Sin City and Arabian Nights and Days

Frank Miller's Sin City and Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days

I recently (finally) saw Sin City and afterwards realized that most of the "good" guys are low-life thugs. Bruce Willis's character, the police officer John Hardigan, is an exception, but he is nonetheless low on the pecking order. The bad guys include: a corrupt politician (and son), a powerful bishop, and nefarious mobsters, alike in their high positions on various totem poles.

The pattern I see is that the little guys, the small fries, are good and the big fish, the politically powerful are the bad guys. I dare say that Sin City is making a commentary on society. Sin City is proclaiming that the evils perpetrated by corrupt politicians, businessmen, and other higher-ups are so heinous that the sins of small-time criminals are practically righteous in comparison.

Not that the small fries can't be evil. They can, but only when they are working for the powerful. (and even then, some are just plain folk working for the wrong people. This is how the Irish mercenaries are treated.)

The moral code of Sin City is laid out most clearly by the delicate arrangement negotiated by the prostitutes. They have independence and protect themselves from abusive pimps and a culture of drugs and disease with guns and a peace treaty with the city cops. The makers of Sin City are laying out their idea of a utopia: the lower classes ruling themselves free from the interference of corrupt and greedy power-mongers.

I certainly wasn't the first to point out moral values in Sin City, but I might be the first to make the connection to Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days. Mahfouz's book features a corrupt city that undergoes a violent cleansing of the upper echelons of government.

There are significant differences between Frank Miller's work and Mahfouz's, such as the direction and motivation given to the "good guys" by beings more powerful than themselves (genies) in Nights. In Sin City the good guys are largely self motivated.

However, there are interesting parallels particularly between Sin City's John Hardigan and Nights's Gamasa al-Bulti. Both are good cops trying to change a corrupt system. Both are brought low, given a second chance, and use their new lease on life to be heroes. Gamasa is reincarnated (also a theme throughout Sin City) through the powers of a genie and John Hardigan is let out of prison after 8 years.

Mahfouz makes no moral judgment on the structure of society in that he does not universally damn the highest levels of hierarchical power the way Sin City does, and Sin City's characters largely lack the sort of internal questioning and struggle that Nights's characters face, yet both stories advocate the righteous killing, the noble assassination of the corrupt. These are things that modern society would never condone, yet more and more the democratic process seems insufficient to evoke the necessary change.

I would love to compare these works further, but that is all I have time for.

And on a loosely related note, here is an amusing website examining some of the physics of Sin City. Yes, the physics are wrong, sigh, still, it's interesting: Sin City physics

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