There is some justice in the fact that the renewed debate over confessed pedophile Roman Polanski, now a free man thanks to a pusillanimous Swiss legal system, should take place at exact the time in which the second bestselling book in the world is a feminist crime thriller trilogy whose main themes are violent misogyny and rape. It was the mere marketing whim of a Swedish publisher that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was not titled Men Who Hate Women. And if being a brilliant filmmaker is all that stands in the way of one's responsibility to do hard time for raping a 13 year-old girl, then one wonders afresh at just what a moral and literary absence was created when Stieg Larsson died (or was killed) in 2004. His feminine hero Lisbeth Salander, now in strong competition with an all-male pantheon of super-sleuths ranging from Holmes to Poirot, did not have the benefit of being plied with wine and muscle relaxants before she was sodomized by a much older man in Larsson's debut fiction, a man upon whom she exacts a revenge that Samantha Geimer will likely not be able to exact upon the director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown.
No doubt a sigh of relief has been exhaled from Hollywood to the Left Bank over Polanski's all-clear. (Has Woody Allen been reached for comment yet?) Moral relativism being what it is in the 21st century, crimes are only as umbrageous as a criminal's ability to thank the Academy. Meanwhile, an entire generation of male and female readers are being fed real lessons on human rights and sexual depredations by a dead Scandinavian Trotskyist who never got to cash in on his storytelling talents.
add a comment