MATT SINGER AND MATT YGLESIAS both seem to think there’s something ironic about someone who supported military action in Iraq decrying the violence in Sin City. That strikes me as too cute by well more than half. We all accept violence for certain purposes — criminal punishment is violence directed by the state against an individual, but we pretty much all think that imprisonment of, say, armed robbers is okay. My support for the Iraq war was always premised on the idea that it would do more good than harm — that it would prevent more violence than it would perpetrate. That was an empirical judgement — a judgement that Singer and Yglesias may think was incorrect, but that was the judgement nonetheless.<\/p>\n
\nSin City depicts violence for its own sake. There’s no purpose behind the violence — it is simply presented as entertaining in and of itself. That is what I object to. I wouldn’t object to violence in a movie that got at some deeper message through the depictions of violence. That would be violence in the service of a purpose. But the idea that depictions of violence, without more, constitutes entertainment … well, yes, I find that deeply disturbing, just as I would find it deeply disturbing that someone supported the Iraq war because he liked seeing destruction on the evening news.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Here he’s just flatly wrong about the film (although right about the political point).<\/p>\n
Part of the attraction of the film – and of noir in general – is the tight moral code that the stories extol.<\/p>\n
Every noir hero – and noir stories typically involve either a heroic struggle or a didactic decline – is built as a hero on a moral decision taken at some risk. The stories with heroes involve a deeply flawed hero – a superficially bad man – who at some risk, stands up against his own interest against a powerful and deeply bad force.<\/p>\n
The three stories in Sin City each involve exactly such a hero, who should – as Harrigan is told – simply go home to his wife, but who can’t and instead tries to protect someone against a powerful and evil force.<\/p>\n
Without that framework, we’re left watching “Natural Born Killers,” and the difference between that movie and this one is instructive to consider – and an explanation of why Sin City works and NBK failed.<\/p>\n
It’s not a movie for the squeamish, but it is a movie with a moral center. It’s more Hamlet<\/i> than The Duchess of Malfi<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
rmed Liberal likes Sin City, finds a moral center in the artful bloody mess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=762"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}