“The air cools. The sounds change. The suits and brief-cases scurry to their fortresses and bolt their doors and balance their checkbooks and ignore the screams and try not to think about who really owns Sin City.”
—Sin
City Volume I: The Hard Goodbye
Sin
City, its creator has said, is not a place but a state of mind (Booker 161). Eager
to do comic books about crime, “about tough guys in mean cities,” in 1991 artist
Frank Miller created the first story of the Sin
City series, initially released in thirteen parts in Dark Horse Presents (Harvey 259). The story was retitled The Hard Goodbye, released as a graphic novel and followed by five more “yarns,”
sordid tales of urban violence set in a climate of complete moral corruption. Influenced
by Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Jim Thompson and “long nights of living alone
in Manhattan and discovering the black-and-white movies,” Miller’s
illustrations drew their inspiration from outside the traditional confines of
the comic book subculture (MacDonald 42, Gabillet 104). Sin City featured gritty
black-and-white stylized graphics, over-the-top, hard-case crime retro
dialogue, hardcore ultraviolence; it became an exercise in the celebration of
film noir culture, one that is particularly extreme, violent and brutal, even
by the genre’s standards. Steeped in darkness both physical and psychological,
the style, characters, setting, themes, and tone of the graphic novel series,
particularly the first four volumes (The
Hard Goodbye, A Dame to Kill For,
The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard) are undeniably
indebted to film noir. At the same time,
Sin City self-consciously draws
attention to the conventions of noir either by reducing or amplifying them,
effectively critiquing its own narrative forms while remaining entirely within
the rules of the genre.
The
noir is a closed world of the imagination from which most sense of “reality,”
of the everyday flow of life has been rigorously excluded, “a sealed-off
environment of airless rooms, and of threatening, lonely streets” (Hirsch 6).
Film noir appeared at a historical moment of crisis, brought about by post-WWII
feelings of disillusionment, the influence of German expressionism and the
hardboiled writing tradition of the twenties and thirties. The dominant world
view expressed in noir is one of paranoia, claustrophobia, hopelessness, doom,
a sense of predetermination, and a lack of clear moral or personal identity (in
all characters but the protagonist). “Man has been inexplicably uprooted from
those values, beliefs and endeavors that offer him meaning and stability, and
in the almost exclusively urban landscape… he is struggling for a foothold in a
maze of right and wrong. He has no reference points, no moral base…
Nothing—especially woman—is stable, nothing is dependable” (Place 41). Everything
is relative, obscured or distorted, and values, like identities, are constantly
shifting and redefining themselves.
The
genre is dominated by images and ideas of entrapment or investigation. Innocent
men are framed or imprisoned for crimes they did not commit or caught up
unwittingly in conspiracies and plots. Investigators struggle to make sense of
events made up of coincidences, hidden interrelations, unclear and confused
motives, to uncover the order embedded deep within chaos. The protagonists of film
noir are men whose experience in life has left them sanguine and often bitter;
in the immediate postwar period, these characters become lone romantic heroes
with an unwavering moral compass, who sometimes operate outside society but are
always above it.
“Film
noir, like the femme fatale, is an elusive phenomenon: a projection of desire,
always just out of reach” (Bould 13). The genre was defined not by plot and
setting as much as style and more subtle qualities of motif, tone and mood. Its
distinctive visual style included low-key lighting, which often produced
unconventional patterns of light and dark; a preference for vertical and oblique
as opposed to horizontal lines; unbalanced, disharmonious or claustrophobic
compositions that introduced tension into the mise-en-scene; increased depth of
field, in which shots become more ambiguous, and, with wide angle lenses,
distorted figures in the foreground; camera position, angle, and the placement
of actors within the frame which subjectivized the third-person camera,
allowing it to express relationships of power, struggle and conflict (Bould
13-24). This style was coupled with generally complex chronologies, subjective
voice over narrations and an iconography of rain-drenched nocturnal streets,
trains, elevators, bars, interrogation rooms and heels clicking on pavement.
Miller’s
fictional Basin City, with its motley collection of lowlifes, assassins and
crooked politicians, fits perfectly into the noir tradition of dark mean
streets. The title’s crime-infested metropolis allowed Miller to explore in stark
black-and-white drawings the brutality and ruthlessness of the denizens of the
underworld (Harvey 259). “They’re very dark,” Miller (under)stated about the
stories, “and the consequences are bad and they’re usually futile… You can’t
have virtue without sin and what I’m interested in is having my characters’
virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment” (MacDonald
42). Like film noir, Sin City is
artificial and divorced from reality; it creates a hyperbolic, familiar milieu
that completely separates its hermetically sealed microcosm and its subjects
from the outside world; it also becomes an extreme reinterpretation of the noir
genre. The artist takes the sinful
environment of noir and raises the darkness and corruption to the nth power. “There is no ‘caped crusader’ here, no colorful costume
criminals,… no redemption. Basin City is Ragnarok, Sodom and Gomorrah, and
every violent, corrupt, urban nightmare rolled into one festering cesspool of
vice, vigilantism, and death” (Blasingame 446).
The titular city enacts Miller’s
own professed desire to make Sin City a place in the mind, with no real-world
location or temporality (Booker 163). The stylistic innovations of the
setting’s depiction not only fit within the boundaries of noir, but, in fact,
highlight genre as a necessary component of interpretation (Pizzino 119). While
characters are generally drawn with enough detail or at least sufficiently
outlined to create instant recognition, the rendering of setting tends towards
abstraction, sometimes approaching what Scout McCloud calls the “picture
plane,” a realm of signs that do not clearly refer to any external reality
(49-57). The benighted necropolis of the novels at times seems barely there, no
matter that it is literalized by office towers, docks backgrounded by an
industrial plant across a river, Kadie’s country-and-western saloon/strip joint.
Much
of the action unfolds in enclosures that seem to have been abstracted from the
novels’ reality–the heart-shaped bed that begins the series, floating against a
pitch-black background (The Hard Goodbye
13), a barred cell that appears to hang in the air (That Yellow Bastard 88-91), a tiled dungeon festooned with severed
heads (The Hard Goodbye 97-102), the
Roarks’ barn, represented merely by a set of white bars (That Yellow Bastard
204-207), and the multitude of images that place characters against no
background at all. “As Miller has said, ‘film noir is about inner darkness not
spooky-looking stories, ’” and by outwardly representing this inner darkness
through the physical darkness of the images themselves, Miller uses these claustrophobic
chambers and the pure, baseless nothingness of some backgrounds to expressionistically
evoke “the controlling desires and fears of each of the heroes” (Fuller). The artist, however, goes beyond the emphasis
on mood rather than setting prevalent in most noirs to the point in which an
understanding of noir is central to grasp the abstracted, stylized images of
physical background and the relationships between them (Pizzino 119).
Miller
displaces the interconnected tales of Sin
City in time as well as space. The realism identified in hard boiled
fiction and film noir is disconnected from its historical context almost to the
point of comic caricature (Finn). By exploiting the characteristics of the
graphic novel medium itself—drawing’s ability to caricature and critique—Miller
exaggerates the spatially and temporally indefinite environment of his comic
book series in order to add to the feeling of confusion and uncertainty that
governs the noir genre. Sin City is a place in which dramatic events occur
incessantly, but where nothing ever really changes, a land without history,
without a past or future, unbound by time and space. The artist offers readers
a collection of images from various decades. Perhaps most striking are the
cars, which can be typically used as temporal markers to roughly identify the
historical setting of the action. In Sin
City though, the cars could come from any decade from the 1940s to the
early twenty-first century, as could the costumes or the skyline of the city.
The
implication is clear: the temporal setting doesn’t matter because all times are
the same in Sin City—a dangerous and politically retrograde notion that
completely disarms any hope that action (by groups or individuals) can lead to
change (Booker 170). The scrambled, virtually randomized chronology of the
graphic novels further adds to the displacement and confusion. Each of the
novels features a similarly nonlinear plot, and they are not published in
chronological order. “A work of striking images, not compelling story lines,” Sin City provides “an excellent example
of the postmodern lack of regard for narrative sequence” (Booker 163). The
narrative pieces never quite fit—slight inconsistencies and bits of missing
information make it impossible to rearrange the events of the series in exact
chronological sequence. This narrative structure mirrors the non-linear plots
(filled with holes, flashbacks, multiple perspectives and revelations) of noir,
at the same time exaggerating the jumbling of narrative sequence found in films
of the genre. Even more than the medium of cinema, graphic novels lend
themselves to defying conventional narrative; because they exist in space, they
are less likely to be confined to a linear narrative.
It
is in this environment that the (anti)heroes of Sin City must evolve. Hartigan, Dwight and Marv epitomize the
archetype of the tight-lipped, morally inflexible, uncompromising individual,
“who defies the law and common-sense self-interest to carve his own
reality into existence” (Darius). These three protagonists are modeled on the
romantic postwar noir hero, but, although their motivations are just as noble,
their methods would not be at home in a classic noir. A chivalric code, handed
down from Chandler, drives the protagonists, whose romantic dedication to
protecting women at all costs rationalizes torturing, murdering and
dismembering of all who do women harm. “Each story has a hero,” Miller said. “There
might be flaws. They might be disturbed, but if you look at it ultimately their
motives are pure…. Dwight wants to keep the girls from getting killed. Hartigan
does everything for Little Nancy and throws his whole life away for her. Marv
goes on a quest that ends up destroying a lot of evil people. So I consider
these people heroes. If you go by Chandler’s definition in The Simple Art of Murder, they’re what I’d like to call ‘knights in
dirty armor’” (MacDonald 42). In keeping with Chandler’s Arthurian references
in his novels, in Sin City Dwight is
invoked as Lancelot and Hartigan as Galahad (A Dame to Kill For 39, That
Yellow Bastard 197).
Significantly,
the characters are, like their cinematic counterparts, loners and outsiders.
It’s telling that our first glimpse of Dwight in A Dame to Kill For has him peering through the skylight of a hotel room,
taking photos of a scene of adultery, prostitution and soon-to-be attempted
murder. The character is placed physically as well as morally outside of and
above this world (3-5). Dwight, like the best noir heroes, has a past—one that
is at first murky, which he wants to forget. “I put the game on and pray it
will chase away the memories,” he says in the beginning of A Dame to Kill For, “the damn Old Town memories, of drunken
mornings and sweaty sex and stupid, bloody drawls” (15). Sometime before these
memories, he had also won a Pulitzer writing for the Times, but now, when he sorts through the “broken pieces of [the
past], … like always, they come together to form the same, sorry picture” (20).
Like
Dwight, The Hard Goodbye’s hulking,
brutish protagonist is similarly an outsider and a loner, albeit for different
reasons. Marv is a lowly outcast from society with superhuman strength and
toughness, but with limited intelligence and only the most tenuous of grips on
reality. The character is so ugly and misshapen (and ill-behaved) that normal
people tend to flee at his approach, so unattractive that even prostitutes shun
his company. Marv is not really as bad as he seems, we are told; he was just
born in the wrong century: “There’s nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at
all—except he was born at the wrong time in history. He’d have been okay if
he’d been born a couple of thousand years ago. He’d be right at home on some
ancient battlefield, swinging an axe into somebody’s face. Or in a Roman arena,
taking a sword to other gladiators like him.” As it is, “the world will [get
him killed], one way or another. It has to kill him. It’s got no place for him”
(A Dame to Kill For 93-94). Miller
described his first idea of the character as “Conan the Barbarian in a trench
coat…. I wanted to do someone who was completely miscast in the universe, a
raging id in a world of superegos” (O’Donnell 114). Protagonists of noir often
represent an older order of masculinity, but never quite that old.
Miller’s
modern barbarian, like all noir heroes, has a soft spot for the ladies. His
sense of chivalry, however, spills well over into the condescending. “It really
gets my goat when guys rough up dames,” he says (The Hard Goodbye 181), and, “It just gets my goat when guys talk
about dames that way” (A Dame to Kill For
89). Fitting for any noir hero, Marv gets into trouble because of a woman,
finding himself framed for a murder he didn’t commit, one that he thinks is his
duty to solve and avenge. Marv, in fact,
dedicates the rest of his life to finding Goldie’s killer, even after he learns
that she had been a prostitute, and even after it becomes clear that she had
come to him in the hope that he could protect her from the danger that was
following her. After all, he explains, “she was nice to me,” an event so rare
in his life—especially from someone so beautiful—that his one night with her
becomes his central experience. Marv’s moral code dictates that he repay
Goldie’s kindness by finding and killing her murderer. The Hard Goodbye’s plot, like those of the other novels in the
series—and of the best noir films—relies on the strength of the protagonist’s
moral code and his determined resolution to follow it at all costs.
Although
Marv would never admit it—and might not even know it—there is good in Sin City
just as there is evil; it’s just hidden beneath the tough exterior of men like
him. “Mostly what keeps me involved in crime stories, the reason I go back to
them,” Miller said, is that under the surface, these are all morality tales…. There’s
a fierce clarity in which each person makes his or her moral decisions. It’s
also the motif of crime fiction that such characters are disguised. They look
like dirty knights; they don’t let on that most of them are compulsive
do-gooders.”
Of
course, in keeping with the noir tradition, none of the protagonists of Sin City would ever categorize
themselves as heroes. “It’s not that I’m some kind of hero that makes me stay,”
Marv insists. “Heroes don’t go weak in the knees and feel like throwing up and
curling up into a little ball and crying like a baby…. No, I’m no hero. Not by
a long shot. I just know that Goldie won’t let me off so easy. No matter where
I go I’ll smell her angel smell. I’ll see that mouth and those eyes and that
perfect, perfect body. I’ll hear her and taste her and I’ll know that it was
me, only me, who could have set things right” (The Hard Goodbye 131-32). But it is this sense of moral obligation to right a wrong
because he is the only one who can that turns Marv into a hero. Meanwhile,
Goldie’s murderer, the creepy, cannibalistic, bespectacled Kevin is the ward
and chief henchman of the aging Cardinal Roark, top man in the Catholic church,
a member of Sin City’s most powerful, and most corrupt, family. Roark, a man
actually hailed as a hero by Sin City’s society, called “Saint Patrick,” is a
man thoroughly saturated with unadulterated evil, a political kingmaker who has
the influence to place his friends in family in positions of power leading all
the way up to the U.S. Senate.
The
Roark family is also prominent in That
Yellow Bastard, the third graphic novel in Miller’s series. “Power doesn’t come from a badge or a gun,” Sen. Roark tells the hero of that story. “Power comes outta lying and lying big and getting the whole damn world
to play along with you. Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain’t true, you
got ’em trapped. You’re the boss. You can turn reality on its head and they’ll cheer you on”
(emphasis in original, 65). Both Hartigan and Marv operate in direct opposition
to the Roark family, the principle controlling power behind the political,
religious, law enforcement and legal systems. Because the noir heroes of Sin City sacrifice their social status,
choosing to operate outside of, or, indeed, in moral opposition to the
definitive power of the law, both are framed for crimes they did not commit and
lose their lives protecting or avenging those they love.
Miller
was initially attracted to the noir mode for its potential to explore moral
corruption and the violence he thinks is necessary to combat it. The themes of
societal corruption generally explored in noir are hyperbolized in Sin City to the point in which
illegality is universally big business (Finn): “In this town just about
anything you can name that’s worth doing is against the law. It works out
better for everybody this way. Cops and politicians make their fortunes by
looking the other way while crooks like Kadie get away with charging ten bucks
a drink” (The hard Goodbye 51). The
law is bribed into ineffectuality, and, although institutions like the police,
the judicial system and the church no longer operate as moral arbiters, they
retain the power allotted to them for such purposes, which is wielded for
individual gain (Finn). The police, church and government are symbolized by
degenerates, but the satire of Sin City is not really aimed any
particular group or institution. It is aimed at power and authority in general,
the central organizing premise of its universe being that almost anyone in
authority is bound to be corrupt, decadent, and vicious, while the more
upstanding characters in the world of Sin City tend to be losers and
outcasts, existing in only the lowliest margins of official society (Booker
165). 
Hartigan
is seemingly the only cop in the city who thinks his duty is to protect and
serve, the only man who will stand up to Senator Roark and Junior, who
tortures, rapes and murders children. Throughout That Yellow Bastard he displays an ethical single-mindedness,
ignoring any strictures of law or custom that interfere with his mission to
protect Nancy, his moral imperative to protect the innocent. Hartigan’s
motives, however, are much simpler than the ethical registers that animate the
actions of most heroes of the genre. Noir protagonists are often confronted
with complicated, difficult questions of ethics that place them at the
intersection of all kinds of personal, social, and institutional obligations.
Hartigan, like Marv and Dwight before him, deals with no such conflict of
interest (Pizzino 117). The hero focuses solely on Nancy Callahan, “little
Nancy Callahan,” “skinny Nancy Callahan,” often repeating her name in his
internal monologue to remind himself of what he must do next. Unlike classic
noir heroes who undergo complicated struggles, often ongoing ethical processes
of negotiation, Hartigan simplifies his course to a single, if suicidal,
transaction: “An old man dies, a young woman lives. Fair trade” (219).
This
simplicity of motivation works to create increasing intensity. In order to
defend Nancy, Hartigan must commit more and more brutal acts of violence and
suffer more and more extreme tortures. Nancy herself becomes an obstacle in his
course, when she expresses her love and physical desire for Hartigan, despite
an age gap of several decades. Although this kind of narrative and thematic
entanglement—the conflict between Hartigan’s uncomfortable attraction to Nancy
and his need to protect her at all costs—has a recognizable noir lineage,
Miller radically simplifies it. This conflict and other narrative elements are
bolder and their proportions are magnified, a sign of the work’s
self-reflexivity and self-conscious use of its own generic norms (Pizzino 117).
True
to the series’ noir influences, however, Miller does not reductively categorize
this opposition of morality (represented by the characters) to authority
(represented by the formal public systems and institutions) as a simple good
versus evil conflict. While simplifying the moral setting of the stories,
Miller complicates the morality of his own characters by exploring their inner darkness
(Finn). Even “clean liver,” “boy scout” Dwight has a dark side that he’s afraid
to let loose, the “monster” in his gut that eventually “uncurls itself and
erupts from [his] throat in an endless, bloody roar” (A Dame to Kill For 82). The character tries to control himself, to
be a part of society, but cannot because of society’s evils as well as his own
faults: “I thought there was a better world out there. I thought I could be a
part of it. I was wrong both times” (147). Nor is every death the hero cause
righteous. The massive carnage Dwight partakes in at the end of The Big Fat Kill is motivated by no
sense of duty, justice, or nobility: “No escape. No surrender. No mercy. We
gotta kill every last rat-bastard one of them. Every last one. Not for revenge.
Not because they deserve it. Not because it’ll make the world a better place.
There’s nothing righteous or noble about it. We gotta kill them because we need
them dead” (165-66).
Miller seems to especially relish
his heroes’ musings as they administer final justice to a nemesis; “their words
are chewed and savored and then spat out with vengeful, gustatory release” (Blasingame
447).
The massacre in The Big Fat Kill is
marked by an unsettling gratification: “The Valkyrie at my side is shouting and
laughing with the pure hateful bloodthirsty joy of the slaughter and so am I” (169).
Film noir was driven by a logic of sexual desire which, repressed (and
suppressed by the Production Code Administration), sometimes turned the crime
itself into the object of the protagonist’s erotic fascination (Bould 15-16).
If the example of The Big Fat Kill’s
final bloodbath is not enough of an argument for Miller’s eroticized treatment
of violence, consider Marv’s thoughts on killing.
The
character says it is the only thing he has ever been good at, so he might as
well enjoy it. His “kind of kill” is not a quick and quiet means to an end; it
is the end, and it’s “loud and nasty... I’ll stare the bastard in the face and
laugh as he screams to God and I’ll laugh harder when he whimpers like a baby”
(The Hard Goodbye 28). The repetition
and magnification of this description when he actually kills Roark, and the
pure pleasure Marv takes in the man’s suffering is even more disturbing: “It’s
not quick and quiet like it was with [Goldie]. No, it’s loud and nasty. My kind
of kill. I stare the bastard in the face and I laugh as he screams to God for
mercy and I laugh harder when he squeals like a stuck pig and when he whimpers
like a baby I’m laughing so hard I cry. He spurts and gurgles and life is good”
(192). This description of the brutal torture and killing at the end of the
novel almost exactly mirrors Marv’s own description of an orgasm in the
beginning of The Hard Goodbye, which
he directly compares to fighting: “You get in a fight, you fight in a war, and
you figure all the worst of it will be worth it for the one big moment…—but this… One last time I wonder why… then
she falls against me dripping with that angel sweat of hers…” (13). The
character seems to take the same kind of pleasure in both acts, a physical,
almost feral intensity that equates sex with violence.
The
female characters of Sin City are
hardly less venomous, volatile or violent than their male counterparts, and, in
the case of Ava, they even surpass the heroes in their viciousness. In the
development and roles of the beautiful, dangerous women that populate his
fictional city, Miller once again draws on the traditions of film noir. In
classic detective noirs like The Maltese
Falcon or The Big Sleep, as in
Miller’s The Hard Goodbye and A Dame to Kill For, the women become
central to the hero’s investigation, its object and sometimes the central
problem in unraveling the truth. Female characters in classic noir’s
detective/thriller narrative fit into one of two categories. The first (and
perhaps most important) category encompasses the femmes fatales, spider-women
who work on the fringes of the underworld: bar-flies, nightclub singers,
mistresses, gold-diggers, murderesses, who sometimes help the hero, but mostly
bring about harm and destruction. The second category is made up of all the
good women the (anti) heroine is contrasted with, those who have no place in
this world: wives, long-suffering girlfriends, would-be-fiancées, or young
girls who are vulnerable and in need of protection (Gledhill14).
In
a reversal of noir’s conventions, the women in need of protection in Sin City
(Nancy and Goldie) actually work on the fringes of the underworld, a place they
would be completely unsuited for in classic film noir. Nancy is a stripper who
dances in Kadie’s, a lowlife saloon frequented by Marv
and other rough types, but who has nevertheless managed to maintain her
stereotypical innocence and purity through it all. Goldie is a prostitute, who,
along with her twin sister Wendy, ran Old Town. Nancy is the best example of an
innocent woman in an non-innocent environment, but other “good” women in the
series are similarly placed in settings that contradict their roles in typical
noir tradition. Shellie, a waitress in Kadie’s, and Gail, a warrior prostitute
from Old Town, both help the heroes, which places them in the second category
of “good” noir women despite their occupations. “Sin City is the kind of place
where all the women are whores and all the whores are beautiful, capable of
handling a gun and taking a punch” (Bould 110). Miller reduces sexuality to
displays of elaborately costumed gun-toting prostitutes, an armed and mostly
naked parole officer and a stripper packing a six-shooter. In this universe,
even the good girls look like bad girls.
The one female character that
completely conforms to film noir norms—although she becomes an exaggeration of
them—is Ava, the typical femme fatale. Defined by her desirable but dangerous
sexuality, the femme fatale of film noir is always a part of the action, never
a part of the décor. The steely, beautiful spider woman, her voice honed to a
sexy, low cutting edge, is independent, ambitious, in search of wealth and
freedom and oftentimes confined to a marriage or relationship form which she
wants to break free, with violent results. Often trailing wisps of cigarette
smoke behind her, the cue of a dark and immoral sensuality, she emerges from
deep shadows, her face turned a harsh white by the high-contrast lighting. The
femme fatale is always filmed in ways that will emphasize her sexuality, often
being introduced as a pair of long, elegant legs (as in Double Indemnity and The
Postman Always Rings Twice) or some other decontextualized anatomical part.
In
accordance, Ava, the dame to kill for, first appears as a set of luscious
lips—which we know would be red if the comic were not in black and white (26).
When she is presented in her entirety, it is as a shadow cast on the floor of
Kadie’s, larger and lusher than life (30). Then she appears in silhouette in a
lighted doorway, getting increasingly closer, from a long to medium shot to
closeup in separate panels, until we see her clearly, first from behind and
then in profile until we finally see her face (31-34). Like her motives and
true identity, Ava’s body and face remain hidden as long as possible. The story
she tells our hero is made up of blatant, outrageous lies, and he instantly
falls for it. A master manipulator, she feigns innocence and vulnerability with
Dwight as she will with the police after she gets him to kill her husband. And
when innocence isn’t enough, Ava uses her sexuality, going to Dwight’s
apartment and basically throwing herself at him. From the moment Dwight walks
into the room, he’s gone, covered from head to toe in the black and white bars
formed by light streaking in through the Venetian blinds. Looking like Walter
Neff did when he stepped into that living room in Double Indemnity, Dwight is trapped. His imprisonment is complete
when he has sex with Ava: “I’m dragged to the ground by a jungle cat. She
devours me and I thank her for it… I say all the things I swore I’d never say
again. She owns me. Body and soul” (63-65).
Even
while limiting himself to the confines of noir character conventions, Miller
intensifies them, turning Ava not into a driven, dangerous woman, but into pure
evil. The character is “a witch, a predator,” Dwight will come to realize.
“Maybe I just got what I deserved, he says, “but what about the others [she has manipulated and
destroyed]? Good men, driven mad…”
(emphasis in original, 174.) Completely
pathological, she has orchestrated the murder of her husband so she can gain money and power and brags
about her twisted victory even as she’s shooting Dwight again and again: “‘I’m in charge’—God, I’ve waited years to say that. Years. Night after night, flat on my back, making all the
right noises while Damien did what you men do. I waited. I planned. For
the moment I could have it all…. Sorry to be such a chatterbox. I can’t help
myself. This is such a rare opportunity. I almost never get the chance to stop
acting—to stop lying. To let somebody
see the real me… There’s a word for what I am, but nobody uses it anymore.
Nobody wants to see the simple truth. If they did, they’d kill people like me
as soon as we revealed ourselves. But they don’t. They close their eyes and
blather about psychology and say nobody is truly evil. That’s why I’ve won.
That’s why I always win” (emphasis in
original, 113-14). Ava’s evilness is intensified to the point of humor; by this
exaggeration of his femme fatale, Miller points out the ridiculousness of the
character type, again relying on comic caricature to comment on the conventions
of the genre.
Miller
not only intensifies elements of setting, plot, and character, but undoubtedly,
and perhaps even more strikingly, comments on the style of film noir as well in
Sin City. The graphic novels are
drawn in unmitigated black and white, “often with the simplicity of woodcuts”
(Bould 112). The lighting, a
hypertrophied chiaroscuro, forms stark and affecting images entirely devoid of
shades of grey. The night is always darkest when
Miller inks it. All the pictures in the graphic novels are drenched in solid
black, the image defined by silhouette and by highlighting features and
portions of figures as if the subjects were standing in rooms completely dark
except for a single light bulb, dangling naked (no doubt) from the ceiling. The
lightning effects are wholly unrealistic but stunning in creating the
uncompromisingly sordid world of Sin City. “At a time dominated by the Image
Comics style, in which more lines seemed better, Miller was going in the other
direction, paring himself and the comics form down to its essential elements”
(Darius). .jpg)
Miller’s
panels, varying in size and shape, are characterized by vertiginous angles and
exquisite use of line, as in the dazzlingly etched images of driving white
rain, and Marv trudging through it, in an 11-page sequence in The Hard Goodbye and in the bricked
alleyway and dungeon, viewed from above, in the same novel (128-38, 108). Images
of entrapment abound in this universe, created by the long shadows cast by Venetian
blinds, over the shoulder perspective, use of squares and rectangles and the relentless
confining and framing by frames within frames within frames. Everywhere you
look there are bricked and tiled walls, barred cells and windows, the paving,
fencing and the Band-Aids on Marv’s face included. There are several panels in which a face on
one side of a frame is in focus while the character on the other side is some
yards behind and out of focus, which puts us right in the mind of the character
in close-up. Perhaps the most stunning example is the closeup of Hartigan with
Nancy in cowboy hat and chaps undulating sexily behind his right shoulder
(143). “Skinny little Nancy Callahan,” the troubled Hartigan muses. “She grew
up. She filled out” (128). Just as noir filmmakers subjectivized the
third-person camera through cinematography and mise-en-scene, Miller’s drawings
form compositions that place us inside his troubled character’s minds,
conveying their emotions and feelings of imprisonment.
Long
sequences are presented with little written text, while other pages are
overburdened with words, with panels cramped by packed speech bubbles and long
columns of text running down a thick margin. The visual image claims a greater
immediacy even as the intermittent excess of text points to the shortcomings of
the visual image at capturing aspects of the hardboiled writing tradition.
Through the visual juxtaposition of image and word that essentially
characterizes the graphic novel form, Miller self-consciously draws attention
to the medium; he points out the scripted quality of the characters’ stories,
particularly evident in the use of language. The artist retains the film noir voiceover narrative
style used to convey internal monologue. Marv, Hartigan and Dwight inarticulately
express their (simplified) existential dilemmas in their narrations, in
accordance with the archetypally fatalistic noir hero. The amped-up hardboiled
style that Miller has perfected for the series, reminiscent of the distinctive
style of detective-fiction writers is extreme to begin with. The style is
pushed here to even greater heights, in what could easily have turned into
self-parody, but doesn’t—because the style is entirely appropriate to the world
of Sin City and to the events being described. “As much as Miller’s embraced
the wild and the exaggerated, each of his works exhibits its own remarkable
internal consistency, its own control” (Darius). Instead of becoming a mere
parody of the film noir genre, Sin City
uses the intensification and reduction of its narrative and stylistic conventions
to comically comment on it. Because these exaggerations perfectly fit the unified,
controlled fictional universe of the graphic novels, they don’t seem out of place,
instead only increasing the internal consistency of each of the stories.
That
Yellow Bastard provides a perfect example of
Miller’s use of exaggerated hardboiled language. Hartigan reacts to forces that
menace him in predictable, invariably terse monologues; even when his heart
condition threatens to kill him, his response to danger is uninflected and
monotonous: “No. Not a heart. Not a heart attack. Angina. The doctor said it’d
be like this. He gave you a pill/ Take the pill he gave you. Not a heart
attack. Get over it. Get over it. She needs you. Nancy Callahan, age eleven” (That Yellow Bastard 30-31). Accompanying
this mostly monosyllabic utterance are four abstract and formalized panels:
three signifying suffering (one in which the character is curled up on the
floor, the other two inserted closeups of his face), the fourth, on the facing
page, signifying determination (Hartigan tries to rise, one hand pressed
against the ground, the other balled into a fist). The following pages again
contain a pair of facing images: Hartigan’s face, stern with resolve, one hand
braced against the ground as he rises, the second of his upright figure, an
outline marked by few details.
At the level of plot, the heart
condition is a source of vulnerability that threatens to destroy the hero; the
stylistic portrayal of this near-death experience, however, emphasizes its
formulaic quality, the necessity to present the constant state of struggle that,
because of his heart condition, is the norm for Hartigan even more than for his
noir predecessors. The suddenness of
this brush with death—especially considering it is only the beginning of the
story—and the subsequent return to action, the clichéd nature of the monologue
and the images that accompany it (crouching, then standing) eliminate suspense;
the focus is not on what is happening, but the familiar and deliberate manner
in which it happens. As Hartigan suffers near-heart attacks again and again,
the experience is naturally less surprising each time, and there is a strong
sense of generic ritual. Miller is commenting on the formulas and expected
events of noir even as he eagerly employs them (Pizzino 118-19). Through the
use of standard, universal imagery of suffering or resolve and the repetition
of the character’s near-death experiences, Miller critiques the use of such
images and plot devices in noir; by circumventing any sense of suspense or
surprise, the artist uses these conventional images and devices not to further
the story, but simply to point out the deliberate, clichéd and formulaic
quality of such ritualistic conventions in noir.
In
The Big Fat Kill, the language again
approaches parody. Dwight finds himself protecting another damsel in distress,
waitress Shellie, from her abusive ex-boyfriend and corrupt Sin City cop Jackie
Boy. In Old Town, Jackie Boy manages to get into an altercation that will lead
to his death at the hands of little warrior Miho. She kills him with one deft stroke of her trusty sword: “She
doesn’t quite chop his head off,” Dwight’s monologue tells us. “She makes a pez
dispenser out of him” (67). This last line is one of the
many times the hardboiled style spills over into camp, becoming a form of both
self-parody (of Miller’s work) and comic caricature (of the noir genre as a
whole). This is not film noir, nor is it the hardboiled fiction of Chandler or
Hammett. It is a postmodern recreation of the noir style, perhaps less serious
than the originals as a critique of greed and corruption, definitely more
devoted than the originals to pushing the boundaries of extreme entertainment
(Booker 168).
“People
tend to do stories on stuff they like to draw,” Miller said. “For me, that was
tough guys, vintage cars and really hot women” (O’Donnell 114). To this end he
created Sin City a hermetic and
hyperbolic noir pastiche filled with parodic self-reflexivity as well as film
noir’s psychological and physical violence pushed to the limit. Throughout Sin City, Miller draws attention to and radicalizes the traditional elements
of noir while remaining rigidly attached to its generic tendencies; in effect,
the series manages to comment on its own narrative norms without ever
abandoning them, creating works that can be interpreted as self-reflexive
critiques of noir while at the same time able to stand on their own as
representatives of the genre. Simple, linear narratives and simplified
characters and settings result in a reduction of film noir to its images. In
its crude certainties, the extreme hardboiled writing style, its depictions of
armored masculinity and eroticized femininity, the shockingly violent events
and its various detectives’ ability to trace crimes to unambiguous individual
sources, Sin City works almost as if
to create not a noir graphic novel, but a portrayal of the very idea of noir.
Without adding anything foreign to the genre, Miller evokes the features of noir more than he represents its values in a mediated fashion. Sin City stays committed to the dynamics of a popular genre and,
without attempting to transcend or redeem it, invites reflection on its
conventions and, perhaps, even reflection on the idea of genre itself.
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