This is one of those films that I end up watching because of its popularity and then after watching, I’m unsure how to proceed having seen it. Do you talk about a Not Rated film with Christian friends and unavoidably stir up their interest in a movie the content of which you want to distance yourself from?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is graphic to be sure. (When I mentioned the title to my wife, she asked if it was a porno! No, it’s not.) The basic story is that of a journalist who in the months before he has to fulfill a prison sentence is hired by a ritzy tycoon to track down his long disappeared neice. The journalist gets help from a mentally-troubled goth computer hacker who plays host to an enormous dragon tattoo on her back, which you wouldn’t see except for a sex scene. Overall, the film even at 2:26 is an absolute thriller of a mystery that will easily end up being the shortest longest film you’ve seen, if you decide to see it.

I read this week that the most important philosophical question to ask when watching a movie, according to the author of a new book called Meaning at the Movies, is

What is the overall view of the nature of man presented by the film as seen by a reasonably perceptive viewer? This can largely be determined by considering plot, characterization, and the tone or mood of the film.

Reasonably perceptive, eh? Well, it doesn’t take much to gather that the view of man in this movie is total depravity. You could even take total depravity in the oft misunderstood sense of “as evil as can be” and still be on target. But this is the view of men in the film. Women are almost exclusively portrayed as the helpless victims of horendous abuses while the girl with the dragon tattoo is the defiant female taking charge. In fact, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is only the name of the novel/film in English. The original Swedish title is Man som hatar kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”). The film indeed highlights misogyny at its worst.