Sin City: Shakespearean Goodness

I’ve been aware of Frank Miller’s Sin City for years. But as a comic book, I could never get into it. Your first impression of a comic is always the artwork, before you read one caption or meet one character. What kept me from reading it is that I didn’t like the artwork. I still don’t.

It’s just a personal opinion; I’m not saying Miller’s artistic choices aren’t original or striking, they’re both. But his Black and White look on the page with no grade between light and shadow has always been so jarring I couldn’t past it. However: that same look that I don’t happen to enjoy on the printed page looks *fantastic* on the silver screen. I’m a firm believer that Film Noir has a greater appeal on the screen rather than the page, that’s why it’s called *Film* Noir. But I digress.

On the movie screen, and 100% faithfully interpreted by Director Robert Rodriguez, Sin City really shines. It’s on DVD as of yesterday (as well as the latest addition to my collection). Last night, watching what snippets of it I had time for, I noticed something for the first time: Sin City is crawling with Shakespearean thematic elements and characters.

The first one that caught my attention was Marv, from the segment The Hard Goodbye. He is determined to get revenge for a murdered lover, but given his mental condition he has strong doubts as to the identity of the killer. He knows who he suspects, but he needs to make absolutely certain first. Hamlet: The Great Dane was visited by the ghost of his murdered father who identified Uncle Claudius as his killer. Despite the spectral visit, Hamlet *still* needed to make sure by other means.

There is a great deal of violence in Miller's stories. The lion’s share of it is done in pursuit of revenge. Anyone up for Titus Andronicus? The eventually-loco general’s daughter is ravaged and maimed, and his sons are wrongly executed by the state. Marv cuts a bloody swath through Sin City in pursuit of Goldy’s killer, and wreaks a vengeance on the guilty party equal in mayhem to Titus, if not equal in style. Of course, as Marv puts it, “it’s pretty damn weird to eat people.”

Things have a way of falling to crap with breakneck speed in Sin City. In The Big Fat Kill, the protagonist Dwight’s life goes south for the same reason Romeo of Romeo & Juliet’s does: He kills the wrong guy. Not wrong as in “That wasn’t correct;” wrong as in “Given the consequences of that *particular* homicide, you should have given the matter more thought, genius.”

There are other examples I can make, but I don’t want to spoil the movie for you if you haven’t seen it, or the comics if you haven’t read them. Any more than I already have, at least. Movie news reports that Robert Rodriguez *is* planning to produce the other number of Sin City stories as films, in 2006 and 2008, respectively. I, for one, can’t wait.

Yea, verily.