saw Lisbeth Salander (the tattooed private investigator of the title) as a feminist avenging angel. Others criticised Larsson’s graphic descriptions of the abuse and mutilation of women, judging the whole effort “misogynist”.Read More:Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/15/girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo

…Donald Kuspit:Duchamp’s nude makes an abstract spectacle of herself, suggesting that she symbolizes the unrealistic society of the modern spectacle. Duchamp realized that art had to become part of and serve the society of the spectacle if it was to survive in modernity. From the Nude Descending the Staircase through the Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even to the raped and murdered nude in the Étants Donnés, Duchamp turned the nude, and with her art, into a spectacle, maliciously dissecting and debunking the beauty she symbolized and embodied in traditional art. The graces and the muses were all female, and the misogynist Duchamp de-idealized their bodies, stripping them of their aura of sacredness. He was an abusive Paris who relegated the three goddesses to the dustbin of mythology. Duchamp endorsed photographic reproduction because it de-idealized reality, stripping it of the spiritual import that made it more than a mere appearance. Ironically converted into an appearance by photography, reality could no longer symbolize human ideals, and as such became a valueless illusion — a spectacle. Duchamp is the emblematic master of the disillusionment with art that is the dirty secret of avant-garde art, a disillusionment for which mechanical reproduction is in no small part responsible. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/art-and-capitalist-spectacle2-8-11.asp

ADDENDUM:

Interestingly, in Joan Smith’s original, positive review of the book in the Sunday Times she doesn’t really take on Larsson’s feminism, noting only that as an activist: “Larsson’s other great preoccupation [alongside the fascist movement] was violence against women, and the scarcely believable horrors Blomkvist unearths are as rooted in misogyny as they are in fascism.” … It has been universally panned as anti-women. In her review in Harper’s Bazaar this month, Mariella Frostrup writes: “A potentially good mystery is lost in scenes – such as a violent rape – that dwell too much on what feels to me like Larsson’s misogynistic fantasies.” On the Arts Desk blog, Graham Fuller judges the film “scarcely feminist”. He writes: “In frankly depicting Lisbeth’s rapes and presenting an obscene array of photographs of murdered women in a killer’s lair, it comes across as glibly indulgent of those visual horrors.” Read More:http://girlwiththedragontattoofilm.com/
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But I have difficulty squaring Larsson’s proclaimed distress at misogyny with his explicit descriptions of sexual violence, his breast-obsessed heroine and babe-magnet hero.

Read More:http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2009/09/larrson_review ---But these nods to feminism are not enough to compensate for the book's graphic and gratuitous violence against women, which is just as gross as anything in Patterson's novels. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also boasts two serial killers who get their kicks from torturing young women to death. We're told how one girl was tied up and left to die with her face in smouldering embers. Another victim is stoned to death, another choked with a sanitary towel, one has her hands held over fire until they are charred and then has her head sawn off, yet another is raped, murdered and left with a parakeet shoved up her vagina. A torture basement is uncovered, complete with cage and video equipment for recording the women's last moments.---

James Patterson’s 1996 bestseller Kiss the Girls features two male serial killers who keep beautiful, intelligent young women in a basement and sexually abuse, torture and kill them. In one never-to-be-forgotten scene, a girl is tied up and a live snake fed into her anus by her captor. In another, a beautiful corpse dangles at the end of a rope, naked except for stockings and one high-heeled shoe. One tough (and beautiful) woman manages to escape however and helps catch the killers. The 1997 film of Kiss the Girls was advertised, as one feminist puts it “as this really empowering kick-boxing woman-take-no-crap movie” on the back of that escape (the writer concludes “I’ve seen it, and it wasn’t.”) In James Patterson: A Critical Companion, Joan G Kotker notes his “indictment of sexism” in his 2002 novel, First to Die, in which women are murdered and sexually violated after death.

Before Patterson there was Dean Koontz, another immensely popular US thriller writer, whose 1986 book Night Chills features a string of graphic rape scenes alongside a female lead character who outsmarts a male military officer at every turn. In short, male novelists have for decades been selling graphic capture-rape-torture-kill novels by chucking in ‘strong’ female characters for balance, and have even gained plaudits for highlighting violence against women in the process.Read More:http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2009/09/larrson_review
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Read More:http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2009/09/larrson_review --- Blomkvist - or "Bonkvist" as he has been dubbed by some Amazon.com reviewers - is far from an old-fashioned sexual moralist. He's "a big hit with women" who has had several love affairs and "a great many casual flings". "An obscure journalist," we're later told, "once even urged him to seek help for his sex addiction." Blomkvist is no sexual predator, however: it's the women that make the moves. Larssson's Swedish liberalism only takes him so far though: while two of the three women who sleep with Blomkvist in the book are bisexual, Blomkvist himself has "zero interest in men". He's "so straight", apparently, that a girlfriend "liked to tease him about being a homophobe". In the first book, we're told that Blomkvist has a daughter who he doesn't see much. His marriage broke down because he couldn't stop having sex with his long-term mistress and boss, Erica, who has her husband's permission to sleep with her lover. When Blomkvist moves to a small town to investigate the disappearance of a young woman, he's only been in his new home five minutes when a woman is stripping off for him. Erica isn't at all bothered when she walks in on them both - she's happy to share.

Then there is the scene in which the hero’s side-kick, Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous Girl, is handcuffed, spreadeagled and anally raped by her legal guardian. Salander is a 24-year old, violent, punkish misfit and a brilliant computer hacker, diagnosed as having such severe mental problems that she is not legally competent. She is also bisexual, very thin and “with the right make-up, her face could have put her on any billboard”. The character has garnered much praise. Jonathan Gibbs in The Independent called her “a vision of female empowerment – a kind of goth-geek Pippi Longstocking”.

This ‘empowered’ woman, for whom the rape is the latest incident in a lifetime of sexual abuse, is convinced that her ‘skinny body’ is ‘repulsive’ and that her small breasts are ‘pathetic’.

At the start of the second book, we discover that Salander has had breast implants put in and that “six months later she could not walk past a mirror without stopping and feeling glad that she had improved the quality of her life”. Why a young woman who has been repeatedly violated by men would want to draw more attention to her breasts is not explained. Neither is the basis on which her quality of life is improved.

Salander does not go to a crisis centre after the rape: “crisis centres existed in her eyes for victims and she had never regarded herself as a victim”. Instead she takes violent revenge on her rapist in the first book and turns into a kind of international super-hero-crime-fighter-cum-maths genius in the second, beating up bikers twice her size. She is, of course, totally unrealistic, as Joan Smith acknowledges, describing her as “not so much a character as a revenge fantasy come to life, powering her way through the novel like the heroine of a computer game”.

So many male visions of female potency resemble cartoons; the kick-boxing girl has become a 21st century literary cliché. In James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdow, another thriller with pretensions to social commentary, a young woman is harassed by a sleazy man while out with her father. She later arranges to meet the pervert alone, and in an absurd scene karate-kicks him to the floor.

These unlikely – and therefore unthreatening – ass-kicking babes may be employed to lend a veneer of legitimacy to work such as Koontz’s which is fundamentally violently misogynistic.Read More:http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2009/09/larrson_review

Read More:http://www.ugo.com/movies/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-review

Read More:http://www.quillandquire.com/blog/index.php/2010/03/15/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo-feminist-or-blatantly-misogynistic/

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Laurie Penny:However, the real problem with sensationalising misogyny is that misogyny is not sensational. Real misogyny happens every day. The fabric of modern life is sodden with sexism, crusted with a debris of institutional discrimination that looks, from a distance, like part of the pattern. The real world is full of “men who hate women”, and most of them are neither psychotic Mob bosses nor corrupt business tycoons with their own private punishment dungeons under the putting green. Most men who hate women express their hatred subtly, unthinkingly. They talk over the heads of their female colleagues. They make sexual comments about women in the street. They expect their wives and girlfriends to take responsibility for housework and to give up their career when their children are born.

Reality check

Most rapists, similarly, are not murderous career sadists who live in flat-pack Ikea torture palaces conveniently rammed with incriminating recording devices. Most rapists are ordinary men who believe that they are entitled, when drunk, angry or horny, to take violent advantage of women who know and trust them.

Equally, most men who see women as objects don’t dismember them and stuff them into rucksacks. They visit strip clubs. They watch degrading pornography. If they work, just for instance, in publishing, they might reject a book title that draws attention to violence against women and replace it with one that infantilises the female protagonist and focuses on a trivial feature of her appearance.

Cathartic though revenge fantasies may be, not every woman is a ninja computer hacker with street fighting skills, and fantasies that divide men into sadistic rapists and nice guys obscure the subtle matrix of real-world misogyny. Real misogyny requires a sustained and subtle response. And real sexism, unfortunately, can’t always be solved with the judicious application of a Taser and a tattoo gun. Read More:http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/09/women-girl-real-violence
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Kuspit:For Baudelaire and Gauguin the photograph was symptomatic of industrial society and instrumental reason, and thus of the realism of maturity, which involves the realization that the world does not revolve around one’s ego. And they wanted the world to revolve around them. But this narcissistic repudiation of it had to do with their inkling, implicit in their awareness that the photograph could be reproduced ad infinitum, that modern society was fundamentally a mass society. For them mechanical reproduction was the beginning of the end of the imaginative self. Mechanical reproduction meant stifling reduction to sameness, the impersonal homogeneity of universal standardization, an instrument of procrustean social control. To be a modern adult meant servitude and submission to a mechanical system — to indifferent administrative authority. They did not want to submit, for submission meant living death, and sometimes actual death, as the first world war, which spawned the Dadaist avant-garde, demonstrated. Read More:http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-17-07.asp