Related Links

0

Sin City Hell and Back

Sin City: Hell and Back

By Frank Miller

'It isn't pretty what a town without pity can do.'

Frank Miller's Hell and Back is love, Sin City style. At its heart it's a romance, in which a hero meets a beautiful woman in one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments, they fall in love almost instantly before being separated, and the hero strives to get his love back. In fact, it's the oldest romance of all, recalling Orpheus, who indeed had to go to Hell and back for his love. Orpheus didn't fare well in the end, but Frank Miller has more faith in his hero Wallace that some day, Orpheus just might make it.

Wallace is a tall, muscular, laconic man whom hard-boiled narratives would usually make a loner. He's not-- he has friends aplenty, most of them veterans like himself who call him Commander. Wallace has forsaken the life of a Medal of Honor-winning soldier for the life of an artist, letting his hair and beard grow wild. He dreams of doing something wonderful with his art, but right now he's stuck selling pictures to skin magazines. We open with Wallace driving by himself, angry that he's given up a paying gig because of pride. He's late with the rent to his saintly landlord, a large busybody who ribs him like a son.

It's while Wallace is driving that he chances to see Esther, a depressed actress in the process of hurling herself into the cold bay. He fishes her out, once he and his landlady nurse the woman back to health, the landlady leaves him alone with her to fall in love. Esther is having a tough time as an actress, and she relates to Wallace. 'She asks about my paintings... asks all the right questions,' Wallace tells us. We don't need to know anymore. They've finally found one another, and more detail would only seem false.

And then, all of the sudden, Esther is kidnapped by thugs who drug Wallace so he watches helplessly as she disappears in a car. Hell and Back, which covered nine monthly issues, is the story of Wallace's search for a woman he's loved for just long enough to really mean it.

Wallace's odyssey is a winding Frank Miller labyrinth, as our hero comes up against several cliches turned on their ear. He turns to a crooked cop who may not be so crooked after all, and finds that every time he follows a lead, someone else seems to be feeding it to him. Beautiful women get in his way, and some of them try to kill him. Soon Wallace has discovered a conspiracy in which one missing actress is such a small and meaningless part to the conspirators that they all seem shocked that he'd look for her. And what he finds at the end is, indeed, Hell.

Miller has a way with mixing the plausible and the absurd with ease-- I love the moment when Wallace's compatriot the Captain rescues Wallace just after he's been given a powerful hallucinogen. Wallace and the Captain must fight for their lives against assassins with guns, but Miller shows the scene through Wallace's eyes. Every character is warped into a hallucination, some of them classical, like cherubs, and some of them part of Frank Miller's ghosts in the attic: characters appear as Captain America, ED-209, even Hellboy.

A quest story like this works only if the main character is put through punishment that urges him to give up. As he searches for Esther, Wallace is drugged, beaten, jailed, driven over a cliff, and seduced. There's a wonderful moment when the conspiracy finally addresses him, tired of trying to put him off. 'Esther is no-one. No friends. No family. She doesn't matter. Wallace responds, 'She has a friend.'

Hell and Back isn't so much film noir as it is that curious hybrid of noir and comic book heroics that Frank Miller seems to own. Call it Miller Noir. Of course Miller wouldn't even deign to kick my tail for calling his beloved, 10-year exploration of the bounds of deliberately non-superheroic crime stories super-hero like, but look: Philip Marlowe talked like Miller's hero Wallace talks, and so does Mike Hammer. But by the time Wallace suits up like Nick Fury, if Nick Fury had had the cool to carry throwing stars and a sword, we're in a very special Frank Miller-devised comic book dream.

And what a dream. Drawing equally from comics, crime dramas like Richard Stark's 'The Outfit,' and of course the noir of old, Sin City: Hell and Back is a violent little romance, a whore with a heart of gold. Love has come to Sin City, and for once, something goes right in the town with pity.