Watching “Watchmen”

Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen is caught between a poignant social commentary and a big-budget Hollywood action flick. In its aspirations towards the latter, it betrays the essence of the novel it attempts to reproduce.

The original novel has strongly political overtones. It is set in an alternative world where America has won the Vietnam War with the aid of the superhero Dr. Manhattan, of whom it is said: “The Superman [or God, depending on who you talk to] exists and he is American.” With Cold War fears in full swing, Nixon has been continually re-elected as a stalwart against the specter of nuclear war.

The images we see in the film’s campy opening sequence are a litany of US historical arch-narratives, defining scenes in a historic struggle of good vs. evil (albeit re-imagined): The Times Square kiss after World War II (where the sailor is substituted for a female superhero, later murdered in bed with another woman); the “Comedian” gunning down JFK in a graphic re-creation of his assassination; the immolation of a monk in Vietnam—all parts of an American historical narrative altered by the interference of superheroes. In the present time of the book/film, the world is a morally ambiguous place rotting with corruption, where even superheroes have to be reminded of what they are fighting for.

Despite these historical re-imaginings, one reality, it seems, cannot be altered by superheroes or by anyone else: the reality of human hatred. This viewpoint was made clear by Snyder’s repeated imagistic allusions to September 11^th, 2001 as ominous portent throughout the film.

I get that the book, and therefore the film, is set in the 1980s, when the towers were still part of the city skyline. But for Snyder, the towers, far from backdrop, are manipulated to add to an impending sense of doom, a reminder of the darker side of human nature. They are in the background during a murder in a tall, seeming impenetrable New York apartment, they are ominous specters of the future in a scene where a casket, draped in an American flag by servicemen, is lowered into the earth in the foreground. They are there again, just above the gates spelling “cemetery”- gates that recall the famed photograph of the gates to Auschwitz. Later on, we see an alternative Ground Zero, cranes with corporate logos already at work in the hollowed-out bowels of a broken city, ready to rebuild another corporate structure. There is even a moment where Ozymandias, a retired hero-turned-businessman, claims, “war will be obsolete” while in the background, we see a giant blimp headed straight for the twin towers, an eerie echo of the planes now etched into public memory.

In his conversation with Frédéric Beigbeder, Paul Berman, speaking of September 11^th, said, “I can’t bear the idea of reading someone playing with it… Events like these or horrible events in our personal life— the worst, most painful events, leave scars that don’t heal. If the scar is not healed, you cannot scratch at it.”

While I disagree with his statement—fiction can and should take on serious topics, for what is art but a way to digest the world around us—there is a way of portraying sensitive material that is tasteful, and a way that exploits it as an easy-access route to the viewer’s emotions.

In a film where such evocative scenes share screen time with the worst sex scene in recent memory (the last  film to use the song “Hallelujah” to convey emotional gravitas was Shrek) this facile use of imagery with ready associations in the modern American psyche was a cop-out on the part of Snyder. His credibility, like the ending of his over-the-top sex scene, shot up in a burst of flames.

Part of the glory of the graphic novel is the complicated, morally ambiguous cast of characters. Costumed vigilantes, ordinary men and women once idolized in the 1940s as heroes, are now obsolete in the face of the world’s first real superhero, Dr. Manhattan

In the film, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was a convincingly wicked “Comedian,” gunning down a Vietnamese woman carrying his unborn child and acting out a rape scene with convincing malice. Patrick Wilson was perfect as the idealistic “Night Owl II, ” a costumed avenger come out of retirement only to find he’s more attuned to the world of birds then the depravity of the world of men.

The real scene-stealer was Jackie Earle Haley, who nailed the never-compromise mentality of Rorschach, the embittered and violent vigilante with all the dark appeal of Milton’s Satan.

Visually, the film was gorgeous- the opening scene of the Manhattan skyline twinkling behind highly-polished glass is stunning, and the later images of the glowing blue Dr. Manhattan as he explores the red planet of Mars are enough to take your breath away. Its stylized depiction of a gritty urban America in the 1980s is sure to spawn fashion trends, particularly with the costumes of actress Malin Ackerman as Laurie Jupiter. Yet despite, the dazzling visuals– and perhaps because of the focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of story-telling–the film fell short of the expectations raised by the book.

To be fair, the film had big shoes to fill: transposing the original graphic novel—one of TIME Magazine’s 100 best novels— and a book that co-creator Alan Moore himself has called “impossible to film.”

Snyder fits an admirable amount of the book’s complicated plot into his movie, but there is no way to transpose the richness, the layered narratives of the novel into a 3-hour film. This is largely due to the difficulty of re-creating the reader’s direct experience of the many layers of “found” documents portrayed in the book: portions of Rorschach’s criminal file and personal documents, newspaper articles crying doomsday, and excerpts of Hollis Mason/Night Owl’s  memoir of the glory days, “Under the Hood.” The novel’s playfulness, its self-referential aspects, all add to the immense appeal of the lush novel, qualities difficult to recreate in the medium of film.

One storyline excluded from the film but lingering in memory from the book was that of a young boy sitting outside a newsstand, reading a comic entitled “Tales of the Black Freighter,” a bleak and gory tale of a shipwrecked man’s descent into madness and violence. (Incidentally, a longer version of the film, which includes “Tales of the Black Freighter,” will be released in an extended DVD version.) Images of the Meta “comic-within-a-comic” panes alternated with those of the real novel, the narrative of one bleeding into the other. It brought home one of the distinct pleasures of reading: the synthesis of what is written with the real world. As you read one narrative silently, hundreds of other narratives are unfolding around you in real time.

In response to the boy’s choice of reading material, a newspaper vendor says: “See? Apathy! Everybody escaptin’ into comic books and T.V.! Makes me sick.”

This line— faithfully reproduced from the book—held particular resonance as I sat in a packed multiplex in a New York City at the center of today’s financial crisis, watching a film about masked heroes struggling to save humanity from itself.

Conclusion: Read the book, but follow Moore’s example and skip the movie.

Tags: 9/11, Alan Moore, Watchmen

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Film & Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.