Mystery writer Andrew Klavan takes Miller and Rodriguez’s “Sin City to task in this rather extensive dissection of the film. I think Klavan’s ultimately making something out of nothing – as much as I enjoy the movie and the graphic novels, Sin City really is little more than easily digestible pop entertainment. Still, the article makes for some interesting reading, and Klavan’s arguments regarding the violence in the film come off far less annoyingly pretentious than some that I read when the film first came out.
The power of these movies even today derives from watching men like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe try�and men like Walter Neff and Jeff Markham fail�to formulate a code of right action and self-denial that will help them navigate a morally dangerous terrain. As often as not, the thrill of the story’s sex and the suddenness of its violence serve as a reminder of how fragile the order of society is, and how weak�how prone to evil�is the human will that maintains it. Even in simplistic tales of avengers like the Mike Hammer stories, the heart was there, the use and abuse of sex bore some resemblance to what we do to one another in life, and the violence referred to our real experience of disorder and our need for justice.
Sin City, on the other hand, is violent because violence looks cool and arouses the filmmakers’ adolescent sensibilities. As for sex, there are some dynamite naked ladies in the picture, but their nakedness is the only affecting thing about them, their outlines their only distinguishing features. These aren’t dames you’d sell your soul for. They’re not characters at all. They’re just body shapes to be mutilated and killed in order to set the well-filmed spectacle of vengeful slaughter in motion.
I can’t emphasize this enough: I like sex and violence in stories. But meaning has a moral weight. Here, as with the degraded photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and the hateful lyrics of Eminem, we’re being asked to applaud a show of undeniable artistic talent without passing judgment on the vision it conveys. It’s kind of like asking us to appreciate the excellent marksmanship of the boys at Columbine High.
