celebrity gossip, academic style

The Gossip:

David Fincher, the director of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has a weird, controlling relationship with his star, Rooney Mara (who plays the iconic Lisbeth Sander).

The Source:

A mid-length Vogue cover story. The photos are worth the click alone. I mean LOOK.

The Evidence:

Several descriptions and quotes of various levels of explicitness.

The most persuasive:

As Fincher talks about the film, his heroine, Mara—with Salander’s awesomely strange hair, bleached eyebrows, and facial piercings—sits next to him, looking for all the world like a troubled college student who takes too much Adderall. She hangs on his every word, her eyes lit with admiration. Their relationship, it quickly becomes clear, is charged with the electric current of the mentor-protégée crush, which is both touching and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Or, as Daniel Craig, who costars as a crusading journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, says about their working relationship, “It’s fucking weird!”

Oh, and also this:

When a waiter appears to take our order, we are all looking at our menus, but I see out of the corner of my eye Fincher nudging Mara. He says with quiet seriousness, “You can eat.” I look up to see her reaction. 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. In the book, Salander is described as boyish and awkward, “a pale, anorexic young woman who has hair as short as a fuse. . . .” Noomi Rapace, the magnetic star of the Swedish versions, looked more like Joan Jett. “One of the things that make our version that much more heartbreaking,” says Mara, “is that even though I am playing a 24-year-old, I look much younger. I look like a child.” I ask if she had to get unhealthily skinny for the role. She says, “Umm . . . not really.”

“It hasn’t been too hard for her,” Fincher quickly adds.

Then there’s the simple evidence of her transformation:

Mara is wearing a slight variation of what she had on last night: black leather boots, a pair of gray drop-crotch parachute pants from Zara, and a vintage Swedish military shirt that she pinched from wardrobe. Google pictures of pre–Dragon Tattoo Rooney and you will find a pretty young thing with lustrous brown hair and bright blue-green eyes. “Before, I dressed much girlier,” she says. “A lot of blush-colored things. Now I literally roll out of bed and put on whatever is there. I have really enjoyed being a boy this last year.”

And the fact that a girl that looked like this:

Now looks like this:

But the interview also emphasizes Mara’s inherent transmutability, and how it works well with Lisbeth’s only “cipher-like” qualities:

Once Fincher approached McGrath, she went straight online to see who was playing Lisbeth Salander. “When I saw that it was Rooney,” she says, “and I saw those bony features, those cheekbones, those eyes, I said, ‘I can’t wait.’ I was instantly inspired. It’s like in fashion, when you get a girl who has one of those haunting faces that you can do absolutely anything with.”

At the center of all of this howling evil is the strangely relatable Lisbeth Salander, a damaged, vengeful, brilliant, androgynous cipher…

If it took a lot of work to make Mara look the part, in some ways she already possessed the right stuff. “I am very slow to warm,” Mara says. “I’ve always been sort of a loner. I didn’t play team sports. I am better one-on-one than in big groups.” This, she says, is one reason she gets the character. “I can understand wanting to be invisible and mistrusting people and wanting to understand everything before you engage with the world.”

Oh, and lest you think that Fincher and Mara are totally doing it, the author of the profile (Jonathan Van Meter — it’s not insignificant that the author is a male) notes that Fincher’s partner has been a key component in the Mara to Lisbeth transformation.

[Rooney] also gets to reside, at least for now, in the family-like cocoon of Fincherworld. Everyone raves about Fincher’s secret weapon, his romantic partner (and producer for the past nineteen years), Ceán Chaffin. A cheerful, formidable presence, she seems to be handling the work of a dozen people, including acting as Mara’s publicist. “She’s incredible,” says Mara. “They are the best people to work with. They will tell you exactly how it is, even if they think you won’t like it. Everything is on the table.” As Daniel Craig tells me, “I wish I’d had someone like David at Rooney’s age just to guide me and say what’s good and what’s bad. You don’t know at that age. You are full of confidence, but you are also full of huge insecurities.”

If you didn’t get the implicit message, I’ll make it clear: Fincher is not sleeping with Mara. In fact, his partner is also involved in the process, and they act like her parents. Maybe sorta. Gurus?

Or even better yet, Svengalis.

You’ve probably heard the term bandied about, but don’t know the precise meaning. Svengali was a character in a novel by the 19th century French author George du Maurnier, and he turned a talentless woman into a phenomenal singer through hypnosis. While she was hypnotized, she’d do whatever he ordered — including singing beautifully — but it also meant that she could not function without him. Today, the terms connotes an unhealthy relationship between a mentor and a mentee, in which the mentor psychologically manipulates the mentee, rendering him/her dependent upon the praise and affirmation of the mentor.

The most famous Hollywood Svengali story was between German star Marlene Dietrich and the Austrian director Josef Von Sternberg. In 1930, Von Sternberg cast the relatively unknown Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and the film went on to huge international success. Paramount took note, and brought both director and star stateside and signed them to long-term contracts. The two went on to make seven films together, the beautiful Shanghai Express and super weirdly awesome Scarlett Empress. Plus the two films were Dietrich dresses as a man and famously kisses a woman (Morocco, Blonde Venus).

These seven films are various levels of remarkable, but the real story was extra-textual: how the two related, how Dietrich seemed to be under Von Sternberg’s spell, how they seemed to most definitely be romantically involved in some way.

Whatever was happening, it’s clear that Dietrich’s films without Von Sternberg lacked the magic of their collaborations. Indeed, with the exception of Destry Rides Again (1940) and the absolutely jaw-dropping performance in Touch of Evil (1958), her post Von Sternberg career has faded away.

Yet it was always somewhat unclear what was going on between Dietrich and Von Sternberg, just as it’s unclear what’s going on between Fincher and Mara, save an artistic relationship that, as portrayed by this particular author in this particular magazine, reads as creepy. Fincher comes off as exacting director who has molded an unformed actress into his perfect Salander; Mara comes off as a naive young woman who has submitted herself and her career to Fincher’s will, trusting that he will not destroy her.

But again, to be clear, this is a story. Interviews and profiles have a narrative line just as novels and films do. The quotes have been checked and the interviews occurred, but the description is the author’s entirely. I do not doubt that Mara deferred to Fincher; I do not doubt that she looks to him for guidance. But I do doubt that the relationship between the two is as, well, dramatic as the author characterizes.

The author’s stake in making the relationship so sensational should be clear: not only does a story with these sort of details create more interest in the story (and more clicks to the website, more blog posts such as this one), but it also abstractly recreates some of the dynamics of the film. While Salander proves herself to be cunning and the very opposite of passive, there are moments — especially in the first book/film — in which she is passive, and cannot self-actualize (or fulfill her potential) without the guidance/assistance of a man. That man may be a positive figure (her boss, Blomkivst), but the man may also be providing negative reinforcement (her parole officer). But the fact remains: Salander reacts instead of acting, just as Mara seems to be reacting to Fincher’s stimuli instead of acting on her own.

Again, I’m not saying that this is actually happening. It probably isn’t. But a profile that recreates the dynamics of the characters in the film is much, much more interesting to read — and encourages readers to then go see the film — than one that asserts that the actors are nothing like the characters they play onscreen. It’s classic star theory: we want our stars to have coherent images, in which their extra-textual lives mesh and complement their performances on the screen. This profile is indeed creepy and disturbing and treads the knife-edge between feminist actualization and misogyny. But then again, so does the book, and so will the film.