Ah, this may result in a bit longer comment... I hope you don't mind?
At least during the first movie, as far as I remember (it's been a couple of years since I've seen them all three), at first they went off to research about a case of murder in a, seemingly, wealthy family, which slowly but surely turns out to be pretty rotten on the inside in many ways. And, wasn't it that the killer was actually someone who only learned his behavior patterns of raping and killing young girls/women from his father? So to say, an intergenerational thing going on and on? And, not with the hard knock of a baseball bat, I think there were some hints in there which pointed at this broken wealthy family having once been Nazi sympathizers. Not all members, but there was a red line leading through it. (Err, maybe this is a part which is a bit hard to understand to Americans: It was so common for wealthy industrial moguls at the time to support the Nazis in different countries, like nothing. - Maybe Larsson picked a real world example from Sweden to design this plot, which maybe is relatively unknown outside of Sweden. That's why it seems so off track...)
Journalist Blomqist worked for a magazine which was left-leaning and dealt with far-right structures from the times of the Reich Nazis being still active in the present-day Sweden (much like Larsson in the reality). I think it was in beginning of the movie that "his" magazine lost a court case against some wealthy mogul. (What that exactly was about, I can't remember and can't reconstruct by reading about the plot somewhere else. Maybe it even wasn't that clearly disclosed in there anyway.) So, it might be that he accepted the case to research the dead girl's case because of having run into troubles with a previous one and simply needing "a new job" (if that wasn't disclosed in more detail). Ah, and by someone approaching to him to do such a research and hoping that he could find out anything (like "if not you, who else will find anything?"), it strongly implies that journalist Blomqvist must have been designed to be someone with a name in the branch. - So, with people not being unable to privately reach out to him or to not be able to find out what he's doing at the moment in his job. (That must have been how Salander stumbled over him.)
As the case proceeded and Salander added to the plot, it was the most easy to understand why, over time: Because such cases like that in the first movie reminded her of her own fate of being an abuse survivor. She was doing what a former survivor might do (might, not must) - try to help to make that kind of abuse vanish from the earth. It was a personal matter to her, and so a personal matter to aid as someone dealt with such a case, as best as she could, to uncover the truth.
I think a final point that made Blomqvist connect to her, in a sense of "suspecting there is something strange going on with her mentally", was the end of the first movie where she let the murderer burn in his crashed car, and Blomqvist found out about it. Which actually would have been a crime, but he did not report that because the guy who died as a pig in a humanly way, he didn't regard him as so much worth to be saved himself.
In movie number two, their fates mixed up again through some other subject that made it into the hands of Blomqvist. Not really by intention, but more by accident (if I recall correctly). But that time, also by the progress of the events, it grew to be about her, not about pursuing another person's case. Through drawing the line before that Blomqvist formed an emotional connection to her, I think this explaines at least his behavior to follow her thread. Like "I wanna find out what's it about with her".
What the custody thing is about in this plot - I fear, for that one would have be a bit acquainted with the regulations and laws that Sweden offers. To me, this context is also foreign with me being German.
At least, I can tell that far: She ended up in there because, as a teenage girl, she once set fire on her abusive father after he, once again, mistreated her mother. Due to Lisbeth's father being a former Soviet agent, which actually shouldn't even exist, this was a problem in this case and it should never come to surface. - Just as it is in the reality when people are involved in a case who actually shouldn't exist or who follow activities that are important to someone in state structures. If they commit crap, this is always being covered up by law and the legal system, so that the country does not have to admit "we foster, equip and protect criminals - because they do some dirty work for us in return, if we demand it". I don't know if I caught it that exactly and correctly, but I think there also were some connections of her father into the system itself, people who then ultimately ended up in control of Lisbeth's life since she was a teen up to the present day. In other words: Her being trapped in custody wasn't an accident, it was also, in parts, her father's revenge on her and the "revenge" of his buddies in higher offices for what she had done. On the sideline, an action to prevent her from ever releasing the info into the world that Sweden had taken a former Soviet agent in and let him work for them instead. Somehow, as an intermezzo and "break" of this systematic, for an amount of time, she became the case of a legal guardian who treated her well and fair - as that guy became ill and close to dying, they had the chance to gain back control over her, and that's when the whole custody circumstance was being used in an abusive manner over her.
In the third movie, as far as I remember, it's mainly about this complex - about people working in state structures and even the secret service covering up what they had once done in getting Zalachenko to switch sides. That for, Lisbeth as well as her father must be silenced for all times. First they try achieving that via killing both, but that only succeeds with Zalachenko. And Lisbeth's under too much surveillance and protection then to be able to easily get a hand on her. So they conduct a different plan to get rid of her - and that is to get her locked up and being declared "insane" and "a danger to the public", so nobody would ever lend an ear to whatever she might be saying. Due to the "plot" or "trap" or whatever you wanna call it that her father helped in creating to make her officially a suspect of those past murders she was wanted for, there was an official possibility to achieve this. (While simultaneously needing to prevent anything to surface that points at Zalachenko's involvement in the murder cases that the court holds against his daughter.) That is the plan these people from within the state structures aim for.
So, long story short: Why Lisbeth was in custody all the time is because she had a father who was an agent that changed sides and that nobody ever was supposed to know about. Due to him being an abusive and violent person, this plan to keep his existence secret failed. One of the people he kept hurting over and over again faught back against him and so he couldn't be hidden in some backwood land anymore. The solution - that Sweden's laws seem to have offered back then - was: Get her perception officially put into question and her every possible action under watch.
Blomqvist, I think, got stuck on her case because, on one hand, in a human way he emphathized with her, on the other, her help as well as her personal case fell into the spectrum of things that he dealt with as a professional journalist. And while getting more and more involved in her personal case, strange and dangerous things that also affected his life kicked in, so it became a personal matter to him too to get Lisbeth's case turned in her favor. Both from human reasons as well as what he thinks is right and what is wrong. - Corrupted people in government who live their own life beyond law clearly don't belong to that. (This applied to the several killings committed by such people in the cases he investigated on in his profession as well as all the sexual abuse and this issue of owning child pornography that applied to the guy in court which was supposed to judge over Lisbeth's sanity.)
I guess, a subject that maybe Stieg Larsson wanted to hint at with his fictional stories: How many abusive and violent people work inside the depths of the Swedish state, past and present, for who knows how long already. The threads of this kind of people go way back into history, ranging into a very widespread level - from politicians to rich people from the country's important economic branches to people who are in a lesser high office, but who have control to fully legally destroy other peoples' lives if they want. They can be found everywhere and nobody ever seriously dared to take them out of their positions to hold them accountable for their deeds. And, at its worst, they're even very interconnected - each one protects the other one, unless it becomes necessary to dispose of one of them, so one's own shit doesn't surface.
Phew, it's all a bit scattered, I admit... As said, it's been a long time since I've seen the movies - and, in fact, I have my troubles imagining what it is like looking at such a film from a foreign country if you don't have any background knowledge about European countries, about life circumstances there and their respective histories.
no subject
At least during the first movie, as far as I remember (it's been a couple of years since I've seen them all three), at first they went off to research about a case of murder in a, seemingly, wealthy family, which slowly but surely turns out to be pretty rotten on the inside in many ways. And, wasn't it that the killer was actually someone who only learned his behavior patterns of raping and killing young girls/women from his father? So to say, an intergenerational thing going on and on?
And, not with the hard knock of a baseball bat, I think there were some hints in there which pointed at this broken wealthy family having once been Nazi sympathizers. Not all members, but there was a red line leading through it. (Err, maybe this is a part which is a bit hard to understand to Americans: It was so common for wealthy industrial moguls at the time to support the Nazis in different countries, like nothing. - Maybe Larsson picked a real world example from Sweden to design this plot, which maybe is relatively unknown outside of Sweden. That's why it seems so off track...)
Journalist Blomqist worked for a magazine which was left-leaning and dealt with far-right structures from the times of the Reich Nazis being still active in the present-day Sweden (much like Larsson in the reality).
I think it was in beginning of the movie that "his" magazine lost a court case against some wealthy mogul. (What that exactly was about, I can't remember and can't reconstruct by reading about the plot somewhere else. Maybe it even wasn't that clearly disclosed in there anyway.)
So, it might be that he accepted the case to research the dead girl's case because of having run into troubles with a previous one and simply needing "a new job" (if that wasn't disclosed in more detail).
Ah, and by someone approaching to him to do such a research and hoping that he could find out anything (like "if not you, who else will find anything?"), it strongly implies that journalist Blomqvist must have been designed to be someone with a name in the branch. - So, with people not being unable to privately reach out to him or to not be able to find out what he's doing at the moment in his job. (That must have been how Salander stumbled over him.)
As the case proceeded and Salander added to the plot, it was the most easy to understand why, over time: Because such cases like that in the first movie reminded her of her own fate of being an abuse survivor. She was doing what a former survivor might do (might, not must) - try to help to make that kind of abuse vanish from the earth. It was a personal matter to her, and so a personal matter to aid as someone dealt with such a case, as best as she could, to uncover the truth.
I think a final point that made Blomqvist connect to her, in a sense of "suspecting there is something strange going on with her mentally", was the end of the first movie where she let the murderer burn in his crashed car, and Blomqvist found out about it. Which actually would have been a crime, but he did not report that because the guy who died as a pig in a humanly way, he didn't regard him as so much worth to be saved himself.
In movie number two, their fates mixed up again through some other subject that made it into the hands of Blomqvist. Not really by intention, but more by accident (if I recall correctly).
But that time, also by the progress of the events, it grew to be about her, not about pursuing another person's case. Through drawing the line before that Blomqvist formed an emotional connection to her, I think this explaines at least his behavior to follow her thread. Like "I wanna find out what's it about with her".
What the custody thing is about in this plot - I fear, for that one would have be a bit acquainted with the regulations and laws that Sweden offers. To me, this context is also foreign with me being German.
At least, I can tell that far: She ended up in there because, as a teenage girl, she once set fire on her abusive father after he, once again, mistreated her mother.
Due to Lisbeth's father being a former Soviet agent, which actually shouldn't even exist, this was a problem in this case and it should never come to surface. - Just as it is in the reality when people are involved in a case who actually shouldn't exist or who follow activities that are important to someone in state structures. If they commit crap, this is always being covered up by law and the legal system, so that the country does not have to admit "we foster, equip and protect criminals - because they do some dirty work for us in return, if we demand it".
I don't know if I caught it that exactly and correctly, but I think there also were some connections of her father into the system itself, people who then ultimately ended up in control of Lisbeth's life since she was a teen up to the present day.
In other words: Her being trapped in custody wasn't an accident, it was also, in parts, her father's revenge on her and the "revenge" of his buddies in higher offices for what she had done. On the sideline, an action to prevent her from ever releasing the info into the world that Sweden had taken a former Soviet agent in and let him work for them instead.
Somehow, as an intermezzo and "break" of this systematic, for an amount of time, she became the case of a legal guardian who treated her well and fair - as that guy became ill and close to dying, they had the chance to gain back control over her, and that's when the whole custody circumstance was being used in an abusive manner over her.
In the third movie, as far as I remember, it's mainly about this complex - about people working in state structures and even the secret service covering up what they had once done in getting Zalachenko to switch sides.
That for, Lisbeth as well as her father must be silenced for all times. First they try achieving that via killing both, but that only succeeds with Zalachenko. And Lisbeth's under too much surveillance and protection then to be able to easily get a hand on her.
So they conduct a different plan to get rid of her - and that is to get her locked up and being declared "insane" and "a danger to the public", so nobody would ever lend an ear to whatever she might be saying.
Due to the "plot" or "trap" or whatever you wanna call it that her father helped in creating to make her officially a suspect of those past murders she was wanted for, there was an official possibility to achieve this. (While simultaneously needing to prevent anything to surface that points at Zalachenko's involvement in the murder cases that the court holds against his daughter.)
That is the plan these people from within the state structures aim for.
So, long story short: Why Lisbeth was in custody all the time is because she had a father who was an agent that changed sides and that nobody ever was supposed to know about.
Due to him being an abusive and violent person, this plan to keep his existence secret failed. One of the people he kept hurting over and over again faught back against him and so he couldn't be hidden in some backwood land anymore.
The solution - that Sweden's laws seem to have offered back then - was: Get her perception officially put into question and her every possible action under watch.
Blomqvist, I think, got stuck on her case because, on one hand, in a human way he emphathized with her, on the other, her help as well as her personal case fell into the spectrum of things that he dealt with as a professional journalist. And while getting more and more involved in her personal case, strange and dangerous things that also affected his life kicked in, so it became a personal matter to him too to get Lisbeth's case turned in her favor. Both from human reasons as well as what he thinks is right and what is wrong. - Corrupted people in government who live their own life beyond law clearly don't belong to that. (This applied to the several killings committed by such people in the cases he investigated on in his profession as well as all the sexual abuse and this issue of owning child pornography that applied to the guy in court which was supposed to judge over Lisbeth's sanity.)
I guess, a subject that maybe Stieg Larsson wanted to hint at with his fictional stories: How many abusive and violent people work inside the depths of the Swedish state, past and present, for who knows how long already. The threads of this kind of people go way back into history, ranging into a very widespread level - from politicians to rich people from the country's important economic branches to people who are in a lesser high office, but who have control to fully legally destroy other peoples' lives if they want. They can be found everywhere and nobody ever seriously dared to take them out of their positions to hold them accountable for their deeds.
And, at its worst, they're even very interconnected - each one protects the other one, unless it becomes necessary to dispose of one of them, so one's own shit doesn't surface.
Phew, it's all a bit scattered, I admit...
As said, it's been a long time since I've seen the movies - and, in fact, I have my troubles imagining what it is like looking at such a film from a foreign country if you don't have any background knowledge about European countries, about life circumstances there and their respective histories.