Sin City

Unless you have an idea of the style and texture of graphic noir, you might think the whole thing a bizarre exercise in sentimental adolescent fantasy, mixing in equal parts violence and sex, in a kind of pulp noir male world which makes Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer seem like a rough equivalent of Hamlet.

And you’d be right of course. The history of noir in America is a long and noble one, taking in such writers as Horace McCoy and David Goodis, before flowering in the cinema with the likes of Jacques Tourneur, all this well before Miller began mining the vein with his graphic novels and his re-imagining of Batman as the dark knight.

That said, Sin City the movie at least has a sense of its source and a style that honours it – no doubt because Miller shares directing honours with Robert Rodriguez (and special guest director Quentin Tarantino, whatever that means).

The show is shot in black and white, with particular elements (women’s lips and eyes and hair in particular) highlighted in bright colours, a bit like the little girl in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or as in dozens of music videos. It’s a neat effect, and though it mainly heightens the sense of misogyny that runs through the various stories, it does also give a nice edge to the very stylised, comic book black and white world imagined by the creative team.

If you contrast the show to the execrable CGI world of Sky Captain, you can see a creative intelligence at work in this carefully crafted homage to Miller’s original static images. The stories also follow Miller’s original very faithfully, for good and for ill, since it’s very hard to get emotionally involved in the fate of the characters, except in a kind of dark, ironic, sardonic way.

Bruce Willis is on hand as an aging, going on sixty cop who saves a young girl from a fate worse than death before returning at the end for another bout to save her again as an infatuated nineteen year old stripper (Jessica Alba). Oh yes, you can sense aging baby boomers grooving on this storyline, at least until Bruce has to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The middle is taken up with Mickey Rourke, heavily made up, as an outcast tough guy who wants to revenge the death of his ‘Angel’ – a hooker who gave him a night of joy despite his looks. A satisfactory amount of blood letting takes place as he feeds Elijah Woods’ portrait of a sociopath to the dogs. If nothing else, the show offered redemption to Rourke as a performer, an amazing match of real and imagined decadence.

The third storyline features Clive Owen (who doesn’t cut as good a rug as Rouke and Willis), who gets tangled up in Basin Town in a feud between hookers who like to run their own lives and a gang intent on making them do what they should do (you get Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson and Benicio Del Toro strutting their stuff and the streets in this little gang war).

Now you will have noticed a few things in this brief summary – women are always women, which is to say hookers and strippers and wayward girls, who carry a taint and ensure damnation, but hell a man’s gotta do what he can to save them, even if that’s a smart smack across the chops. Baddies of course just want to see them nekkid, or better still, give them a good whipping, but the sex thing never goes too far – just enough to titillate those male adolescents in the audience who think hookers and outcasts are the way to go in this crazy mixed up world where problems are just a hill of beans and there can only be good and bad sociopaths trying to get it on with hot young things (with the good sociopaths pounding the heads of the bad ones into a yellow sludge when they do the wrong thing).

So yes,  of course men are men, macho and almost always destined to die, full of dark impulses, often driven by the bad deeds of high up baddies in the church or the state (the Catholic church gets a good, solid slamming here), and relatively impervious to bullets and other known means of destruction, such as hanging and stabbing and castration, at least until they’ve played out their mission in the storyline.

In short it’s a congenial blend of violence of a slapstick kind and dark brooding, which must have charmed a few punters since it managed a respectable A$6.29 million at the Australian box office, not a bad result for a niche product, and it will surely attract ongoing attention on dvd.

Female audiences might well wonder what it’s all about, but presumably they haven’t tackled the kind of torture confronting nerds as they fantasise about payback time for the bullies in the school yard. Was that a scream, wondered the nerd, as he wrenched the testicles from the school bully prop forward? No this is a scream, he thought, as he took his Tarantino licensed samurai sword and spilled his guts and blood on the red zone soil.

Oops, sorry just went off on a Frank Miller fantasy. So the show is what it is, and if you like Millers’ graphic novels, then odds are you will like this show’s very stylised recreation of them. Others will wonder what the hell all the exaggerated poses and Spillane dialogue is about, but that’s their loss and a gain for adolescent boys everywhere of any age.

The dvd images and sound are in pristine shape, with the abstract black and white heavily fantasy CGI visuals looking pretty good (what there is of reality in the background comes from sweet Austin, Texas, which looks more like a chocolate box in the daytime than a noir setting, but there’s actually very little of Austin and a lot of computer in the show). Rodriguez also had a hand in the music, as did ex Aussie Graeme Revell, but it mainly hums along in the background like an hysteric on a consistent melodramatic high.

Unfortunately the current edition only has a ‘behind the scenes’ special feature, suggesting that at some stage down the track, BV (releasing for Dimensions/Miramax) will attempt to milk the mugs for a special edition. Poor nerds don’t get it – life’s not for extras, life’s for the main show. Life is short, get yourself a babe and get down. ‘cause the grim reaper is coming, and he only offers a special kind of hell where the laser beam carves out your eyes …

 

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