Lately I have been geeking out to an unprecedented degree. Indulging geek impulses is a slippery slope: one day you find yourself writing an epic essay about a graphic novel for your blog (consider yourself warned) and Netflixing season one of Battlestar Galactica (shame-loss alert!), and the next morning you wake up with a Star Trek chair in your living room and realize that no one will ever have sex with you again.
I have read many Watchmen reviews in the weeks since I saw the film (in a matinee showing on opening day, the only lady in a sea of doughy middle-aged men who awesomely clapped at the end), and I’ve noticed there are basically two postures—condescending or reverent—its reviewers tend to assume. Which is appropriate, really, since those are also the two attitudes that people seem to have towards comic books in general.
But the weird thing was that all of these critics wrote with a certain gravitas and reticence, which I thought was strange until I started writing about it myself and discovered that I felt the same way. I read Watchmen when I was 19, but it wasn’t the same touchstone for me as it was for so many people—a stance that allowed me to approach the film with unadulterated excitement instead of the deep dread that readers feel when Hollywood is about to shit all over something they cherished through their formative years. So what’s up with that?
Well, I’m the kind of person who almost always feels nervous about everything (or, rather, nothing), so that explains that. But why did everyone else seem nervous? I have given it some thought and have decided that it is probably due to Watchmen creator Alan Moore’s one-two punch of being a genius who looks like he lives under a bridge. Famously, he’s this rabid Lorax figure who has loudly denounced all of the (admittedly inferior) film adaptations of his work. It is only natural that we, members of the dunderheaded pop culture that made those productions possible, feel intimidated, threatened and, worse, judged by this intimidating figure with his air of vague menace.
Anyway, I think the movie was okay—no better, no worse—and worth watching. Any admirer of the graphic novel can’t deny the director’s loving gaze, which perfectly captured the comic’s aesthetic, if not its tone. Some details were spot-on, including Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s powerful performance as that charming psychopath, the Comedian, and Jackie Earle Haley’s spot-on portrayal of that less charming psychopath, Rorschach. Other details—the soundtrack among them—smacked of that special laziness that is the mark of a big ole budget.
Apart from the soundtrack and a few relatively minor details, the movie was about as good as it could have been. No matter how deftly the source material was handled, how can anyone expect the medium of film to capture the sheer power of Watchmen’s pithy panels, which say one thing and show another with an irony unparalleled in comics? Moore created an epic yet insular world in which images and dialogue echo and resonate across its pages, and the best argument for the special power of the comic genre is that this movie, which stole almost all of its images and words verbatim from its source, failed to replicate, much less recreate, the poetry of the original.
Adapting postmodern literature is difficult under any circumstances, but it is almost impossible in Hollywood movies, which require a coherent perspective or voice. Watchmen the graphic novel is postmodern at the macro and micro levels: there are stories within stories within stories that bounce around in our brains as they admire, parody, and critique history, pop culture, and the very conventions of the comic book medium, among other ideas and institutions. In Watchmen, aged superheroes are washed-up celebrities with tell-all memoirs and sappy scrapbooks that are appended to each chapter of traditionally paneled action, with shifts in tone that are somehow blatant and imperceptible at the same time—the true mark of awesome writing.
Herein lies my main problem with the movie: its one-note tone. Like the comic, the movie is narrated by Rorschach, a deliberately clichéd character in everything from his detective costume (trench coat, sporty scarf) to the hardboiled prose of his journal (e.g., “The dusk reeks of fornication and bad consciences”). The film captures Rorschach’s voice rather well, but it omits the story’s many other voices—and the beauty of Watchmen is in that cacophony.
Contrast this observation in Hollis Mason’s autobiography:
It’s funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they’re related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there’s a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
with a representative entry from Rorschach’s journal:
The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists…
and you’ll begin to understand what is missing from the film.
But all that is really symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that Watchmen has been consistently misread as a cynical, pessimistic work when it is, in fact, rather the opposite.
It’s easy to see why the Watchmen have been perceived as such a surly lot—snide touches abound in the comic, the most prominent being our guide through a world that “stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell,” Rorschach, whose very identity mocks our most self-involved science, psychology. His mask is forever forming new symbols, but they ultimately converge into a single stereotype with a fatally inflexible worldview.
The other characters have their own problems. The backstory alone is rife with failure and dysfunction: the first Nite Owl runs an auto repair shop, the first Silk Spectre is a “bloated aging whore,” and Mothman is in the bin. Their contemporary counterparts are impotent (Nite Owl II), egomaniacal (Ozymandias), and totally annoying (Silk Spectre II). Their impulse to save the world is described as a perversion, their morality is ambiguous, and they generally seem sort of bad at life.
Everyone talks about the ways in which Alan Moore reflected and magnified the anxieties of his milieu by reimagining the American hero as a figure driven by personality problems and a deeply flawed society. His take on the archetype caused a paradigm shift within the world of comics, where the series was among the first to unflinchingly explore the dark consequences of violence in an imagined world that seemed a lot like our real one. More importantly, Moore’s “heroes” resonated with readers still reeling from our losses in Vietnam and the pressure cooker atmosphere of the Cold War.
All of those things are true.
But what if we examine Watchmen as a different sort of cultural artifact? I think you can deconstruct the graphic novel’s notoriously bleak reputation to uncover a surprisingly rosy take on modernity—maybe even the most optimistic account of warfare in the twentieth-century canon. Despite its gritty trappings, within the seemingly cynical Watchmen universe there exists a powerful, if disguised, strain of hope.
To me, the real power of Watchmen is in how Moore channeled an entire generation’s worst fear into the glowing figure of Dr. Manhattan. Moore’s achievement is not just that he wrote a comic that humanized superheroes; he also humanized the abstract idea of annihilation, recasting it as a sympathetic (if not empathetic) force.
It’s pretty clear from his handle alone that Dr. Manhattan, who is also referred to in the comic as the “H-bomb” and “a man to end worlds,” personifies nuclear power. Moore took something that was on everyone’s mind—weapons of mass destruction—and remade it into a hero. Consider the following passage that describes Dr. Manhattan:
Our entire culture has had to contort itself to accommodate the presence of something more than human, and we have all felt the results of this. The evidence surrounds us, in our everyday lives and on the front pages of the newspapers we read. One single being has been allowed to change the entire world, pushing it closer to its eventual destruction in the process.
and the parallels are obvious.
It’s interesting to me that he is also the most emotionally complex character. At first, he just seems like another postmodern protagonist who is mourning his own detachment from the world. But I think Dr. Manhattan is totally emo, probably the most unlikely emo character ever in the worlds of fiction and film. I’d go so far as to say he’s the beating heart of Watchmen.
Consider his self-imposed exile, when he moped on Mars like a teenager who has locked himself in his room. “Watchmaker,” the most emotionally charged chapter of the graphic novel, showcases Moore’s masterful use of irony. He takes this character that talks like a pretentious fortune cookie and sends him to Mars—a planet with layered cultural associations of emotional bankruptcy (war, men, aliens, etc.)—and uses technical devices like repetition and quasi-quantum gobbledegook to sustain a powerful nostalgic tone as he explores themes like love and its inevitable decline.
By the end of all that, we realize that Dr. Manhattan and his lifeless Mars are not bankrupt; they are bereft. And then Laurie’s visit to Mars helps him realize that people are pretty neat, after all, so he resolves to save the world. And while that doesn’t work out, exactly, by the end of the story the threat has been defused, and so blood on a button becomes ketchup on a shirt.
Nuclear weapons are usually perceived as a threat—a boogieman—for obvious reasons, but in Watchmen, they are recast as a melancholy and benevolent superhero. The movie, to its credit, takes this thought a step further with its revised (and, to my mind, much improved) ending, in which nuclear destruction (instead of fake psychic alien squid) is also a plot device that brings about world peace.
Whatever you think of Dr. Manhattan, there is a certain romance to annihilation in Watchmen. By the time New York is blown to bits towards the end—those stark panels in which the needy newsman and his aloof young customer embrace before they vaporize—you get the sense that Moore believes that the threat of mutually assured destruction is actually a fine opportunity to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya." And I think that is a very interesting take on the Cold War specifically and the idea of hope in general.
As ever, in the final analysis, my gaze turns on myself. Part of me steps back from this argument and says WTF? Dr. Manhattan is emo? Watchmen is secretly optimistic? Do these ideas reflect my own misanthropy instead of what’s actually there on the page and the screen?
But then Future Me, gazing down serenely from her Star Trek throne, says, “Who has time for this self-analysis shit? I have some Battlestar Galactica to watch.”
9 comments:
I am once again impressed with your observations, oh Shimmering One. They are very well thought out and constructed. Did you go back and re-read the graphic novel before writing this? If not, I am pleasantly surprised at your capacity for retaining information.
If you don't mind, I am going to post a link to this at the bottom of my entry.
Over the past few weeks I have read many reviews of Watchmen, but this is by far one of the best of the entire lot. It is EXCELLENT! Wish my own review could have been even a third this good :-)
Phillip, thanks for pointing me toward this one.
Thanks, guys!
To answer your question, Phil, I read it again after I saw the movie. I have a terrible memory.
This is really wonderful. Thanks for it. I live too far away to have had the opportunity to see this movie yet, but I reread the graphic novel in an act of kneejerk solidarity with all the people back home who are, by turns, complaining about and revering this new version without me.
Your take on the novel is excellent, and made me thing on new things. I believe you've illustrated that the beating heart of the narrative lies, rather than in Dr. Manhattan, in the matrix between all these characters eking out their methods of romancing society (by dominating it, or changing it, or going with its own perceived evil flows). What Dr. Manhattan seems to represent is the hope you've described: cold hard nature stepping back and assessing humanity as worth saving after all.
I cannot imagine that the movie's new ending, which you've briefly alluded to (so that's all I really know about it), can be as satisfying as the ending of the book. So I am interested in someday discovering why it strikes you so. In the book, the destructive gesture might work because it plays on those universal fears of the other in a world where fears of our own actions have become too comfortable to deter us. It is a pitched cold war outcry, the vain hope for a straw villain that can turn everyone's horses from the apocalypse. It is also rather more elegant in its original comic book setting, of course: Alan Moore attempting to change the course of the cold war with ideas, generated by writers and artists, and communicated in stasis—communicated, in fact, in an act of shocking and violent publication.
When it comes to the cold war, it is a traditional theory in any case, mirroring explicitly similar schemes laid out in Theodore Sturgeon's short story "Unite and Conquer" (1948), Kurt Vonnegut's Novel Sirens Of Titan (1959), and the very famous Outer Limits episode "The Architects of Fear" (1963). Of course it also reflects virtually every other pop culture evaluation of the nuclear threat, frequently envisioned as an alien or monstrous other, which became a boomer kinder-trauma motif that formulated the psychological landscape of that whole decade.
But the simple fact that this idea, that an alien invasion might change the face of cold war opposition, was bemusedly quipped upon by Reagan himself in 1986 at the Reykjavik peace summit, is reason enough to include it in the movie version, or any historical sci-fi treatise on the cold war, even at the subversion of perceived verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief, or, in fact, the idea’s less appropriate fit off the comics page.
Oh crap, I've filled up your whole comments section. Sorry.
I take your point about the matrix. There’s definitely an “only connect” thread from beginning to end, from the themes we’ve already discussed to that crossroads where the backstory and the main narrative meet—i.e., Laurie’s origin story. But I still think that the story’s beating heart is Dr. M. for reasons above and beyond that brilliant passage that describes his meditation on Mars.
We know that Watchmen goes to great lengths to criticize inflexible worldviews. Many of the characters represent different (and opposing) paradigms: the Comedian sees the world through a certain lens that is very different from, say, the lens of Rorschach. All of these “heroes” try to change the world by applying those ideals in radically different ways, but the fight is futile. Ultimately, they are all impotent, failing to effect change at even the personal level. They want to believe in the power of codes and symbols and costumes, but underneath it all they are just troubled, lonely people dressed up in funny clothes. The exception, of course, is Jon, who is a nudist.
I think the strongest argument for the film’s revised ending is that it furthers the idea that destruction can bring out what’s best in us. In the movie, this plays out quite literally. To me, the synthetic squid plot point is relatively weak and awkward in the graphic novel. I didn’t find the comic’s conclusion elegant at all, because it seems to me that this idea that writers and artists can change the course of the war with ideas is sort of simplistic and naive—just the sort of worldview that Alan Moore finds suspicious. I think, if anything, the work of those writers and artists on Ozymandias’ island was shown to be just as disastrous and misguided as any of the other one-dimensional paradigms the other “heroes” represent. The way forward is to discard those coherent worldviews—to blow them up—an idea that also tracks with the journey of Dr. Manhattan, who discards his science-oriented tunnel vision and taps into the wonder of the weird wide world.
And yet!
I think you make an awfully compelling case for the original end. Your argument for the psychohistorical context of the alien symbol feels right, and though I’m too dumb about history to know the first thing about whatever Reagan said in Iceland, that observation alone has me close to convinced that you’re on to something. On the other hand, I have often wondered if works of science fiction and fantasy are a little too in love with their metaphorical monsters. I prefer the uncanny side of genre fiction, which is sort of oxymoronic. (The uncanny, by definition, is a little incoherent; whereas genre fiction, by definition, incorporates certain symbols and conventions.) To traffic successfully in the uncanny, I think those symbols have to be slippery and multivalent, which is really fucking tricky. Just ask David Lynch.
I think it’s wonderful that I agree with everything you’ve said about the end of the graphic novel while, for the very same reasons you feel they are weaknesses, counting them among the novel’s strengths. Isn’t that neat?
This is Ozymandias’ chapter. His autobiography is relegated to a sterile and bulleted list of accomplishments dictated to three dead men. So ultimately, this misguided and simplistic act of climax—Veidt’s grand plan—must stand as nearly all the revelation we get, as observers, of the contradictions between his image and self-image. One gigantic, insanely Kirby-esque and monstrous four-color WTF perpetrated on all the whole world for its greater good, as envisioned by Adrian Veidt. It seems reasonable to assume that this fits nicely within the point of the book, as similar contradictions and revelations have been explored with nearly every other character.
The way this climax also plays nicely into Moore’s overall heroic cynicism, if that can be permitted, is in the act’s ultimate failure. Oh, we don’t really know how it fails because the Watchmen stops. Does it backfire? Is it revealed as fake? Does world peace require such compromises to liberty that it is no longer more worthwhile than war? (After living through the cold war and these last eight years of, what, “hot peace”?, I tend to fall for the latter). Anyway, I totally see what you’re saying, I just like it for the reasons you don’t. Maybe it’s just that the novel fatally, doggedly, grimly follows its own course right down the rabbit hole with its psychologically doomed populace. That same onion skin angle-nihilism now perpetrated by the work itself. Did Alan Moore think he could actually stop the cold war with the Watchmen? Honesty, I really hope so.
As for genre fiction, I’m not much of a fan. Once the genre of something becomes obvious it also starts to feel self-limiting to me. It’s odd—that limitation doesn’t bother me in movies or TV (really: I’d use “structural parameters” when I was making the same argument about a movie, and talk all about how certain discipline here can achieve a “formality”), but with literature I find it limiting. Still, if I get you correctly—that all this post-earnest genre stuff really gets awfully cozy with its own precious deconstructions—then I’d have to totally agree. But I still love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
It’s really kind of awesome to vicariously appreciate the end through you, especially since I feel petty for harping on one little thing I don’t like about something I otherwise have so much affection for. I also like that, while I don’t think (or even hope) that Alan Moore thought he could change the world with Watchmen, there are people like you who disagree with me.
I’m interested in your point about Veidt’s image/self-image because I never really thought about the contradiction in the world’s smartest man doing something that was fundamentally pretty stupid. To me his identity is less about contradiction and more about tunnel vision. Veidt’s real flaw was not naiveté, exactly; it was in being too intellectual—all head and no heart—to the point where he couldn’t even recognize what was an atrocious act of mass murder.
I also find it interesting that you see contradiction as important to characterization in Watchmen, because I don’t see it so much. The point seems to me that most of the characters sorely lack the ability to accommodate contradiction in themselves or in the world. The only exception I see (apart from Jon, obviously) is in the relationship between the first Silk Spectre and the Comedian, whose own (rather disturbing) abilities to embrace contradiction/complexity produced what is essentially the “miracle” of Watchmen—i.e., Laurie. It is also interesting that this lone exercise in character-based dichotomy is relegated to the backstory. But don’t even get me started on Watchmen and nostalgia, because then I’d probably be obligated to go back to graduate school.
As for genre, I meant fiction in the broadest sense, across media. What I meant to say is that I like so many things about comics, sci-fi, fantasy, etc., I find certain conventions like the monster-as-metaphor frustrating. (Buffy is fine, but I much prefer Dr. Horrible.)
This is a weird analogy, but it reminds me of people who take Freud too seriously. They miss the very thing that’s cool about him (viz. the idea of plumbing our own depths) and, you know, look for penises in the works of Henry James.
Ha ha, you said plumbing.
Well I've had a great time. I certainly think I came out liking the book more than I did when I went in, and frankly I think you've made me come at it from a few new angles.
Plus, here in this comments section I have twice seen an online person express enthusiasm for the quality of an argument she disagrees with. I'm not sure I have ever seen that before. Thanks for that.
I'll leave you with one last hopefully clarifying note, however. I don't mean to imply that I think the characters sense or embrace their contradictions, but that the characters themselves are built, within the warp and weft of the story, as contradictions between their self-indulgent and rigid personas (plus what they imagine to be their effect on the world) and the crazy people their actions tend to reveal them as, instead. This, I guess, is a meta contradiction, a byplay between a collection of untrustworthy narrators and the omniscient conventions of graphic storytelling.
I'll stop taking up all your space now. I've had a lot of fun here, and it was nice to meet you this way.
My word verification today is barrool, which I am taking as a hint (or possibly a command).
Yup, it was fun. I've actually met you and Sunshine in real life a time or two (though briefly) at Ellie's in Gboro. Hope that all is well on the other side of the world!
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