The Filmgoer's Diary 2018/19

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO I 2011 I Why Society Needs Violence

David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) is a true example of beauty in contrast. While it is set in Sweden – a nation that ranks highly in quality of life and social welfare – the plot unravels the serial murdering of various women and the disappearance of a young girl who had been subjected to years of physical and sexual abuse. The contrast can also be seen aesthetically: throughout the film, clean, sterile cinematography is undercut by sudden bursts of violence. While the society retains its image of perfection, violence always lurk underneath the façade. Watching this film, I cannot help but try to make sense of this contrast. What is the logic of concealed violence? How does it co-exist with a society that champions liberal and progressive ideas? These questions cannot be resolved exclusively through psychological explorations. I feel that it is necessary to also address the paradox of a society that tries to curb violence but reproduces it in concentrated but concealed forms. In other words, the film made me interested in concealed violence as a social phenomenon of the modern liberal society.

The film's depiction of violence seems to have been a product of an extremely normative society. Simply stated, a normative social ethic – equated in this essay to Foucault's notion of the gaze – inflicts violent coercion against individuals in the society. First, the gaze imposes rationalistic division of individuals into two categories: the conforming subject and the alienated object. Each of this category receives violence in its own way. On the one hand, the conforming subject is forced to suppress his free will and strictly comply with social norms. This generates two experiences: (1) psychological tension and a need for catharsis and (2) disdain or fear – or perhaps repressed jealousy – towards those who do not conform. On the other hand, the alienated object is trapped in the role of the other, denied equal treatments and sociologically isolated. The tension that arises between the alienated object and the conforming subject grows and eventually leads to violent confrontation. The subject inflicts violence upon the object in disdain and to achieve catharsis; the object retaliates to gain consciousness and escape alienation from herself. In this formula, social normativity expressed as the disciplinary gaze leads to violence among individuals in the society. I will now discuss this formula in relations to the plot as well as aesthetic and directorial choices in the film.

The society portrayed in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a free, liberal and democratic society that seems to exist in a state of social consensus. Despite the lack of institutional control, this society appears to be stable because there is a consensus on social ethics and norms. Everyone seems to understand what constitutes right and wrong actions in society. Social welfare for instance is made available to individuals who are supposedly "sociable" – there is social incentive for acting the right way. Punishment for immoral act is also social. This is illustrated early on in the film: how the media responds to immoral act like a lack of journalistic integrity. Whether or not the media and the welfare system are expression of individual compliance is not important. What is important is that most characters in the film accept the normative ideas expounded by these institutions. We see this in how the term "normal" and "strangers" are used as standards. Individuals seem to internalize the standards and thus the norms; this is a society where the mechanism of regulation lies in the normative power of norms and values. This is a very good illustration of Foucault's disciplinary society. In the disciplinary society, power to control individuals are not manifest in individuals or institutions, but diffused in the normative force of the culture at large i.e. knowledge of what constitutes "normal" or "strange". As Foucault would call it "an indefinitely generalizable mechanism" (Applerouth & Edles, 2016). Also called Panopticism. Individuals in a panoptic/ disciplinary society do not need explicit institutions to control them, they self-regulate because they have internalized the knowledge, the standard of normal, the normative values.