10 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy Sin City

2. Noir Is Real

Film noir is a genre that has produced some of the most infamous lines of dialogue in cinema history, some of the smokiest screen sirens (Humphrey Bogart included), and any number of evocative images harnessing the lightning techniques of German expressionism to create a foreboding, otherworldly setting. They're not supposed to be realistic. Far from it. You think that Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, the authors who wrote most of the movies' source material, had actual experience as private eyes? No! They probably never even met a gangster moll! It's all make believe innit. All larger-than-life, fictional material that are meant to exist in their own little pocket universe, where everybody wears trenchcoats and fedoras don't have an unfortunate political association. Sin City is based on the premise that that is how the world works. That is the same world than Basin City exists in, a world where all the men are either downtrodden detectives or righteous vigilantes (with trenchcoats) or else big-time gangsters. And mostly all the women are femme fatale sex objects, prostitutes, or - surprise! - the bad guys. It takes it as read that such a universe exists, and that all the tropes and cliches therein aren't hacky but just the way things are. And the sooner you deal with that the sooner you can get on with all the fun business of Marv hitting things, Hartigan crying and Miho slicing fools up. Oh and it's got even more ridiculous lighting than a film noir, even, so we suppose you also need to accept that it's perpetually nighttime in Basin City and most of the streetlights are always set to "atmospheric".