In Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish film Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (literally “Men Who Hate Women,” marketed in English as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo), investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is tied up in a torture dungeon. He’s almost certainly about to die. When his captor, Martin Vanger (Peter Haber), offers him a glass of water, he sniffs it before drinking it. It’s a clever, subtle detail that doesn’t appear in the source material, Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (also originally titled Män Som Hatar Kvinnor). But Blomkvist is already strung up by his neck; why is he worried about being poisoned on top of that? Maybe it has something to do with what Martin tells him about the countless women he’s kidnapped, raped, and killed over the years: They always think that if they’re nice enough to him, if they flatter him and do exactly what he says, he might let them go. Their only priority is survival, right up until the light leaves their eyes. That question of priorities permeates every adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo—both the novel’s textual translation from Swedish to English and its two film interpretations (Oplev’s and its American counterpart directed by David Fincher).
Larsson’s reason for writing Män Som Hatar Kvinnor and its sequels, Flickan Som Lekte Med Elden (“The Girl Who Played With Fire”) and Luftslottet Som Sprängdes (“The Castle In The Air That Was Blown Up”), was pragmatic: After spending most of his life in Stockholm barely scraping by as a left-wing journalist who investigated far-right extremists, he wanted to earn enough money to retire with his long-time partner, Eva Gabrielsson. Given his lifelong dedication to combating racism and intolerance (John-Henri Holmberg, Larsson’s editor and mentor, told The New York Times, “Among other things . . . he would not tolerate derogatory opinions of others based on their secondary characteristics, such as ethnicity or gender”), it is perhaps not surprising that even in his commercial novels, he prioritized an antimisogynist message rather than adhering to any conventions of the detective genre he was trying to exploit. The truly surprising thing, as Joan Acocella expressed in The New Yorker, was that these novels—which are at times so wooden and digressive they seem to dare the reader to persevere to their conclusions—became international sensations, complete with multiple successful film adaptations.
To date, the series has sold over 100 million copies worldwide, but The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo remains the most well-known of the bunch. It was first published in Sweden in 2005, but the English translation wasn’t released until 2008. The book opens with Blomkvist, who’s just been convicted of libeling Hans-Erik Wennerström, a prominent Swedish businessman, and spends the first 30 of its roughly 600 pages going into excruciating detail about the financial crimes Blomkvist falsely accused Wennerström of committing. Lisbeth Salander, the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, a genius, antisocial hacker whom Blomkvist eventually enlists to help him with the Harriet Vanger case, doesn’t enter the narrative until page 38, and she doesn’t actually meet Blomkvist until page 358. Ostensibly, opening the book with the background about the court case serves to show that Blomkvist is a heroically moral reporter and explain why he eventually accepts an offer from Henrik Vanger, another wealthy Swedish industrialist, to look into the murder of his niece, Harriet, who disappeared 40 years ago. But it’s mostly just a confounding way to start a mystery thriller novel that spends most of its time unraveling an entirely different crime.
Apart from its bizarre structure, part of the disconnect between an American reader’s expectations and the actual text of the book is due to the alterations that were made to the text in translation. The first and biggest was changing the title from “Men Who Hate Women” (which Larsson was adamant about keeping) to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, but there are others, too: Lisbeth’s tattoo is scaled down from a full back piece to a smaller one on her shoulder blade, and The New York Times reported that Gabrielsson asserted Christopher MacLehose, whose publishing imprint, MacLehose Press, purchased the U.K. rights to Larsson’s Millennium series, “needlessly prettified the translation.” The original English translator, Steven T. Murray, was so opposed to MacLehose’s edits that he eventually asked to be credited under the pseudonym Reg Keeland. As Murray told SouthWest Writers, “In the case of the Millennium books, I wasn’t given enough time to go over the final editing, and I also didn’t agree with many of the changes that had been made. For example, in one scene where Blomkvist is at his sister’s house, she asks him how he’s doing. Larsson wrote, ‘I feel like a sack of shit,’ but this was arbitrarily changed to ‘He told her he felt as low as he had in life.’ These kinds of changes alter the tone and flow of the writing, and I didn’t want to be blamed for such things.”
Translating Larsson’s novels—into both a different language and, eventually, a different medium—was a difficult prospect from the start. Larsson handed in the Millennium manuscripts to Norstedts Förlag, their Swedish publisher, in early 2004; just a few months later, he died of a heart attack at the age of 50. Because Larsson had planned Millennium as a 10-book series but only completed three of them, and he wasn’t able to supervise the translation of the three that did exist, many English-language publishers wouldn’t touch it.
MacLehose was something of a last resort. As MacLehose told The Guardian, Norstedts gave him “two very large, and very battered typescripts and told me another was on its way soon. They then asked if I would be really, really kind and read this thing that they thought was very good, but absolutely nobody else in the English-speaking world agreed.” According to the newspaper, “a distinguished U.S. publisher of crime fiction told him the book was such a mess it could not be fixed.”
MacLehose agreed to publish the series, but only if he could edit the translation. That’s how Men Who Hate Women ended up with the catchy, misleading, and vapid title The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (The second book retained The Girl Who Played With Fire, but the third was changed to The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.) “If you had the author, you would make suggestions. We didn’t have the author but that shouldn’t stop you making the sentences more interesting for the reader,” MacLehose explained.
With his edits to Murray’s translation, MacLehose prioritized shaping the text into something that would appeal to readers who were looking for a more traditional thriller, and that ultimately affected its perception in English-speaking countries. It’s still unquestionably odd that a crime thriller entitled Men Who Hate Women would open with a 30-page screed against lazy financial journalists who fail to hold wealthy businessmen to account, but at least that title elicits more relevant questions when faced with this idiosyncrasy, such as, “Is Wennerström secretly a misogynist? Is Blomkvist? What are these men hiding?” A book titled The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that opens the same way raises a more dire question: “What does this have to do with anything?”
Because of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo‘s sprawling, unwieldy plot, any film adaptation was necessarily going to have to prioritize certain elements and omit or de-emphasize others. There is simply too much going on in the book to adapt its entire narrative. Oplev and Fincher’s films take different approaches to carving out a more cohesive story from Larsson’s large canvas—and they also both reflect what each version’s publisher chose to emphasize with their titles.
Oplev’s film (which was released in 2009 and written by Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel) keeps the focus on hate crimes against women. Oplev’s direction is competent and workmanlike; it doesn’t look like anything special, but it makes up for that with its script. Heisterberg and Arcel largely excise Blomkvist’s crusade against Wennerström; instead, they prioritize the central mystery and reshape the text as a more conventional detective story. Unburdened by the need to explain Blomkvist’s entire career as a journalist and how he keeps the magazine he founded funded, Heisterberg and Arcel have more time to get into the details of the investigation and more fully flesh out their smaller cast of characters. Salander (Noomi Rapace) benefits the most from this; there are small details that give viewers insight into her actions and motivations. When she seduces Blomkvist, they have consensual sex, and then, much to his surprise, she leaves as soon as she’s gotten what she needs from him. She was just using him to get off, and that kind of agency is a refreshing counterpoint to the film’s various examples of men taking that agency away from women through force and violence.
In contrast, the Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) of Fincher’s film (which was released in 2011 and written by Steven Zaillian) is as enigmatic and shallow as its title. Even though Zaillian includes a great deal more of Blomkvist’s (Daniel Craig) subplot with his magazine and Wennerström, he too ends up more of a sketch than a fully developed character. In his review for The A.V. Club, Scott Tobias noted that Fincher’s version “is all surface—magnificent, arresting surface, but surface all the same.” The stunning visuals effectively reflect the vastness of the narrative, but, like the book, the film is simply too wide-ranging to effectively tie its themes together. Fincher’s film is a more plot-accurate adaptation, but Oplev’s film feels truer to the text, because it better captures the message Larsson was trying to convey.
Larsson saw the bluntness of Män Som Hatar Kvinnor as vitally important; MacLehose saw the marketability of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as paramount. Oplev saw the feminist theme of Män Som Hatar Kvinnor as its selling point; Fincher saw the slick harshness of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as its draw. Warring priorities about the translation of the novel led to films that feel worlds apart despite their shared source. It’s almost unfair to compare the films; it would be as useful as comparing a book called Men Who Hate Women to one called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. By the time The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo made it into Fincher’s hands, the text had been altered so many times in so many different ways that there was no clear consensus around what it should be. Instead, it was a matter of interpretation—what did each artistic voice want it to be? Between the translations and the films, audiences got four different answers.
