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| Wednesday, March 30, 2005 |
The redefinition of sin
 I can already hear the critics kvetching. If depravity ever abounded in a film, it abounds in this one. If moral decay was ever so colorful (or not-so-colorfully as it were) put on display, it was rendered in silver screen glory here. Sin City, if ever there was an aptly named film, these critics will lament.
Bollocks.
These people have clearly never seen Ichi the Killer, and if they had, they complaints matter not in any event. There are dark places in the human experience, and they deserve to be plastered on screen as much as the next rose-tinted view of pleasant days and nostalgic vistas. And boy, do they get plastered all over this piece of celluloid.
Yes, there is a male member being torn off -- literally -- on screen. Of course, plenty of blood is splattered and sprayed, all of it in multiple colors. There's even the cannibal serial killer of prostitutes who eats off a girl's hand while she watches (you don't actually see the act). But that's nothing next to the massively powerful Catholic priest who joins in with he of the woman-eating fetish.
Are you sick to your stomach yet? Though the depictions of violence I've just described (and more) is given a thoroughly cartoonish rendering, slightly eschewing the graphic nature, the subject matter remains disturbing. In short, I can't really blame you.
So while it may be easy to write Sin City off as pure ultra-violent fantasy, more evidence of the moral rot in our social apple core, it would be a disservice to do so. The film is born and bred of the darkest of human reflections, but it says something that the reflection breeds some of the most tragic noble heroes this side of a Homerian epic.
Bruce Willis' John Hartigan, for example, isn't particularly sinful. He is, perhaps, the most saintly of the cast. You'll have to forgive him his vengeful murders; they were designed to stop a pedophilic serial killer from hurting anybody else. But even the more despicable ruffians who populate this fictional city of sin are fascinating less for their sins than for their redemptions.
As a matter of course, everybody is violent on some level. In fact, it is violence that is seen in an entirely neutral light. It is the sexual depravity and the abuse of women that marks the bad guys as truly bad, and if you couldn't notice that distinction the characters go out of their way to remind us that the good guys are out to save the women from being hurt. The heroes are killers. The villains are worse, and how's that for a social commentary on the morality of force to achieve a just end, to say nothing of feminism?
No, I suppose I can't convince you that this film is deep social commentary. I won't even try, but I will say it is extremely well executed visual masterpiece theatre, and for two hours there's only so much you can ask for from a commercial action flick courtesy of the bad boys at Dimension.
So yes, it was a good film -- castrated yellow villains and all. But just wait for the critics. Just wait for the naysayers. You'll likely hear a great deal from them, or maybe you won't. Maybe we'll all be lucky. Maybe it'll seem too ultraviolent in the first place. Maybe they'll stay away, and having not seen the film, keep their mouths shut.
Or maybe not.
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