Movie review: Sin City - A Dame to Kill For

I first saw Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s grimy noir anthology Sin City in high school. It was violent and sleazy and stylised within an inch of its life, so naturally my teenage sensibilities were pretty taken with it. It was only recently, when I actually decided to read the source material, that I recognised just how sadistic, misogynistic and generally hateful it was.

Plenty would argue that this is precisely the point. Miller’s worldview has always been about heightening the weary archetypes, smoky settings and pervasive pulpiness of the noir genre to cartoonish extremes. The hardboiled “heroes” are crueller and colder, the femme fatales more ruthless and cunning. It’s a vision so far removed from anything resembling reality that it virtually dissuades you from engaging with it on any critical level.  

Just shy of a decade later, we get Miller and Rodriguez’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, a second round of dour, desaturated vignettes with more brawls, more breasts and a bigger body count. There’s no evolution to be found; this is precisely the same sour universe of misanthropy its reckless predecessor was.

Even the once-groundbreaking visual aesthetic looks no more dynamic and refined than it did back in 2005. (In fact, it looks even cheaper here.) But as lazily forgiving as a certain part of me remains toward the original, nine years is too long for a filmmaker to learn nothing.

I’m generally OK with gratuitous violence, but it was the female representation here that I found myself unable to get past. Criticisms against misogyny in the Sin City universe are nothing new; after all, it was not uncommon to see the letter columns of Miller’s original issues peppered with commentaries on his tendency to paint women as either distressed damsels, nefarious whores or ludicrous masturbatory fantasies. It might be easy for some to tar Miller as a straight misogynist, but that does dismiss some of his more progressive achievements.

This is the man who re-imagined Batman’s sidekick Robin as a 13-year-old girl in The Dark Knight Returns. This is the creator of Martha Washington (one of comics’ most radical female protagonists). Even within the Sin City series, there are some ideological advances to be salvaged. The Big Fat Kill follows the prostitutes of Old Town, a gang holding dominion over a territory under constant threat from patriarchal violence; women laying claim to the ownership of their sexualities, defending them by force. Sure, the yarn is still filtered through a male protagonist, and the women are envisaged as scantily-clad walking wet-dreams, but there’s enough feminine agency there to take hold over the blatant sexualisation somewhat.

Anything is better than most teen sex comedies. When you set the bar that low, it shouldn’t be a surprise when multiplex fare scrapes across the line with the minimum.

But it’s these achievements exactly that render A Dame to Kill For all the more indefensible. Of the three leading female characters, one is a prostitute, one is a stripper and the other is a manipulative, black-hearted villain who is incidentally naked for the majority of her screen-time.

Film critic Sheila O’Malley is one of few offering an alternative position on the film’s female representation: “Rodriguez/Miller's presentation of women may be one-note, but it's not nearly as reductive as the one offered in teenage sex comedies like the recent Behaving Badly, or in the films of Judd Apatow, where women's only power comes from being passive-aggressive and petulant. At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want.”

I get that. I even defended the recent Ridley Scott crime-thriller The Counselor under similar terms. Cormac McCarthy’s screenplay strung up the bloat of male hubris to such an extent that it was deeply pleasurable to see a savvy, self-serving woman lay waste to it. Similarly, Miller’s universe is largely comprised of naive, arrogant men worthy of ruin. In the eponymous vignette, Eva Green’s smouldering Ava Lord may be labelled as a “witch”, “slut”, and “whore” by the men dying to possess her, but she owns every last one of them, and thus in a certain sense, owns these words.  

But whatever weak defence could be assembled for that episode crumbles in the film’s final act – a vengeance story structured around Jessica Alba’s grief-stricken stripper Nancy Callahan (spoilers ahead). The first Sin City arc structured around the interior monologue of a woman; this narrative thread had the potential to radically divorce itself from the previously established subtext. Instead, it cements it.

Nancy seeks revenge against a corrupt senator, but lacks the courage to pull the trigger. So it’s a male’s ruthless physicality that spearheads her vigilante mission, a male spirit that rescues her from imminent defeat, a masculinised exterior employed in her transition to hardened assassin. We watch Nancy jaggedly snip at her locks and slice her face to scars, as if her femininity was some sort of weakness to be expunged.

Whatever the traditions to which homage is being paid, representation is always a product of the social context in which the work has been made. The universe where Sin City is set may well be some heightened, cartoonish distortion of old values, but the universe in which it is being consumed is still ours; one in which female representation at the movies remains in a pretty lousy state right now. We should be resisting the values that don’t align with our own, regardless of the source material and how faithful we are to it.

Remember when all those white-supremacist Marvel aficionados went bananas because Idris Elba got cast in Thor as the gatekeeper to a world of Aryan Gods? Fuck them and fuck that, because at the end of the day, there are more people of colour in the world than there are Marvel diehards, just as there are more women in the world than there are Frank Miller purists. So the representation in Sin City is better than that of most teen sex comedies? So what? Anything is better than that of most teen sex comedies. When you set the bar that low, it shouldn’t be a surprise when multiplex fare scrapes across the line with the minimum.

With the majority of Hollywood greenlights these days being reboots or remakes of existing properties, it’s inevitable that some of that mythology will need to be re-configured and re-contextualized to meet our standards. As a culture, all we can do is continue to encourage that process. For this reason, the disproportionately negative critical reception for A Dame to Kill For thus far is probably a good step. It’s not the worst thing mankind has ever wrought. But it’s not good enough.

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