I thought this comparison between right-wing Christians and Sin City‘s Frank Miller was curiously apt:
At first glance, it may seem unlikely, but the makers of Sin City and theocrats in Washington and elsewhere share certain core beliefs: in the advanced moral decay and anarchy of modern society, the worthlessness of the existing democratic political forms to stem this decay and anarchy and, underlying everything, the essential rottenness of human nature (after all, this is Sin City). Of course, the former apparently wallow happily in these facts of life while the latter deplore them.
Via Andreas, posting in the comments at TalkLeft. TalkLeft, by the way, hated Sin City. I enjoyed it – it’s a character flaw, I guess, that I enjoy “violence ballet” movies – but it wasn’t anything special.
It did convey the feel of the comic books very accurately, and for far less money (I think the three graphic novels the movie was based on cost something like $15 to $20 each), so from that perspective I guess the movie is a bargain.
And what about the Mo Movie Measure?
(What’s the Mo Movie Measure, you ask? It’s and idea from an old Dykes to Watch Out For cartoon. The character “Mo” explains that she only watches movies in which 1) there are at least two female characters with names, who 2) talk to each other sometime in the course of the movie, about 3) something other than a man. It’s amazing how few movies can pass the Mo Movie Measure.)
Ironically, this movie, unlike most, passes the Mo Movie Measure – the prostitutes talk with each other about politics and saving their area of town from the mob. I say it’s “ironic” since Sin City doesn’t imagine women as being much more than pin-ups and prostitutes. Yes, the prostitutes are deadly killers, but Sin City treats this more as a fetish (oooooh, lingerie and weapons together!) than as a serious belief that women can ever be powerful in their own right.
I won’t even get started on the portrayal of women in actual comic books, but I will ask this: when was the last time a women authored and drawn mass market super hero comic had a woman in it who didn’t have pneumatic breasts, a waist that spoke of bulimia or anorexia, and wide hips and ass?
These days, I still read Hellblazer and Stranges In Paradise, and that’s it. SiP had hands down the best portrayal of a fat woman ever, and she was beautiful. But (a) it was writen by a man, and (b) it wasn’t mass market super hero. Hellblazer is just sick, but I can’t help my gacination with John Constantine. Mostly because I want to see him played by a young Sting, and then drag him off to bed. But I digress.
I think comics are starting to be taken seriously, and I’d like to see more women authored and drawn books on the masss market. After all, if Xena was popular enough among young girls, as was buffy, why can’t we get a comic or a TV show by a woman?
I’m missing a whole different perspective here. I feel cheated.
>>I’m missing a whole different perspective here. I feel cheated. >>
I love this.
I like SiP a lot, myself.
My problem with John Constantine (I’m talking about the comics here; we shan’t speak of the film version) is that he’s such a dangerous, foolish, reckless, self-absorbed, emotionally-hamstrung freak that no strong, smart woman in her right mind would stay with him. He’s worse than Batman. There’s no way to work great female characters into his life, because the only plausible thing they’ll ever do is sprint in the opposite direction. He had a girlfriend at one point, an Irish woman I absolutely loved. After way too long, she said, “You know what? You’re a waste of time,” and off she went.
My other problem with Hellblazer is that sequence with the saintly porn stars in the Ozarks. I don’t have the descriptors for that abomination.
Not that I don’t find him hot myself.
Hey, let’s play facile comparisons! Sin City has something in common with Vanity Fair because all the women wear expensive, impractical high fashion…
Sin City is Frank Miller’s take on noir detective fiction–the world is a gritty, ugly place, where everyone’s on the take, except for a few low-down guys like Our Hero with his own twisted brand of virtue. And everything is extreme. The guns are big, the cars don’t merely drive around curves but leap over them and bounce, heroes can get hit or shot and stagger to their feet.
I think anyone who really believes the deadly prostitutes just had weapons for fetish purposes must have gone out for popcorn anytime Miho was onscreen. (She gets a much bigger role in the comics, incidentally.)
Actually, there are a bunch of best-selling comics among young girls created by women. As I understand it, the best-selling comics in the US nowadays aren’t superheroes – they’re manga.
The trouble is though, that regardless of what people want to see or read the titles have to be marketable. If you were to produce a comic about an unattractive woman who worked in a library, it might be a cult hit, but wouldn’t be a huge seller like ‘X Men’ or ‘Wonder Woman’. It’s mostly young men who buy the comics, so they want to get their weekly dose of their fantasy on paper.
That’s why the way that most comics are drawn is to extremes, and why when they’re made into movies they replace spandex with leather. Just look at the idealised shape of ‘Superman’ in the comics or the incredibly proportioned ‘She Hulk’
I enjoyed SiP and a few other Dark Horse titles as well, until my local comic shop went bust.
You’re mixing up cause and effect. Young men’s fantasies are captured in comic books, therefore young men read them, not the other way around. “Buffy” proved to the world that a TV show with a smart female hero and with lots of sexualized shots of handsome men would bring in female fans. For the record, there’s a bunch of Buffy comic books written by women that are really popular here in Austin, though I don’t know about in general.
Portrayal of women in comics is still extremely problematic, but I wanted to mention Alias as a Marvel-distributed comic with an interesting, tough, and non-stereotypical lead female character (former superheroine now working as a private eye).
There is still a glaring lack of women-written-women in comics, though. Both Alias and Strangers in Paradise are written by men. The only woman allowed to write a mainstream female-centered superhero comic does it by relentlessly fetishizing the characters (Gail Simone on Birds of Prey).
What Amanda said. We already know that girls are big readers–more so than boys, apparently. Why would they suddenly stop buying if the books included colorful pictures and cliffhanger plotlines?
I’ve had met a lot of women who loved Neil Gaiman’s Sandman saga, as I did. One of the things I liked most about it was that it portrayed a lot of subcultures with insight and compassion.
As a bona-fide nerd, I got to take a step back from the feminist perspective for a second:
I LIKE Sin City. And X-Men, and Spiderman, and whole other slew of DC and Marvel comics (not a fan of retibutionists: The Punisher doesn’t do it for me). Yes, I realize that the female form is ridiculous, as is them wearing high heals (HIGH HEALS?!?! WHO THE HELL WOULD FIGHT CRIME IN HIGH HEELS?) But, I like the plots. I like the modern day mythology, I like the interwoven art forms. When I get the ones written by the chicks (and maybe I’m reading the wrong ones) they seem too girl-powery, or degenerate into stereotypes (Oh, shopping. OH boys.) *shrugs* Don’t jump on the medium too much.
Everything in Sin City is exaggerated and ridiculous. (I mean, Miho fights on rollerblades at one point.)
I’m hardly pointing to Japanese comic books as a source of feminism, but it’s very true that their market is much more demographically spread than ours. There are entire, popular comic-book lines for girls. There are comics read by adults (no, not just rape manga). Here it’s seen as art drawn by teenaged boys, for the most part. That means it tends to attract teenage boys (and the older versions thereof) as writers and artists.
Also, you gotta love Marv. Even Lisa Schwarzbaum – the only bad (or mediocre) review* for Sin City I read – loved Marv.
Also, the one scene with Powers Boothe was great. Between that and Deadwood I’m convinced that Powers Boothe is just exceptional at playing powerful, sleazy men.
Thank you, Mythago, for poining out the …odd… male female power dynamic in Manga and anime. I don’t have the dual doctorate in weomans studues and japanese culture to actualy figure out what’s up with those people, but they’re sure strange!
Piny, of couse JC is a shite who’ll screw up the oife of any woman he’s involved with. And he knows it too.
The book has gone through differnt writers, so I figure the whole porn thing was just a bad run of writers.
I liked Constantine a lot better when he was a character in Swamp Thing and The Books of Magic–when he got his own line it lost all the mystery.
I agree, but the people making the comics have to know their market. Personally I’d LOVE to see more generously proportioned women in comics, but I doubt they would sell well in the mainstream.
I too agree with Amanda’s as-always insightful comments, and would like to ask her when Pandagon will be up and running again? I need my fix.
What’s Pandagon? My guess would be the giant robot Chinese bear that fought Godzilla, but I might be wrong…
Mythago: The first 20 comics in Hellblazer were, IMO brilliant. But Books Of Magic came long after the first Hellblazer was around.
Long, long after.
John Constantine also made an appearance in Sandman, and he fit right in.
I think the trouble with Constantine, from what I’ve read, is that he’s an antihero, defined by his perverse refusal to learn from his mistakes and grow as a person. Contrast that with the main character in Books of Magic, which seemed to be a classic coming-of-age story, or Morpheus in Sandman, in which a major element of the storyline was that Morpheus had profoundly changed from what he’d been for eons, and was struggling to understand that change.
Aw, shucks. For months now I’ve been confusing Sin City with American Flagg. Now I have to reorder my estimation of various movie reviewers’ prudery, because as I recall City was a lot meaner and more cynical.
Pandagon is the blog Amanda posts on.
I have finally seen Sin City. Did not watch it at first for one reason – some Christian (probably catholic) gave a review damning the movie. I remember reading that the villian wore a cross, mentioned god all the time, and was a pedo serial killer. This made me mad, I like traditional family values. But I watched the movie, finally. Well, what can I say. Turns out this movie is actually non-fiction. I could not find one thing wrong or unrealistic about the movie. Only thing I found upsetting was that the good guys die. At least they die for a greater good.
When is Sin City II coming out!