The Red Circle

Once upon a time in Ohio, I called Robert Rodriguez a “Movie God.” There is no appropriate way to fully compress into a paragraph the impact Frank Miller has had on the comics industry. These were two men that were, arguably, at the top of their game in 2005. Rodriguez had a fully independent outfit, Troublemaker Studios, in Austin, Texas. Frank Miller was finally on the verge of the cinematic career he had always wanted (RoboCop 3 sank both his and Fred Dekker’s hopes and dreams of the big time). And those forces combined to make the noir-ish, hard-boiled, blood-caked graphic novel series Sin City into a major feature film. Robert Rodriguez had zero studio interference because he could make the film on the cheap and on the quick in his own house. He even invited Frank Miller to co-direct his own creation.

One man who personified cinematic “cool” was working alongside a graphic storytelling legend.  And yet, somehow, the finished product is a cinematic non-entity. It Frankly (and Robertly) fails as a film. And I am about to tell you why.

Adaptation is a tricky thing. It’s not just the retelling of a story. You have to translate the storytelling experience, as well. Film has a way of telling those stories that is completely different than traditional mediums like books, music, or comics. For one, film has a director. His job is exactly that – he directs the viewing experience. He controls how his audience perceives his characters. He controls what information is withheld, and what information is divulged to the viewer through both performance and composition. A comics author (in close conjunction with a comics artist – very rarely are the two jobs done by one person) also has similar duties, but a lot of his work’s theme is still left to the whims of his readers.

When adapting any non-filmic story to the film media, changes must be made. As noble as “feeding pages through the camera” seems as a concept, it never results in a satisfying movie experience. A simple way to argue this point is to look at the first two Harry Potter films versus the third one. The first rigidly adhere to every literary convention and plot point of the novels. While, perhaps, the most accurate films in the series, they are also the most boring.

We’ve been there before. It’s the difference between being read to and being told a story. Film does not work as a “shot by shot” adaptation. One simply just needs to look at JAWS for this convention in practice. The genius of Steven Spielberg was to take a blockbuster novel and translate it into a blockbuster movie. It seems so simple. But, in the novel, Quint doesn’t get eaten, and the shark dies of exhaustion seconds before devouring Chief Brody, who has all but given up. The movie takes the same endgame – the shark dies – and turns it into an explosive, rousing ending that is not only visually stimulating, but thematically fulfilling. Chief Brody, long terrified of the water, is stuck directly in it with the physical embodiment of his fear. And he destroys the hell out of it. JAWS is heavily inaccurate as a word-for-word translation. It’s also one of the best films ever made.

Film has something that no other medium has. It uses the edit to tell a story. Unlike a comic book that has panels all line up in a row and a visual layout to move the viewer’s eye around the page in a general order, film is uniquely controlled. Imagine flipping through a story with one panel at a time, and a light that blinks to tell you when to turn the page. Comics and books are at the mercy of their readers. Readers are capable of taking as much time as they want to soak in all the detail of a comic panel. They will interpret a character’s demeanor and line delivery based on visual cues. The filmmaker, on the other hand, has complete control over his audience. A shot will end when he wants. A character will say a line of dialogue how he wants.  The edit itself is how the story reveals itself. You get a series of shots, that, if taken one at a time and free of context, would make little sense. But when these images are projected in a row, even without words, a story is told. The best adaptations take the heart of a movie and explore it in a uniquely cinematic way.

The best example I can think of is Chan-Wook Park’s Oldboy. If you were to take the comics of this and Sin City – both black and white, and both dealing with the morality of the scumbag – and compare their filmic counterparts, the difference would be amazing. Park takes Oldboy’s understated sketches about a man imprisoned in a hotel room for fifteen years, and drastically changes the visual look and the character’s motivations. It is, almost perfectly, taking a story and telling it as cinema. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller take a heavily stylized graphic novel about murderers and made it into a highly stylized movie about murderers. You can see the disconnect. Why was this film even made? The film is just the comic book, only moving. It adds nothing to the existing story, and it adds nothing to the experience that only film can provide. It’s the difference of being read to versus being told a story.

And this isn’t simply to point out that the Shot-For-Shot ethos of Sin City (see Bill’s argument for visual aids) yields no positive results. There are some absolutely brilliant performances – Mickey Rourke and a very, very loose Benicio Del Toro certainly come to mind – and it was pretty imaginative visually. The scenes themselves were certainly striking in the strong uses of deep blacks and blown out whites. But cool and good are sometimes in opposite street gangs. Sin City’s insistence at using the comic’s panels for storyboards is pretty, but pointless.

Sin City is, at its heart, a violent noir story. In a perfect world, that film would have been adapted without the glitter and gloss. It could have been pared down to a series of characters that felt real beneath their stylistic appearance. These are people with problems. They are interesting characters whose story is told to the viewer via  sequences of “cool shit.”  Paring down the visuals and integrating a deeper look at the horrible (yet poignant) lives of Dwight,  Marv and the Old Town Girls could have been a real tour de force entry in bringing noir back to the big screens. Instead of the rebirth of Daschiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler-esque stories, we got The Spirit. Can I be any more clear?

I once called Robert Rodriguez a “Movie-God.” I imagine I spoke too soon.

Flip Sides to hear Bill Zilla’s alternate take right here.

Share