Reflections, Reflections

While checking out Drudge this evening, I came across a link to the new movie Sin City. I would never see such a movie unless I was forced to by some professional reason. What amazes me with such movies is how normalized they are in our world, that this is considered de facto as "entertainment." To me, it shows just how mentally diseased modern, liberal society and its inhabitants are.

A very pointed review from Jeffrey Westhoff, Northwest Herald/Rotten Tomatoes:

Few movies have pulled me in opposite directions as brutally as “Sin City.”

Technically and cinematically, “Sin City” is an astonishing work that meticulously re-creates Frank Miller’s landmark comic series.

[...]

Yet these dazzling special effects and performances are used to illustrate repugnant, vile stories.

Sadism is the major theme with dozens of explicit shootings, stabbings, beheadings, dismemberments and castrations (you know you’re gone beyond run-of-the-mill movie violence you need to use the plural for “castrations”). “Sin City” is a place where all men are killers and all women are prostitutes, except for the “good girl,” Nancy (Jessica Alba). She’s a stripper.

I know, I know – the name of the movie is “Sin City” so no one will walk in expecting the next “Heidi.” The movie delivers exactly what the comics have, homages to vintage films noir and pulp crime novels, although Miller ODs on sex and violence. “Sin City” contains moments that would have made Robert Mitchum or Mickey Spillane wince.

[...]

Miller and Rodriguez probably rationalized that the soft-core sex and hardcore violence are mitigated by the film’s sense of “romance.” Each story is about a man trying to save a woman. Police Detective John Hartigan (Willis) rescues a girl who grows up to be Alba’s character, and then he must rescue her again. Former private detective Dwight (Owen) protects his girlfriend (Brittany Murphy) from drunken sexual predator Jackie-Boy (Del Toro).

[...]

Marv’s and Dwight’s stories pass through Old Town, the district run by a heavily armed sisterhood of prostitutes led by Gail (Dawson, a dead ringer for her character in the comic). “In Old Town, the ladies are the law,” Dwight muses.

Here Miller and Rodriguez plant another of their artistic defenses, that the women of “Sin City” are powerful. Yet this is a pathetic example of the comic-book definition of female empowerment: the ability to kill without conscience while flaunting enormous breasts.

[...]

Yet as a narrator, Rodriguez is at his worst when at his bloodiest (“From Dusk Till Dawn,” “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”). Unlike his idol, Sam Peckinpah, and his mentor, Tarantino, Rodriguez has no feel for irony. He glories in violence for the sake of violence. It means nothing in his films. We’re not supposed to learn anything from it; we’re not supposed to laugh uneasily at it. We’re supposed to think it’s cool.

A project so extreme in its unseemliness as “Sin City” needed a filmmaker who at least can dupe us into believing the ultraviolence has a higher, artistic value.

Because by the time “Sin City” gets to one man castrating another with his bare hands, I’m no longer marveling at the film’s technical achievements. I’m wondering if finding entertainment value in a moment so brutal and meaningless constitutes a sin.

We all should wonder.

What kind of mental and emotional structure does a person need to have to see such a movie and clap?

"He glories in violence for the sake of violence."

Actually, I would disagree, since there are a variety of narratives with the types of violence and roles and messages being spewed in such movies. He glories legitimizing a variety of kinds of violence, and much more. In reality, he is glorifying real ideological and power structures in society that underlie these narratives, not some empty "violence for its own sake as entertainment" reason. Since a violent scene always occurs in an ideological context, it's impossible for the violence to be there just for "violence´s sake."

The success of movies like this one are of the many examples why modern society is so deadened in its capacity to criticize what is wrong and neurotic, why people are so cattle-like. Where is the outrage about such a cultural product and the numerous others like it?

.