Sin City

Among the few movies I've had a chance to watch this year, without doubt the most unique is Robert Rodriguez's Sin City. Also without doubt is that it is extremely well-made. But it is also a film that teases the line between pornography and art (with violence, not sex), and stays--just--on the side of art.

The film is shot in black and white with a liberal splashes of color in almost every frame--the red of a woman's dress or the blonde of her hair; rays of blue and green headlights; the dirty yellow of a disfigured character's skin. Camera angles give every character a dramatic, heroic, or sinister look.

Nonstop voice-overs narrate dark deeds in gravely voices filled with doom. Three storylines wind and only loosely connect, even less so than is the case with the film's artisitc cousin, Pulp Fiction. In each of them broken men try to protect or avenge their women in a world gone mad with violence and corruption. This is something like a comic book, video game, soap opera, film noir, and pulp novel put in a blender and brought to the screen.

The result is relentless, gory, art-house violence and a dark and pessimistic story.

There is a key moment at the end of the second storyline when several characters are raining automatic weapons' fire down from high rooftops into an alleyway crowded with hapless mobsters. The gravely voiceover: "No escape. No surrender. No mercy. We got to kill every last [...] one of them. Every last one. Not for revenge. Not because they deserve it. Not because it'll make the world a better place. We need a heap of bloody bodies so when mob boss, Wallenquist, looks over his charts of profits and losses, he'll see what it cost him to mess with the girls of Old Town. The valkyrie at my side is shouting and laughing with the pure hate for blood-thirsty joy of the slaughter. And so am I."

That about sums up the movie. It is a movie whose characters have a lust for the kill, and for the kill in the bloodiest way possible. One dismembers his enemy and feeds him to a wolf; the one quoted above massacres them by the dozen; the third rips and beats the bad guy to a soupy yellow goo.

That the protagonists in each of the film's three stories are experts in inflicting pain--indeed, that they resolve their conflicts through specific acts of hyper-violence--suggests that the film commits that ultimate sin in Christian cinema-theory demonology: it "glorifies violence," and has no artistic merit.

The Cicero demurrs from this conclusion. Sin City is a fair picture of hell, or of a world abandoned by God, which amounts to the same thing. And it does not glorify hell [spoilers ahead]: the first protagonist is horribly executed after winning his vengeance; and the film closes with the last hero shooting himself in the head, recognizing his victory is pointless and his life is doomed anyway. One does not walk away from Sin City wanting to be among its citizens.

Sin City is internally consistent with the rules of its world and the arc of its characters. It is uncompromising and coherent, and it teaches the viewer the horrors of its world. It shares that virtue with Ingmar Bergmen's great The Seventh Seal (1957) and Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979).

The violence is an integral part of its story, which is what distinguishes it from pointless, titilating, pornographic violence (as seen in Kill Bill, Volume 1, 2003) and makes it cinematic art. It is not art for everyone--parents who let their children see this movie should be visited by a social worker--but that it is art at all is an achievement indeed for Hollywood.