do not watch this movie unless...

as part of our weekend-long celebration of her birthday, my yin and i went last night to see this movie:

which is best described as The Da Vinci Code meets the rape/revenge genre meets Sweden for brunch. it made me think of a class i took last semester, and the week we spent talking about vampires. we had watched this most excellent film:

which is best described as a thoughtful reworking of the vampire genre. but this is beside the point.

the point is that somewhere i heard the former film compared to the latter, and i walked into The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo expecting it to be something other than what it was - a dreadful display of sexualized violence, gratuitous sodomy, and the restoration of not one, but TWO patriarchs through the pain of a young woman.

more disturbing, however, was the reaction of the couple in front of during the second rape scene, when the protagonist gets revenge on her attacker. although my eyes were turned from the screen in an attempt to mitigate my intake of violence, i couldn't help but hear the man and woman in front of us laughing and cheering as Lisbeth tortured her probation officer.

i thought about desensitization, and how frightening it was that anyone could find pleasure in the images being shown on screen. i though about cinema, and how problematic it was that the apparatus had turned the people in the theater into a group of reluctant voyeurs (like myself and others) and gleeful sadists (the young couple in front of us). i thought about leaving, and how perplexing it was that i was willing to tolerate this in order to see what happened next.

[lapse]

my yin and i talked about the film on a bench outside the theater, discussing the things i have just written. we came home and attempted to wipe the images from our minds, and yet - even this morning - pieces of the plot keep popping into our conversation. i don't know what to make of this, except to say that watching the film is inseparable from doing harm to oneself...

these are the decisions we make

or don't make

every moment of our lives.