Sin City or Gross Exploitationville?

Sin City is the latest comic book adaptation to hit the silver screen. The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, which is great for the comics industry. But the unquestioning acceptance of the content of the story has left me feeling a bit uncomfortable.

Sin City started its life as a comic book written and drawn by Frank Miller way back in 1992. Miller is an undisputed master of the form, and the Sin City stories are among the most visually stunning comics of the decade. They are illustrated in the starkest black and white, sans-gray scale, and their layout and composition are breathtaking.

Sin City, both as a comic and a film, is also remarkably violent and anachronistically sexist.

There is something troubling about the ease with which Sin City’s content has been accepted. There is a context in which a work like Sin City can be appreciated, but in the time since the release of the film, it seems that context has not been considered. And that creeps me out a bit.

Most reviews of the film at least mention that Sin City is largely homage to film noir and 1950s pulp fiction. Its dialogue often seems pulled verbatim from a Mickey Spillane novel, as are its social relations. The men are, without exception, hard-boiled, violent thugs who range from “noble (but flawed)” to “sadistically evil.” The women, in turn, are all femmes fatales and steely-eyed dames with the occasional damsel in distress thrown in for good measure. This is all in agreement with the source material, and the well-constructed homage would seem to give Sin City sufficient artistic license for us to enjoy what we might otherwise condemn.

I have yet to read a review of the film, or even have a conversation with anyone who saw it, that sufficiently explains Sin City’s violence.

In the wake of films like Kill Bill, it has become accepted that a violent story—even an outrageously violent story—can have artistic merit. We should not confuse this with simply accepting stories that are outrageously violent without any sort of critical examination, which seems to be the problem with Sin City.

In the comic world, crime fiction, the genre into which Sin City most closely fits, is something like the bastard child of mainstream superhero stories and the more artsy indie work. It melds the over-the-top violence and dark fantasy of the former with the artistic credibility and realism—or at least “realism”—of the latter. In conforming his homage to ’50s pulp to the conventions of the comic book, Frank Miller saw fit to make the story really, really violent.

1992 was a strange time for the comic world. The transition from “comics are just for kids” to “comics are an artistic medium in their own right” was very much still in progress. There were active battles over censorship being fought all over the place. Comic book stores were being shut down for selling indecent materials, and the industry was considering further self-censorship as a stopgap. All mainstream publications still adhered to the dreaded “Comic Book Code” forged in the ’50s to restrict unwholesome content. The letter columns from the early Sin City comics read like ACLU manifestos, as Miller ranted against censorship like his livelihood depended on it—which it did.

The extreme violence of Sin City is a direct challenge to the content restrictions looming over 1990s comic books.

Anyone reading or watching Sin City without at least some understanding of this context should be disturbed. Perhaps we should be disturbed anyway: much of the entertainment from a dark fantastic story lies in allowing us to explore those things that horrify us, all the while with the promise that when it ends, we can return to the everyday world. But, lacking context, I cannot believe that a story like this could be entertaining. The mix of violence and sexism should be setting off alarm bells all over the place, and it hasn’t.

In context, as a visually stunning, well-constructed homage that is a reaction to abiding social pressures as well as a visceral thrill, Sin City is a work of art. Out of it, it’s a particularly brutal piece of pornography.