How We Search Now: New and Old Ways of Digging Up Wolfe’s “Sir John Moore”

Abstract

I begin not with the Victorian period but with our own millennium—with, in fact, the Millennium trilogy, the phenomenally successful series by Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson, the first of which, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was published posthumously in 2005.¹ Let me be more precise: I begin with the 2009 film adaptation of this novel, directed by Niels Arden Oblev, a movie that enjoyed widespread critical and commercial success and was later remade into an extremely faithful 2011 American version. Even if you have not read the books or seen the films, you have probably heard something about them, most likely something about their central figure, Lisbeth Salander, who has been hailed as both a postmodern heroine and a striking alternative icon for our times; certainly Noomi Rapace’s performance in this role in Oblev’s film creates an unforgettably powerful image. Salander is introduced to viewers as an unnervingly gifted isolate, a multiply-pierced and tattooed loner who is preternaturally skilled at penetrating the complex network of encrypted information systems in which she makes her living as a private investigator. In the movie’s establishing phases, Salander’s connection to her laptop is her most important relationship; her primary identity is that of a punk cyberhacker who exists most comfortably in webs of digitized data.