Sin City

[oyceter]

I am extremely unsure as to what I think of the movie. It was absolutely gorgeous. It was also really bloody and I have a very bad stomach for violence and the only reason I watched it instead of squinching my eyes shut for all of it (I only squinched for about half) was because it was so beautifully shot. So my brain was very confused, because every two seconds it was "Ooooo pretty! EW! Pretty! Oh ewww! Ooooo, more pre--- ewwwww!" Also, the gender politics are incredibly messed up, which is not particularly a surprise to me, given that it is Frank Miller and given that it is Frank Miller film noir, but it was still very difficult to watch.

Art-wise, I haven't read the comic, but I bet even after I do, I will think this is the most gorgeous and fitting comic-book adaptation ever. It is beautiful. The colors, the cinematography, the editing and the shades, gah, the shades... I loved how everything was framed, I loved the splashes of red and yellow and etc., I loved how every so often Rodriguez would hold a shot and let it become more and more starkly black and white. And the way the separate stories fit together, everything.

On the other hand, the squick and the gross factor. I mean, ewwwww. Ewwwwwwwww. The only reason I could even watch it, bloody and gross though it was, was because in some places it was so exaggerated and so comic-book-esque and so stylized that my stomach made it through. Well, barely... it's still feeling rather queasy. And so much gratuitous violence, and so much anarchy. I dislike the rule-by-violence world of the movie (I suspect londonkds would as well?), particularly the justification everyone makes about killing everyone in their way just to avenge the death of a beautiful innocent hooker with a heart of gold/prevent the death of a beautiful innocent dancer with a heart of gold/save the women. Did I mention the screwed up gender politics?

I haven't read much Chandler or watched much noir at all, but I'm guessing that this sort of madonna/whore dichotomy is fairly endemic to the genre. Frankly, I'm not actually interested in watching that much more noir because the grittiness of the world really disturbs me after a while. The authorities are all corrupt, violence or feminine wiles are the only means to get ahead, and the only thing a sort-of-good man can do is protect the women and shoot or torture anyone who gets in the way. This worldview is very alien to me. Not too many of the women in Sin City turn out to be evil and conniving, but they're still beauties on pedestals, even if the majority of them are prostitutes.

I did get very excited about one storyline with armed prostitutes -- pretty girls with guns! Yay! But then it rapidly went the way of the other storylines. I'm not sure if this is criticism of the movie, of the book it's based on, or on the genre in general, but it continues to irk me. All the viewpoint characters are your typical weathered, wiseass guys, and there isn't ever a woman's POV. They're all idealized and airbrushed and made into symbols. The same happens with the men, too, but in the direction of violence and kickassedness. I spent a good deal of the movie wondering what a feminist film noir would look like or read like. Someone needs to write that for me... sigh.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I wrote a feminist film noir-- well, play noir once. It was heavily influenced by Chinatown and was about a woman (not a professional detective--a political campaign worker) who takes a complaint by an apparently crazy woman ranting about poisoned water seriously and starts an investigation which ends up implicating the politician she's working for. Intertwined with that was a plotline about a female serial killer who kidnapped babies and (she was nuts) basically loved them to death. The protagonist was a grown-up crack baby who'd never been adopted, and was seriously depressed.

Basically, I used a lot of film noir tropes about corrupt politicians in a corrupt world, literal pollution and moral pollution, and one slightly grimy knight in armor cleaning up a corner of the city, but made the detective a woman, the images of femininity centered around "woman as good mother/bad mother" and "woman as dependent child/independent adult" rather than "woman as Madonna/whore," and the restoration of order be both political and the integration of the protagonist's dark and light sides. (Not all film noir restores order-- Chinatown doesn't-- but a lot of them do.) Plus examining media portrayals of women and stereotypes of women as opposed to the women we actually see onstage.

I wrote this as my grad thesis, and I could do it better now, but I will say that it played as more integrated than a synopsis makes it sound.

[oyceter]

Oh cool! Um... do you think I could read it by any chance?

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Um... If you really want to. I think I only have hard copies, if I even have those-- I lost a lot of old work when my laptop got stolen along with the case that had many of my discs in it, and a bunch of my back-up discs turned out to be corrupted-- but I'll take a look when I get back.

I should warn you that, though as I said it's more coherent than it sounds, it's very much early work. As in almost exactly ten years earlier.

[oyceter]

Oh no worries... I don't want it to be a bother for you, though of course I would enjoy seeing anything you wrote.