The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, H&M, and the difficulties of marketing a female action/thriller hero.

Whenever I see an article about H&M's new "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" line I waste valuable seconds of my life being irritated, so where better to vent than my fashion blog?

I'm aware that it's probably stupid to get annoyed by high street fashion marketing. It's always going to be dumb. H&M is just making use of a popular book and movie franchise to sell bland goth-lite clothes. However, the designer hired by H&M to create the Lisbeth Salander line is the costume designer from the actual movie, and the clothes look exactly like normal H&M clothes, except monochromatic. And... "Lisbeth Salander studded wedge heels"? Right.

Omigod I can't wait to get my emotionally-damaged hacker outfit! Yay, generic-looking $200 jackets!

I'm not wild about they way Lisbeth Salander is being marketed in preparation for this film. It's going to be hard enough for Rooney Mara to measure up to Noomi Rapace's fantastic performance in the original Swedish-language adaptations, and I doubt that "sexy" marketing is going to help in that regard. A gajillion people bought this book: isn't that evidence enough that Lisbeth Salander is already an interesting character? Is it necessary for Mara's first -- and aside from a recent spread in Le Monde, which is unlikely to reach most of this movie's prospective viewers, only -- photoshoot for the Dragon Tattoo movie to look like this?

Photos from W Magazine.

Seriously? I mean, obviously this photoshoot wasn't made using the actual Lisbeth Salander costumes, but most people taking a casual glance at it are not going to know that. Aside from the fact that they essentially amount to a collection of sexualised images of a character whose defining backstory centres around child abuse, these pictures do the movie a disservice by making it indistinguishable from a multitude of other fashion spreads. Girl straddling a motorcycle and looking pouty? Meh. Every actress in Hollywood has done a photoshoot that either includes a sexy motorbike pose or involves a goth/punk theme (especially former child stars trying to appear "adult").

Fun fact: if you google "Rooney Mara Lisbeth Salander", the second image that comes up is one from this photoshoot, posing topless in the snow while looking fragile and wistful. Does this bare any resemblance to her performance as Salander? Probably not. But it's still the first set of images people are going to find before the movie comes out, because aside from the trailer no screenshots have been revealed. Of all the photos from this shoot, I'd say this one looks most like the Lisbeth Salander we can expect to see in the movie:

Perhaps a bit too glam, but I'm going to give the film the benefit of the doubt and assume that they're going to make Salander more messy-looking onscreen and less like an Adam Lambert backing dancer. Which brings me to my main worry about Lisbeth Salander's appearance in the American remake: grunginess.

Salander's style (if you can call it that) is entirely wrapped up in her prickly, angry, socially-maladjusted personality. She dresses with explicit aim of coming across as scary and unappealing. She isn't part of any goth subculture, and she has no difficulty attracting a partner when she wants to get laid and therefore does not dress with the aim of being sexually appealing. In the typical (male) hacker stereotype she spends long stretches of time on her computer, eating shitty food, not washing, and not changing her clothes. As a physically small woman who is justifiably wary of abuse and attack, she goes out of her way give off as many negative signals as possible. The way Rooney Mara has been styled, however, doesn't quite match this. Firstly, her hairstyle looks expensive and trendy instead of home-cut and messy, and secondly, if ever there was a role for which an actress should "ugly up", Lisbeth Salander is it.

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander. Photo from Le Monde.

Rooney Mara is beautiful. She looks like a model. She looks like a model with a cool haircut that probably needs trimming and restyling every other week. I'm not saying this is a casting issue -- I'm saying that "beautiful" is probably not a word that should be associated with this character. In the original movie, Noomi Rapace, both through body-language and through styling, looked like someone you might see (and probably avoid) in real life. Rooney Mara looks like someone who would turn heads. This illustrates the gap between a book and a Hollywood movie, because while on the page Salander can be described as unsettling in appearance, as skinny and weird-looking, as creepy and bony, what this translates to on the big screen is: thin.

It's been mentioned in interviews that Rooney Mara went on a strict diet to maintain Salander's appearance, but you can't really compare this with something like Christian Bale's transformation for The Machinist because on the big screen, skinny women are the norm.

That's a pretty shocking photo, right? Particularly if you've seen Christian Bale in Batman, where his arms are about the circumference of his waist in that picture. However, while Rooney Mara's weight-loss for Dragon Tattoo was probably just as difficult to maintain, the end result is... a woman with the same physique Keira Knightley had in Pirates of the Caribbean, a child-friendly action comedy in which she played the romantic lead. They need to go further. In designing a look for Lisbeth Salander, the description you should be concentrating on isn't "skinny goth", it's "scary-looking". And if the end result is that Rooney Mara's Salander looks like a model doing a punk-themed photoshoot, they're doing it wrong.

Postscript: I rewatched the trailer while I was writing this, and although I still think that it's a brilliant trailer that does its job by making me want to see the movie, I notice that it contains a surprisingly tiny amount of Lisbeth Salander. Is this because Daniel Craig is the big-name star and therefore the lynchpin of their marketing for the film, or -- my paranoid feminist brain worries -- is the studio wary of including too much of a a tough, weird female character in case it scares people away? See for yourself.

In order, the recognisable Salander moments (ie, where her face isn't obscured by a helmet) are: Salander looking at something; looking at photos; kissing a girl; looking at a man; on a bed, looking at photos; looking at Daniel Craig; appearing threatened; a man touching Salander's head; running; a moment of the rape scene; Salander on top of (attacking) a man on a bed; looking at Daniel Craig; getting out of a car wearing a blonde wig; in the shower, shivering; walking, peering through a doorway.

That has got to be the most passive depiction of an action/thriller hero I have ever seen. I trust David Fincher to make a good film that reflects the violence and stress of the books, but the way it's being marketed is as if the Bourne Identity trailer had been made up entirely of clips of Matt Damon looking at stuff while other characters got all the dialogue and action sequences.