Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
2011 · David Fincher · The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice where the light on each face is coming from. (light)
Cronenweth keys faces off monitors, scanners and laptop screens with the room around them nearly black. Outdoors the Swedish winter light is flat and directionless. Indoor practicals are always too small.
Payoff: These people are lit by the documents they are reading, which tells you what the film thinks power is. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). The reading calls this a lectosign: an image you have to read, rather than one that explains itself through action.
Watch the camera glide, then stop exactly where it needs to. (camera)
Fincher's moves are motorized and repeatable. A slow push, a lateral drift, a locked frame. Handheld shows up rarely and on purpose, which is why the sudden violence hits so hard.
Payoff: Nothing in the framing is accidental, so when the film turns rough you know it chose to.
Listen to the score refuse to tell you anything. (sound)
Reznor and Ross write analog drones, corroded textures and long near-silences. Ren Klyce mixes wind, snow, hard drives and engines into the same field, so you cannot always tell music from machine.
Payoff: The sound holds cold and dread as a constant condition instead of spiking whenever something happens.
Watch a scene in one city cut into another. (cutting)
Baxter and Wall run Blomkvist and Salander on separate tracks for most of the first hour and cut them together as if they shared a room. Music and ambience carry across the hard cuts.
Payoff: The film's space is wiring rather than geography. People connect through data long before they ever meet.
Count what Blomkvist actually manages on his own. (performance)
Craig plays him reactive and outmatched, dependent on other people's competence, unimpressive in a fight. Mara plays Salander flat, with minimal voice and face, so a small movement registers as an event.
Payoff: The nominal lead is the assistant. The film keeps its charge in watching and reading, not in acting on things. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: a hero who perceives plenty and can no longer act adequately on it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Blomkvist sort the 1966 parade photographs into order. (structure)
Strangers took those pictures casually, for no reason. He crops, enlarges and grids them until they run like frames of a film, and a girl's head turns toward something nobody meant to shoot.
Payoff: The crime becomes visible only because a crowd photographed nothing in particular, at intervals, intending nothing. In the reading: any-instant-whatever. The reading calls these any-instant-whatevers: ordinary moments with no privilege, which become movement once someone puts them in a row.
Look at the bridge, the one road onto Hedeby island. (staging)
Burt builds the Vanger compound from dark wood, heavy furniture and family portraits, reachable by a single crossing. Salander's Stockholm is cables, hardware and takeaway boxes. The two worlds never share a texture.
Payoff: The island is a family policing itself. Nobody had to come in from outside for any of this to happen.
Watch how long the two hardest scenes hold without cutting. (staging)
Fincher shoots the assault and the retaliation in extended takes, flat and evenly lit, with almost no score. The retaliation is procedural. Nothing in the staging offers you relief.
Payoff: The refusal to cut away is the film's position, and it is also what the argument about this film is about.
Note how much film is left after the mystery closes. (structure)
The Harriet case resolves and the film keeps going, through the Wennerstrom fraud and then one small wordless disappointment of Salander's. Zaillian kept Larsson's shape rather than trimming to a finish.
Payoff: That last stretch is where the film's real subject gets the frame to herself, and nothing in it repairs her.
Carry this in: Track where the light on each face comes from. Almost always it comes off something they are reading.