Mad Men, 1966, and Stieg Larsson

The new season of the TV show Mad Men has grabbed its biggest audience ever and triggered new media interest in the culture of 1966, which provides the backdrop for this year’s plot. Having been through the death of JFK and the early 1960s with Don Draper and company, we now arrive at the mid-60s, when the civil rights movement is coming to prominence and the culture is about to experience enormous change. To set the tone, check out this present day New York Times article reflecting on the historical accuracy of the first scene in the March 25  season opener, which is drawn right out of the reality of civil rights protests in New York. And, if you don’t mind getting that inane Zou bisou bisou song stuck in your head (in the TV series sung by Jessica Paré, who plays Megan, the new and much younger wife of Don Draper), check out this YouTube version of the Gillian Hills 1962 original:

 

But 1966 is important to Stieg Larsson fans for another reason: It is in September 1966 that Harriet Vanger is said to have gone missing in the pre-story that fuels the plot of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

New Music from Sweden: First Aid Kit

Photo by Cici Olsson

We have recently been enjoying the music of a pair of sisters from Sweden who call themselves First Aid Kit: Johanna and Klara Söderberg, who are aged 21 and 19 respectively, and have just released a terrific new album called “The Lion’s Roar.” They performed at a sold-out concert in New York this week and have been touring the U.S. after hitting #1 on the Swedish pop charts.  The Lion’s Roar is very folk-country, and has lyric allusions as well as musical homages to Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Johnny Cash, June Carter, and other American country and indie voices.

“Are Femme Fatales The New Feminists?”

asks novelist Chris Pavone in a recent Wall Street Journal blog post. Pavone, the author of The Expats, riffs on the theme of  “how many women have been beating the crap out of people in movies recently.” He starts off referencing Lisbeth Salander, “that tattooed girl herself,” who is, in Pavone’s words, “the surly new archetype of ass-kicking woman.” He then goes on to highlight the 2011 films, Hanna and Columbiana, as well as Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, Kate Beckinsale in Underworld, and the just opened Hunger Games. What’s happening in film is also happening in television, says Pavone, citing “Piper Perabo’s oddly compelling combination of ass-kicking and wisecracking and tight-skirt-wearing, on Covert Affairs.” He goes on to argue:

“What’s with all this female-perpetrated violence? Two and a half years ago, when I started writing a thriller called The Expats about a spy turned expat homemaker who relapses, I thought I was doing something marginally original. Sure, Angelina Jolie had been beating people up for years, but she was a statistical outlier in a field populated by her beau and his pals, while Rooney Mara was playing an ex-girlfriend. Now everywhere I turn there are stoic, buff women running around shooting guns, and elbowing people in their tracheas. (And by “people,” I mean men; these women are not, for the most part, beating each other up.)  Why? Is this Fourth Wave Feminism, wherein women are the new action heroes—the assassins, the spies, the hired guns, the defenders against the occult? (We even have an actual nonfiction First Lady who looks like she has a fearsome right hook, a far cry from the Rosalynn Carters and Nancy Reagans of my youth.) Is this a bona fide cultural shift, in the way we view gender roles? Or just a venal marketing shift, in the way moviemakers are angling to earn a buck? Or both?”

What do you think?

MGM: We Got Nicked On ‘Dragon Tattoo’

When is a 231% profit a loss? Apparently when MGM says it is. At least that is the implication one could draw from this recent report in the Los Angeles Times:

Returns of $231 million in worldwide box office wasn’t enough to turn a profit on “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer disclosed in financial results released this week that it is booking what Co-Chief Executive Gary Barber called a “modest loss” on the film. On a conference call with shareholders, he said the independent studio, which covered 20% of the approximately $100-million production budget for the movie co-financed and distributed by Sony Pictures, needed “Dragon Tattoo” to collect about 10% more revenue in order to break even.

As a result, he said that while talks with Sony are ongoing for a potential sequel based on the second book in the “Millennium” trilogy by author Stieg Larsson, MGM would participate only “assuming we can achieve better economics” — Hollywood-speak for a lower budget.

The DVD is out

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has just been released on DVD. We continue to welcome comments from the followers of The Tattooed Girl blog about the David Fincher/Rooney Mara/Sony film itself, or in comparison to the Scandinavian film versions with Noomi Rapace, or in comparison to the Stieg Larsson books. We want to hear from you!

As the Wave of IKEA Noir Continues, Should Dan Brown be Jealous?

“The next Stieg Larsson” label, spread around in the last couple of years by book publicity departments like so much herring, has become tiresome, even to those whose book sales may have benefited from the comparison. Which is why we were so struck by the wry answer given to the inevitable question by Jo Nesbo, the multi-talented Norwegian author of the increasingly popular “Harry Hole” novels.

Interviewed at the New Zealand International Arts Festival, and asked how he felt about being called “the new Stieg Larsson,” Nesbo replied: “It could have been worse – I could have been the new Dan Brown.” 

As The Independent goes on to report, the Norwegian writer’s success — which stands on its own — may be beginning to rival both his late Swedish contemporary and the author of The Da Vinci Code. Apart from the fact that Nesbo is now (according to his publishers) selling one book every 23 seconds, Hollywood success beckons, as Nesbo’s The Snowman is shortly to be filmed by no less than Martin Scorsese.

There is a second reason we were interested in the story: The Dan Brown connection. As readers of The Tattooed Girl may know, we were authors of the bestselling guides to the Dan Brown novels with our Secrets of the Code, Secrets of Angels and Demons, and Secrets of the Lost Symbol. The Hollywood rumor mill continues to swirl with stories about when we will see The Lost Symbol movie. For a while we were given to understand that Dan Brown was trying to write the screenplay himself, but recent word is that screenwriting has been taken over by Danny Strong, who received a lot of attention last week for his work on Game Change, the HBO movie of the Sarah Palin campaign story.

A YA Novelist/Lawyer Imagines Stieg Larsson’s Consuming Passion for Writing his Millennium Trilogy

We enjoyed reading the recent blog post of Francisco Stork, a YA novelist who has also had a long career as an attorney. In it, Stork imagines how Larsson might have approached the self-motivation to write his novels, having never before published a novel…and tries to extend the same “Larsson Approach” to any writer who wants to follow their passion to write novels. We don’t know Stork, but we like what he has to say. Looking at his biography on Amazon, we also note he is of the same global generation as Stieg Larsson. Stork was born in Mexico in 1953; Larsson in Sweden in 1954.

The Larsson Approach
Authored by Francisco Stork

Here’s the story of how the Larsson Approach was conceived. You’re at the Gardens Mall in West Palm Beach three months ago. You volunteer to stroll baby Charlotte around while your wife and daughter and daughter-in-law make their way from Abercrombie to Zappos. They’ll meet you by the Starbucks in an hour and a half. Baby Charlotte falls asleep the first five minutes after they leave and there you are with 85 minutes left. You find a padded bench and sit. In back of the stroller you see your daughter-in-law’s book: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. You’re a bit of a snob and don’t ordinarily read any book that has sold more than the Bible, but you’re desperate. After a few pages you discover that the boy can write. He’s no Marcel Proust, but still he has something. A certain honesty. You can feel the fire behind his words.