The Sin of Sin City

Wednesday, September 28th, 2005

I never got around to seeing Sin City, but I meant to. Andrew Klavan’s The Sin of Sin City offers an interesting assessment:

The movie, an almost uncannily accurate reproduction of the Frank Miller cult-classic comic-book series of the same name, is certainly as brilliant as it is bad. It’s brilliant because its black-and-white palette with pulsing intrusions of red, yellow, and blue looks beautiful; because its acute and vertiginous camera angles are thrilling; because its imitation of the comic’s atmosphere is remarkably complete; and because the cast is excellent. It’s bad because all that aesthetic power is put into the service of a masturbatory barbarity.

The film’s interlocking stories are all, essentially, the same story. Boy hurts girl; other boy avenges girl. Along the way, the severed heads of women are mounted on walls, the testicles of rapists are ripped off by hand, women are eaten by men, men are eaten by dogs, throats are cut, brains spattered…. In other words, all those gorgeous visuals ultimately represent nothing more interesting than the internal world of a crawly 12-year-old boy, his alternating fantasies of torturing naked women and of being the strongman who comes to their rescue.

Now, 12-year-old boys are what they are and fantasies are what they are, and I condemn neither. If boys’ consciences didn’t wrestle with their violent desires, there would be no adventure stories. Nor, as my own novels attest, do I object to sex and violence as pure entertainment. Sex and violence are central to entertainment because they are central to the language of our dreams.

But the translation of daydreams into art — even violent, sexy pop art—requires at least some minimal interaction between the raw material and a compassionate conception of the terror and dignity of being human.

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