My friend Neda Ulaby has a cool piece about how Fox has beefed up its investment in making movies overseas for the markets where they’re produced — and how that’s going to affect what we see on U.S. screens:

“China is the second or third biggest market in the world at 50 percent local,” [Sanford Panitch] says. “India the fourth biggest at 90 percent local, France at 40 percent local, Germany at 30 percent local, Korea a billion dollar market 50 percent, Japan — actually, Japan [is] the biggest international market in the world, 60 percent local.”

Fox International Productions actually started off three years ago with a Japanese version of the movie Sideways — that’s the one about two guys touring wine country. “When we originally got into the business,” Panitch says, we thought, ‘We’ve got this great library, let’s take advantage of it.’ And ironically, local markets don’t want recycled Hollywood content.”

And really, why would they? Bollywood hardly needs need old American ideas. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has refreshed Hollywood’s interest in stories from abroad. That’s not a Fox picture, but Panitch says his division is introducing foreign books, scripts and directors to the larger Fox system.

“There’s a new aesthetic that’s coming out of people that weren’t schooled in traditional Hollywood ways,” he says. “There’s an incestuousness creatively here where we’re all reading the same publications and listening to the same music.”

It’s always nice when economic incentives line up in favor of creative storytelling. We’re already seeing something like this on television in the melancholic dramas we’ve imported from Israel and remake as In Treatment and Homeland. And it would be fascinating to see what conventions developed in international market end up sticking with American audiences. Could an Indian norm of chaster but emotionally charged romances find favor with devoutly Christian or Jewish movie-going audiences? Could grittier action sequences like the ones in Miss Bala, which Fox brought to the U.S. after one of the company’s executives based in Mexico found it and promised the director it wouldn’t be changed for American audiences, take the place of pyrotechnics? I haven’t watched enough recent Chinese movies to speculate on patterns there, though Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon certainly suggests there’s an American market for Chinese martial arts movies, a steady supply of which have reached our shores since.

I really hope all of the people who complained vociferously about Emily Browning’s cover of “Sweet Dreams” in Sucker-Punch are happy now, because this one is so much worse:

There is no way the ancient Greeks were this freakin’ tacky.

And I know I’m a total apologist for this movie, but really, Browning’s cover:

Is to Sucker-Punch what Carey Mulligan’s “New York, New York” cover is to Shame: self-indulgent, manipulative, and affecting anyway:

None of them, of course, add up to anything like Karen O and Trent Reznor’s “Immigrant Song,” cover, though I kind of wish they’d found a way to set it up so that’s what Lisbeth Salander does at karaoke or something:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was never quite my jam: it’s over my personal comfort threshhold for depictions of sexual assault, and the early financial stuff is some seriously heavy furniture, so I never read the subsequent books. That said, I’ve always been half-amused, half-depressed by the idea that this novel, originally titled Men Who Hate Women, and directly connecting capitalism and the abuse of women, is a huge American hit. Who knows what it is about this particular package that got these ideas, which would be radioactive in another context or presentation, into circulation?

All of which is a long way of saying that, no matter what you think about the novels and how they depict violence against women and the way those women recover, I don’t think creating a clothing line inspired by Lisbeth Salander glamorizes either the terrible things that are done to her or the things she does in response to them. That’s what Natalie Karneef is arguing in a post that’s produced a moderate buzz, rising up to ABC News. She writes:

And now, H&M, you have created a line of clothing based on her character: a woman who has suffered a lifetime of abuse, who is violently raped, and who is hunting down a man who violently rapes and kills other women. Lisbeth has been through hell, and her clothing is her armor. That’s her choice, and it’s an understandable choice. But you glamorize it, putting a glossy, trendy finish on the face of sexual violence and the rage and fear it leaves behind.

I wonder if you’ve considered how a survivor of sexual violence chooses her or his fashion choices…When I dress in the spirit Lisbeth Salander, it’s because I want to send a message to men: to stay the fuck away.

Anna Norling, the Division Designer at H&M, says that she is “so proud” of this collection, because Lisbeth is the “very essence of an independent woman.” Lisbeth Salander is independent woman whose mother was abused by her father, who was violently raped by a man in charge of her well being, who is harassed and bullied by men in public, and who is severely emotionally scarred.

Stieg Larsson was inspired to write The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because he witnessed a girl getting gang raped when he was 15 years old. I’ve heard it said that being raped is like getting a tattoo – it never goes away. I hope your shoppers bear this in mind before they emulate Lisbeth Salander.

There’s a lot going on here, so I’m going to unpack it step by step. It’s pretty hard to tell from either Karneef’s post or her statements to ABC, in which she says she objects to the collection because it “glamorizing surviving rape” whether she thinks Lisbeth Salander is a role model or not. Again, having read only the first book, it’s not particularly clear to me that Lisbeth is an aspirational figure. She’s painfully thin, has difficulty emotionally connecting to people, works in a field that allows her to isolate herself from human contact, and the violence she herself commits is both offputting and logistically out of reach for most women. Neither her experience nor means by and extent to which she’s recovered seem particularly glamorous.

And are we really supposed to find “glamorizing surviving rape” so offensive? Sure, a narrative where someone is brutally attacked and rises from their hospital bed dewy and saintly would be offensive, but it also would be so emotionally implausible that it wouldn’t resonate with people. Stories on the other hand that emphasize that rape and sexual abuse are horrific and difficult to recover from but that still celebrate the strength of survivors seem appropriate. But whom am I or anyone else to tell survivors where to find their role models or how to interpret the stories they find meaningful?
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The bridge is yours.

-Is anyone actually excited about the American Psycho remake?

-Gorgeous designs for Katniss’s introductory gown in The Hunger Games.

-This is not news, but Robyn continues to be just so great.

-Will 2012 be the year of the dude movie?

-Karen O. Trent Reznor. You’re welcome:

I really like David Fincher and his movies, hearing that he did this to Rooney Mara in preparation for her performance in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo really kind of freaks me out:

She followed every one of Fincher’s strange directives from day one. According to the story, “[Mara] mentions a time Fincher said, ‘Go out and get really, really drunk and come in the next morning so we can take pictures of you.’ He wanted to show Sony that she could look strung out. ‘And I did it!’ says Mara. ‘Threw up all night!’” That set the tone for their relationship, which Craig characterized as “f—ing weird!” During one dinner during filming, Fincher tells Mara “with quiet seriousness, ‘You can eat.’… Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. ‘You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must.’ She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it.”

She’s said that she didn’t have to get unhealthily skinny for the role, and Fincher, who of course asked her to do these things, said it wasn’t “too hard for her” to obey his regimen. Which, you know, maybe is the case. People have the right to put themselves through extremely intense things for roles — Michael Fassbender dropped a ton of weight for Hunger, as did Christian Bale for The Machinist — even if they’re unhealthy, and even if it makes me uncomfortable. I can’t imagine having a job with an incentive system where the chance to work with any individual person is worth subsisting on grapes or drinking myself sick, and I’m glad I can’t. I wonder if Fincher put Robert Downey Jr. through a lot to prove he could play his role in Zodiac or if he just trusted that Downey could play an addict.

But maybe the scariest thing about all of this is the fact that Mara, who looks incredibly pale and tiny on the Vogue cover that tells us all of this, and who would look very skinny to any normal human being, including, say, a crusading left-wing journalist, isn’t actually considered to be sufficiently skinny to play a waifish hacker. We’re really defining extremely skinny down to the smallest category we can find. And by extension, labeling a lot of weights that take tremendous work and control to achieve, as “normal,” or even big.

The bridge is yours.

-Oprah should know the best way to do tequila shots is with oranges and cinnamon.

-I’m reading All-Star Superman, so Scott Eric Kaufman’s observations on the visual forms in the comic are very useful.

-Zombies and superheroes invade highbrow fiction.

-Dress like Lisbeth Salander.

-Martin Sheen is annoyed at his fellow Hollywood liberals:

The bridge is yours.

-AMC follows Bravo in creating a fan-based talk show.

-The Getty’s sending more pieces back to Greece.

-A video game meant to address the lack of representation of LGBT characters.

-The implosion of Kevin Smith.

-Getting pretty excited for David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo even though I fully expect a lot of it to be hard to watch:

-I’m not particularly excited for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I am excited for Trent Reznor’s soundtrack.

-George R.R. Costanza.

-Men are more valuable to TV networks than women.

-Someone needs to stage a sci-fi intervention at AMC.

-If you’re going to blow a lot of money on something silly, this looks like a reasonably enjoyable way to do it:

As I’d expect from the director of both Zodiac and Se7en, it looks like Fincher’s adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s almost gleefully embracing the darkness, labeling it “The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas” complete with tattoo needles wielded in anger and a cover of Led Zepplin’s “Immigrant Song“:

What remains to be seen if any of Steig Larsson’s politics survive into the movie. I had a very difficult time with the first book and never read the subsequent ones. Certainly, there’s something sort of amusing that a book that explicitly links capitalism and violence against women and that lionizes an aggressively left-wing journalist became a phenomenon in America, given how crazy unpopular either of those ideas would be if they were broken out and put in a position paper on a cable news crawl. But—and I think this is a very hard line to define—I tend to think Larsson stepped over the line between dramatizing the horror of sexual assault and lingering a little too long on it. It’ll be especially interesting to see if the movie preserves the retaliatory rape of a male character as an indication of what Fincher decides he wants to put on-screen.