Al wrote:
"As for the electric chair analogy, I was thinking of Marv
from SIN CITY. Hardboiled, and then some.
John added:
"and certainly a noirish world"
I'd put the emphasis on the "-ish." Although Sin City adopts
a noir style for its presentation, I find the characters to
be far too hardboiled to be noir. Now I'm not one to say noir
and hardboiled and noir are mutually exclusive, in fact, I
see a large overlap, but I don't place this within it. Almost
everyone in the world of Sin City is so hardboiled that the
noirness that envelops them never actually touches them.
There's never any possibility that the mean streets might
turn the good man mean. Look at Hartigan. Corruption keeps
him from doing his job. He rots in jail when he administers
justice outside the law. And the woman he wanted to protect
gets taken again when he gets out. But he is still a pure,
noble hero to the end. And Nancy, the victim,
"never screams." And the evil characters are pure evil. That
seems to be part of noir for me, characters confronting their
own morality, what they will and will not do to get what they
want. There is never any doubt at all how anyone will act in
Sin City -- the good guys will be good, the bad guys will be
bad -- and making its underworld denizens good and upright
citizens bad does not change that.
Mark
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