Hatchet Job: "Sin City" as Anti-Noir
02 February 2006
Earning well over $70 million, Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez’s "Sin City" may well be history’s highest grossing act of public masturbation. The film has all the highlights of two adolescent male imaginations spitting out what it is, to them, to be cool: hard-ass guys in leather and red Chuck Taylor’s jumping out of windows, carrying big guns, driving fast cars, beating people into pulps, surrounded – constantly – by big-tittyed women wearing next to nothing or nothing at all. And as far as the aesthetics of cool go, the film looks great. The pages of Frank Miller’s graphic novels are lifted onto the screen while the film’s heavy visual contrast and splashes of vivid color bring the comic books to life. Great. Fine. Fantastic. "Sin City" is a good-looking film, and it does more to develop stark film noir imagery than any film, ever.
Now that we are past that, "Sin City" is not a good film. For all of its technical prowess, it is overdone. You get as much pleasure watching the images of "Sin City" go by as by turning one of Miller’s books on its spine and flipping the pages with your thumb; you can dispense with the latter in maybe 20 seconds and still have an evening to go and see something else.
After all, "Sin City" suffers from a fundamental flaw: bad writing. Three and a half stories are started as vignettes in the film. Marv (Mickey Rourke) is a brutal thug looking to revenge the death of his favorite hooker. Dwight (Clive Owen) is... just a guy who has a girlfriend, I guess... who kills a shady cop who was cruising around the part of town where all the scantily clad women with big guns live. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is an ex-cop protecting a girl he once rescued. And The Man (Josh Hartnett) appears at the beginning and end of the film – in the best looking scenes in the film – for reasons that are never clear.
Why the film is told this way is equally unclear. The separate main characters meet only in the most fleeting passing, and one man’s plot has no effect on any other’s. Given the film’s title, the storytelling in "Sin City" is perhaps meant to elicit some indelible community tale, the city streets that affect all the people who live on them. That argument offers what is ultimately the safest out for "Sin City"s narrative haze: it references film noir.
Indeed, the city as gathering place, breeding misery and deceit, is a prime figure in film noir. Los Angeles in "Sunset Boulevard" (Billy Wilder, 1950) and Vienna in "The Third Man" (Carol Reed, 1949) figure prominently in the downfalls of the leading men, as if the mens’ stories could have happened in no other place.
"Sin City" is not, however, a film noir. Yes, it has the look and the locations: the seedy bars, the back-alley warehouses, docks, and tar pits where evil deeds get done. But the city is also filled with inane characters, telling us in voice over exactly what is about to happen, then describing it as it is happening, then reminding us of how cool it was – that thing that just happened – in case we did not remember.
If voice over is the stereotypical parlance for film noir, it is for its quick ability to get inside a character’s head. In the classic film noirs that use it – "Double Indemnity," (Billy Wilder, 1944) "Sunset Boulevard" – voice over is a connective tissue, told from some point after the events on screen have happened, bringing leaps in time together while offering a window into the internal degradation of characters who themselves do not understand the evil behind their motivations and so must talk their way through it to us. In that way, the voice over is a carrier of the natural humanity of bad people – as there are few good people in film noir – and the resting place of some transient hope that the even worst people among us feel, at times, some level of doubt.
But no doubt exists in "Sin City." No second guessing. The characters are soulless figures proceeding inhumanly forward, bent on destruction and revenge. They have no interior motivations or thoughts. Their voice overs exist in the present tense, describing in unnecessary detail the scenes on screen. If the screenwriter’s mantra is "show, don’t tell," Miller and Rodriguez have never heard it. The voice overs in "Sin City" sound more like play-by-play – and bad play-by-play at that. John Madden on celluloid. Bill Walton meets Philip Marlowe.
The argument supporting "Sin City"s inherent inhumanity has been that its characters exist in a comic book world: they need not be human characters in a place where all that happens is stylized fun and guts and glory. Rodriguez raises the same argument in discussions of the film’s violence, that since the blood is not red and the film is black and white and comic booky, it is not, in the end, a violent film. This is Rodriguez’s most insulting affront to his audience’s intelligence. We all have imaginations: blood is still blood, even if it is mustard colored, and a man tearing another man’s scrotum out is not funny, even if the action comes packaged – vomit-inducingly packaged – with the line, "I took away his weapon – both of them."
With lines like these, "Sin City" is no more than expensive wanking, a few little boys getting their rocks off on screen. Less than noir, "Sin City" is anti-noir, the counter to a form that by its nature is concerned with humanity – with the doubt and pain characters cause themselves in the process of carrying out evil acts – by creating characters who do not feel any pain at all, and are thus inhuman. The resulting brutality is insulting, not because of the brutality itself but because of the meaninglessness by which it is carried out: blood and guts – gleefully, joyously – without motive or provocation. And the one redeeming value of "Sin City" – its visuals – is not enough to mask this emptiness.
right on....but we've had this discussion already. that's the difference, i suppose. that you can have these kinds of discussions with your friends, but no self-respecting critic would talk this way about a film. truly a hatchet job, and a good one at that. which is why you're a critic, and not a hack.