| |
|
No he wouldn't. He's a fat never-was. He looks ten years older than he actually is. If Hartigan was a history professor close to retirement, Douglas would be a good fit.
I engaged with the characters in a very real way, and much less with Hartigan than with anyone else. Fully realised characters - please, girlfriend. Why on god's green fucking earth would we need that in a Sin City movie, in a Sin City anything? It's archetypes. Hartigan is a Bogart archetype, world-weary and desperately bitter. He tells everyone he's on borrowed time from the beginning. His end is never a shock, it's a culmination of everything Hartigan is supposed to be.
It's not arch. For fuck's sake, READ the definitions you posted. Most of them are irrelevant, dealing with the word as a prefix, and the last relates to Sin City in no way whatsoever. "Mischieveous, roguish"...? Idiotic. And it's not a pastiche. It references film noir in the same way that 'The Usual Suspects' does. Uses it as a starting point, and then moves on. Sin City has always been a fantasy-based, noir-based narrative. Marv's story, recently retitled 'The Hard Goodbye', is signposted throughout as a Conan-style fantasy narrative, and no more so than in the movie, where Dwight's quickie-psychoanalysis from 'A Dame To Kill For' is repeated line for line to underscore the point. Jesus, we're talking about a film in which Marv is runover three times in a row, where Clive Owen's Dwight jumps off a building, survives being blown up around five times, where Hartigan survives being shot about a dozen times (with a heart condition), and still lives to be shot up some more some eight years later on.
But just because it isn't real doesn't mean it doesn't deserve to be treated seriously. Calling it 'just a laugh' is to demean it, to reduce it, to completely miss the expressionistic way in which it's drawn or shot. Sin City has always been an expressionist work, and the movie only heightens this. The use of colour is expressionist. The concept is expressionist. It satisfies virtually every criteria for being labelled such. It's not a pastiche - that has connotations of parody and subversion. Sin City, the comic and the film, adheres to noir conventions while moving beyond them, to say something entirely different.
Yes, I can hear lines like 'sometimes standing up for your friends means killing a whole lot of people' without laughing, sleaze. As you say, Sin City is played straight - but it isn't Spinal Tap. It isn't a spoof. It deserves being read straight, as if it was real. And if you don't do that - with the comic or the movie - you're missing half the point, in the same way that people who think that 'The Scream' is just a cartoonish painting, or that Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' is about someone changing into a bug, are missing half the point. Sin City may play on American ideas of gangerism and noir, but it's wholly European, specifically German, in the way it's produced, both 2D and 3D. It's abstract and existential, as Miller himself has said. |
|
|
