Sin City

The Red Dress in the Machine: Sin City and the Afterlife of the Image

Sin City opens with a woman on a rooftop in a red dress. Everything else in the frame is silver, black, and rain, but her dress and her lips burn. A man in a suit offers her a cigarette and a little speech about how he’d do anything to save her. Then he shoots her, holds her as she dies, and tells us in voiceover that he’ll cash her check in the morning. It’s a two-minute overture, and it tells you nearly everything about the film that follows: its genius for the single frozen image, its romance of violence, and the way it treats a woman as the thing color is for.

Twenty years on, the film is easy to file as a style exercise, a technical stunt that briefly made green-screen look like a new art form before 300 and a hundred superhero movies made it ordinary. That undersells it. Sin City is one of the strangest objects in the history of reproduced images, a film that uses the most thoroughly mechanical way of making a movie available in 2005 to build a shrine to a hand-drawn original. To understand why it dazzles, and why the dazzle wears thin, it helps to go back to the critic who first worried about what machines do to images.

A copy that worships its original

Walter Benjamin’s famous claim about mechanical reproduction is that it strips away the work of art’s aura, the sense of a unique object existing in one place and time and carrying the weight of its history. A painting hangs in a chapel; a photograph can be anywhere. Film was, for Benjamin, the purest case. Its actors don’t perform for an audience in a room but for a camera and a cutting table. Their performance gets broken into pieces and reassembled by someone else. He thought this was disorienting but also potentially liberating: freed from ritual and reverence, images could become tools for seeing the world rather than objects of worship.

Sin City pushes the first half of that diagnosis about as far as it can go. Robert Rodriguez shot almost the entire film digitally against blank green walls. The streets, the rain, the cars, Basin City itself all exist only in the computer. Actors performed into empty space, sometimes on different days from the scene partners they’d appear beside on screen. If the classic film actor was already exiled from the stage, these actors were exiled from the world. There is no “here and now” behind Sin City. There’s no there at all.

And yet the result is an intensely reverent film, built around fidelity to an original. Rodriguez treated Frank Miller’s comics as a literal storyboard, recreating panels nearly line for line, and he resigned from the Directors Guild so that Miller could share directing credit. The point of all that digital weightlessness was to resurrect the authority of the printed page. Benjamin described a historical shift from “cult value,” where an image matters because of its sacred presence, to “exhibition value,” where it matters because it can be shown everywhere. Sin City runs the shift backwards. It takes the most exhibitable medium imaginable and uses it to venerate a relic. It is a copy that wants to become its original, and its best moments carry a genuinely uncanny charge: a comic panel breathing.

That inversion produces the film’s most interesting limitation. Benjamin loved what he called the camera’s “optical unconscious,” its ability through close-ups and slow motion to reveal things in the world that the naked eye misses. The camera, he said, works like a surgeon cutting into reality rather than a painter standing at a distance. Sin City has no optical unconscious, because it has no world to cut into. Nothing in the frame is accidental. Every raindrop and every silhouette was decided in advance, first by Miller’s pen and then by a compositor. The film can’t surprise itself. That is why it feels so airless on repeat viewing, and why its pleasures are pleasures of recognition rather than discovery. You admire it the way you’d admire an extraordinary diorama.

The city as allegory

If the film is closed off from the world, it opens onto something else: allegory. In his book on the German baroque mourning play, Benjamin described a theater of corrupt princes, martyred heroes, and scheming courtiers in which nothing is quite a person and everything is a sign. Bodies become emblems. History appears as a landscape of ruins. He wrote that allegories are to thought what ruins are to things.

That is a better description of Basin City than “noir.” The film’s characters aren’t psychological beings; they are emblems wearing trench coats. The Roark family is the baroque court in miniature: a senator and a cardinal whose power is hereditary, personal, and rotten, and a son literally poisoned yellow by the means used to preserve him. Marv is the martyr, a body built to absorb punishment and testify through it. The city is a heap of ruins: a farm where a cannibal keeps trophies, a tar pit full of bones, a run-down bar where the same faces recur in each story. No one in the city grows; they just suffer in exemplary ways.

The film is best when it fully commits to this. “The Hard Goodbye,” Marv’s story, works because Mickey Rourke turns the allegorical mask into something that hurts. Buried under prosthetics that make his face look like a boulder, he gives Marv a wounded, almost childlike dignity, and the gap between the emblematic face and the living voice inside it is the most moving thing in the film. Bruce Willis’s Hartigan, an old cop with a bad heart, gets a smaller version of the same effect. The middle segment, Clive Owen’s “The Big Fat Kill,” is the weakest because it has the least going on beneath the emblem. It’s slick, but it’s all gesture: severed heads, comic-book swordplay, and a voiceover that mistakes attitude for interiority. By the third hour of hard-boiled narration (the voiceovers start to sound like the same man rearranging the same metaphors), the allegory hardens into mannerism.

Bringing back the scaffold

Here Michel Foucault helps explain something the Benjamin lens notices but can’t quite account for: why this fantasy of personal, visible, bodily power was so satisfying to a 2005 audience.

Discipline and Punish opens with a gruesome public execution in 1757 and then traces the long shift away from that kind of spectacle toward a quieter form of power: surveillance, routines, records, institutions that shape behavior rather than tearing bodies apart. Modern power, Foucault argues, is diffuse. It flows through schools and offices and files rather than radiating from a king. It doesn’t need to make an example of you because it’s already watching.

Sin City is a nostalgic film in the most unsettling sense: it’s nostalgic for the scaffold. Basin City has no cameras, no paperwork, no institutions that work. Power here belongs to a family and lands on bodies. Justice, when it comes, is torture performed for the audience: Marv letting a cannibal be eaten alive by his own dog, Hartigan tearing apart the Yellow Bastard with his bare hands. The film is also clear that the official system is no better. Marv’s story ends with him strapped into the electric chair, and the first jolt fails to kill him. He mocks the executioners.

Foucault noticed that public executions had a dangerous tendency: the crowd sometimes sided with the condemned. The spectacle meant to display sovereign power could turn into a carnival celebrating the criminal’s defiance. That’s exactly the position Sin City puts us in. We are the crowd at the foot of the scaffold, cheering the martyr’s last insult.

This is where the film’s appeal comes into focus, and where it gets its emotional power. Contemporary power is faceless and everywhere, and nobody can punch it. Sin City offers a world in which evil has a face and a family name, in which it’s literally colored yellow so you can’t miss it, and in which a big enough man can break it with his hands. That’s a fantasy, and a conservative one. But it names a real longing, and the film knows how to feed it.

Benjamin’s warning about this kind of pleasure is sharper than Foucault’s. At the end of his reproduction essay, he observed that humanity had become so alienated from itself that it could experience its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure of the first order. He was writing about fascism, and it would be absurd to call Sin City fascist. But the film does take violence, especially violence against the body, and turn it into pure design: blood glowing white, a decapitated head lit like a lamp. It aestheticizes the very thing its allegory could have exposed. The baroque mourning play at least mourned. Sin City mostly savors.

What color is for

The question of whose bodies get savored is where Laura Mulvey becomes unavoidable. Her argument in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is that classical film organizes looking along gender lines. Men drive the story; women stop it. A woman on screen tends to become spectacle, an image whose “to-be-looked-at-ness” freezes the narrative for a moment of contemplation. Mulvey identified two ways a film manages that image: by investigating and punishing the woman, or by turning her into a fetish, an overvalued object whose beauty is complete in itself.

Sin City does both, often in the same shot, and its signature technique is a fetish in almost the textbook sense. Selective color in this film overwhelmingly marks women: the red dress in the overture, the stray colored details on women’s bodies, the lit-up showgirl glamour of Nancy’s lasso dance. Color is where the film’s eye lingers. It’s the place where the narrative pauses so that the image can be admired.

Consider the narration too. Every story is told by a man. The Salesman, Marv, Dwight, Hartigan: the voiceover belongs to them, and so does the inner life. Women in this film don’t narrate; they motivate. Goldie, the woman whose death launches Marv’s story, is introduced as a body in his bed, and she’s dead almost before the plot begins. Her twin sister exists largely to be mistaken for her. Old Town’s prostitutes are given guns and their own territory, a legitimately interesting idea about a negotiated, outlaw sovereignty, but the film can’t stop framing them as pinups even while they’re running the place.

The usual defense is that this is all pastiche, a knowing reproduction of pulp’s gender politics. But pastiche isn’t critique unless something in the reproduction changes the way we see the original, and Sin City has no interest in that. Its fidelity is the whole point. Faithfully copying a fetish just gives you a more polished fetish.

There’s a more interesting connection worth making, and it runs between Mulvey’s later work and Benjamin. In Death 24x a Second, published a year after Sin City, Mulvey wrote about the “pensive spectator,” the viewer who, thanks to digital playback, can pause and contemplate a frozen frame, and finds in the stillness a kind of reflection that a moving image usually rushes past. Sin City is a film made entirely of stillness. Every shot aspires to the condition of a panel. In theory it should be the ideal object for pensive viewing. But stillness only becomes reflective when it interrupts something. Here everything is already frozen, and in that permanent pause the women are frozen into poses while the men remain the ones who move, speak, decide, and die meaningfully.

A gorgeous ruin

What, then, is Sin City? It’s a real achievement, and it deserves more credit than its imitators have let it keep. Its fusion of comic page and moving image was a genuine formal invention, and at its best (Rourke’s ruined tenderness, the stark cutout beauty of the snow in Hartigan’s last scenes, that red dress on the rooftop) it produces images that stay lodged in the mind the way great panels do. It understood something real about its moment: that digital cinema could make a film entirely out of signs, and that audiences hungry for a world where power has a face would happily live there for two hours.

But the film’s brilliance and its limits come from the same source. Because it is pure image, it can’t discover anything. Because it is pure allegory, its people barely exist. Because it makes violence beautiful, it never asks what the beauty costs. And because its eye is a fetishist’s, it can only see women as the places where color goes.

Benjamin believed the shock of new images could wake people up, but he also knew that shock becomes habit. The fate of Sin City’s style bears him out. Nine years later, a sequel arrived with the same look, many of the same actors, and almost no audience. The trick that had felt like a revelation now looked like a filter. That’s the clearest verdict on the original: it was an event in the history of the image, and an event, by definition, can’t be repeated. What’s left is a gorgeous ruin, one that’s still worth walking through, as long as you notice who is doing the talking and who is only being looked at.