Sin
City's Family Tradition
Cultural, Literary, and Filmic Analysis
by Troy Brownfield
Originally online:
http://www.newsarama.com/movies/SinCity/SinCityAnalysis.htm
“I never saw her in the daytime. We seemed to live by night. What was left
of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked.”
Robert Mitchum said that. Out of the Past. 1947. If Frank Miller had
been born a few decades earlier, he still might have written Sin City and
Robert Mitchum would have played Marv. Of course, Bogart would have been
Hartigan, and Joseph Cotton might have made a mean Dwight. And Goldie? Rita
Hayworth. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
There are certain givens in art. There’s what the artist meant versus what the
audience gets. And some of them actually get it. There’s what the critics say
the artist meant. And some of them are actually right. There’s interpretation,
and meaning, and metaphor.
And there’s influence. Influence and tradition. Sin City swims in
influence and tradition, and Frank Miller knows it. His collection of
mini-series and short stories are a modern monument to the hard-boiled school
and film noir. Today, that style of writing and film is so ingrained in our
common unconscious that the tropes are used in Flonase ads. Flonase, for
Christ’s sake. But every once in a while, you find a guy like Miller. Miller
was the kid in the audience who got it, and now he’s the artist. Wanna see
where he’s coming from?
“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the
Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred
years of democracy and peace . . . and what did they produce? The cuckoo
clock.” -- Orson Welles, “The Third Man”
Let’s be clear on one thing. Just having a private eye or a hard-luck loner in
the lead doesn’t make something belong to the hard-boiled noir school.
Otherwise we’d have to include Magnum and Woody Allen, and that just wouldn’t be
clean pool.
Detective fiction existed prior to the smoky rooms and bent fedoras of the
‘40s. In fact, Edgar Allen Poe is credited with the first true mystery short
story, "The Purloined Letter." Then you’ve got Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator
of Sherlock Holmes. They weren’t the only ones. In fact, some scholars, like
Ian Ousby, writer of Guilty Parties, crisply divides the era of detection
prior to 1921 into “The Golden Age” (sound familiar?).
Ousby’s Golden Age included the early drawing room mysteries, solved by clean
men in comfy lighting. They were the kind of stories where the wrong-doer might
be revealed, then surrender with a “Well, you certainly got me, old chap.”
Obviously, that’s not the Sin City world.
However, in 1921, we got Black Mask. It was the magazine that gave a
home to a legion of writers eager to show off their gritty stylings. So while
Agatha Chrisite was creating Hercule Poirot, Dashiell Hammett was getting drunk
off his ass and writing for Black Mask.
“When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it” – Humphrey Bogart as Sam
Spade in “The Maltese Falcon”
Hammett is one of the central pillars of what is simultaneously described as the
hard-boiled school and the noir movement. Generally, the fiction has been
denoted as “hard-boiled”, while the films have been regarded as “noir”, due to
the French descriptor applied toward a trend of darker cinema. Over time, the
styles get lumped together as one “noir” catch-basin, since so many of the
“hard-boiled” novels and short stories got the noir film treatment. From here
on in, let’s just call the whole thing “noir” for simplicity’s sake, but you’ve
got the gist of why they’re different, and you can be the smart guy at the
cocktail party who takes home the blonde (or you can be the blonde that slaps
the smart guy; it’s America).
Back to Dash. Infamous for writing dark prose, being drunk, banging writer
Lillian Hellman (and for writing dark prose and banging Lillian Hellman while
drunk), he basically erupted onto the scene, dominated it for about a decade in
both print and Hollywood, then flamed out.
Hammett’s first major work was Red Harvest, published in 1929. I’d tell
you the story, but you know it, because you’ve either seen Yojimbo, A
Fistful of Dollars or Last Man Standing. They’re ALL Red Harvest;
they’re simply adaptations varied by country and decade. It’s still the same
first-person story about the laconic gunslinger who rolls into town and pits
both sides against the middle. Ousby maintains that Hammett’s real revelation
here is that he demonstrates the notion that whole towns could be corrupt. But
seriously, with Teapot Dome and Black Thursday, that wasn’t really
a secret anymore.
Still, that quintessential narration? The tough guy telling you what he’s doing
and why? That really begins here. Hammett pushes it to a new level of
perfection in 1930’s The Maltese Falcon, later immortalized on film by
director John Huston. Bogart burns Sam Spade into the brain of the planet,
putting down the “one” of his Greatest-Film-P.I. one-two punches. Spade is the
tarnished hero. He’s not terribly broken up that his partner is killed, so,
hey, it’s all right if he sleeps with the guy’s wife. Still, he’s the smartest
guy in the room and the one to solve the case, so who cares if he’s rumpled and
angry. This was a new kind of guy, and he wasn’t Holmes or Poirot by a damn
sight.
“The next person that says ‘Merry Christmas’ to me, I’ll kill them.” – Myrna
Loy as Nora Charles in “The Thin Man”
In 1934, Hammett pounded out the last of his truly great novels. That was
The Thin Man, a work that played upon his own real-life relationship with
Hellman by casting the leads as drunken socialites who were barely sober enough
to solve the central mystery. Thin Man turned out to be Hammett’s own
version of the Frankenstein conundrum; the titular character is actually the
villain, not the hero, though the subsequent film version and its scads of
sequels imply otherwise.
Nick and Nora Charles weren’t roiling in the gutters like other noir heroes, but
they were self-destructive and cynical. They had bad habits, and they didn’t
care who knew. Far from paragons, they actually came off as a modern couple in
their willingness to point out each other’s failings with well-timed zingers.
They were the template for many lit and film couples to follow.
As for Hammett, he was restless and worn. After Thin Man, he basically
screwed around in Hollywood, working on scripts and never writing another
novel. He died in 1961, but his impact lasts.
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass
window.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely”
I was talking about pillars. Every day, someone copies Raymond Chandler, even
if they don’t know it. I’ve walked the halls of academia, where guys who have
thought way too much about Joyce and Faulkner drink coffee and look down on
writers like Chandler. But as much as anyone who ever published a novel in
America, the British-educated Chandler has influenced the way that people talk,
the way that writers write, and the way that plots are structured.
Whereas Hammett’s sensibilities introduced a more tarnished investigator,
Chandler expanded the notion with his own literary influences. Schooled in the
classics, Chandler even considered naming his main character Mallory, after the
writer of La Morte Da Arthur, the work which serves as the basis for our
modern interpretation of King Arthur. Instead, he settled on naming his private
eye after the playwright Christopher Marlowe, that contemporary of Shakespeare
who was found murdered. Chandler did, however, keep aspects of knight-errantry
in his character description. Phillip Marlowe is not always welcomed in a
society that considers sleuthing a dirty business, but he himself is questing
for redemption in an effort to do right. Hell, one of the novels is called
Lady in the Lake and a character in it is Grayle. You do the math.
Still, even with his personal attachment to the hero’s journey, Chandler makes
Marlowe swim in dirty water. There are thumb-sucking nymphets, porn, murder,
implied incest, adultery, and cons of all sizes, and that’s just in the first
book. That’s The Big Sleep, by the way, published in 1939 and made into
another classic starring Bogart in the lead (that’s the 2). [Fun side note:
being as much of the plot has to do with dirty pictures, most references to the
content of the photos were excised for the film, though the plot remains the
same. And the screenplay? It was adapted by . . . William Faulkner. Literary
cred versus a paycheck. You be the judge. Anyway . . .]
Apart from the themes that he brought to the work, Chandler displayed a
tremendous command of language. He’s imminently quotable, and many of his great
lines ended up on the screen. All of his Marlowe novels (expect, I believe, for
Playback) have been filmed repeatedly, and the character has been played
by tough guys like Bogart, Mitchum, James Garner, James Caan and Powers Boothe
(brilliant in the ‘80s HBO series, Phillip Marlowe, Private Eye). These
guys signed on to be able to say things like that great line above about the
blonde. Chandler’s books are filled with lines like that; the first-person
narration lends itself to wise-cracking monologues about everything from police
operations to drinking alone, and Chandler makes it bounce and sing.
Some people have become confused over time between the cheerfully amoral Sam
Spade and the more morally grounded Phillip Marlowe, likely because both were
played by Bogart in their most famous film incarnations, and most people know
the characters from film rather than reading. It bears noting that Hammett came
off as more of a pessimist in his work. And Chandler, while depicting filthy
times and crimes, still stuck with the notion that a man could be heroic. His
dissertation on the topic from The Simple Art of Murder reads, “Down
these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man.
He is the hero, he is everything.”
With all that in mind, certainly the redemptive quest quality is on display in
Sin City. Marv’s mission. Hartigan’s mission. Dwight’s. Consider.
Think for a moment about another huge film getting released this year; Lucas
goes on and on about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey, but he doesn’t get
to own the concept just because he has the most money.
“Bourbon straight! With a bourbon chaser.” – William Bendix in “The Blue
Dahlia”
Obviously, there’s a lot more that we could go into. We’ve got Ross McDonald
and his Lew Archer stories. There’s the collected works of Jim Thompson, who
applies a particular kind of grime to The Killer Inside Me and The
Grifters. There’s James M. Cain, with his wicked women and scheming
drifters. Of course, there’s Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, who shoots the
unarmed naked woman who killed his partner at the close of I, The Jury.
For the newer school, you’ve got James Ellroy’s damaged L.A., Andrew Vachss’s
Burke, and Walter Mosley’s African-American turn on the old chestnuts. And
believe it or not, one of the style’s biggest fans is making the leap this year;
though he basically retired from being the horror brand name, Stephen King has
written his first hard-boiled novel (The Colorado Kid, due from the
publisher Hard Case Crime this year) after years of parading his
influences in books like The Dark Half.
So here’s the deal. Frank Miller is working in one of the basic American
literary traditions. Sin City isn’t just the sheen of Rodriguez and
Tarantino, though that will be swell. It’s not just hot chicks in leather and
Jessica Alba with a lasso, though who can argue with those? It’s not just Art
Direction. It’s about pulp poetry, EC Comics violence, heavy blacks, and the
notion that stories don’t have to be pretty to be beautiful.
The American audience has been to Sin City before, in one form or
another. This time, they’re getting new directions from a more recent
resident. Still, somewhere down those mean streets, in the afterworld smoky
shadows of some midnight club, a table full of writers raises their glasses in a
toast. They’re gone, but not forgotten, and they’re saving a chair for Frank.
---Troy Brownfield founded ShotgunReviews.com and serves as the
Editor-in-Chief. He’s a professor of English, journalism and communication and
freelances for a number of print and online sources. He’s never broken a
whiskey bottle over a guy’s head in a fight (though he’d like to), but he does
have a couple of great blonde stories.