Sin City and the relative evils of our society

I recently went to see Sin City, expecting it to be more or less an entertaining evening of comic book adaptation. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find it somewhere between Spiderman and The Punisher which are both relatively edgy interpretations of their predecessors. A little violence here, a little sex there, what you would typically expect from today’s “R” rated comic book/ graphic novel iterations on the big screen.

But it appears that the makers of Sin City weren’t going to be satisfied until their film came close to, if not actually achieved, the title of “most violent movie ever conceived and/ or brought to fruition.”

In fact, the “R” rating is highly conditional, I understand, since it is likely it would have been given harsher treatment by the Ratings Board had all the blood and gore not been in either black or white or some other strange color. I guess making the movie monotone except for someone’s lips here and there, and on one occasion a man’s entire yellow body, softens the blow of watching someone get a hatchet up the legs, his face pounded into mush on the ground, or being cut into tiny pieces by an amazingly adept hooker/ ninja swordfighter.

Here’s a snippet of what you might find in this delightful romp:

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DWIGHT:
She doesn’t quite chop his head off. She makes a Pez dispenser out of him

(They then show you this process)

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PRIEST:
There's a farm at North Cross and Lennox. It's all there. And while you're at it, ask yourself if that corpse of a slut is worth dying for.

[Marv shoots the priest]

MARV:
Worth dying for.

[Shoots him again]

Worth killing for.

[Shoots him again]

Worth going to hell for.


(Ahh…the age-old sport of killing clergymen)

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[Voice-over]
JOHN HARTIGAN:
I take out his weapons.

[Shoots Junior’s hand]

JOHN HARTIGAN:
Both of them.

[Shoots Junior’s groin]

(Ouch.)
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Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a little violence every once in a while. Sometimes it’s strangely cathartic to watch your hero avenge the death of his family/ girlfriend/ pet salamander by pushing a car out of a window, throwing any number of people off a bridge and torching four city blocks, but there comes a point when the human stomach is just not equipped to handle it any longer. Braveheart is an incredibly violent film, but it was more or less necessary to the story and it was not excessive. You have to wonder, though, if you really need to watch some man rip off some other guy’s mangled genitals, even if his body is made up and colored to be a cartoon.

But the bigger question at hand is why is this considered appropriate for mass consumption and OK for anyone under 17 to see as long as their parent is there, but a quick flash of Janet Jackson’s breast on national broadcast television is the most traumatic attack on our country we have ever seen. Why is the FCC reacting to complaints and asking NBC to hand over all of their Olympics footage to see if viewing ancient, yet naked, statues around Athens is a violation of the sweet, sweet innocence of our country? I think we should be showing these things. At least in my opinion, seeing what a breast looks like will be more useful to our nation’s maturing young boys than seeing how to appropriately chop off a man’s legs and feed them to his dog while he watches.

I think Michael Moore didn’t quite get to the core of his thesis in Bowling for Columbine as to why our country is particularly violent. I think the reason is because we are a nation of violent, yet sexually awkward and inept individuals. No one knows how to appropriately court and seduce a lover, but if you had to inflict serious pain on him or her, that’s totally fine. Why is it that we embrace violence and accept it as completely normal and more or less business-as-usual, but any hint of the sex act sends our puritanical country into a tizzy? I am convinced that had Justin Timberlake shot Janet Jackson on screen, there would have been no mosaics over the footage they replayed over and over on the news. And the Parents’ Television Council would continue on their merry way.

Someone mentioned the Bible as the root of this disturbance of the balance, and I think they may be onto something. There is a lot of discussion as to what you should and should not do sex-wise (most of which is taken out of context, I might add), but the pre and post-Jesus God seems to be pretty liberal when handing out the butt-whoopings. Torching the city of Sodom, killing the native residents of Canaan, drowning entire legions of Egyptian soldiers, and not to mention almost anything that happens in Revelations. We missed a step or two along the way folks. Europeans are known for being fantastic lovers and having no qualms about showing human body parts on television, and how much violence do they have? I think some figure showed England as having eleven gun deaths in one particular year. I think there were eleven gun deaths in South Central last night.

So all in all, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be allowed to see violence like Sin City, but I am saying that if something as far out and “suggestive” as this and other films like it are acceptable, then we need to ease off on our fear of sex and nudity so that we can get a balanced view of the world. And quite frankly, if anyone was watching the Super Bowl and hadn’t seen a breast before that incident (save the actual children who probably shouldn’t have) then there is a much bigger problem in this world. Women in America, I do not envy you having to teach sex-ed to your twenty-something serial killer boyfriends.