I came home last night and decided to watch Sin City–it had been a while, and evening conversation about The Spirit movie had me thinking about Frank Miller’s work on film.

I loved the Sin City comics early on, loved the art and the retro-noir dialogue. Loved the smart, sexy women and the fact that they were as badass as the men. Loved Marv, especially.

Watching the movie while I was falling asleep, eyes closing, made me focus on the language of Sin City in a way that I hadn’t in a bit, if ever. The stylized language of noir has a code all its own, strong verbs, powerful adjectives like a gut-punch just when needed, the repetition of lines, of powerful words when needed.

Its voiceover is never overpowering because it’s so clean, simple. Lines like this:

I’ve seen his victims and their twisted little faces
all wide-mouthed and bug-eyed
frozen in their last horrible moment of living

provide just the right amount of imagery with words to complement the clean black-and-white and occasional splashes of brilliant color.

I love film noir from the ’40s, movies like Laura and The Lady from Shanghai, Night and the City and Gilda. But it was thinking about Shakespeare that made me focus on the words of Sin City. Thinking about the power of words that come from a specific time and place, and what they can do.

But unlike Shakespeare, the words of noir only fit in that setting, that place. Even Sin City works best because it’s hyperstylized, because it transmuted so much of the feeling of comics to the screen.

We read comics because we love the combination of images and words. Good comics require both, but though we notice when the words are lacking it can be hard to give them extra credit when they’re extraordinary. They tend to blend into the whole seamlessly.

And we so rarely get to hear those words translated perfectly to the screen, to hear them spoken by such perfect casting choices as Mickey Rourke and Clive Owen, whose voices were simply made for these words:

No reason at all to play it quiet
No reason to play it any way but my way

and these:

All kinds of death is about to hit less than yards ahead of us
And still it’s hard to take my eyes off her

Stylized. Even with line breaks, like poetry. And it is in itself a kind of poetry, with its own rules, conventions. And Miller is a master of it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 11:30 am and is filed under Comic Books, Movies, Rewatching/Rereading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.