Sin City
I caught Sin City on DVD the other night for the first time. I was very impressed by how well Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino brought Miller’s aesthetic to the screen. It was hard enough making the movie just look like the graphic novels, to judge from the making-of documentary included in the 2-DVD set. But what really impressed me, as a person who grew up in New York City, was how well the filmmakers enacted heroic physicality within the urban landscape. No matter where they grow up, little boys dream of having super-human powers and strengths. (Or else, invisibility.) There is a universality in that. But the things they imagine themselves doing with that power will vary, based on where they live.
If you grew up on a farm (like Clark Kent), you may have imagined running through corn fields at 1,000 mph, or lifting tractors with one hand, etc. And that makes sense. But when you grow up in a big city, like I did, the imaginary enactment of super-human strength involves city streets and skyscrapers and cars and neon and such. I was extremely impressed, and very surprised, to see how faithfully Sin City brought this action to the screen. The filmmakers could only have been following imaginary precedents very similar to my own. When you’re a kid who gets a lot of enjoyment from his imagination, you realize very quickly that omnipotence is boring. It’s boring to be God. If all you have to do is imagine it, and it is, if you can transform the landscape with a gesture, raise the dead, stop time, travel to the other side of the galaxy in a second, you’re going to run out of fun stuff to do very fast. The optimal amount of super-human power is just a few times stronger than a regular man. This is what you discover when you’re an imaginative kid. When Marv announces to the cops waiting for him outside the door “I’ll be right out”, he smashes the door to splinters, with what looks to be the force of a small explosion. When he holds the face of the bad guy down against the surface of the road while driving his BMW CS 3000, he does so with casual, grinning ease. This is exactly the way it was inside our heads as kids. Just enough strength to make a casual gesture of incredible strength. There is no need to blow away a mountain with your breath, as if it were a pile of salt. What I want to be able to do is crush the bones of my enemy with my grip, leap a few hundred feet, and suffer many times the force of gravity with a smile.
December 20th, 2006 at 3:41 am
[…] If you grew up on a farm (like Clark Kent), you may have imagined running through corn fields at 1,000 mph, or lifting tractors with one hand, etc. And that makes sense. But when you grow up in a big city, like I did, the imaginary enactment of super-human strength involves city streets and skyscrapers and cars and neon and such. I was extremely impressed, and very surprised, to see how faithfully Sin City brought this action to the screen — sin city tarantino […]
December 23rd, 2006 at 5:31 pm
[…] It sure doesn’t hurt that your adoring fan base is a bunch of pud-junky-techno-nerds. This animated GIF is actually a clip from the recent adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City graphic novel by Directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Alba played “skinny little Nancy Callahan”, all growed up and opposite Bruce Willis. […]