I Preferred The Original Dragon Tattoo
July 17, 2010 13 Comments
Pop culture is weird sometimes. Lately I keep being forced into a vague awareness that there’s a book (or something) called The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I see people reading it on beaches and the subways. It’s featured prominently in all the bookstores. Go to Amazon and it will be somewhere there. Go to some other website and you’ll see an Amazon ad for it. I think it’s going to be made into a movie. Or already was. So movie people talk about the coming (or already made) movie. Because supposedly that’s interesting too.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against it, whatever it is. It’s just that for the life of me I can’t begin to picture or imagine what’s supposed to be such a big deal about this book. I know zero about it so in my mind I suppose I can imagine it being anything from a softcore romance to a serial-killer slasher. I’ve just temporarily filed it mentally under the same compartment into which I placed The Kite Runner a few years back and The Da Vinci Code before that.
But still, whatever it is, surely it can’t possibly merit the attention and high profile it’s been given. I mean, can it? From the way it has become ubiquitous in the media, it pretty much has to be the best book (it started out as a book, right? or was it originally a children’s TV show or something?) of all time to live up to it.
Because if not, I do resent being forced into awareness of this book I’m pretty sure I’ll never read. Now, you’re going to say (maybe), “Sonic Charmer, it’s a good book. You see, there’s this girl, and she has this tattoo, and they…well the government, you see…I mean there’s this ancient bloodline, and…well anyway there’s a lot to explain, but just read it. You’re prejudging. It’s really good!”
Okay, maybe you have a point, imagined interlocutor. Maybe. But even if it’s like a pretty good book and all, so what? Does that mean I have to keep not being able to not be aware of its existence all the time? What’s the big deal if I don’t read or have any knowledge of some pretty good book? Aren’t there other good books for me to be aware of and not have time to read? Leave me be.
Here’s the other thing. To me, the phrase “dragon tattoo” always and forever will inherently have only one connotation, and it’s a Fountains of Wayne song. Mind you, it’s a very good Fountains of Wayne song. Indeed, that’s the problem: I simply can’t imagine the book version possibly measuring up.
Aha. I feel you, bro’. I hear you, I just disagree.
Maybe what you’re saying is you guess it’s just hype and it’s working like a snowball rolling and getting bigger. I refused at first to watch Twin Peaks. I hated the hype. I was sure I’d hate the series. After about a year I was forced(!) to take tapes of Twin Peaks and give it a chance. I watched 3 episodes in a row almost every night. Addicted.
I refused to watch The Sopranos at first; this hyped-up show about opera singers. Fuck that!
And then I watched an episode .. part of it.. and one more and I was hooked.
I wish I’d seen the Matrix (1) in the cinema and I hope I didn’t simply because I didn’t know it would be so great or didn’t have who to go with. If I didn’t go because it was hyped-up, it’s kind of dumb.
I still hate hype. And if I love something, I need to feel it’s not mass-produced and mass-liked, but made exclusively for me. Hype irritates me. And besides, countless idiotic things are hyped up but hey, maybe that book is actually kind of great.
So you’re saying I should give the book version a chance? Seriously though, how can it possibly top the Fountains of Wayne song? And of all the Fountains of Wayne songs to try to turn into a book, why “Red Dragon Tattoo”? Why didn’t they start with “Stacy’s Mom” or “Fire Island”?
Anyway, I’ve nothing against hype, if I understand where it’s coming from. Twin Peaks was a David Lynch cult TV show. Matrix was a hip sci-fi geekout. Sopranos was…well I’m still not sure. But still, for the most part, those hypes all make sense to me.
I just broke down and wiki’ed this Dragon Tattoo thing. From what I can tell, it’s some sort of…detective/thriller fiction. From Sweden. Well fine, I’m sure it’s pretty entertaining, but why is it so special?
I’m interested in how these things catch on exactly. There are a zillion detective/investigation thrillers written every year. Dean Koontz writes one like every six days. So why did this one tap into that whatever-it-is zeitgeist that made it The Book that even like 23 year old hot girls in business suits read on the subway?
Just as one might ask what was it about The Sopranos that made it catch on in a way that, say, “Wiseguy” with Ken Wahl a few years earlier never quite did, it seems fair to ask why some random detective thriller from Sweden is suddenly The Book Everyone Read. What is it about this particular detective thriller exactly?
Why are girls reading this thing? (Girls often seem key to whether something catches on or doesn’t – again, see Kite Runner or Da Vinci Code.) Is it the fact that it has “girl” in the title? “tattoo” in the title? “girl” and “tattoo” together? Is that what made all the trend-setting girls get intrigued and want to read it?
I don’t have the answer. I’m just asking the questions. This seems important to figure out! If I understood this then maybe I’d like understand lots of other things I don’t understand. (Like girls in the first place)
So help me!
>Anyway, I’ve nothing against hype, if I understand where it’s coming from. Twin Peaks was a David Lynch cult TV show. Matrix was a hip sci-fi geekout. Sopranos was…well I’m still not sure. But still, for the most part, those hypes all make sense to me.
Well, I understood there’s hype about a tv series by Lynch (even if I only knew him by Blue Velvet at that point) and it didn’t make me like the hype. I hated it. I didn’t want to become part of it. And then I loved it so much, I was so hooked. So did people watch it because of the hype or did it get hyped up because so many people loved it?
Matrix’s hype is easy to understand but only once you’ve watched the film, otherwise you’d say ‘so it’s an action/sci-fi with metaphysical themes, so what? Is everyone now into metaphysics? Lots of action films are out there. What’s the big fuss about this?’
I didn’t read The Da-Vinci Code. You did. So you’re in a position to tell: why was it so damn popular? Because it’s an Umberto Eco for the masses? Maybe.
>Just as one might ask what was it about The Sopranos that made it catch on in a way that, say, “Wiseguy” with Ken Wahl
I didn’t see Wiseguy.. but there’s more about The Sopranos then just a zeitgeist, right? I mean it’s made spectacularly well, played incredibly well, cast fabulously, scripted brilliantly, cruelly, hilariously, humanly. It’s filmed like a Movie, not a made-for-tv drama, and every episode felt a little bit like watching a film. The devil is in the details. I don’t even go in for Mafia films. I loved Goodfellas, but am not into the Godfather movies.
It’s a good question, really. To ask about The Sopranos or about this book, but sometimes god, the devil, humor, poetry.. they’re all in the details.
>So you’re saying I should give the book version a chance?
Yep! Definitely. And then you can tell us what you think is the reason it was such a success. You’ve got me curious now.
>The Book that even like 23 year old hot girls in business suits read on the subway?
Ahhhh…. I didn’t realize. Now you’ve explained its mystique!
So long as I thought it’s just ‘some people’ in places like the beach.. it meant little to me. Now that I know plenty of .. hot girls in Business suits on the subway read it.. yeah, now I’m a hell of lot more curious. Funny but true.
The fact is, you actually work in a place where (hot?) women (more than 2?) work and probably wear, well clothing, yes they’re probably dressed but ahh they would wear business clothes, so you ought to know more about them than I do or ever will.
Only once did I work in such a place and even then.. the suits were one floor up, the women on my floor just wore trendy informal clothes.
Hot young women in business suits.. yes.. It’s all mysterious.
Of course, success feeds on itself and undoubtedly some read it just to be in on what’s hot. If neither of us was the shy type, I’d say: ask these women what about the book it is they love. Of course Amazon reviews would tell us that but who can really go all the way there to find out…
>Is it the fact that it has “girl” in the title? “tattoo” in the title?
lol.. could be, a little.
Do women have blogs where they discuss things like “why is Die Hard so popular among young men? Is it the fact that “death” is in the title, that “hard” is in the title?” which *is* a part of why Die Hard is so good. It’s a better title than “it’s hard being a man but someone has to do it”.
>If I understood this then maybe I’d like understand lots of other things I don’t understand
I think by now you Owe it to us to read it and tell us!
I think what you’re getting at is that one can’t know the reason for hype, and whether it’s well-founded, unless they see the thing for themselves. Which is true enough. And yes whether hyping Matrix or Twin Peaks was justified (which it pretty much was in both cases, at least if we’re talking Matrix 1 and Twin Peaks Season 1) was only evident after seeing them. But here, I’m just saying I can’t imagine what this Dragon Tattoo book could possibly have to justify its hype. It could be justified, I just can’t envision how.
I could certainly imagine that Twin Peaks had brought a uniquely creepy, Lynchian weirdness to TV without ever seeing it. I could imagine that Matrix had cool groundbreaking special effects and action that would appeal to fanboys (though I hadn’t quite anticipated the ‘philosophical’ component before seeing it). But I can’t conceive of what could be so special about some investigative thriller novel from Sweden (unless perhaps – just guessing – it has Da Vinci Code’ian themes in it – on which, see more below). Maybe you’re right that it’s about details. In that sense the parallel with Sopranos is maybe closer. I’ve never quite seen Wiseguy but it was a Mafia show in the early ’90s which had its devoted following, was pretty well thought of, had some good actors, etc., but obviously was no Sopranos. And yet if you had to sit down and explain to a Martian what the big gulf of difference is between Sopranos and Wiseguy, you probably couldn’t. So what one wonders here is, could one explain to a Martian the difference between this Dragon Tattoo thing and some Dean Koontz novel?
You ask why Da Vinci Code caught on. Well basically because it cleverly (if shamelessly) flatters women. It’s almost as if it was engineered by a team of scientists to be an Oprah Winfrey-promoted bestseller. The metaphysics of Da Vinci Code, after you wade through the Eco stuff, conclude with a patronizingly Winfreyian premise: namely, that the Christian church suppressed the holiness and goddessness of women. Seems to me (do let me know if you disagree) that women are likely lap up stuff like that. So that’s how it caught on. First with the Winfreyites, then women everywhere, including hot girls who borrowed it from their cougar moms, and from there to their boyfriends being forced to read it, etc etc until it became the monster that it was.
We can think of this as the Da Vinci Vector to reach mass-market appeal, and I mean this sincerely: kudos to Dan Brown for discovering it and becoming a billionaire off it.
I guess part of the motivation for this post was to discover whether this Dragon Tattoo thing has, also, reached mass appeal via the Da Vinci Vector. In other words, does it have some cheesy women-flattering theme? I have no idea whether that’s the case, mind you, but I can’t envision any other possible explanation for why some detective thriller from Sweden would have ended up being read by hot well-coiffed 23 year olds on subways. I mean, can you?
>The metaphysics of Da Vinci Code, after you wade through the Eco stuff, conclude with a patronizingly Winfreyian premise: namely, that the Christian church suppressed the holiness and goddessness of women.
The book concludes with that or is it permeated with it? If the former then maybe this is the cherry on the cake, not the cake itself.
>Seems to me (do let me know if you disagree) that women are likely lap up stuff like that.
I never tried feeding it to them.
Hard to know.
The book concludes with it, or more precisely this conclusion unfolds over the course of the book. (The novel takes the form of a mystery/investigation…). So it’s as if the cherry is the cake. But really, there’s just not a whole lot of ‘cake’ to this book to begin with (besides this).
re: feeding it to them, well maybe you should! If the Da Vinci Vector can make Dan Brown a zillion dollars, maybe it can be useful for obtaining…other goals, as well.
Everything you need to know is here:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/07/05/100705sh_shouts_ephron
lol!
Tho’ being irritated by people’s names sounding Swedish is a little silly. Nora Ephron is a deliberately populist author, a sort of copywriter, so I guess changing names seems like an obvious choice for her. Maybe she figures the book should be set in Manhattan.
You have got to be kidding me. All this was about was predicting the next best seller?
If all you wanted was sportswriting — a play-by-play of the success-path of this particular novel, then, OK, maybe it exists and you could find it.
But it would take a lot of work even to get that. And it would tell you little or nothing about how the next ‘game’ would go.
But a genuine theory about why this particular novel caught on that doesn’t successfully predict which novel (out of a publisher’s list, e.g.) will catch on next (and next, and…) is … ?
So why would someone want to ‘know’ this ‘knowledge’ if being able to know it depends on there being a theory that is coherent enough to make somebody some real money, and the odds of that are … [???]?
I certainly would not bet any of my own money on my ability to ever know this answer.
Given the extant historical record at being successful at ‘knowing’ the answer to “which novel will ‘hit’”, then possibly, you don’t actually want to ‘know’ that.
But you’ve spent time wondering about popular successes.
Maybe you just want a play-by-play account of each individual ‘game’. But maybe not.
You invested energy for a reason. So you may want something else than — perhaps even very different from — ‘knowing’ why this particular novel is popular.
And that would be….?
I’m less interested in the play-by-play of this or that particular fad, than the in patterns that underlie them. And I don’t care about ‘predicting bestsellers’ per se. I care about understanding people. In this case, I’m musing about what the things that people turn into bestsellers might tell me about people.
In that sense the play-by-play of Dragon Tattoo, or any other fad, if analyzed properly, might or might not give a clue as to the general pattern, and thus, what people do or don’t value. How do you know it wouldn’t?
More curiously, why does it bother you that I’m interested in the subject and express that interest in a blog post? Frankly, I’ve blogged about much, MUCH dumber things
I understand what you mean about previous experience with one item affecting your experience with another–I kept thinking of the FOW song as well while I read the Millennium trilogy…so eventually I merged the two, recording a “Red Dragon Tattoo” parody about Larsson’s book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vL59O-I3NiY
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