The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  Property rights are always in crisis, constantly contested, with conflicts between agrarian economies and commercial exchanges dominating in the past and concerns about data privacy, security, and uninvited surveillance ruling today. Hermes, as god of commerce, came long ago to embody the spirit of capitalist enterprise in his association with artisans and merchants. But as cattle rustler and master of “stealth,” he was also linked with agrarian interests as well as with robbers and thieves, working both sides of the street and therefore supremely well qualified to mediate disputes.14 Our new conflicts about privacy and intellectual property, oddly, still stand under the star of Hermes. In a world that enforces boundaries by technological means, Lisbeth enjoys unparalleled freedom and mobility, mirroring computers, tapping telephones, and deactivating alarms, leaving collective forms of regulation powerless. An expert at lawlessness and (data) trespassing, as she describes herself, she leaves no traces behind and is able to outwit even top security consultants. Hers is a mercurial art, and she goes about her work with a genius that makes us wonder whether her stolen goods are not in fact earned gifts.

  As it happens, Lisbeth is most often on the wrong side of the law but on the right side of justice. She may be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and she may be profoundly asocial, but her curiosity about the deaths of others (she loves “hunting skeletons”) makes it clear that she does not share all the symptoms of those with attention deficit disorder. Like Bluebeard’s wife, an unacknowledged female trickster, she also enjoys “digging into the lives of other people and exposing the secrets they were trying to hide.” It is this deep investigative bent that sets her apart from Hermes, Coyote, and Hare. Lisbeth, much as she is wedded to a world of technology, cannot resist spying and trying to read the minds of others and understand their motivations.15

  “I find it hard to think of an equivalent of Lisbeth Salander anywhere else in the worlds of crime novels or films,” wrote Lasse Bergström, head of the Swedish firm that published Larsson’s trilogy.16 His reaction mirrored the response of Larsson’s readers as well as many viewers of the film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011). And yet our culture seems to be creating, in films like David Slade’s Hard Candy (with its seemingly vulnerable Little Red Riding Hood look-alike), heroines who take justice into their own hands and enact revenge fantasies against what Stieg Larsson called “men who hate women” (the manuscript for what is now a trilogy originally came in two parts, each with that title). Building on rape-revenge films of the 1970s and 1980s (Lipstick, I Spit on Your Grave, Extremities, etc.), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo gives us a heroine whose identity exceeds her status as rape victim. Lisbeth is neither traumatized nor deranged by the abuse she has suffered. She accepts violence against women as the way of the world and acts efficiently to create a deterrent by exacting revenge for it. Combining the survival skills of the trickster, the cool intelligence of the boyish Final Girl, and the courage of rape victims who testify against their abusers, she becomes part of an action plot that is coded as an inviting crime/retaliation narrative, providing viewers with all the satisfactions of revenge enacted.

  Stieg Larsson’s literary inspiration for Lisbeth Salander came from an unlikely source: a popular children’s book that was translated from the original Swedish into over seventy-five languages and became one of the top-selling books of children’s literature. Larsson explicitly named Pippi Longstocking, the heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s book of that title, as a model for Lisbeth. That Salander uses the nameplate “V. Kulla” (a not-so-veiled reference to Pippi Longstocking’s home, Villa Villekulla) strengthens the connection, even if Salander denies any kinship bonds. “Somebody’d get a fat lip if they called me Pippi Longstocking,” she asserts with characteristic pugnaciousness.17

  Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking is “no ordinary girl.”18 With no adults supervising and limiting her activities, the world becomes a playground for her transgressive boundary-crossing. From the start, Pippi puts her trickster skills on display, lying “all day long” (as a result of dwelling too long in the Congo), reciting tall tales about adventures in exotic locales ranging from the “Cannibal Isles” to “Arabia.” A hunter and “Thing-Finder,” as well as a girl who loves riddles, she outriddles her enemies, defeating bullies, bandits, and strongmen. Pippi tells tall tales in order to outfox school officials and local authorities. A disruptive force, she succeeds, as skillfully as her mythical male counterparts, in uncovering the absurdity of social conventions and regulations in a culture that cannot countenance the idea of a girl who is autonomous, without parental supervision and without a legal guardian.

  “Never Violence!” was the title of a speech Astrid Lindgren delivered on the occasion of receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and it led to a landmark legislative ruling in Sweden prohibiting physical violence against children, the first law of its kind. In the 1978 Frankfurt address, Lindgren tells a moving story about a boy sent into the woods by his mother to fetch a birch rod, a switch she will use to punish him. Unable to find a rod, the boy returns home in tears and tells his mother, “I can’t find a rod, but here’s a stone you can throw at me.”19 A champion of children’s rights and animal rights, as well as an early environmental activist, Lindgren cast her lot with the powerless and vulnerable, while also creating a heroine who models irreverent vitality, determination, and resilience for readers.

  Larsson more than likely grew up not just with the Pippi Longstocking books but also with an awareness of Astrid Lindgren’s crusade against violence. It is not hard to imagine how Sweden’s most prominent fictional girl shaped his conception of a “dysfunctional girl with attention deficit disorder—someone who would have trouble fitting in,” as he described Lisbeth. There are other, possibly less likely, prominent cultural figures that worked on his imagination. One might be found in the figure of Lex in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), a film that reminds us of how fictional and cinematic girls—brash and bold—are often in the vanguard, anticipating the liberties that will one day be embraced by their somewhat older, adult counterparts.

  It is Lex who saves the day for the group of sightseers touring Jurassic Park, when they discover that some of the ferocious predators on the island have broken free and are on the rampage. She sits down at the computer, recognizes how it runs (“It’s a UNIX system! I know this!”), and then pulls up a program called “3D File System Navigator” to restore security systems in Jurassic Park. Her name, of course, has already signaled her expertise in computer language and language systems in general. Interestingly, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (the novel on which the film is based), it is Lex’s brother Tim who manages, on his own, to get the security systems back online. He wards off dinosaurs, protecting Lex when the adults are either dead or have let the children down. In a stroke of crowd-pleasing genius, Lex becomes, in Spielberg’s film, the computer geek, adept at coding and at command language, and it is she who saves the day.20 In odd ways, perhaps because of its collective creative process that draws on a range of imaginative palettes and its willingness to be both cutting-edge and edgy despite the high financial stakes, Hollywood seems magically attuned to what is in the airwaves, anticipating what is to come rather than just recycling what is in the here and now.

  Lex and her facility with languages did not appear out of thin air. When we turn to the fairy-tale repertoire, it becomes clear that Jurassic Park is to some extent a reimagining of “Hansel and Gretel.” Recall that the voracious velociraptors who turn on Lex and Tim are all female—this is Jurassic Park and the female dinosaurs have miraculously discovered how to reproduce (“Nature finds a way”). And the raptors mount their assault on the two siblings in a kitchen space, making it evident that we are watching some kind of weird sci-fi update of the Grimms’ tale. Gretel saw her “moment in history” (that’s how Anne Sexton described it) and shoved the cannibalistic witch into the oven. Lex diverts the raptors while struggling to crawl into a cabinet, and her mirror image o
n what looks for all the world like an oven leads one of the raptors to crash headlong into a hard surface. It is worth noting that Hansel and Gretel are able to return home on the back of a duck, thanks to the poetry in the spells Gretel chants. Like the mythical Hermes, the two children are adroit liars and arrant thieves who, like all tricksters, also traffic in enchantments.

  That Spielberg was playing in Jurassic Park with gender role reversals becomes evident through the carefully orchestrated color coding in the film. For starters, Hammond, the naïve idealist, is always dressed in white, while Malcolm, the cynical realist, wears black. It seems, then, not coincidental that the paleontologist Alan Grant wears a blue shirt at the beginning of the film, while his collaborator Ellie Sattler wears a pink shirt. By the end of the film, his shirt is caked with mud, and Sattler’s pink shirt is tossed aside to expose a blue undershirt beneath it.21 Lex may not seem to be a close cousin of Lisbeth Salander—she is less adventurous, irreverent, and fearless than the girl with the dragon tattoo—but the two are in the vanguard of a movement that invests girls (Lisbeth is called exactly that in all three of the novels in Larsson’s trilogy) with skills that were traditionally in the DNA of heroes, young and old. The stakes may not be high for Pippi Longstocking, but intelligence, craft, and a skill set that involves mastery of language (of one kind or another) become, for Lisbeth, Lex, and Gretel, matters of life and death. All survivors, they are all also crusaders, crazed by the perils in the world around them but triumphant in their focused response to the threats aimed at them and at those for whom they care.

  Artful Avengers

  Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), directed by Martin McDonagh, reminds us of just how unhinged our new female tricksters can be, with the character played by Frances McDormand swiftly turning from “mad mommy” to “Charles Bronson.”22 The film gives us an unlikely heroine: fifty-something Mildred Hayes, feckless and fidgety, recently divorced, a woman on the verge throughout the film and for good reason: her daughter was brutally raped and murdered, and no one has been arrested. Mildred, herself a survivor of spousal abuse, channels her anger into seeking justice. She begins the quest to identify and arrest her daughter’s killer by renting three billboards. The words that appear on those billboards are: “Still No Arrests?” “How Come, Chief Willoughby?” and “Raped While Dying.” Mildred embraces bold defiance in multiple ways, at first using words as weapons when she puts her high-wattage questions and statements of fact on public display. But soon she moves to more provocative strategies, producing injury and inflicting harm when she turns a drill on her dentist’s thumbnail and then gut-punches teenagers in ways that make us wonder whether this is in fact the turn we want our new cultural heroines to take. And when the violence is played for laughs, it becomes all the more evident that justice stands in the shadow of vengeance. And that is the point at which we may want to ask who is behind the scenes, creating new sword-wielding female tricksters who undo the older models of word-wielding women.

  “You’re a badass, take-no-prisoners woman,” a defeated husband tells his wife in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), a multi-million-copy, bestselling novel turned into a film two years later. Directed by David Fincher, the film takes the idea of the avenger heroine to the point of near parody. In scenes of stylized violence, we watch a woman turning into an agent of the kind of homicidal rage ordinarily inflicted on women by men (as the data convincingly tell us). Gone Girl turns the tables, creating a crafty killer, a woman who is seductive, smart, and treacherous. Gone is the cowering victim and instead we have a lead who knows exactly how to find her version of justice—she has become a towering figure of revenge. Is Gone Girl, then, a feminist manifesto, with a woman rebelling against the cultural pressure to play the “cool girl” and “Amazing Amy,” then getting even in ways cold-blooded and chilling, or is it a misogynist rant featuring a female psychopath who fakes her own death, lies about being raped, and kills to cover her tracks? In classic trickster fashion, Amy engages in self-serving deceptions, taking on the role of an amoral outlaw who sheds feminine stereotypes and takes control in ways that women have traditionally not. In what feels like a masterstroke of irony from an author who has tapped into the idea of heroines using storytelling and writing as forms of self-actualization, Amy keeps a diary, with entries that will be used to incriminate her husband in her staged murder. “She’s telling the better story,” her husband Nick tells his lawyer in the film version of Gone Girl. “She’s telling the perfect story,” the lawyer responds.23 Amy may be a monster, but she is doing nothing more than defamiliarizing the cinematic stereotypes of psychopathic men, all the while masquerading as an abused female victim.

  Many of these new tough girls are not at all inclined to temper justice with mercy (think Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 Kill Bill), especially when they are on political missions. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) has Maya, a CIA officer obsessed with hunting down Osama bin Laden, who operates in a theater of global combat that offers entirely new terrain for female heroics. Maya may cringe while witnessing violent interrogations and torture, but her determination to find and punish terrorists never falters. Homeland’s Carrie Mathison, from the same era, is more complicated, but she, too, obsessed with a terrorist named Abu Nazir, shows a form of unforgiving single-mindedness that shades into pathology. Both Maya and Carrie continue the tradition of wielding language as a weapon. Maya turns an office window into a slate for issuing reprimands. Carrie creates a visual map of her manic thinking, papered with evidence and clues that eventually lead to Abu Nazir’s capture.

  Many of the female tricksters who have emerged in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century are girls, and they are often modeled on figures from fairy tales. But now they have complemented their arsenals of verbal weapons with heavier artillery. Cinematic culture dotes on Little Red Riding Hood almost as much as Granny does, creating girls that turn into the monsters that once preyed on them. The revenge fantasy enacted in Gone Girl turns even darker in recent films, with heroines sporting hooded sweatshirts or red leather jackets, carrying a basket (containing weapons more likely than food) as they make their way to Granny’s. In the 1990s, Little Red Riding Hood turns from vulnerable innocent into a ferocious grrrl.

  Matthew Bright’s Freeway (1996) takes us to the mean streets of Southern California, with an urban Red Riding Hood named Vanessa Lutz (does her last name scramble “slut”?). In her red leather jacket—packing heat in her basket—she makes her way to Granny’s house. The Little Red Riding Hood tropes drop in ways that are fast and furious, and she is seen trying to elude a host of stalkers, among them a pedophile serial killer named Bob Wolverton. (His profession? What else but child psychologist.) In these woods, there is no rescuing huntsman, as becomes clear when Vanessa’s boyfriend, Chopper Wood, is gunned down by rival gang members.

  On the way to Grandmother’s house, Vanessa’s car breaks down, and the smooth-talking Wolverton, who camouflages his homicidal impulses using the guise of a benevolent therapeutic intervention, gives her a lift. Vanessa gains the upper hand, and, like James Thurber’s feisty Red Riding Hood who pulls a pistol from her knickers when the wolf threatens her, she reaches for her revolver when Wolverton reveals his true intentions and identity (the dead giveaway that he is California’s I-5 killer is that he cuts off her ponytail with a straight razor). Wolverton, critically injured and left mutilated after being shot by Vanessa, manages to make his way to Granny’s trailer park, where he conceals himself by wearing a shower cap and capacious nightgown. Vanessa is no fool, and she wrestles the predator to the ground, knocking him out and delivering her final line, “You got a cigarette?” to horrified police officers, who arrive only once the danger is past. She becomes one cool and casual customer.

  It would be reassuring to imagine that Matthew Bright’s girl in red has become a cultural heroine, a survivor who manages, against the odds, to turn the tables on the adults who have victimized her, some of whom are psychopaths masquera
ding as social workers. Vanessa has been seen as the figure who points the way to a reversal of values, undermining a status quo that turns a blind eye to the sadistic impulses of prison guards, police officers, and social workers and fails to recognize the social injustices inflicted on marginalized groups.24 But the foul-mouthed, proudly illiterate, gun-toting high school dropout who asks for a cigarette after slaying Wolverton is hardly a role model. Her retaliatory moves are instinctive and in the service of her own personal survival rather than fueled by righteous indignation at the social order. She may set things right by bringing Wolverton to justice, but they will remain awry so long as a grrrl’s only recourse is to the tactics of the assailant.

  Although David Slade did not set out to make a Little Red Riding Hood film, the story flashes out at us in his 2005 Hard Candy when we see, on the poster advertising it, a girl dressed in a red hoodie, messenger bag slung over her shoulder. She is positioned with her back to us, feet poised on a platform the size of a skateboard, right in the middle of an animal trap lined with jagged blades. “Absolutely terrifying!” shouts the banner over the image, and we are entitled to imagine that this film, too, will subject us to the horrors of watching an adolescent girl at the mercy of a homicidal maniac, a killer who remains ominously invisible on the poster.

  In this updated spin on the fairy tale, the girl and the wolf have their first encounter online. Thonggrrrrl14 and Lensman319 flirt in a chat room and arrange a rendezvous. The names and numbers are telling: this Little Red Riding Hood is a flirtatious fourteen-year-old (underage and seductive), and her date will be with a photographer, a man who lives off a craft that suggests an investment in visual pleasure. And indeed the thirty-two-year-old Jeff will turn out to be not just a photographer of women but also a consumer of pornography, with a stash of incriminating images in a floor safe. Encoded in the names of these two adversaries are their gendered roles, with Thonggrrrrl14 named after a provocative article of clothing and Lensman319 gesturing at the notion of the male gaze.