"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."- Lt. Gen. James Mattis
"I'm Shellie's new boyfriend, and I'm out of my mind. You ever so much as talk to Shellie again, you even think her name, and I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman." - Clive Owen as "Dwight" in Frank Miller's Sin City.
As you may have heard, Sin City killed at the box office over the weekend, taking in a total of $29 million. This set a certain right wing tongue clucking about the film's alleged anti-Catholic bias and gratuitous immorality, in a week that also saw the passing of the Pope.
Sin City adapted by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, from the latter's noirish series of graphic novels (that's comic books to we Philistines), certainly offers plenty of fodder for right wing culture critics who like to inveigh against secular Hollywood's hatred for Judeo-Christian institutions. SPOILER WARNING: One of the film's villains is a corrupt Catholic priest who feeds on human flesh. Michael Medved should have a field day with that little morsel.
This is all kind of ironic, since the recent movie that Sin City so profoundly recalls is Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Gibson's emetic masterpiece was technically brilliant, claustrophobic, heavy handed and heartless, all traits that seem to be winning laurels for Sin City.
Gibson, rebuffed by the studios, financed his movie independently. In a similar sacrifice, Rodriguez quit the Directors Guild to obtain a directing credit for collaborator Frank Miller. Mel made The Passion his way. Rodriguez, a famously DIY auteur likely made most of Sin City at home on a computer. Considering the violent subject matter, his credit: “Shot and cut by Robert Rodriguez” could not be more accurate.
Where Gibson's Passion appealed to a ravenous demographic of true believers, Rodriguez Sin City keeps faith with the fanboys. And just as Gibson's film was the most exacting cinematic recreation of an incendiary passion play (he even chose to shoot in Latin and Aramaic and briefly flirted with releasing the film without subtitles), Sin City is the most slavishly adapted comic book movie ever.
There is no way to accurately describe its distinctive look. Shot on high-definition digital video, the movie is black and white with striking splashes of color throughout. Most of the computer-generated world surrounding its archetypal characters, recalls not only noir films but also German Expressionism. Though I haven't seen the graphic novels, Rodriguez is said to have used them for storyboards, and has largely kept the hardboiled dialogue intact.
Rodriguez has essentially fused four of Miller's stories, all quite similar in tone, storyline and character into one rambling whole. The cumulative effect is wearying, or brutalizing, depending on your taste for heavily stylized torture and murder sequences. If you haven't seen enough beheadings on the evening news, Sin City serves up plenty more.
In the first story, Bruce Willis plays Hartigan, an aging cop (we're asked to believe he's in his 60s) who makes tremendous sacrifices to save a young girl from the clutches of a rapist. In the second piece, Mickey Rourke (darkly funny) plays Marv, a seemingly indestructible strongman out to avenge the death of a hooker. In the film’s third and loosest segment, Clive Owen is Dwight, a private eye who helps a team of vigilante hookers dispatch a crooked cop (Benicio Del Toro, looking like the Cure's Robert Smith) and take on a Mafia army. The whole bloody mess is bookended by a couple of pointless scenes involving Josh Hartnett, as a suave hitman. (Note to Rodriguez: Hartnett doesn't really do suave.)
Each of these narratives follows the same pattern. Our violent hero exacts brutal justice on the offending villain, all in the name of rescuing or avenging one of Sin City’s seemingly endless supply of scantily-clad, nubile female victims. The women here are all strippers, hookers or cocktail waitresses. The exception is Carla Gugino as Marv's probation officer, who we're told is a lesbian even as she struts in front of Marv in her panties and nothing else. This is all the more pronounced since sex, like joy, is largely absent from Miller’s nightmarish underworld. It’s probably for the best as the approach to female sexuality is cluelessly adolescent. One of the most ludicrous moments finds an 11 year-old girl, after deliverance from the clutches of a rapist, tearfully thanking her saviour by saying, "I'm still a virgin and I'm still alive."
Though critics have compared the interlocking narratives to Pulp Fiction, this movie has none of the space or rhythm of Tarantino's breakthrough film. There are no real narrative surprises, very little humor (except tellingly, in the scene Tarantino "guest directed") and no real characters. Sin City is all cool (cold) dazzling surface. Since we’re only invited to gawk at the eye candy and marvel at the audacity of its violence, there’s no consequence, no emotional heft.
I'd be a hypocrite if I said I didn't enjoy violent movies. If there's a place for our darkest, most disturbing fantasies, it's definitely in art. Last week I defended Chanwook Park’s Oldboy, another comic book adaptation with sadistic violence and underwritten female victims. Though that film has its flaws, there’s also genuine feeling in its tragic narrative. Oldboy has a heart, where Sin City just feels heartless.
Gibson's Passion ended with Jesus dying on the cross only to be resurrected and ready to kick some ass. Though it professed to be about Jesus' ultimate act of love and sacrifice, it felt more like a two hour justification for taking horrific and punishing revenge on someone. Anyone. This same ugly tone weighs oppressively throughout Sin City. If the success of Gibson's film can be called a zeitgeist moment for the righteous rage of evangelical Christians, then Sin City can also be seen as a benchmark in American attitudes toward violence.
For the past year I've often wondered just what other Americans think and feel about our conduct in the world. In particular I wonder how torture, war crimes and sexual humiliation have become not only status quo, but folded into our mass entertainment. To be honest, I wonder if the popularity of Sin City at this point in time explains American passivity toward the atrocities commited in our names. Maybe it's not passivity at all. Maybe many people think the torturers are heroes.
Though it may be foolish to view the film’s popularity through a political lens, it strikes me as unseemly to take pleasure from the creative comeuppances imagined by Miller and Rodriguez. Extrajudicial punishment, torture, murder and now kidnapping are all in a day’s work for some American heroes. General Mattis, Charles Graner and their ilk would probably find plenty to admire in the chivalrous macho men of Sin City.
