Original Sin
Sin City
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller
The Band Wagon
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Godard's nifty defense of the estheticized nature of movie violence-"It's not blood, it's red"-gets turned around by the new comic book movie Sin City. Robert Rodriguez attempts to invent a new movie form by collaborating with graphic-novel artist Frank Miller (who shares directorial credit). They prioritize the artifice of comic books by emphasizing a b&w stylization in which bloodshed is shown as iridescent, silvery-white blotches. It's not blood, it's not red; it's just phony.
The colossal artistic failure of Sin City should be definitive proof that in this bad period of adapting comic books into movies, the films we get are banal and redundant. Comix don't need to be movies. Graphic art has its own principles and justifications that become inane when converted into live action. Rodriguez and Miller try to resolve this problem through digital photography that simplifies the imagery, recreating the starkness of print panels. Their wasted effort does little more than turn cinema back into two-dimensional flatness. And it doesn't just lack pictorial depth.
This film's sensibility (like Miller's Batman-derived graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns) is essentially juvenile. Rodriguez and Miller drag us back to ignorance with a neo-noir crime story laid out into serialized segments according to the ADD structure of comix. John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a cop with a martyr complex, saves an 11-year-old kidnapping victim; Marv (Mickey Rourke) is a street fighter avenging the death of his prostie girlfriend but falls in love with her twin sister; Dwight (Clive Owen) leads a team of streetwalkers against the underworld. All of it is presided over by a death angel (Josh Hartnett) acting out the genre's secret boyish misogyny. Thus Sin City is true to the spirit of Miller's graphic-novel intrigue, letting fans hold on to their teenage cynicism about the world. (It's like some unholy hybrid of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Road to Perdition.) We're submerged into a violent fantasy miasma-the very triviality and insularity from which the best movies (and the best pop music) normally offer deliverance.
It'll be difficult for some people to let go of the immaturity enshrined by Sin City. Rodriguez blends the cheap allure of escapist movies and sophomoric reading habits as if they belonged together-as though today's shrill pop culture needed more validation and promotion. By repeating pop clichés, Rodriguez prevents moviegoers from seeing past them and understanding reality. Rodriguez is in the zone-Hollywood-wise-using the same elastiviolence as in the Matrix movies: Killing and brutality are absurdly amplified yet have no effect. Worse than inuring audiences to violence, Rodriguez conditions them to accept it as a form of entertainment in itself. (Rodriguez's Latin-American, quasi-Catholic blood excess probably won't get him pilloried like Mel Gibson; he cagily flatters media watchdogs by using a swastika-shaped ninja blade to both mark and annihilate a bad guy.)
Rodriguez and Miller don't actually have an esthetic, just a gimmick. If they were interested in making comix conform to life rather than reducing humanity to comix, they could have continued Godard's blood/red dialectic and usefully contrasted reality with art. But Sin City is a stifling rather than exhilarating experience. The alternate-universe look is occasionally striking (especially the black-light stroboscope effect of the faster chase scenes). Still, the overall effort feels hugely unimaginative, recalling Warren Beatty's misbegotten Dick Tracy. Only Mickey Rourke, whose face is digitized into granite grimaces like a Dick Tracy goon, successfully creates a characterization. Rourke barks his pseudo-Spillane dialogue almost soulfully, but Frank Miller's script doesn't countenance soul; this overwritten hard-boiled universe ("The Valkyries at my side are cheering with pure, lusty, blood-thirsty joy") is all mannerism.
As shot by Rodriguez, Sin City's digital b&w lacks the mystery of photochemical b&w photography. A noir without the enveloping quality of shadow or the tactile sensation of smoke, it fails at what makes movies a great visual art form. It's like watching an illuminated chalkboard for two hours. That may seem like a reduction of Rodriguez and Miller's painstaking work with green screen and digital technology-but not really. Surely the point of Sin City's homage to the comic book is that everything, finally, comes to pencil and paper. No matter the technology-and despite implementing the new Sony HDC-950 camera to capture video imagery that can be readily manipulated-the basics of moviemaking are still imagination and purpose. Because of that, Godard's crucial theorizing throws a wrench in Rodriguez and Miller's hard drive.
There's no understanding of violence and death in this comic book movie. Nor is Rodriguez concerned with how the stylized representation of carnage affects us spiritually. Look at the way Hartnett's kiss-of-death book-end sequences try for high-style seductiveness-the epitome of Rodriquez's glossy, stripped-down, animatic style-yet they lack the elegance of actors achieving credible emotional rapport. The mannerisms quote bad movies rather than illuminate life. After the ethnographic promise of the 1992 El Mariachi, it has become obvious that Rodriguez isn't an esthete and has no interest in authentic humanity. He's just another geek auteur.
Given that the themes of Sin City are crime, violence, sex, depravity, fate and, oh yeah, heroism, it's disappointing that Rodriguez and Miller aren't after much more than a reworking of film noir tropes. Oliver Stone almost got the idea right in U-Turn (his feverish distillation of modern paranoia and nightmarish archetypes). But one of the cleverest examples of stylized, reflexive noir in movie history is Fred Astaire's "The Girl Hunt Ballet." This delirious pop parody can be seen in the new DVD release of Vincente Minnelli's 1953 The Band Wagon. Its take on pulp largely relies on the modern audience's delusion that it sees the world with more honesty and intensity than past generations. The continuing marvel of "The Girl Hunt Ballet" comes from the sophisticated blend of noir cliché and musical-comedy satire; Astaire and Minnelli released audiences from the susceptibility of smart-ass dramatic convention. Plus, they provided sizzle.
When Astaire's detective dances with Cyd Charisse's seductress, the physicality of sexual attraction is in friction with moral suspicion. It's both funny and alarming and makes the bubble-tittied Amazons and hammer-fisted tough guys of Sin City look not abstract as Rodriguez claims, but absurd. Sin City's makers are too proud of their inordinate replication of graphic-art style to have audiences reconsider their easy responses to genre. That was the point of The Band Wagon's ebullience and esthetic refinement-even 50 years ago, Hollywood's first-rate wits laughed at their enjoyment of trash, putting it in proper satirical perspective.
Today's pop confusion could be seen in Kerry Conran's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; its tipsy imbalance of sci-fi dread and old-movie fancy was a more childlike expression of the same geeky technomania in Sin City, but it wasn't sharp enough to achieve parody or nasty enough to seem hip. Rodriguez and Miller do both and in doing so have innovated the comic book movie. But that term ought to be an oxymoron. Sin City is an oxymoron made for morons.