The music of the mechanics of the investigation

A man, recently humiliated for making unsubstantiated accusations against a public figure, is brought to a remote, frozen corner of Northern Sweden, an island of vast manors inhabited by the aging members of an industrial dynasty, some of them one-time Nazis, few of whom talk to each other anymore. The man has been asked by one of the family elders to research his memoir, but the real purpose of the research seems to be to discover what happened to a 16-year-old niece who vanished back in 1966.

As the man gets deeper into his increasingly precarious task (many within the family aren’t nice to him; one even shoots at him) he hires a young woman as an assistant—the same young woman who did an extremely thorough background check on the man for the family elder. Turns out they make a great team: he’s cool but affable, ruggedly handsome in his heavy knits, a sort of old school gumshoe type of investigative reporter, good with legwork and making contacts; she’s withdrawn and socially handicapped, a genius with data processing (she may even have a photographic memory) and swift with acts of necessary roughness, diminutive, with a pale, orphan-child face, multiple piercings and tatts, and, at times, an invincible mohawk. (How does her hair stay so vertical after wearing a motorcycle helmet?) The film they’re in has little time for conventional character development, so our rapid registering of their peculiar, quiet chemistry is important. The characters are embodied by Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, whose performances, defined by such distinct choices in body language, appear effortless, or rather, all about attending to the task at hand. And that’s the sensibility driving The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in a nutshell: telling a story one task at a time; process, procedure, efficiency.

The hiring of director David Fincher for the English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s pulpy, often tawdry international bestseller is inspired. Very few filmmakers could simultaneously manage a production of this scale and bring to it such personal, unfussy finesse. Early scenes snow us with exposition and flashbacks, yet we get everything we need to, and even if we don’t it’s all quite compelling. There’s a great deal of ordinary work up on screen: googling, highlighting documents, scanning photos, thumbing through files, and all of it clips along like the tip-tapping of a crash cymbal. The mystery at the heart of this is genuinely interesting, the resolution pretty satisfying, but what animates The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the music of the mechanics of the investigation itself.

Fincher’s work underwent a seismic breakthrough with 2007’s Zodiac—a mystery that doesn’t even have a resolution!—and this new film takes its cues from that film, as well as 2010’s The Social Network. All these films are on the long side, all of them crammed with plot, all of them hugely dependent on pace, rhythm, dynamics, adrenaline. Dragon Tattoo isn’t the deepest thing Fincher’s made (its serial killer’s gimmicky showmanship mirrors one of the corniest/most shamelessly lurid elements of 1995’s Se7en) by it’s as engrossing as his best work. Even after two-and-a-half exhausting hours, I found myself eager to come back and see what Fincher and his cohorts do with the next installment of the trilogy.

Fight Club: We got the beats

Our unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) holds a position that could only have emerged in the late 20th century: he’s something called a recall coordinator, which basically means he negotiates the degree to which products have to annoy, maim or kill buyers before the manufacturer actually has to do something about it. It’s a brilliant occupation for the protagonist of a film that’s aged so well that its time is still coming into being. The first rule of Fight Club (1999) is, however macho/obnoxious/show-offy it may seem, don’t underestimate Fight Club.

Off the top, our young Narrator’s already reached an advanced state of yuppie zombification; his insomnia renders everything “a copy of a copy of a copy,” debilitating sleeplessness being an apt response to a world conspiring to keep one simultaneously lulled from disruptive critical thinking and excited by the possibility of perpetual shopping. Then Narrator meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a salesman of soap—"the yardstick of civilization"—and projectionist of family films into which he slips big dicks. He has silly spiky hair, dresses like a trailer park pimp, and waxes anti-establishment philosophy; he’s also handsome and sculpted and wants to get physical with Narrator, prompting what we might deem an ultra-masculine friendship, gay romance, or a solipsism so overpowering as to induce prolonged hallucinations. These guys start their titular club in basements and backstreets and it grows or catches until all over America men are denouncing their identities, pounding the shit out of each other, and waiting for cues to launch spectacular acts of terrorism.

So Fight Club’s trajectory is itself novel: boy meets girl; boy meets boy; boys fight (for fun/self-betterment); second boy steals girl; first boy finds himself; everything goes bananas. The film didn’t initially “perform,” but it established director David Fincher as a masterful, if over-eager, manipulator of industrial light and magic: the walk-in IKEA catalogue, the camera’s vertiginous swoops, the fantasy air collision all feel a little overbearing and Roger Rabbity. But who else could have told this unruly, audacious story with such vigour? In its perverse depiction of mental illness, leading up to its big twist, this adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s eponymous novel is actually an outstanding adaptation of Philip K. Dick, the oft-adapted, rarely apprehended author whose schizophrenia imbued so much of his science fiction. Fight Club suggests that schizophrenia might be the natural result of prolonged exposure to late capitalism. And I almost believe it.