| |
|
Just saw it again for the second time. Utterly awesome.
First of all, anyone saying Sin City (the comic - wish they'd stop calling them 'graphic novels', they aren't and it's just sad reverse-snobbery that says they are) isn't serious is, I think, entirely missing the point. They are played entirely seriously - it's a fantasy brought to life, a 'film noir' fortified, bottled and sold to us exaggerated to the nth degree. Denigrating it by calling it comedy is just a little reductive, like having a go at Superman for being 'larger than life'. It is a comic - a heightened, extrapolated, monstrous version of every comics story you've ever seen, with semi-indestructible, sociopathic/psychotic heroes and gorgeous, powerful goddess-women. It's the DC Universe with automatic weapons and a deathwish.
And so is Sin City the movie. There's almost no use referring to it as being an adaptation, because it barely qualifies as one - it's a translation, and a perfect one at that. This movie should be studied along with American Psycho and Naked Lunch (how to adapt an 'unfilmable' novel) and Adaptation (how to approach the 'unadaptable') as a part of a dissertation on how to adapt a text to a different media. In this case, simply to present everything in the text as it actually appeared in the text, without fear or favour. It's one of the most fearless movies I've ever seen. Anyone who laughed at the hard-boiled dialogue, delivered straight - try watching The Maltese Falcon or The Third Man these days (banishing completely the idea of the sacred text, if you can) and stifle a giggle. This is old-school pulp dialogue, treated with the respect it deserves - not because it's realistic, or because it's stood the test of time, but because it works for and with the medium and because it's rich with character, with history and with blood. Pulp is all about the real made ridiculous, played straight so hard it hurts. Fear of adapting this kind of hyper-realised narrative - that's not a new thing. To give an example near to my heart - Leslie Charteris' 1930s Saint novels and short stories can be cruel, bloodthirsty animals, and pre-date Fleming's Bond in that regard by over twenty years. In the original material, Simon Templar exhibits his own brand of justice : burns villains alive ; embarks on a one-man killing spree in post-Prohibition New York, gutting, strangling and shooting every bad guy he meets ; takes on the world-warmongers of the pre-atomic world with nothing but a camp quip, a gun and a deadly steel-blue gaze. How do they present this on the small screen? With Roger Moore's gentleman thief, Saint-lite, with bloodless hands and an arch eyebrow for the discerning audience at home. He's not the only pulp 'hero' to be castrated (definitely a choice word, but for more interesting reasons than you'd think) for a mass-market. That Rodgriguez, Miller and Weinstein chose not to do so shows the kind of balls you'd expect from male egotists like them, and it works beautifully.
So all the women are beautiful and barely dressed, and so all the men want to protect them. That's a convention of the genre, and in Sin City, it's sufficiently bastardised as to call the whole thing into question. Pulp is an examination of the male psyche, so of course it's going to raise questions. But the women in Sin City's fantastic, hyperreal universe can easily take care of themselves - Dwight has that hammered home often enough. He may be a street-smart murderer with a new face putting it all on the line for the women of Old Town, but Miller's women prove themselves more than capable of being their own creatures, something that actually writes back to the male-psyche-centric pulp-avatar that is Sin City. Pulp traditionally presents us with the male gaze, warts and all - Sin City is self-conscious enough to provide us with a mirror. In the end, Miho et al save his life more times than he saves theirs, and the hookers don't EVER have hearts of gold. Old Town takes care of it's own, and does so, despite the source of it's income, by virtue of being without any traditionally male input. No hierarchical structure smacking of a patriarchal, masculo-centric viewpoint, no traditional female-control methods. The only thing that 'The Big Fat Kill' proves in terms of character is that Dwight is an honourary Old Town girl, allowed to assist because he's as hard and as merciless as they are, not because he's more - Dwight is allowed the job of taking care of business because he has nothing to lose if he's caught, unlike Gail and Dallas. In his turn, Marv is allowed to keep going because they recognise that he won't be stopped by anything except death - he's a living tool of veangeance for Wendy and Gail, rendered so by the fact that he's mentally ill and an incredible masculine atavism. They allow him to complete the job, not because he's The Man of the story, but because he'll do it, and do it perfectly for their purposes, and they show their tool the respect he asks for, and nothing more.
Hartigan is more complex - an old man on massively borrowed time, getting to save the kid twice in one story, and so (subtextually, but you'll forgive me a little license here) redeem himself for thirty years of looking the other way while his colleagues, including his own partner, took the city for whatever they couldn't earn on a cop's paycheck, and for a lifetime of never allowing himself or Eileen a family untainted by the (male) Sin in the City. Nancy isn't just a little girl or a woman, she's a representation of a family that never got started, as well as a (male) child that was spoiled for adulthood every time corruption shat on Hartigan's job. It's no coincidence that he destroys Rourke's groin both times he saves Nancy's life, emasculating and so ending something purely male that lived to spoil innocence. So Hartigan does save her, and himself into the bargain. Fair trade. |
|
|
