Secret Societies

Skull and Bones (Viola F. Barnes Photographic Collection)

There is the Hemlock Society which is devoted to suicide and The Eulenspiegel Society whose members gather to express sadomasochistic desires. Perhaps in the directory of forbidden societies, these two are cross linked, as suicide can be looked at as the ultimate act of self-abnegation. But what other forbidden secret societies exist? As far as the secret part goes Yale’s Skull and Bones is one of the most secret with its secrecy being the most forbidden thing about it. What goes on in its secret crypt which is the incubator for future leaders of business and government? Obviously there are other forbidden societies which collect things like intelligence. Let’s say you rise up in the NSA to a point where you have access to the most restricted information our government has to offer. Who are you going to discuss these matters with, but other members of this select group which shares your privileges? Similarly let’s say you’ve earned an astronomical amount of money. Who are you going to discuss the problems of maintaining and having such wealth with than others in this elite club whose forbidden covenant has to do with dominance and greed. Tom Wolfe termed the aspiring members of this forbidden society, the Masters of the Universe. And then there is Opus Dei, the Catholic society whose rituals, in imaginatively embellished form, have been the basis for thrillers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. And what about terrorist cells which are so secret and forbidden that the members only know each other by their avatars? Still in all of these endeavors there’s an implicit camaraderie. Whether your out to destroy yourself or the world, you belong to a forbidden society because you believe in something that creates a special bond with those who share your unique vision of how life should or shouldn’t be.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

In the Dirty Harry films Clint Eastwood established a dynamic by which retribution is justified by the degree of the crime being avenged. Harry Callahan was the best argument there is for terrorism as a response to oppression and his .44 Magnum is curiously prescient of escalating cycles of vengeance and reprisal not only on an individual level but in troubled parts of our present world. In David Fincher’s adaptation of Stieg Larrson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a similar dynamic is working. The over the top vengeance that Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara) engineers is directly proportionate the traumas she’s experienced both in the present, as a victim of a brutal rape, and in the past by virtue of her abusive upbringing. She's the spokes person for all the mutilated women in the movie, the equivalent of a walking class action suit against a world of serial murders and sexual abusers. The novel and the movie on which it’s based, whatever one may think of them, are, however, beyond good and evil, since they are cultural phenomenae and significant as products of their times. And what makes them unique? Firstly, on the broadest level, to quote George Santayana, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The film is mired in repetitions, beginning and ending on an accident, perpetrating a family line of sexual predators and propagating the notion of a never ending cycle of revenge. Beyond this, every era produces its own private eyes and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo presents a social misfit, threatened with institutionalization, who is a master of bisexuality, hacking and self-mutilation (to the extent that she is pierced and tattooed). As private eyes go, Lisbeth is about as far from the cool elegance of  The Thin Man as they come, yet she’s an acute observer and up there with the best shamuses.  Archaic forms of  Christianity permeate the plot and also recall the kind of nightmarish form of Christianity that raised its head in, in The Exorcist  and more recently in The Da Vinci Code. Most of the movie takes place on an island and one can’t help thinking about another island in contemporary Swedish folklore and that’s Bergman’s Faro where sadism, familial agony and a God that was both haunting and silent were also portrayed, albeit with eons greater profundity and a total lack of the kind of emotional manipulation that both Larsson and Fincher excel at.