The sin of Sin City

Rating: 3/10 (22 September 2005)

Predictably, some critics have labeled Sin City a 'gorefest', have dismissed it as yet another example of tarantinesque gratuitous violence designed to appeal to the crudest instincts. If only it were that harmless: in my opinion this film is a manifestation of a disturbing sexual pathology lying deep within the American psyche. Worse still is that it seems unlikely that its makers were unaware of what they were doing while they created and then released this pathogen into the world. For many years now psychoanalytic knowledge has been in vogue amongst filmmakers, and in particular screenplay writers, there being numerous books, symposiums,etc devoted to this trend.
Sin City deconstructed
From a psychoanalytic point of view the film is messy and confused: numerous substitutions and role reversals come into play, making it hard to identify any clear-cut syndromes, and at times it's even as though neuroses are battling each other for supremacy. Despite all this mess it is possible to point out a number of prominent emotionally significant features present in the film, motifs which are not exactly subtle, given the heavy-handedness and emotional loudness which are typical of films by Tarantino, (here only a guest director).
Firstly, there is the film's heavy glorification of women: although nearly all the film's female characters are hustlers who injure, mutilate and kill men, women are excessively glorified, almost deified: "She smells like angels ought to smell, the perfect woman...the Goddess. Goldie" (Marv).
The adoration of women, often at the expense of reduced sexual feeling, often indicates what Freud called'castration anxiety': One coping strategy for the sufferer involving an effort being made to demonstrate to the threatening father-figure the 'cleanness' of their feelings toward the mother-figure. Sexual feeling toward all women may eventually become habitually sublimated into a chaste glorification. But, to complicate things, one of the role-reversals in the film involves castration anxiety being safely acted out in that the 'little boy' wins the mother by turning on and defeating (usually by mutilating or castrating) a threatening father-figure, (and sometimes the mother-figure herself performs this task). And no less than four acts of castration are graphically depicted in this film.
Most of the film's villains live in order to exercise sadistic violence toward females: they are violent and threatening father-figures, unworthy of the affections of the mother-figure. The only sin an inhabitant of Sin City can commit is hurting a woman, and revenging that hurt (always using extreme methods), is the only virtue and the sole motivation for the film's 'good guys'. The sickening violence in the film is in this way legitimized: made into a 'good cause'. And, strangely enough, the film seems to assume that the audience shares this value system. It is furthermore easy to interpret the numerous acts of mutilation performed on the male characters as symbolic castration : by being gravely injured, sometimes dismembered they are rendered powerless and impotent.
Most of the film's male characters, heroes and villains alike, are really put through the grinder, they are shot, cut stabbed, mutilated..and, well damaged in just about every way imaginable. And yet none of them shows any pain: it's as though their sufferings are unimportant, it's what they deserve. They seem to derive masochistic pleasure from this treatment, are positively invigorated by it. (An extreme example of this is the Buddha-like serenity shown by the character played by Elijah Wood after being dismembered, partly eaten by a dog and finally, decapitated).
Like Bruce Willis in one of his earlier films, Die Hard, the picture's 'good guys' undergo bodily mortification and suffer all sorts of injuries and hardship in order to avenge or rescue a female mother-figure, (in Die Hard represented by Bruce Willis's wife).
For a lot of masochists the overcoming of physical pain is felt to be an act of purification: the masochist 'paying' for having shameful sexual feelings. It is also noted that for many masochists these shameful feelings stem from homosexual urges. And sadomasochism, as we all know, does indeed figure large in 'gay culture', which has several sadomasochistic icons: the passion of Christ, and the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (who was tied to a post and shot full of arrows), being the most prominent.
Combine this with the heavily-overstated unresolved castration complex and mother-fixation and you have a reasonably solid case for interpreting the film as a sort of tour-de-force of homosexual angst. This interpretation does not seem to apply to all cases. Sometimes the guilt feelings cannot be suspected as having their source in homosexuality : Bruce Willis's later relationship with the girl he saved is obviously incestuous ,"I'm old enough to be your grandfather", and after a passionate kiss in a motel Bruce Willis finds himself with a noose around his neck.
It is no coincidence at all that such a film, one which seems to be maliciously working overtime to corrupt and pervert a young audience, is a faithful transference of a comic book onto celluloid. The creator of the Sin City comic series, Frank Miller, is credited with the screenplay for this film. In the past the corruption of youth seems to have been the aim of many comic book writers. In fact the problem got so bad that pressure groups were formed to combat it. It is an interesting trivia fact of comic book history that DC Comics was brought into life in order to create an alternative to a genre which had become characterized by violence and perversion.
Sin City can thus finally be regarded not as a worrying new trend in film-making, but rather as a relic from a past best forgotten: an undeserved tribute to a corrupt art-form.