Watchmen, or: YOU FOOLS

This man has giant nipples.

I was 13 the first time I read Watchmen. I took it out from the library on a whim because I had heard it was good from the guy at my comic book store, curled up in bed, and read the dang thing. At the time, it was the best comic I had ever read; 7 years later, I can say the same thing. I don’t remember why I loved it in 2001; probably because of the gritty dialogue and narration, or because I thought Rorschach was cool, or whatever. I just knew it meant something as opposed to the shitty post-2000 Chris Claremont X-Men run I had been slowly weaning myself off of, or really, any modern comic. A year later, I wrote an essay about how life-changing it had been for a high school English class. I’m really glad my old hard drive burnt out and erased any trace of that stinker.

The reasons why I liked Watchmen in 2001 are no longer the reasons I like it in 2009, because I find something new every time (hold your hats in front of you if you’re about to vomit). A fact: The writer, Alan Moore, is a genius when it comes to structuring his comics. Disagree with his writing if you will (though you’d be stupid), but the man’s ability to weave in complicated narratives and panel layouts is beyond any other writer in the medium. Witness, for example, the structure of the sequence where Rorschach is apprehended by the cops (whoops, spoiler warning): The panel layout is parallel. First & last panel: Neon sign in a puddle. Second & second-to-last panel: foot hovering over the puddle. There’s more stuff. Check out the issue where Dr. Manhattan lives his entire life at one moment, with the chronologies and narratives hopping all over the place, yet still weaving together towards a cohesive plot. Conceptually, there had never been anything like Watchmen before it was published, and arguably not since then.

I could go on but I won’t, since I’m starting to bore myself: The point is, Watchmen as a comic book is structurally unique. The rhetoric Moore and artist Dave Gibbons were using: Parallel imagery, recurring imagery, multiple narration, mixed chronologies, graphic metaphor, and so forth, are things that specifically work in the comic medium because you have time to process it all. In film, a million things go whizzing by and you miss them; in a comic, you have time to slowly leaf through and catch everything. With a comic as dense as Watchmen, this famously made a film adaptation seem somewhat impossible, as directors from Terry Gilliam to Darren Aronofsky stumbled with the film rights over a 20-year period of Fox or Warner trying to get some shit done. For 20 years, the comic was considered unfilmable.

Until Zak Snyder wandered in. Let’s be clear: I think Zak Snyder sucks. I wouldn’t suggest he’s not capable, because he obviously went to film school, but the man is about as subtle or artistic as a bag of dicks. 300 was an example of his bluntness: overuse of CGI and slow-motion, the casting of wooden actors, poorly conceived original content, a weird current of moral absolutism running through all of it. This is good! This is evil! There is no in between. A director who lacks subtlety trying to direct Watchmen is like a man with no arms trying to play Beethoven. Even if Snyder appreciated the comic (which I have no doubt he did), he just wasn’t going to be ambitious enough to pull it off.

When I say ambitious, I mean really fucking ambitious, because the comic can’t be filmed literally. It just can’t. There are entire sequences that cut between the present and past from panel to panel that go on for pages and pages; a literal adaptation of that would be too jarring. Too flashy. Memory is a big topic in the comic: Specifically, how we construct our identity through what we remember, and what we repress in order to rewrite the past. The way Moore handles the flashbacks, there are an equal number of reconstructed scenes and quick image flashing. In the latter, the tone is atmospheric, as dozens of memories are criss-crossed in an attempt to find the truth – Dr. Manhattan’s reason for living, Laurie’s real father, whatever – it doesn’t read like a conventional narrative. Zak Snyder has only given us conventional narratives in his movies before. How was he going to pull this one off?

I know, I know – give the poor bastard a shot. And I was ready to, until I saw the first trailer last summer: wooooooooooof. Overuse of CGI and slow-motion. Over-aggressive song choice. Aesthetic changes from the comic that, while small, meant something. For the unfilmable comic, Snyder had done a lot of tone and plot mucking…so what was the point?

My problem isn’t that he might have botched the adaptation. Andre Bazin’s theory of adaptation, although a little outdated, holds as such: The adaptation cannot touch the original. That’s simple enough. No matter how shitty this movie was, I could still pull my copy off the shelf and enjoy it. But at the same time, the adaptation does change the original a little, because in today’s era of movie hype and celebrity worship, the public perception is often taken as law. Whatever people thought of Watchmen the film, they were going to project that interpretation on Watchmen the comic, and then comic dorks like myself would find themselves starting a thousand worthless sentences: “No, but you see…”

Early reviews from credible sources have not been good. They’ve described it as a bloated, over-long action-fest with poorly delineated themes and wooden-at-best acting (although Jackie Earle Haley is supposed to own shit). I’m not saying that critics know everything, because they all loved Juno, but I think generally, critic reviews tend to reflect popular tastes for that audience: When every high-minded critic likes a movie, most “high-minded” film watchers will like it. When they dislike it, the same thing. And they do not like Watchmen.

So, in the process to make a movie for comic dorks, Zak Snyder may have destroyed the comic’s reputation in the eyes of every non-comic reader if the movie does turn out to be a bomb. Is that a problem? Well, it might stop them from reading the comic because of that awful movie, they’ll say, and they’ll be depriving themselves of an interesting something. I know, that’s laziness, but Snyder has aided their laziness. He has given them a reason to be lazy. He has given them this (possibly) dud of a movie, which snarky commenters will mock by clucking, “I’ll whisper…” in their friends’ ears.

The point: Watchmen means a lot to me. I’m bummed to see this movie come out the way it has, and I don’t think my complaints are unfair. The movie exists, it won’t change my perception of the comic, but something will be changed on a cultural level, and it might just be a backlash against the comic. I hope everyone who sees the movie and likes it is inspired to pick up the comic so they can hopefully see what I’m griping about. Am I griping about nothing? Maybe. Hopefully not. Nerd rage is a tough thing to parse.