Salander in Cyberspace

  • Sarah Casey Benyahia
Chapter

Abstract

This chapter considers the Millennium (Swedish) film trilogy’s use of the crime genre to explore contemporary anxieties around the role and significance of cyberspace. The three films develop a discourse on the possible organisation of society in the virtual world; here the borders between detective and criminal, legal behaviour and criminality are entering new territory. In ‘Cyber Crime and Punishment’ Drucker and Gumpert argue that, ‘When criminal behaviour meets cyberspace, a collision occurs between material and virtual worlds’.1 This collision between the material and the virtual is a fight for dominance in the new world of cyberspace. It determines whether this new world will reinforce the existing power structures of the material world or subvert them. These conflicts include those concerned with gender relationships in which the border between masculinity and femininity is being contested. Cyberspace as an unregulated space also provides a new and urgent context for the tension between the role of the state versus the autonomy of the individual, whether cyberspace will be ‘wild west or gulag’.2 The two central characters, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, represent the different sides of the conflict: the virtual versus the real world, female versus male, the individual versus the state.

Keywords

Virtual World Popular Culture Digital Infrastructure Action Hero Electronic Frontier 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

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© Sarah Casey Benyahia 2013

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  • Sarah Casey Benyahia

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