Meet Frank Miller. You may know him from such hits as 300, Sin City or, if you're a real nerd, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.
I know him as the cranky prick who has been humping the dead corpse of the noir genre for so long, there's isn't an orifice he's left unraped, the director of what looks to be the shittiest movie of the year and, of course, the poster boy for the Manly Man complex.
Frank Miller is obviously a punk. Look at him, in that 1986 photo above-- that's the face of a man who hangs out at arcades, goes to Goth clubs, rages against the jocks who kicked his ass in high school and, most importantly, calls every woman to reject him a whoring bitch and every woman to tolerate him a bitchy whore.
Think I'm pulling it out of my ass? Art tells us a lot about the artist so what can the working life of comicdom's crankiest creator tell us about himself?
Well, let's look at the Spirit, his first full directorial effort:
What do these clips tell us (besides the fact that Eva Mendes isn't even bothering to phone it in-- seriously, you'd have to WORK to act so badly)?
Once again, as he did in Sin City and as he's doing in All-Star Batman, Frank is showing his scared little inner boy. Every woman he creates is a prostitute, a whore, a victim or a monster. All women are Femme Fatales in the Millerverse: and if they aren't, they'd better be Donna Reed.
Miller is afraid of women.
And in Miller, we find the kind of man every man is, at core, afraid of becoming: bitter, angry and ultimately weak. He's a Manly Man, the cartoon of a strutting mouse-- the kind of man you can see ducking a bar fight and beating his wife when he gets home. Someone who wants to be powerful, but isn't. Mostly, he's afraid.
All men want to be powerful, but few fetishize power like the Manly Man- and that fetishization often has to do with a kind of fascistic lust for violence and an absolute Us and Them mentality. It isn't so surprising to find that the Them (you know, besides the gays and minorities, which Miller perfected in 300's giant bald RuPaul)-- can be women too. And why not? What could be more threatening than that which we desire but has the ability to reject us?
And so Miller's creation of women. The prostitutes of Sin City are fiercely protective of one another but, in the end, reflexive of his inner belief that there's always a trade in male-female relations-- the villainesses of The Spirit, always self-interested or even the Woman In Trouble he employed in the Hard Goodbye ultimately had a quid pro quo in the very base of the "love" story. This is Neo-noir with a kind of paleoconservative twist.
Frank Miller remembers an age that never existed and it seems he's obsessed with it: back in the 20s and 30s, I suppose, back when men were men and women were women. He lived through the 70s and 80s, through Second Wave feminism and its backlash and, for that, I have to have some sympathy for him-- Second Wave feminism must have been a hard time for a pencil-neck with a yen for the pulps.
But whatever it is that he wants, that his fantasy mind keeps calling back for, it isn't worth it. It doesn't make a better man, to think of women as either the Enemy or the Mysterious Other. It doesn't come off as strength, the thing that Miller, I think, ultimately wants.
It's okay, Frank: whoever she was, let it go. You're a famous director now! All the chicks dig directors. Ask Woody Allen.
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