Sin, Yes; Porn, No

I'm surprised to see Josh Chafetz and Lindsay Beyerstein both taking a pedestrian position vis-à-vis violence in Sin City. I disagree that the movie's violence or gore is objectionable in any sense, and that's fine—people can disagree about these things. But I don't think Josh and Lindsay are couching their objections in fair terms. Josh says that he worries about the state of my soul (not my individual soul per se, but insofar as it exists, I assure you it's pure gold); Lindsay thinks the movie was "a depressing reminder of how sexy torture is to some people" (which is needlessly hyperbolic and inflammatory).

So my strong concern for my good ethical name compels me to say that I not only disagree with them, I think their positions are unsustainable. There are excellent reasons for Quentin Tarantino to have made Kill Bill as greedily violent as it was, and the same applies to Sin City. Both works have certain aesthetic obligations, anthropological goals, and camp objectives that signal the OK for ratcheting up the violence—to a steroid-fueled cartoonism that isn't actually like violence in any sense. I think these ends have been pretty well covered by the film critics. But let's say that Tarantino and Miller/Rodriguez/Tarantino had shot the violence without the mitigating cartoonism. I can't imagine that these movies would work with realistic violence, but putting that aside for a moment—would they be offensive?

Cut to Wendy Steiner's The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, which I try to push whenever the conversation turns to decency standards. Steiner highlights a legalistic paradox concerning varying standards for different media: Nobody, for example, bothers any more to try Lady Chatterly's Lover for obscenity; even court precedent has decided that text no longer has a pornographic capacity. (Otherwise I'd include American Psycho in this discussion, which is an excellent example of intentional obscenity as literary tool.) This happens whenever newer technology replaces a medium as the prime format for smut, e.g., as photography entirely replaced literature. In hindsight, these provocative cases always seem quaint, and though that consideration shouldn't necessarily color our judgment, I'm willing to bet that a summer blockbuster made 5 years from now will make Sin City look the way that Sin City makes Braveheart look: tame.

In obscenity trials of any medium, the strategy is the same: to show that the objectionable material is at the apex of realism, critically indistinguishable from reality. The defense is always the same as well: to prove that even lascivious imagery works in a virtual way if it does so to serve art (e.g., Robert Mapplethorpe; the NEA 4). Lindsay gets at this in her point that Sin City provides an insufficient dramatic arc for the violence to serve. I think that's wrong because the violence is partly Miller's point in ways that lots of people are discussing. But moreover, most summer action movies provide the same plot (think: any non-funny movie starring Nicholas Cage) but tweak the violence—sounds like traditional porn to me.

I think it's more helpful to describe these things in terms of virtual and real than narrative . The violence of Sin City is virtual. Were the violence realistic, per my earlier question, I think there'd be a much stronger case against the movie, because that would amount to neutering a crucial tool used to accomplish the aesthetic.

I'm trying to think of a movie that features violence I find offensive. The most recent I can come up with is City of God, a movie laden with offensive violence, being more documentarian in nature and conveying the awful violence of a really horrible situation. But it's far from the case that the movie is offensive in any sense for it. The Passion of Christ was far bloodier than the Bible requires it to be because Mel Gibson's theology is pornographic in itself, so in some sense I guess that he successfully found the virtual violence level to match his inner gore. Ladder 49 sounds as if it features some offensive fire violence, but only because it serves as a backdrop for a bunch of hero-assholes. Tom & Jerry don't really do anything except hit each other with frying pans but it's all virtual, so what can you do?

Soft on Hollywood violence? I'm afraid a snuff film might find a sympathetic audience in me. My opinion might change were science to make ground on the claims that portrayed fiction affects the way that people interact with the world, but I'm not holding my breath on those charges. Breakthroughs in behavioral science notwithstanding, the virtuality of fiction serves as a built-in use/mention clause. The ideas in fiction are open to hostile criticism, but I think that fiction devices probably should be given a limitless purview.