The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2022: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009), directed by Niels Arden Oplev

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: 'No Rest For the Wicked' by Lykke Li

       The 00’s have been the Golden Age of films based on books. From Harry Potter to Twilight, Hunger Games to the DaVinci Code, film adaptations were enjoying the most success they’d seen since the dawn of Hollywood. Millions, if not billions of dollars pouring into the box office, and studios were riding high on the hog, ready to exploit this cash cow as long as it kept giving milk. There was an amount of backlash of course, mostly from terminally online dudes desperate for the world to know they don’t like these movies made for women and children, but nothing that could really curb the momentum.at the time. It was a YA world, and we were all just living in it.

       The Millennium Trilogy slides right into the ‘also-ran’ category of this boom period. I can remember the buzz around the books when I was younger, I can remember seeing previews for the movie adaptation starring Daniel Craig, but then things just fizzled out. Stieg Larsson, the author of the books had died before the books had even released, so there was always going to be a hard limit to how far studios could ride this gravy train, but after the initial buzz wore off it seemed like America was utterly uninterested in anything Swedish that wasn’t related to meatballs or Abba. That’s how it was for me, a collection of weird titles and covers languishing in the back of my memory like a rusty car frame in the backyard, so when I decided on the theme for this year’s Marathon I figured that October was a good time to do some spring cleaning. Mentally speaking, I’m still a very messy person.

       Released in 2009, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was directed by Niels Arden Oplev, written by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, and produced by Soren Staermose through Yellow Bird, ZDF Enterprise and others, based on the novel of the same name by Stieg Larsson. Michael Nyqvist stars as Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of Millennium magazine whose career is in limbo after being set up to lose a libel case against a local corrupt capitalist. With only a hefty fine and some jail time to look forward to, Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, member of the Vanger Group. Vanger is looking to hire Blomkvist to find out who murdered his niece Harriet, who disappeared from the family manor some 40 odd years ago, and with nothing better to do with his time Blomkvist agrees. However Mikael can’t do it alone, and luckily he won’t have to, after a meeting with the mysterious Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a professional hacker with a penchant for investigation and a chip on her shoulder. Together they will dig into the history of the Vanger family in the hope of finding Harriet’s killer, but when you’re as rich a family as the Vangers you’re bound to have more than one skeleton in their closet.

        A rich family with a dark secret is a plot line that stretches back to Gothic fiction, but Dragon Tattoo does attempt some things to set it apart from the rest of the pack. There’s our female lead Lisbeth for example, the bisexual punk rocker girl with a mysterious past who’s also a professional hacker, which sounds like some Mary Sue stuff but doesn’t really come across that way in the story. Then there’s all the rape, which I’m sure was meant to make things feel ‘real’ and edgy, but I could have done without it.

       I also could have gone without this movie being 2 and a half hours long. Of course when you’ve got a mystery story you want to drip feed information, but everything has a limit. Lisbeth practically has a movie all her own before she even links up with the main plot, and when the mystery is all but solved it still takes an hour to actually wrap things up. Really the movie isn’t bad but it runs on for so long it ended up killing my motivation to write about it.

       I also can’t help but question the motives behind the story. While Lisbeth would go on to become more prominent across the trilogy, it does seem a little telling that Larsson, a journalist and activist, would make the main character of his book a super successful journalist and activist who all the ladies fall for, even women half his age. Which I mean okay, there’s nothing wrong with a little wish fulfillment, but it probably would have been better to do it in a story that didn’t include multiple rape scenes. Look at James Bond for example, power fantasies out the ass with nary a rape scene in sight.

       The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo gets a mild recommendation. If one can maintain their concentration throughout then I imagine the film being appealing to anyone who is a fan of Seven, Zodiac or any of those epic 21st century crime thrillers. Otherwise it’s like a long, uncomfortable car ride, but everyone is talking Swedish. A nightmarish scenario if ever I’ve heard one.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2019: The Seventh Seal (1957), directed by Ingmar Bergman

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Dance of Death", by Andrew Bird

       When many people think of the works of Ingmar Bergman, there’s a good chance that what they envision is pretty similar to that one popular skit from that one popular comedy show, Mystery Science Theater 3000: Movies cloaked in deafening silence, where frigid, Teutonic people toss vague comments at each other as they stare off into the distance, contemplating the meaning of existence. Rather basic for a spoof, I believe they center it around herring because that’s literally all that Sweden’s allowed to be associated with, but I think the fact that the parody even existed speaks to Bergman’s talents and creative vision. Fellini was a great director, as was Truffaut, Kurosawa and the like, but how many people beyond the hardcore cinephiles would recognize a spoof or satirization of their films? Bergman, however, by being so famously dour, stands amongst the likes of Hitchcock and Lynch in that his ‘reputation’ preceedes him. You step into a film 5 minutes in or 10 minutes in or an hour in and you instantly know it’s a Bergman film. That’s power, ladies and gents. That cinematic immortality.

       Of course it’s also possible that the MST3K guys were just making an in-joke and none of viewing knew or cared what the fuck was going on, making that beginning paragraph all bullshit, but we’re down to the wire and I’m writing on fumes here. Anyway, my first non-MST3K taste of the work of our esteemed Mr. Bergman was the Virgin Spring back in Marathon ‘14 (and yes, fucking hell I’ve been doing this for too long), a tragic story of lost innocence and revenge. Since I’ve been bringing back so many other filmmakers back from the past, I figured he was long overdue for a return. A big return, and how much bigger can you get than a film that was referenced by Bill & Ted and Last Action Hero? This is the last time I’ll get to utilize that lead in this month, so let’s make it count with The Seventh Seal.

       Sometime in the middle of the 14th century, knight Antonius Block and his squire J return home to Sweden after spending a decade fighting in the Crusades. While resting on a beach Block is approached by Death, intent on taking him away, but instead Block challenges the reaper to a game of chess, wagering his life on the outcome. The gamble earns him some respite and Antonius and J make the long trip back to Block’s estate, but said trip is anything but peaceful. Sweden has been hit with the infamous Black Plague, and any sense of reason or order is being drowned out under the screams of hundreds or even thousands of the dead and dying. Why is this happening? Is this some punishment from heaven for some unknown transgression? Does god even exist, that he would allow these things to happen? These are the questions that Antonius and his traveling companions face as they make their journey further and further into a world gone mad. Yet no matter how mad it gets, no matter how far they go, death is never far behind.

       So as you’d expect from a film where Death is a character, this movie is about death. How we confront the inevitability of death, on an individual level as well as a collective one. Which is interesting, because it allows for a shift in tones without ever generating a feeling of whiplash. The scene where a parade of people are whipping themselves and crying for god to protect them from this disease they do not and cannot understand (one of the most tragic moments in the film) can fit right alongside a scene where Death kills a guy by sawing down the tree he’s resting on because that’s the way she goes, sometimes a person’s death is a huge tragedy and sometimes their dumb ass fell out of a tree. Antonius’ desperate search for proof of god’s existence to justify the suffering fits right alongside J’s war-hardened nihilism for the same reasons, the looming sense of manic dread in the face of what seems to be the apocalypse is counteracted by songs about farting and horses acting like crows. Even the ending is this mixture of light and darkness, of endings and beginnings. Death comes for us all, The Seventh Seal seems to imply, but you can’t let that keep you from living.

       This is also the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s collaboration with Max von Sydow by the way, which would last until 1971’s The Touch. Seeing him here and in the Virgin Spring those jokes about Bergman films being silent and dour gain some weight, but I found Antonius’ stoicism barely containing this geyser of self-hatred and existential panic rather compelling. I found he was often overshadowed by the stronger personalities, most commonly J, but I believe that was Bergman’s intention, that Block’s experiences had made him withdraw from the world and fed into his depression. It’s a bit of a trip to watch his work here and remember that thirty some years later he’d be playing a side character in Dreamscape, a movie that most people haven’t even seen, much less set it alongside Ingmar Bergman’s most famous film. What a wild career this dude has had, from Swedish classics to Flash Gordon to The Force Awakens.

One thing I do find a bit weird in hindsight is how much emphasis pop culture places on the chess game portion of The Seventh Seal. Chess is an important part of the film of course, kicking off the plot and setting up scenes but the amount of chess playing in the film is actually quite small, you could count the number of moves made on screen with one hand. Prior to this review, I thought The Seventh Seal WAS the game of chess, some kind of bottle movie where Death and the protagonist played each other for an hour and change, interspersed with conversations about philosophy and meaning (and no, you can’t have my idea Jim Jarmusch). It’s still a film about the struggle between man and death, but I guess the competition with the grim reaper aspect of The Seventh Seal is more appealing than the ‘struggling against the inevitability of death and an indifferent universe’ thing. Maybe Antonius should have challenged him to a fiddle contest.

       The Seventh Seal is probably one of those movies that’s too good to be on a Halloween movie list, but since I’m the one writing the reviews, it’s going in anyway. There’s nothing in the way of spooks, Death is the only fantastical bit here and he’s just some bald dude in a robe, but it does deal in some heavy subjects which can be scary to think about when you’re lying in bed trying to sleep. Yet there’s this calming presence to this film as well, a feeling of peace not unlike those childhood days after a good night of trick-or-treating. The perfect atmosphere to end this long, dark marathon of the soul, a perfect film to recommend. Hope you have a good time, and I hope to see you again on the next review.

Happy Halloween!!! 

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages (1922), directed by Benjamin Christensen

     

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Is Everybody In?", by William S. Burroughs feat. The Doors

     Maybe it’s a personal thing, but silent movies have always kind of freaked me out. Maybe it’s the ghostly, pallid hue that everyone has, maybe it’s the way that everyone seems to speak but there’s no sound except for the creepy accompanying music, or maybe it’s because you can’t gain much of any context from the sounds of the movie so you have to give your full attention to it and thus focus on the first two things, I don’t know. Despite the aversion to silent cinema however, I have seen several in that classification, most of which resided in the horror genre. I’ve seen Nosferatu of course, as well as The Golem from 1915 (one of the only occasions to feature a golem as the monster) and Vampyr, which involves some freaky supernatural stuff.  All of those movies were of the German expressionist genre by the way, which just goes to show that the Germans have always been weird.

      Technically an exercise in Swedish expressionism rather than German, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages was at the time of its release the most expensive Scandinavian film ever made (thanks wikipedia). A documentary of sorts, Häxan explains partly through pictures and partly through vignettes the attitudes and public perception of witchcraft through the middle ages, how witches concocted the spells they used and the methods by which the Inquisition used to torture them. The educational portions are educational at the very least, but it’s the acting portions where things take a leap off the deep end. There is some downright disturbing imagery going on in Häxan, and I don’t mean disturbing for a uptight, less advanced 1920’s movie audience, I mean disturbing in general. Torturing women, eating boiled babies, satanic orgies, Satan himself (played by our esteemed director) jacking off a butter churn, the kind of nightmares are made of. That’s what this movie feels like, not like you’re watching a coherent, structured film, but as if you’re experiencing sleep paralysis or something. Strange and bizarre things appear that frighten you, but you have no control over how those things appear, and even when they do you’re only subjected to more. I don’t know if you could call it a horror movie as such, because genres usually have specific memes or whatever to define theme, but this movie is far more unsettling than most I’ve seen. This is the kind of shit you’d find in H.P. Lovecraft’s attic.

      There are several different versions of this film you could watch, as is the case with many silent movies, with different runtimes and musical backing and such. The version I watched was restored by Anthony Balch and released in 1968, featuring a free jazz soundtrack and narration by beat writer William S. Burroughs (the scariest man in literature). The idea of free jazz may turn off some people, but the dissonant soundtrack only enhances the overall surrealism of the film in my opinion, and Burroughs’ droning croak of a voice is the iron smoothing out the wrinkles in your brain. Probably not a fun movie to watch on acid, but perhaps a movie you’d like to watch on Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: The Virgin Spring (1960), directed by Ingmar Bergman

     

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Sweet Revenge", by John Prine

     So far we’ve had some pretty iconic directors sprinkled around the list this year. Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, John Milius, etc. Which is great, but with the exception of Hitchcock, we haven’t really broken out of the United States yet. Which is bad, because there are scores of great films and great directors outside of America and Britain that are worth experiencing. Like Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman for example, one of the most famous auteur directors of all time, and whose name sounds like something you’d call your pet alien. Bergman’s films are notoriously bleak and somber affairs, frequently dealing with such lovely themes as death and insanity, and used so many long bouts of silence that it makes Stanley Kubrick seem inadequate by comparison. Which sounds like just the right kind of mood to be in on Halloween, so I decided to pick a Bergman film more or less at random and see how it went. What I ended up with was The Virgin Spring.

      In a scenic part of the featureless Swedish countryside, there once lived a Swedish family, who lived their lives as was appropriate for Swedes to do at the time. The pride and joy of the family was the daughter, Karen, a beautiful young girl with golden hair and a willful personality, One day, Karen and her kind-of-insane relative Ingeri take a trip to the local church, to deliver the candles for Mass. Tragically, while on the way to the aforementioned church, Karen is accosted by three goatherds. Karen is raped and murdered, her possessions looted and her body covered in dirt and mud. The family is understandably upset when Karen is missing for so long, and when three mysterious travelers come by to stay the night, carrying a familiar looking shift to trade, it sets the stage for some good old-fashioned revenge.

     I have to admit that The Virgin Spring was a bit tough for to get into at the beginning, those long bouts of silence and vague dialogue are all too real, but once I got into the meat of the story it started getting really interesting. That bleak atmosphere Bergman is so famous for is totally appropriate in a movie about the futility of vengeance and the silence of God. While not really a horror movie (unless you count the destruction of innocence), it’s a good film to put under your belt if you’re looking to become a more advanced movie fan, or if you want to clear the room after a particularly raucous party this Halloween. And if you’re Swedish, well, you know what to do.