“
She is my warrior woman. Always, and never.”[1] The battle of the sexes has typically feature heavily in film noir, with patriarchy ultimately achieving the upper hand. With reference to “Sin City”, has the genre changed as a result of feminism?
To analyse efficiently the overall consensus of the gender conflict in film noir, it is initially best to acquire an background and explanation of what the genre is. Film noir emerged from a period of political instability: 1941-58, the time of the Second World War and the Cold War. In the United States this was a time of repressed insecurity and paranoia; emotions generating mental instability, as is similarly seen the protagonists in Sin City (2005, directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez). The American Dream seemed in tatters, and American national identity was under severe strain. The audience wanted something to reflect their cynical mood, having just endured another World War. Hollywood wanted B-movies to supply them. Film noir was the appropriate territory for both institution and audience alike.
With reference to the ‘Before and After’ genre ideas of Altman; the producers unknowingly preceding critics, film noir is now believed to be, “A movie characterized by low-key lighting, a bleak urban setting, and corrupt, cynical characters.”
[2] It is a term usually used, “to describe a dark, suspenseful thriller.”
[3] Yet alternatively, it’s insisted that “film noir is not a genre, but rather the mood, style, point-of-view, or tone of a film.”
[4]These explanations are all essential, for through their different definitions develops the argument as to what is this ambiguous genre film noir? And can it be simplified and cemented into a single accepted identity? Furthermore, the debate spirals downwards evermore still, right to the term genre. Its definition of “meaning type of classification”
[5] is not questioned. But this word, too, suffers from feelings of fraudulent identity, and excessive nitpicking. This stems particularly from the Barthes’ belief that “all texts refer finally to each other”
[6], hence only ‘hybrid’ or ‘sub’ is perhaps always the necessary prefix for the word genre, for there are no pure-breed, single genre movies still being made.
To ignore this is to disregard the mass Twentieth First Century audience, all of whom expect no less than a conglomerate of movie types together in one text. And in our laissez-faire economics, dominate media industries would never reject revenue from the pluralistic, active audience. However, without introducing a specific moving image text, discussing this debate is a fruitless endeavour. Thus, this question of if “film noir is a genre or a visual style”
[7] will again be addressed later. For now, what can be agreed on is that, given these definitions and demarcations, the customarily male dominance in film noir is not by right or means some deliberate complexity, or even a necessity. Mostly, it is the director’s decision, the audience’s expectation, and the hegemonic stronghold Hollywood has on noir, that means these ‘black’ films have preferred protagonists of the traditionally more formidable sex for so many reoccurring years. Basing main perusal on the movie Sin City it will be observed as to whether this patriarchy is reinforced with conventions of the old, or broken with the noir of the new.
The text’s visual style is as much homage to earlier film noir, as it is an improvement on the past. Whereas in older silver screen, film noir such as The Big Sleep (1946, directed by Howard Hawks) and Notorious (1946, directed by Alfred Hitchcock), the audience would have to be told the colour of anything moderately important, now by post-production, editing techniques, important items are deliberately coloured for the sake of the viewer. This suggest that film noir is more of a visual style, but not that ‘Sin City’ relies on it.
‘Sin City’ starts with the camera fading to a CGI-created nighttime, which is a development over the original night-by-night camera shooting of historical film noir. It is a rooftop scene, and a diegetic cop siren sounds, the pitch being the first implicit audience signifier that crime is perhaps a persuasive presence in this urban environment. The music then goes into a non-diegetic jazz sound, typically romantic in its gesture. We see a lone person. A lithesome lady wrapped in a red dress. This is a mise-en-abime for herself. Even if only in an unconscious manner, the audience identifies her as the typical noir femme fatale. Matriarchal power is before us.
Dangerous and seductive, she stands taut towards the railing. “Although the femme fatale remains a male fantasy at least she has the compensation of seducing, rather than being seduced by, the male protagonist and often leads him to a bad end.”
[8] With this in mind, she is someone by whom every Freudian follower, unconsciously if willingly wants to be dominated by. A woman for whom every feminist will cheer. And the one to whom the audience wholly expects the man to fall victim. From a medium-long shot in the foreground, we see her askance features, and in the background, from the shadows, a stranger approaches.
Confident in stride, tuxedo wearing to connote, “masculine independence and aggression”
[9] ; he is the Bondian representative of patriarchy. A Straussian binary opposition has emerges. A voiceover takes over. His voice. Masculinity superiority dominant ideology is reinforced. The audience begins to doubt the woman’s position of power. His voice in our heads, we hear him speak. His monologue is a smooth, sotto voce of poetic enunciation. He challenges brutish male stereotypical stupidity. He is our hero.
They begin to talk. An implicit battle has begun for gender supremacy. The camera angles switch betwixt both of them, over their shoulders in a shot reverse shot. The audience feels the full impact of their words. We warm to them, particularly the man. He is driving both the conversation and the narrative forward. He is also a gentleman – he has just offered her a cigarette. He is practically handing over his phallic power. Or a piece of it. The audience is affable towards him. She accepts, power then swinging to matriarchy.
Rain falls, synchronous sound coming soon after. The audience sees the storm surge.
Rightfully, the woman then takes the dialogue reigns. She reveals she is readying to face an adversary. The man says she wants to be rescued. The hero says he will help her. Passively, stereotypically, she accepts this. The unknowing audience will be tricked into thinking of her now only as a Proppian princess. Conversely, fans of film noir will figure this a femme fatale trap, typically to trick men. Parallel asynchronous romantic music begins. The two kiss and embrace, each other ensnared, her svelte form melting in his strong frame. The audience are offered a brief postmodernist intertextual comic-book shot of the kissing couple. This is as much for Frank Miller’s fans as it is signifying an immortal love, captured in a single frozen second. A peaceful picture of a thousand words.
Light flashes with a swift sound.
The man’s voiceover starts again. He anchors what happened, the explanation demanded from a tense audience. “The silencer makes a whisper of the gunshot. I’ll never know what she was running from. I’ll cash her cheque in the morning.”
[10]The audience is disgusted at that man, as through the voiceover they now feel mislead by the money-lusting misogynist. He silently holds her, almost remorseful, slowly lowering her to their knees as the rain patters downwards. He waits until the last of her life slips away, and she goes stiff. Repulsed with us, the camera pulls and winds away from the event. We get our last look at that anti-hero. This extreme high-angle, archetypal noir shot of the scene is a generic one, shown from “an oppressive and fatalistic angle that looks down on its helpless victim to make it look like a rat in a maze.”
[11] The audience can only unsettlingly assume that the resulting crimson that flows into the on-screen words ‘Sin City’ is a metonymy of the dead woman’s own blood.
This dawning disequilibrious, stun tactic that the directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez have chosen to execute is done for multiple purposes. The first is to instil the feeling of melancholy and moral corruption that churns so vividly in film noir, and to inject these emotions into the passive audience this emblematic scene is done to “sum up the diegesis of the film.”
[12] Additionally, as this was also the first and same scene through which Frank Miller was introduced to the idea of the movie by Robert Rodriguez, the audience are given a similar, privileged prologue to that of the auteur. Finally, this opening to reintegrate the casual moviegoer into a genre that has not stalked the movie screen since relatively recent reinvigoration, with films such as L.A.Confidential (1997, directed by Curtis Hanson).
L.A.Confidential similarity starts with the unconventional film noir disequilibrium, as well as an almost immediate male voiceover which, with a deliberate irony and offering evidence of pluralism, denigrates the institution that made the film: Hollywood. In doing this however, Marxist would still see the directors as willingly subjugating themselves to the Studio System. Regardless of this, the anti-hero here is the lone-wolf detective type that also stars in The Maltese Falcon (1941, directed by John Huston), yet is a type oddly absent from ‘Sin City’. Instead for ‘Sin City’ we have the hulking psychotic hero, Marve, and the less romantic one, Hartigan. Dwight’s character type can be called the only genuine hero of the film, but his morals become blurred in that fiendishly noir fashion, much like the protagonist of the “quintessential film noir”
[13] ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944, directed by Billy Wilder).
In these four movies, there is typically a pro-patriarchal subjective camera, and a dominant heterosexual relationship. The (anti)-heroes’ narratives are often motivated by the Oedipal trajectory of going through difficulty to settle down afterwards with a woman. However, a sign that film noir has evolved is the inclusion in the two latest texts, if only briefly, of overt Saphism in lipstick lesbian couples. Therefore, this is some proof of progression, and evidence that small showing that society is more tolerant to ‘deviant’ sexualities. However, this does not offer much support for matriarchy’s rule, except perhaps from an extreme, radical feminist theory viewpoint. And let us not forget that in the four films, each has a leading male protagonist representing patriarchy at the fore, and their voiceovers dominate.
The voiceover is “a distinctive feature of the genre film noir”.
[14] The base utilization of these is to further identification between the invited audience and antagonistic hero, allowing them a particular perspective provided by the protagonists. In film noir, as women are always the muted group, never possessing of protagonist main leads or voiceovers to impress or express dominance, an implicit patriarchy stands. Because of this, and the fact that directors of film noir are dominantly men, the common feminist argument that men “abuse their power”
[15] is strengthened. The reason for the voiceovers is not solely for character identification, or reinforcing patriarchy throughout. They also assist help evidence “activities that have significant moral implications, the problem is magnified.”
[16] This is particularly seen in ‘Sin City’ when Dwight has the deceased cop beside him. The jostling of the car at a high speed makes the body’s slumped head move, as though nodding, and Dwight starts hallucinating that the body is speaking to him. This is one key reason then why film noir uses voiceover. The protagonists are always in stressful situations, and voiceovers help to suture the conscious and conscious conflict that is the life-force of many noir narratives.
The three, interlinked narratives of the portmanteau film ‘Sin City’ are all adapted from Frank Miller’s gloriously graphic comics, with the male sex shown to shove their stories onwards throughout. As aforementioned, this male-as-norm depiction of the main protagonists is a paradigmatic film noir convention. Although why this is a convention cannot be bound to one box, and, evidently, why there now needs to be three male voices is somewhat an enigma. It could be that nowadays men’s masculinity is currently in a “crisis”
[17]state that has not yet been resolved. This is perhaps due in part to past feminist movements inflicting ideas of the New Man into society, and thus fracturing any concrete singular ideas of masculinity towards which a male audience can aspire. Consequently, men now need multiple representations of themselves in order to appease the fragmented, multiple male audiences’ desire for narcissistic identification. Also, it could simply have been done to allow the ladies in the audience to have their pick of visual fanfare.
The fact that none of Frank Miller’s comic creations have a woman that is constantly pushing the narration demonstrates his androcentrism. This reinforcement of patriarchy is somewhat understandable, as when he was originally drawing these illustrations, societal views were not as liberal as they are in contemporary times. However, during his creative prime, his portrayal of women was radicalism reborn. This is most aptly expressed in the appearance of Gale.
Gale is the sole, respected leader of the Old Town, a rundown but sizable chunk of Sin City. With stirrups up to her heels and all the attitude to amble down the darkest Sin City alley in them, her representation as a strong leader is a paradox. This is particularly because the audience sees the Whore before them, which defines her as an extreme throwback to the women whose “lives were spent at the bidding of men.”
[18] Such a representation would satisfy any male audience need to subject someone to the gaze Laura Mulvey of which has spoken, and supports the idea that the female body is filmed to “provide erotic pleasure,” and to get “ultimately a sense of control over her.”
18 This will not be comforting to the modern female audience who disdain of such stereotypes, but Gale’s dominant personality and position, however, will.
Her decisive decisions and impulsive aggression is at a photo-finish comparison to all the men in the movie. This idea of a lead lady possessing that much power and poise has not yet been seen in ‘black’ film, showing a new development, or at least the further-enhancement of one. Easily, she is the epitome of Matriarchy. However, as this improvement has had to come from the adaptations of somewhat old work, it can be a corollary idea that film noir has not had much development. Something that can be said is that Gale is a forward step for film noir femme fatales, for she is atypical of them. The differences would best be drawn between the original female pioneer of film noir: Phyllis Dietrichson in ‘Double Indemnity’.
Phyllis is calm, calculating and calloused, whereas Gale obviously is not. The cause of this could be that women now allow themselves, or men allow them, to be more violent overall. Between the two, Phyllis would be seen overall as the forerunner for matriarchal power. This is due to her guile in getting the protagonist to do as she pleases. However, patriarchy is reinforced as the stronger of the film’s conclusion. This is because her ‘female’ feelings betray her plot to kill the protagonist, and she unsurprisingly herself gets shot with her own weapon, an appropriated phallus, thereby being punished by the male backlash.
Another area of comparison between ‘Sin City’ and ‘Double Indemnity’, is their being deemed “violent”
[19] and “brutal”
[20] in their own ways by reviewers and subjects to call for censorship in their time, which is understandable for them both. In ‘The Maltese Falcon’, and ‘L.A Confidential’, it is obvious that women are the muted group. So to gain notice or notoriety they, “have to express themselves in the dominant mode of expression.”
[21] For the first three historically, they take the route of male speech. In the case of ‘Sin City’ – there is a more violent backlash at those that want to oppress them, and this perhaps demonstrates them going towards violence. As the women are merely shot-gunning at those that are trying to annex their Old Town territory during a time of social unrest, the audience sympathise with their anti-hero means. Furthermore, it is also understandable on a psychoanalytical level, as not opposing situations such as this “would have inevitably meant a loss of fate”,
[22]which would only incur further trouble. This is supported in the Sin City when the Old Town ladies have ambushed and begun murdering their enemies in a strategic area. The audience hears Dwight explain during this slaughter that the women were not doing it for some psychotic euphoria – although their sadistically smiling faces say otherwise. Furthermore, it is said that neither is it for well deserved revenge, although the audience sees it as an added perk. He says it is because they want the mob bosses to see, when they examine their loses, that their causalities were horrific in comparison to what they might have gained. While it is Dwight’s voiceover, the audience sees him as merely a passive spectator, and that matriarchy seems to rule supreme in this concluding scene, at least within its own enclosed realm. Women cannot be colonised any longer.
Through the analysis of film noir, to declare who is the clearer victor of the war for gender superiority, it still seems likely that patriarchy is the dominant ideology. Obviously, this is strongly rebutted in terms of expressive female sexuality, and the heroine’s dynamic, destructive or deceitful tactics. However, with the narrative leading characters the audience subjectively route for all being male, and the distinctive film noir voiceovers thus being given to them, ensuring that the audience is positioned to identify with a male subjectivity, patriarchy still reigns. Female audiences are acknowledged in narrative, but only to a lesser extent.
(Word Count: 2953)
Independent Study: Bibliography
Books:
1) Kaplan E. Ann (1980), Women in Film Noir, London: British Film Institute
2) Peter Marsh and Anne Campbell (1982), Aggression and Violence, Great Britain: Basil Blackwell Place
3) John Fiske (1987), Television Culture, Great Britain: Routledge
4) Alain Silver and James Ursini (1998), Film Noir Reader, New York Place: United States Limelight Editions
5) Valerie Bryson (1999), Feminist Debates, Great Britain: Macmillian Press Place
6) Nick Lacey (2000), Narrative and Genre Key Concepts in Media Studies, China: Palgrave Place
7) James Watson and Anne Hill (2000), Dictionary of Media & Communications Studies Fifth Edition, Great Britain: Arnold Place
8) Susan Hayward (2001), Cinema Studies. The Key Concepts. Second Edition, USA and Canada: Routledge.
9) Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon (2002), The Changing Roles of Women, Great Britain: Heinemann Library Place
10) David Gaunlett (2002), Media, Gender and Identity, Great Britain: Routledge
11) Tim O’ Sullivan, Brian Dutton, and Philip Rayer (2003), Studying the Media, Italy: Oxford University Press.
12) Billy Wilder (2000), Double Indemnity, Great Britain: University of California Press
Websites:
http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html Gives an extensive look at film noir and was useful for some background knowledge.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=film%20noir Used briefly as a definition for film noir.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/10/27/double_indemnity_2005_review.shtml Used to show that reviewers regard Sin City as violent.
Films:
Sin City (2005, directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez).
The Big Sleep (1946, directed by Howard Hawks)
Notorious (1946, directed by Alfred Hitchcock)
L.A.Confidential (1997, directed by Curtis Hanson)
The Maltese Falcon (1941, directed by John Huston)
Double Indemnity (1944, directed by Billy Wilder)
[1] Sin City, produced in 2005, and directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez
[2] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=film%20noir[3] Watson, James and Hill, Anne (2000) “Dictionary of Media & Communications Studies”, page 114
[4] http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html[5] Watson, James and Hill, Anne (2000) “Dictionary of Media & Communications Studies”, page 126
[6] Fiske, John (1987 ) “Television Culture”, page 115
[7] Lacey, Nick (2000) “Narrative and Genre Key Concepts in Media Studies”, page 145
[8] Lacey, Nick (2000) “Narrative and Genre Key Concepts in Media Studies”, page 149
[9] Kaplan, E. Ann (1980) “Women in Film Noir”, page 19
[10] Sin City
[11] Silver, Alain and Ursini, James (1998) “Film Noir Reader”, page 68
[12] Hayward, Susan (2001) “Cinema Studies. The Key Concepts[ Second Edition.”, page 98
[13] http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/10/27/double_indemnity_2005_review.shtml[14] Hayward, Susan (2001) “Cinema Studies. The Key Concepts. Second Edition.”, page 98
[15] Bryson, Valerie (1999) “Feminist Debates”, Page 37
[16] Marsh, Peter and Campbell, Anne (1982) “Aggression and Violence”, Page 103
[17] Hunt, Leon (1998) “British Low Culture”, Page 57
[18] Sardar, Ziauddin and Loon, Borin Van (2002) “The Changing roles of women”, Page 114
[19] http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/05/19/sin_city_2005_review.shtml[20] Wilder, Billy (2002) “Double Indemnity”, page 1
[21] Watson, James and Hill, Anne (2000) “Dictionary of Media & Communications Studies”, page 200
[22] Marsh, Peter and Campbell, Anne (1982) “Aggression and Violence”, Page 141)
