A Pilgrim’s Digression

Sin City

I don’t know what surprised me more, the high quality of this film, or the fact that until now Robert Rodriguez was best known as the director as such recent hack work as Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D. However, when I looked up Rodriguez on IMDB, I discovered that back he has done two other movies that I like very much: Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and From Dusk ’til Dawn. Those two good movies still don’t explain why Rodriguez undertook to direct such pap as Spy Kids, but perhaps as in the literary world, an author must submit to all manner of indecencies in order to survive and produce masterpieces.

Sin City is a masterpiece. With Tarantino-like brilliance, Rodriguez interweaves separate stories set in a fictional dark metropolis that combines modern and traditional film noir, from Double Endemnity to Bladerunner in a strange mix of surrealism and violence.

There is a brief scene at the beginning in which an assassin kills a woman, thus setting up the atmosphere, the cinematography, and the coldness of the world portrayed in the film. However, it is the next scene that really sets these stories in motion.

The stories begin with an ending, of sorts. Bruce Willis’ character, Detective Hartigan (”Heart Again”—he has a heart problem in the beginning of the film), steps straight out of a Mickey Spillane novel to kill a child molester and murderer who also happens to be the son of a powerful Senator. In doing so, Hartigan is himself shot nearly to death by his partner, who betrays him. This story forms the core of the film, and though we suppose at first that Hartigan is dead at the end of the scene, at the end of the film we discover that the Senator (played by Powers Booth) has kept him alive and even paid to cure his heart condition in order to punish him for shooting his son (who is also alive, but horribly deformed). In my view, the miracle cure of Hartigan’s heart problem is symbolic of the sacrifice he made to save the life of a girl in the clutches of the Senator’s son. This little girl loves Hartigan and writes to him anonymously all the time he is in prison.

This theme of abuse of women and girls runs throughout every story in this movie. The film was much criticized for its graphic violence when it appeared in theatres. The film is violent, no doubt about that, though I would argue it is cartoonish violence, which negates it’s impact. The film is, after all, based on a comic book in which one particular character, Marv, is struck by a car, shot full of bullets, leaps out of high windows, and escapes all of this unscathed. The violence is also harnessed to a profoundly moral vision in which those who perpetrate violence against women are severely punished.

The second and third stories in the film illustrate this theme perfectly. Marv, an ugly, superhuman monster, proves to be a loyal and moral creature who defends those who befriend him and even seeks to avenge the death of a prostitute, the only woman who ever showed him love. In the third story, Dwight, played by Clive Owen, also takes his revenge on men who would enslave and abuse women. Dwight assists a group of prostitutes from “Old Town” in defeating the pimps who would rule them.

Indeed, those who are the real monsters in this film are not the men like Dwight, Marv, and Hartigan, who do perpetrate some pretty ghastly, violent acts upon their enemies. The monsters are the men like Powers Booth’s Senator Roark and his handsome son, played by Nick Stahl. The monsters are men like Cardinal Roark, played by Rutger Hauer, and his “adopted” son Kevin, played by Elijah Wood. I don’t think there has ever been a creepier character put on film as Elijah Woods’ Kevin. Kevin is slickly cute in a boyish way. He wears Converse Chuck Connors sneakers…and he likes to rip women apart and eat them. The suggestion is that he is a kind of werewolf. We rarely see his eyes. Hidden behind spectacles, usually we only see a glare or a reflection, hinting at the soullessness of the beast behind them.

Far from being the immoral gore-fest portrayed in the posturing of the political class, Sin City is about moral men living in a city so evil that their morality is mistaken for corruption.