The Main Problem with Watchmen: Not Enough Dicks

This is a censored picture. In the movie, his swinging cod is out in full force.

I saw Watchmen the other day, and while I won’t waste time crying about how much I didn’t like it, one thing has irked me hard like a needle made out of diamond lodged in my urethra; specifically, how afraid Americans seem to be of dicks. Playing catch-up: A character in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan, doesn’t wear clothes because he’s transcended humanity and clothes are a human function. So, he’s naked the whole film. Also, he’s blue and glowing, so this amounts to a bunch of bright blue dicks on screen for a chunk of the movie.

Of course, this is somewhat controversial. When I checked all of my message boards (hurf, durf), I read testimony after testimony of people being at the theater where other movie-goers laughed or cringed when the offending dicks swung on screen, or in extreme cases, of people just walking out because they couldn’t handle the junk. In theater after theater in town after town, there seemed to be one universal interpretation of the movie: “Dicks are scary.”

Full frontal male nudity is one of the last cinematic taboos in that most people giggle like hyenas when they see a man’s penis on screen. Never mind breasts or the vag or even a hairy chest: Of all the sexual organs, the penis is the only one that reverts the collective mental state of the audience to the mind of a four-year-old, giggling and pointing at something they’ve already seen a lot. Do you think the men, upon taking a piss or getting in the shower, shriek and cower at the sight of their own organ? Do they shrill like a de-clawed cat, “Eek! A penis!”

You know, as much as I think Zack Snyder blows, at least he didn’t censor the dick. At least he said, “No, I am going to make audiences deal with a little more nudity than usual” and told his CGI artists to rotoscope as much veiny detail as possible (or maybe he just said, “Dicks! That’ll shock ‘em!”) I remember when Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Walk Hard were coming out and Judd Apatow said his mission was to put a dick in every movie he made, so that eventually the audience would get de-sensitized to the male organ instead of treating it like a hot potato of sexual awkwardness. Snyder, intentionally or not, is following this line of thinking: If you don’t want to see the penis when you go to the movies, too bad. It’s going to be there. And you need to deal with it.

Watchmen had so much male gaze that I almost really did want more blue peens to balance it out. I think Malin Akerman is as foxy as the next terrible actress under 30, but there’s a part during that miserable sex scene where the camera zooms-in and focuses on her chest as she starts to undress and I thought, “Oh my God, is the camera really going to focus on her boobs spilling out of her shirt?” (or at least some variation of that). Snyder was giving every fanboy a metaphorical handjob, teasing them with some shameless nudity; thankfully the camera shifted away and I lived to white knight about another typically masculine heterosexual shot in a mainstream Hollywood movie. We all love boobs, but if you’re going to pay so much attention to them, why not other parts of the human body?

I have no idea where I’m going with this. I just wrote 600 words about wanting more dicks in my movies. I’m gonna go start a drinking habit.