Sin City - Evil vs evil

June 11, 2005
Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl) in Sin City.

Yellow Bastard (Nick Stahl) in Sin City.

Ashley Crawford discovers that comic books, and the heroes and villains who inhabit them, have gone mainstream. The latest, Sin City, is about to hit the big screen.

Marvel and DC comics have been slugging it out in the cinemas for some time now. Like all good superhero fights, there have been some surprises along the way, but none could compare to the frightening frisson of Frank Miller's Sin City.

Sin City is co-directed by Miller and Robert Rodriguez of Once Upon a Time in Mexico fame, with some input from the uber-king of mayhem, Quentin Tarantino. One of the people I viewed the no-doubt illegal disc with described it perfectly as a "love song to violence".

Sin City will leave even the most hardened hard-core action buff flustered. It's not the overt violence so much as the poetry with which it is presented. We're spared the more graphic aspects of torture, but the suggestions are, if anything, worse.

What is even more disturbing is that one starts to support the deranged heroes of this epic of good and evil. The only thing that differentiates the heroes from the baddies here is degrees of savagery; the only thing that is forgivable about the horrendous torture played out by Mickey Rourke's brilliantly portrayed monster-hero Marv is just how purely vile his victim, Elijah Wood's Kevin, is proven to be.

Miller's other heroes in this sprawling epic, Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a cop with angina, and Clive Owen (touted as the next Bond) as Dwight, a vigilante with a soft spot for a group of warrior-women prostitutes, are obsessed, bordering on the downright psychotic.

Comic-book fans have always been divided over the merits of DC - and its spin off, Dark Horse Comics - and Marvel. It's similar to the old divide of being a fan of the somewhat darker Rolling Stones and the more pop-oriented Beatles; one hinting at Satanic impulses, the other borderline hippy and happy.

Obviously that is a simplification, but comic-book fans remained divided for many years. Spider-Man was a goofy teenager who blundered into superpowers; Batman was an obsessed vigilante. Spider-Man worried about acne; Batman brooded over his murdered parents.

But during the '80s the very nature of "comics" shifted. Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly created the commix magazine Raw, which introduced a new group of artists including Charles Burns, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes. Spiegelman followed up with his innovative Maus, the story of his grandfather's survival of the Holocaust, a comic that won the Pulitzer Prize. Robert Crumb gained a dubious kind of respectability in fine art circles as a precursor to such contemporary avant garde figures as Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon.

To a point, the superheroes had been kept in cotton wool, avoiding much of the existential angst of the new breed of comics writers. That changed forever when Alan Moore created Watchmen in 1986 for DC. It was an action comic that delved into the psychological and moral issues of being a superhero. Miller burst on to the scene in the same year, decimating the simple notion of do-good superheroes once and for all.

Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns is a dark epic of a character called the Batman. Any pervious incarnation of the Bat immediately faded from sight. Miller committed the ultimate sacrilege: Batman, once ageless and lantern jawed, had grown old. This was his last case. He was more bitter and more twisted than ever and the once-invisible superhero was pondering his own mortality. The battered Bat even ends up slugging it out with a painfully do-good servant of the government, Superman.

Superheroes would never be the same again.

Grant Morrison followed up with Arkham Asylum, where the Bat faces the Joker yet again. It is a dark and harrowing tale, and is almost devoid of physical action; the violence is almost purely psychological. In a similarly strange shift, Neil Gaiman appeared on the scene with his epic series The Sandman. The "hero" of this mammoth tale is Dream. The other major characters are his siblings; Death, Delirium and so forth. Moore pushed the boundaries with his sprawling historical account of Jack the Ripper in From Hell.

Hollywood, for better or worse, finally took note. Taking the essence of Miller's Dark Knight, director Tim Burton got things off to a rollicking start with the gothic, shadowy Batman in 1989. It didn't take long for the rot to set in as the film's box-office success inspired a moribund series of rather pointless sequels. Then, kapow, Marvel stepped into the fray. The Hulk, The X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Elektra, all stepped up to the big screen with varying degrees of creative success. Marvel's The Fantastic Four and Ghost Rider are next off the line.

The most eagerly awaited chapter in this genre is Batman Begins, starring Christian Bale. The new Batman, the first since 1997's rather tragic Batman & Robin, goes back to Miller's Dark Knight as a source. Advance word has it that some of the gothic sense of threat will return to the series.

We've had The Punisher, Hellboy, Blade and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Once the realm of escape and fantasy for disenfranchised school boys, comics are now the mainstream fodder of a giant machine, and all too often lacking the strange passion that originally created them.

Rodriguez learnt a key lesson in watching these films, one suspects. The most effective segments were often those lifted, quite literally, from the comic-book page. Director Ang Lee took the scene of The Hulk swinging an army tank around his head frame-for-frame from the original comic.

This is, perhaps, why Sin City is so powerful. It doesn't pretend to be a movie; it's not an adaptation - it's the real thing. It's clear from the first grainy, black-and-white scenes, that this is a moving comic book.

With the comic series Sin City, Miller once again broke the rules. The super power his major hero, Marv, has seems to be a cement skull that can take any amount of pounding. His hero needs medication. He is, at core, a psychotic thug, admittedly one with a somewhat misguided heart of gold. His quest in both book and film is to revenge the love of his life. This love is born from a one-night encounter with a hooker, Goldie, played in the film by Jaime King.

True to the book, the film starts in a dingy hotel room on a heart-shaped bed. "I'm staring at a goddess. She's telling me she wants me. She sounds like she means it." To which one is tempted to say, "Don't they all." But Marv is so ugly - he makes Hellboy look pretty - that you gotta feel sorry for the lug.

Frame by frame, sentence by sentence, Rodriguez remains true to Miller's cruel epic. In many ways, the cinematic Sin City is a compendium of numerous cultural forms; crime fiction, from the romance of Raymond Chandler to the blood and guts of James Ellroy and Jack O'Connell is clearly apparent. Not surprisingly, there are hints of Rodriguez's and Tarantino's own work with From Dusk Till Dawn and Pulp Fiction respectively. The shadowy approach of noir, most especially Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, is bowed to. The use of black and white, with occasional splashes of vibrant colours achieves a powerful chiaroscuro.

But it all hails directly from the original pages, even the opening scenes of a rutting Marv and Goldie captured in stark profile.

For aficionados of the comics, the film of Sin City embraces three editions of the book series; The Hard Goodbye; The Big Fat Kill; and That Yellow Bastard. An extraordinary amount of the original dialogue and narration makes it intact to the big screen. The film is book-ended rather brilliantly with the Bruce Willis character, although the three heroes involved become essentially one.

It's doubtful one could make a strong argument for the morality of Sin City. There's sex, gore and violence aplenty. One thing it isn't is sexist. Almost all the women are warriors, and they carry their weight, along with knives, swords, guns and whips. There are standout female performances from Rosario Dawson as a valkyrie, warrior, hooker Gail, and Brittany Murphy as a down-at-heel but unbowed cocktail waitress. You don't mess with these ladies, although they don't mind a bit of help from their macho addled allies in the form of Marv, Hartigan and Dwight.

But, like Miller's comics, this film breaks every damned rule it can find. At the end of the day it transcends the cliches with a soaring rush of adrenalin; brilliant camera work, strangely moving acting and staccato, machine-gun dialogue coalesce into a powerful epic of evil versus evil - it's all a matter of degrees. But when evil becomes personified, as in the nauseating Roark Jr/Yellow Bastard, played eerily by Nick Stahl, we know which side to back.

For decades comics were derided by academia as the stuff of kids - something to be discarded along with the acne of adolescence. But then comics grew up. It's still a guy thing - the masters, Gaiman, Burns, Speigelman, Moore and Miller are all, obviously, male. But it is no longer a form for derision. The final shift has been made with the considered approach taken in the filming of Sin City. It ain't pretty, in fact it's downright disturbing. But there can be no arguing that it is a work of art.
Oh, and another thing. Whatever rating they decide on, this is not for the kids.

Sin City is scheduled in cinemas on July 14.
