Choose Your Own Sin City

The film adaptation of Frank Miller's classic comic has shocking things to say about our generation [or perhaps just about Luke Baumgarten]. If shocking things frighten you, you can read a less earth-shattering version.

While my comrades went off dipping quill and ink into that southern den of iniquity, no doubt indulging all manner of wanton desire, I made a day's journey west in search of what celluloid truth and beauty [beauty, truth] might, someday, find its way inland.

Strangely, we found [intoxicants, breasts, ultra-violence, asocial computer programmers] essentially the same things.

However, where they found these things in real life, front and center, under the epilepsy lights of Las Vegas, I found them on a massive movie screen, which I chose specifically because it was a relic of 1950's cinema, and as such made viewing an homage to crime dramas and film noir all the more poignant. I was forced to sit near the front and to the far left side because asocial computer programmers also care about poignance in movie watching, and because they like to stand in long lines for days to get good seats. Also, it's hard to find parking in Seattle. When I saw the movie, it looked bent and a little pinched on one end. Distorted and poignant.

[If you haven't read the comic or if you just don't care about comics, skip to the third to last paragraph]

Sin City is a lot of little orgies. Orgies of violence, blood, dismemberment, bondage gear, breasts, dangly earrings, overacting, under-acting, smoking, drinking, criminal insanity and others. Most of all however, it is an orgy of hyper-exact adaptation. If you're a big fan of the comic, it might leave you feeling schizophrenic.

The astute media critic Ben Kromer [asocial, though not a programmer] has argued that Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's adaptation of the comic all my friends gleefully hid from their parents is perfect in every way, which is to say it's too perfect in all the wrong ways.

Because he has far more pulp, [maladjusted geek] and noir credibility than I do, here are his words:

"What's bothering me? I look for the word and come up with 'inflection'. The actors are saying the words I remember, but they're saying them wrong. They don't sound the way they do in my head. It's not the actors' specific voices, it's the inflection. Too fast, too slow, too high, too low."

The biggest problem with comic book movies, if Mr. Kromer is right, is that they can never play as well onscreen as the comic played in your head.

This is true of novels as well, though it's not such a bad thing. I never fell in love with the voice I made for Moll Flanders as she slept her way up and down the social ladder of 18^th century England or even Robert Langdon's as he deciphered DaVinci's code.

Comics, though, beg you to make up voices. They beg you to play out scenes. The voices you make up always kick ass. Each scene carries the perfect tone. Everything in your head is always perfect.

Then some plebian like Michael Madsen comes along, probably doesn't even read the comic, and screws up everything. Fifteen minutes after the opening day's first showing gets out, 10,000 blogs post saying just that. He ruined everything.

Sometimes though, taking liberties with dialogue works.

The comic was at once a fervent homage to and a gentle satire of the pulp and noir genres. The film takes the satire one step further, as now there are actors, forced to recite the implausibly hard-boiled dialogue.

If you've ever read a crime novel or a pulp comic and thought to yourself, real people don't talk like that, Sin City proves you right. Shellie's [Brittany Murphy] parting soliloquy to Dwight [Clive Owen], urging him on, is brash and babydollish. With a single, massive tear poised on the apple of her cheek, she takes her time, pouting, over-mouthing the words, pausing between them.

It's time Rodriguez gives to her, offering an extended and uncharacteristic pause in a highly frenetic movie. The audience laughs.

Comic book dialog sucks, and we, realizing that it sucks, are awesome. Likewise, 15 minutes after the first showing of the day, 10,000 blogs post to that effect. That was, and we are, awesome.

This, in a sense, is what the cult of pop culture is, either what it always was or what it has become. We watch, read, or listen to things and either revel in them until they become a part of us, or we critique them with detachment, depending on which clique you roll with [depending on if you ride a Vespa or if you live with your parents].

Sin City, the film, is the perfect illustration of this. For people who loved the comic, it's just about the most faithful adaptation imaginable. As such, it's awesome.

The person who wrote and illustrated the comic also co-directed the movie. He practically used his comic panels as storyboards, but still it lacks something untouchable and certainly unfilmable. Something like childhood. As such, it's not good enough.

[Comic haters skip to here]

I could continue, but to those that have never read the comic--to those who didn't devote large chunks of their childhood and adulthood to pop culture in general--such meta-aesthetic pondering and psychological posturing would mean nothing. It probably means nothing anyway.

Sin City is starkly black and white, with occasional splotches of color. The film has lots of blood, but it's usually not red. There are beheadings and dismemberments and a lot of joking about both of those things. There are lots of female breasts. The bad guys are rapists, child molesters and murderers. The good guys are murderers too, but while onscreen they demonstrate profound good will, masculine compassion and self-sacrifice, almost not like murderers at all. Despite the strangeness of this, Sin City has many familiar tropes and themes. Good and Evil [in the Platonic sense] fight it out here. Good always wins.

If this sounds appealing to you, go watch it.

Read the full thing here.

Titles are meaningless

I wrote an op-ed this week. I have no idea how many Catholics live in Sandpoint.

After his death, on Saturday, following a long battle with Parkinson's disease, television stations all over the world preempted their reality television shows for a dose of reality. Pope John Paul II, probably the single most powerful spiritual leader in the world, was dead. God's Catholic man on planet Earth was gone.

The broadcasts were a retrospective of John Paul II's most courageous moments in office. His fight against communism in Poland. His struggle against what he called the "culture of death" worldwide. They were laudatory. For now, besides Christopher Hitchens, everyone in the world loves him. Even most Evangelical Christian commentators have momentarily stopped referring to the Bishopric of Rome as the seat of the anti-Christ to praise this particular pontif. Most commonly since his death, people have marveled at the unique swath he cut across the philosophical, theological and even political landscape. He seemed unwilling to ally himself with any one faction within the Church. He took bold strides to restore orthodoxy while working to reverse Anti-Semitism amongst Catholics and apologizing for the role of Catholics in the slave trade. He was conservative, but not rigidly so.

But after the world has wiped its eyes and mourned Pope John Paul II, and it takes a harder look at the man Carol Wojtyła, what will remain is the life of an unbelievably powerful man who fought for humanity in a maddeningly piecemeal fashion. While he didn't tow a party line, John Paul II was nonetheless a fierce ideologue who was both a liberator and an oppressor. Using a first-century rubric for good and evil, many sins of omission marred his pontifical infallibility.

His work with Lech Wałęsa's Solidarity movement in Poland is widely credited with bringing down Communism in that country. His force was so great among the religious of Eastern Europe that Mikhail Gorbachev said communism worldwide only fell through his influence.

The Pope himself at least believed he was present at an important crossroads. He referred to the attempt on his life by Mehmet Ali Ağca as "one of the last convulsions of the 20th century ideologies of force. Force stimulated fascism and Hitlerism, force stimulated communism."

While this is true, force needs no ideology to drive it. Force itself is a sufficient motivator for oppression. Governments of force existed well before fascism and communism, existed contemporaneously with them, and persist still. And while Carol Wojtyła stood in staunch defiance of both the Nazis and Soviets, his record against the equally lethal and repressive dictators of South America was deplorable.

His hatred for Communism ran deep and, fearing its growth in the Americas, he publicly condemned the liberation theologians of South America because of a tangential connection to Marxism. He forced his priests to make peace with the likes of Augusto Pinochet and other tyrants because of their ostensible ties to capitalism. This was especially disastrous in El Salvador, where Cardinal Óscar Romero sought the Church's help ending the brutal murders perpetrated by right-wing death squads.

Far from being a revolutionary priest, Romero was a conservative who merely recognized a desperate need. John Paul was unable to see the distinction between liberation theology's solidarity with the poor and the class struggle of Marxism. As a result, thousands of people, including Romero, died in a country as rigorously Catholic as Poland.

John Paul II often rebuked the West for employing an "imperialistic monopoly of economic and political supremacy [gained] at the expense of others," but allowed exactly this trampling of the poor by right-wing dictators because the thought of collaborating with pseudo-Marxists was too distasteful.

John Paul II's later magisterial work focused on questions of human agency. His 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae was a pointed rebellion against what the pontiff claimed was a world-wide "culture of death," in which babies are routinely killed before they are born and old people are similarly killed before they should die. John Paul deftly laid out a line of demarcation for believers, which included contraception, abortion, embryo manipulation, euthanasia and capital punishment. All these things, he wrote, were intrinsically evil.

As with communism, he ignored certain vitally important contemporary issues [overpopulation, disease etc] to ensure his culture of life message was consistent. So concerned was he with not preventing or abridging life that he seemed to spend little time in reflection about the quality of those millions of lives he urged into existence.

Get born, Stay alive, don't die. Food, employment, shelter, personal freedoms, economic parity--all that is up to you. Good luck. Do whatever you can to have a good life, as long as your good life includes ten kids or celibacy. Or the rhythm method. And capitalism.

If your life stops being good, becomes unbearable--if something in your brain misfires, and you're a vegetable, drooling, unable to feed yourself, or if you're in horrible pain every second of every day--know that God's will is nigh.

If someone you know is suffering, alive but in excruciating, impotent pain, let it go. Let them relish what life is left. Morphine is fine, just keep him plugged in.

And if your husband--who sleeps with prostitutes, who beats you, who has boils on his flesh and whose teeth are falling out--if he forces himself upon you, relent, he's your husband. Even if whatever he has kills you, he's your husband. You'll be in a better place soon.

For overpopulation, unrecoverable states, and AIDS, there are no biblical correlates. You can't look to Matthew, Isaiah or Deuteronomy.

However, where there is no textual evidence, thankfully God gave us pragmatism and the power to invent. We can wipe out an astounding number of these horrible human blights with just one tool and some honest ethical inquiry. We need condoms [male and female] and the power to question.

Forget for the moment about abortion, the death penalty and stem cells. Focus on condoms. Maybe contraception is against God's plan. Rape is too. So is murder by retrovirus. Pick the lesser.

That is not to say we should always utilize the technology available. We live in a time of rapidly advancing medical technologies and must develop an ethics to keep up with our inventions as well as our plagues. We have the power to keep almost anyone alive, or at least breathing. If not their minds, we can at least keep their hearts beating. We can keep oxygen flowing to their brains. Given these most amazing of powers, we must now select the right ideology. We have to honestly ask ourselves, If God [through the processes of nature, the body's ability to heal, miracles] isn't keeping this person alive, why should we?

More than communism or fascism, the ideology of power that is most dangerous in this bioethical quagmire is the one that answers, we should because we can.

Right now, lying in state is a man who symbolizes the fundamental shortcoming of all ideologues, rigid views and a myopic perception of context. Given his many accomplishments, his work in ending oppression in Poland and his efforts to end capital punishment worldwide, Pope John Paul II was still a man who made peace with murderers like Pinochet and who told a world crippled by overpopulation--which is also, this minute, being decimated by AIDS--to not protect themselves.

A lot happens between encouraging life and not taking life, between birth and death. When absolutism and idiologism rule, it's that long stage--the living part--that we forgot.

Read the full thing here.