erik lundegaard

Sin City
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Sin City (2005)

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s a little like Fox News, isn’t it? Grizzled old white dudes and babes. Moral righteousness leading to torture. A mangling of the English language. Prostitution.

I’m looking at you, Greta van Susteren.

I’ll give “Sin City” this: It’s the most comic-booky of movies. Entire shots look like comic panels. There’s a beautiful, hand-drawn simplicity in the look even as there’s confusion about the directors. The movie was “shot and cut” by Robert Rodriguez, but it was “directed” by Rodriguez and Frank Miller, the writer-artist of the “Sin City” graphic novels, while Quentin Tarantino is listed as a “guest director.” Apparently, he did one small, forgettable scene.

Written byFrank Miller
Directed byFrank Miller
Robert Rodriguez
Quentin Tarantino
StarringJessica Alba
Devon Aoki
Alexis Bledel
Powers Boothe

For all these hands, not to mention the three-plus storylines, there’s cohesion here. It’s all of a piece. It connects and interconnects. But it’s putrid. It reveals a sick society. Not the one in the movie but the one that watches the movie.

Cool and cruel

“Sin City” worships at the twin altars of cool and cruel. Its heroes are cool, with scarred faces and overcoats swirling like capes in the wind, and they speak in the sentence fragments of Mickey Spillane: “Just one hour to go. My last day on the job. Early retirement. Not my idea. Doctor’s orders. Heart condition.”

They’re also cruel. It’s not enough to kill the bad guys; they need to torture them first. I’m reminded of Nathan Zuckerman’s line from Philip Roth’s novel “Zuckerman Unbound.” It’s 1969, and in the wake of MLK and RFK and someone taking a potshot at his old professor through his study window, Zuckerman thinks, “Blowing people apart seemed to have replaced the roundhouse punch in the daydreams of the aggrieved: only annihilation gave satisfaction that lasted.” Now even annihilation isn’t enough. Now you have to tie them to a tree and cut off their arms and legs and summon the dogs.

We get three stories about grizzled, tough men fighting an almost superhuman corruption on behalf of a sexy, female purity.

In the bookending stories, Hartigan (Bruce Willis), a cop with the proverbial day to go before retirement, plus a heart condition, risks it all to save an 11-year-old girl, Nancy, from the clutches of a deranged child molester/torturer, Roark Jr. (Nick Stahl), who just happens to be the protected son of U.S. Senator Roark (Powers Boothe). Hartigan succeeds, but his partner, Bob (Michael Madsen), has been bought, and shoots him and leaves him for dead. “An old man dies, a little girl lives,” Hartigan thinks. “Fair trade.” Except he’s not dead. More on that later.

In the second story, superstrong Marv (Mickey Rourke), with a face as blunt as the old Spider-Man villain Hammerhead, is enjoying a night with a beautiful blonde named Goldie (Jamie King) on a heart-shaped bed. She’s in color, he’s not. (Most of the women in this thing are in color.) Goldie smells like angels ought to smell. She’s the perfect woman. A goddess. So says Marv in voiceover. Then he wakes up beside her corpse, framed for the murder. The rest of the story is less to clear his name than avenge Goldie’s killer. It was one night with a prostitute but Marv is in love.

He gets intel from his parole officer, Lucille (Carla Gugino), nekkid, va-va-voomy, gay. “She’s a dyke but god knows why,” Marv tells us. “With that body of hers she could have any man she wants.” Right, but she doesn’t want. This attitude permeates the movie.

He gets intel holding a man’s head in the toilet. “It was Connelly!” the dude sputters. “But he won’t talk.” CUT TO: Marv holding a man’s face on the ground as he drives his car around town. To us: “Connelly talks. They all talk.” This attitude permeates the movie.

The villain? A supersilent cannibal named Kevin (Elijah Wood), who eats prostitutes with the movie’s true villain, Cardinal Patrick Henry Roark (Rutger Hauer), the most powerful man in the state. His brother is a U.S. Senator because of him. He owns the cops. And he’s got a taste for flesh. Or souls. “He ate their souls,” Roark says of Kevin. “And I joined him. They were all whores. Nobody cared for them.” Ah, but one man did. He cared for Goldie, and for her twin sister, Wendy, who visits him on death row after Marv tortures and kills Roark, and is then framed for all of Kevin’s crimes. Question: With Roark gone, who’s running things? Or does a corrupt system continue on automatic without a corrupt man pulling the levers?

In the third story, prostitutes, in the midst of a truce with corrupt cops, kill a woman-beater, Jackie Boy (Benicio Del Torro), who has wandered into their territory. Oops, he’s a cop. A hero cop. Question: How come nobody knows this? His picture was all over the media and not one person recognized him? Read a newspaper, for Chrissake. The rest of the story concerns the lengths Dwight (Clive Owen) will go to destroy the evidence before the cops find out.

Finally, we return to Hartigan, who is framed for child molestation, spends eight years in solitary where his only solace are the letters of 11-year-old Nancy, then gets out when the letters stop coming. He searches for her. Guess what? Not only is she the superhot dancer at the bar they all attend (Jessica Alba), but this is what the bad guys wanted: for him to lead them to her. Because Roark, Jr. has unfinished business. In an attempt to regrow the balls Hartigan blew off, Roark Jr. has turned hideous and yellow, more Ferengi than human. As a child molester, too, one wonders what he wants with Jessica Alba in full womanhood. Moot point. By the end, to Nancy’s relieved, half-smiling face, Hartigan rips off his balls with his bare hands. Then she and Hartigan get away. But Hartigan knows there is no “away” for Nancy as long as he’s alive. So he tells her some nice words, sends her on her way, and thinks the “Fair trade” line again as he puts his gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

Not feeling it

That’s how it goes down in Frank Miller’s world: the grizzled (Hartigan, Marv, Dwight), with ailments (heart condition, hallucinations, plastic surgery), protect the sexy (Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jaime King, Brittany Murphy) from the sick and powerful (cannibals, child molesters, woman beaters). Viewers get to think themselves heroes while indulging in torture. In this way, it’s a good Bush-era film.

At one point, Dwight thinks up this prose-poem to Miho (Devon Aoki), the sword-wielding protector of prostitutes:

Deadly little Miho.
You won’t feel a thing unless she wants you to.
She twists the blade.
He feels it.

But we don’t. Which is how we can watch crap like this.


  • In Sin City, the grizzled ...

  • ... protect the sexy ...

  • ... from the sick.

  • In Sin City, the grizzled ...

  • ... protect the sexy ...

  • ...from the sick.

  • Grizzled ...

  • ... sexy ...

  • ... sick.

  • It's nicely art-directed anyway.

—March 19, 2014

© 2014 Erik Lundegaard