Sin City -- Shocked! Shocked!

Getting old does not necessarily mean losing touch with mainstream culture, but it does impose a certain barrier to understanding. As we age we move first toward and then away from the mean of human experience. I now occupy a position somewhere on the "long tail" of the demographic charts and the world I remember is not the one that informs the perceptions of most Americans.

This was brought home to me again yesterday. "She Who Shall Not Be Named" and I accompanied a friend to see Sin City. Since I have some modest credentials as a "film scholar" the others looked to me for critical opinions. I was trying to be polite and consequently muttered some vague things about style and CGI and how nice it was to see Mickey Rourke back in action (I fondly remember his early work in Diner and Angel Heart), and how much I loved the noir genre, and how much Rutger Hauer is coming to resemble Rod Steiger. But beneath the polite amenities I was deeply disturbed -- not so much by the film itself, but by the audience reaction.

Sin City is one of the most unrelentingly violent, sadistic, nihilistic, and brutal films you will ever see. The fact that all this is contained in a magnificently stylish and dynamic package does not alter the fact that this film wallows in human degradation. It is an all-out assault on our humanity. It features murder, torture, cannibalism, vivisection and worse. It's view of humanity is unrelentingly bleak. Beneath the stylish surface it is an unredeemably vile and loathsome thing.

And several people in the audience loved every moment of it. They cheered and laughed at some of the most gruesome scenes, and as they wandered out of the theatre they babbled on joyfully about it, recounting some of its most vicious moments. They scared the hell out of me.

These were not children. They were twenty- and thirty-something adults. The movie obviously touched something in them that I found incomprehensible and repulsive. I was shocked and disturbed. There was a profound gulf in sensibility between me and them.

This was not the first time something like this had happened. A couple of years ago I screened, for a college-age audience, a film by Tony Scott [Ridley's idiot brother] titled True Romance. Some students had requested that it be shown in order to complete the "Tarentino Cycle," [though he was just the screenwriter]. There are two shocking scenes in it -- one distinguished by its over the top racism [which did shock the kids] and the other by its over the top misnogynistic violence [which thrilled them]. When James Gandolfini sadistically brutalized Patricia Arquette the male students went wild -- laughing and joking and cheering him on. The women in the audience sat silent till the end when they cheered Patricia's revenge.

I was shocked by their reaction. At the time I rationalized it by remembering that they were teenagers and therefore by definition marginal. For them stylized violence is trangressive, a way of violiating the rules of a culture that excludes them from meaningful adult roles.

But yesterday's audience was comprised of adults -- young to middle-aged with just a few of us old fogeys in attendance. Granted it was an afternoon performance [one of the joys of retirement is that you can do things during work hours] and these guys [the audience was overwhelmingly male] should have been at work. Maybe the marginalization thesis works for them too, but I fear not. I could test that by attending an evening performance, but I have no wish to subject myself to Sin City again.

So which is it? Are we dealing with a generational divide in which young to middle-aged adults respond favorably to things my generation despises? Or is it simply a case of marginal young men striking back at a society that cares little for them and their problems?

Scanning reviews doesn't resolve the question. They have been generally favorable and many critics admit to a guilty fascination with Sin City and its inhabitants. It could be argued that most reviewers are young to middle-aged and therefore reflect a generation's sensibility. But there is also the fact that the critical community subscribes to a methodology that distances themselves from the mainstream culture and consciously opens itself to transgressive material. Thus a really old guy like Roger Ebert can enthusiastically endorse this pile of .....

I don't know the answer. Do you?