Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (3/5 Stars)

It kills me how much I love you

In a way the first Sin City movie had it easy. It’s three stories dealt mainly with a dark pessimistic view of power embodied by murderous senators, bishops, and cops who importantly were all men. The heroes, like Marv (played by Mickey Rourke) who had a rule that he never hit women but felt that men were fair game for torture and murder, the all male gender of the bad guys really helped him sort out exactly who to torture and kill: the brutal violent men especially those that hurt women. The morality of the movie being clarified the movie could be as violent and gory all it wanted to both men and women. Well, maybe it was okay. There is an argument I will bring up later that may point out a chink in the armor of that logic (although I think Director Robert Rodriguez deserves the benefit of the doubt.) But at least on its face it was more okay than the titular story of this particular movie, which contains an evil manipulative woman played by Eva Green and the man named Dwight (Josh Brolin) that violently loves her. She’s a sociopath but she isn’t hurting any one physically weaker than she is (so no women, just men are killed) and her main weapon is psychological/sexual not violent (she gets other men to kill for her). So is it okay for Dwight to seek revenge by killing her? After a brief review of the movie we will have a brief discussion about violence against women in movies.

“Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” is an okay movie. It has good moments of great film noir where the digital black and white graphic novel landscape famously innovated by the original movie in 2005 is rendered beautifully and where the language of the script flows in that great Chandler-esque poetry of depression and darkness. But these are only moments and they are infrequent. The best parts have to do with Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance as a suicidal gambler and the first half of the titular story as Dwight is manipulated (and he knows it) by a woman he hopelessly and pathetically loves/hates. This is great film noir stuff but the movie meanders where it should have been guaranteed more success, that is, all the hold over stories from the first movie: a prequel for Marv, a sequel for Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), and a cameo from the militant whores of Oldtown (headed by Rosario Dawson). For one thing after nine years between movies nobody looks quite the same. Bruce Willis looks downright ancient. Mickey Rourke simply does not move around like the powerhouse fighter he is supposed to be. In fact, he looks like he put on at least 50 pounds of fat. The same can be said for Rosario Dawson though her clothes (looking way out of place on her now) desperately try to hide it. Michael Clark Duncan is dead. Dennis Hasbert has replaced him with not nearly the same amount of stage presence. Finally there is Jessica Alba who looks the same but probably shouldn’t. Her character in the first movie was the object of an obsession so she was never needed to be or was anything but good looking. In this movie she becomes the protagonist of her own story on a mission of vengeance that does not make sense for the character or the actress playing the part.

Jessica Alba is not a film noir protagonist. Look at all the men; worn out battered, beaten, pathetic, and violently depressed men. They are and should be ugly blokes. Nancy Callahan, though hard drinking, enraged, and depressed, does not at all give out the same vibe. Even when she does scar up her face she still looks like she is on a fashion catwalk just this time in the sort of fetishitstic getup Catwoman made famous. This does not make sense in a film noir story told from her point of view. Film Noir mental weather shows up in the constitution of the body after awhile. Women I would think are welcome in the genre but they have got to start playing by the rules the guys play by. Lose the fashion makeup, the strict diet and exercise regimen, and grow some bad history into the eyesockets. See Noomi Rapace in the Swedish version of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

Before we discuss what kind of violence against women is okay or not okay, first we have to settle the question of whether any kind of violence should ever be okay. We can expand this of course and directly ask why would we want to watch any kind of PG-13 or R rated or NC-17 movie. The debate goes back to Aristotle who suggested that the education of children should be limited to good things and should omit bad things. The fear being that children would be poorly influenced by the negative things perhaps even going so far as to try to imitate them. That should sound familiar. Censors have been saying that about movies, TV, comic books, and recently video games for a long time. Studies have not shown yet that they make kids more violent. But even if they didn’t, why watch bad things? Why don’t we just watch happy fluffy things all day instead of Film Noir a genre bereft of color, comfort and happiness?

The first reason is pragmatic. The world is in fact a dangerous PG-13 and Rated R and NC-17 place and though it is possible perhaps in some parts of the world in this particular day and age to shield one’s eyes without any consequence, if most of us did it, the opportunistic evil that is present in the world will opportunistically consume us whole. James Madison was wont to write about laws as ‘parchment barriers.’ That is to say that they were of no use unless there was a coercive force behind it. Polite suggestions do not work in the real world and as Machiavelli would remind a wise prince, being capable of anything is the first requisite in keeping power against a foe that is also capable of anything. PG-13 and R rated and NC-17 rated movies can illuminate the dangerous parts of the world in a far more informative and educational way than censored movies can and in this they are useful for the good in fighting off evil.

It should be noted that movies do not have to be documentaries in order to do this. George R.R. Martin, the writer of Game of Thrones, has defended the violence in general and the violence against women in particular in his fantasy saga a Song of Ice and Fire partly on historical grounds. His novels may be set in a completely different world but the context is drawn from an understanding of World History, particularly English Civil Wars. The saga is illuminating in its depiction of how these types of wars work and helpful in understanding parts of the present day world that have yet to modernize or have recently collapsed into a medieval mindset. But this is just the pragmatic reason.

The second reason is that Film Noir is enjoyable to watch. The Greek call it catharsis: the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions. This can in fact be done second hand. I like to give the example of skydiving. Falling to one’s death is not a enjoyable thing but the prospect of it does engage the body into a fight-or-flight mode where the mind enters a higher plane of activity and adrenaline is released creating a sensation of being more alive than you were before. Now imagine if there was a way where you could trick your body into creating that sensation without actually being in harm’s way. Strap a parachute on your back. Buckle yourself into a rollercoaster. Watch a violent movie. What the censors have never fully understood or more likely do not want to believe is that violent movies and video games do not provoke aggression; they are a substitute. As Freud would posit, human beings are a species driven by evolution to have several aggressive instincts. Civilization inhibits these instincts causing discontent among the people. Now it is certainly not this writer’s point of view that civilization should not do this. It needs to if we are to live together in some sort of peace, but the need to live in peace should not obscure the fact that it is natural for individuals to feel frustrated when they can’t get everything they want whenever they want it. In other words, take away our civilizing education and we are all babies, giant violent selfish babies. That is the truth.

But let us not simply make a blanket statement declaring that everything is okay to show in a movie. This, after all, is art criticism and the whole point of that is to make distinctions between good and bad movies. So in that spirit let us deliniate where violence is okay to be enjoyed. I have explored this idea before in my reviews of SuckerPunch and This is the End but to summarize the rule: a movie must ask the viewer to empathize with the victim, Or: if the viewer is to empathize with the aggressor than it is only in circumstances of equalilty. In other words, don’t be an asshole and pick on someone your own size (or bigger). With the latter we can incorporate most action classics from Jackie Chan to Quentin Tarantino into the category of good cinema. With the former we can also make a distinction from good horror films and bad horror films. In a good horror film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre the audience is asked to identify with the girl being chased around by killer maniacs. She goes through hell but she survives and has a laugh at the very end of the movie that encapsulates everything a great horror movie experience can achieve. (Honorable Mention: Sam Raimi for what he did to Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead series). This contrasts with any of the various forms of ‘torture porn’ that has saturated cinema in the last decade. These bad movies do not ask the audience to identify with the victim, but the bad guys as they torture people. That is sadistic and not good (and unnecessary given the various ways aggression can be catharsised.) Honorable mention for terrible person if not a terrible filmmaker: Lars Von Trier.

Let’s go back to Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The question is whether Dwight, the person the movie asks us to empathize with, should retaliate violently against Eva Green. Is she equal or superior to him? What exactly happened? She seduced Dwight to kill her husband. He went ahead and did it and then she turned on him and shot him several times. He survives and seeks revenge. The story ends with Dwight killing Eva Green after she tries to seduce him for the last time. That seems okay, right? I mean she shot first, didn’t she? But it can be more complicated.

Roger Ebert had a good insight once about the way male filmmakers attempt to justify sexual violence. In his review of the 2010 remake of “I Spit on Your Grave,” he had this to say:

“This despicable remake of the despicable 1978 film "I Spit on Your Grave" adds yet another offense: a phony moral equivalency. In the original, a woman foolishly thought to go on holiday by herself at a secluded cabin. She attracted the attention of depraved local men, who raped her, one after the other. Then the film ended with her fatal revenge. In this film, less time is devoted to the revenge, and more time to verbal, psychological and physical violence against her. Thus it works even better as vicarious cruelty against women.

First, let’s dispatch with the fiction that the film is about "getting even." If I rape you, I have committed a crime. If you kill me, you have committed another one. The ideal outcome would be two people unharmed in the first place. The necessity of revenge is embedded in the darker places of our minds, and most hate speech is driven by "wrongs" invented in unbalanced minds. No one who commits a hate crime ever thinks his victim is innocent…..

…..

No, it’s the first half of the movie that’s offensive. It implicitly assigns us the POV of the men as they taunt and terrorize Jennifer in plausible ways — which are different from her killing methods, which are implausible, probably impossible, and offered and received as entertainment….”

That is to say, in order to justify what the filmmakers really want to show (and what their intended target audience wants to see) they will unrealistically exaggerate the woman’s guilt (she is a rich bitch, she stupidly spent a night alone in a secluded cabin, she used sex appeal to manipulate a man) or they unrealistically exaggerate the woman’s ability to enact revenge or both. 

In the case of “Sin City: A Dame to Kill for,” there is some of this phony moral equivalency, but I hesitate to argue that it is there because Robert Rodriguez or Frank Miller actively hate women. I think it is there because they have decided to venture into this dark aggressive instinctual territory and are embarrassed by what they found there. And they use the phony moral equivalency more as a way of evading their questionable behavior than as an excuse for it. Take the small scene in which a businessman played by Ray Liotta is cheating on his wife with a prostitute. He hates the prostitute and decides to kill her even though he doesn’t want to because he knows he can’t stop seeing her because he loves her and that will destroy his marriage and his business via the alimony. It is a powerful scene and the only thing that stops the murder is Dwight who is covertly taking pictures of the whole thing (the wife hired him to get proof of her husband’s infidelity). The moment after Dwight knocks out Ray Liotta, the prostitute takes off her fake blonde wig, speaks in a different tougher accent, and acts like she was never afraid at all even when she had a gun pointed at her head.

Why did the scene end this way? Are we the audience supposed to feel that everything that had come before it was just a lark? But in real life, don’t real men kill their real girlfriends all the time and in the same crazy, vicious, jealous and desperate way that this man just tried to kill this woman in this story? And is it not the whole point of this movie called, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” to explore that dark territory in men’s minds? And so is it not a cop out to show all the behavior leading up to the moment of truth and then afterwards argue that this type of male behavior does not affect women, to go so far as to posit that the woman was in control the entire time. To victimize women and revel in the harm created is misogynistic. We all know that. I argue to victimize women and then feel ashamed and pretend that they were not victimized may not be exactly misogynistic, but it is most definitely cowardly. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller came up to the bell of sexual violence without any encouragement or provocation. They chose to do it. They should ring the bell. And then they should take a step back and look at what they have wrought with clear eyes and ask the audience to do the same. That’s what Shakespeare would have done. That is the difference between the Swedish version of “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and the inferior American remake and of course “Sin City: A Dame to Kill for” too.