Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Watching
the Watchmen
(Watchmen, 3/16/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Love
it or loathe it, you have to grant that a lot of thought has gone into
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's post-modern superhero epic, Watchmen.
Take the title, which self-consciously evokes everything from Juvenal's
Satires (Quis custodiet ipsos custodies—"who watches
the watchmen?") to the Book of Isaiah ("I have set watchmen
upon your walls, O Jerusalem") to the speech John F. Kennedy was
supposed to deliver in Dallas in November, 1963 ("We…are the
watchmen on the walls of world freedom"). It also refers to the
"Doomsday clock" kept by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists,
which represents the editors' perception of how close we all are to
"midnight," or nuclear Armageddon. (As of this writing, the
watch stands at 11:55pm.)
Somewhat less thought appears to
have gone into Zack Snyder's long-awaited movie version. To the approval
of most fans, it is scrupulously loyal to the graphic novel—perhaps
slavishly so. For the non-fans out there, who perhaps don't muse upon
every syllable of Alan Moore's pontifications, Synder's reverential,
shot-for-shot replication of the comic makes the film verge on 1) incomprehensible,
and 2) terribly self-important. For those patient enough to stick with
it, though, Watchmen preserves enough of the novel's anarchic
humor to make for 160 (mostly) diverting minutes.
The conceit behind Watchmen
is the question "what would somebody who dons a costume to fight
crime really be like?" According to Moore, they'd be borderline
personalities, trafficking in sadism, fetishism, sexual assault, fascism
and/or godlike delusions. Thus the rogues' gallery of Moore "heroes"—Rorschach
(Jackie Earle Haley), a sociopath with an inkblot for a face; Ozymandias
(Matthew Goode), a corporate titan with a line of Ozymandias action
figures and an ominous fixation on Alexander the Great; Silk Spectre
(Malin Akerman), a babe in latex (the Latex Spectre?) who's mostly in
it for the celebrity; the Comedian (Jeffrey Deane Morgan), a right-wing
bruiser who comes off as a cross between the Joker and G. Gordon Liddy.
Like Batman, none of these have
super-powers beyond those afforded by his or her particular madness.
The only genuine super-human in the group is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup),
a scientist who got his atoms scattered in a laboratory accident and,
upon his miraculous resurrection, gained God-like control over all matter
and energy. He also happens to glow blue, like a TV tube, and is growing
weary of all the little humans around him, with their little cares and
squabbles. Maybe this detachment is why he goes naked and apolitical,
his particular package—unlike his colleagues—bending neither
left nor right.
All this unfolds in an alternative
1985, with Richard M. Nixon still in the White House after five terms,
and the Russians about to invade Afghanistan. On the plus side, plug-electric
cars are already a reality, passenger dirigibles are practical, and
maybe, just maybe, we'll escape the Presidency of George W. Bush. It's
this warped topicality, this version of current events as seen through
a funhouse mirror, that gives the movie its unique appeal. For me, just
seeing the Comedian at the JFK assassination, packing up his gear on
the grassy knoll, was better than any of the stage fights or fancy effects.
Though it definitely impresses 14
year-old boys, the comic's sophomoric eloquence ("In cataract darkness,
I bludgeoned him, his screams unnervingly shrill…") is not
exactly stuff for the ages. Mostly, it sounds like discarded pages from
Travis Bickle's narration in Taxi Driver. Still, you have to
give Moore credit for helping the graphic novel genre to steal from
better sources.
The fact that box office figures
for Watchmen are down from Snyder's last comic adaption, 300,
has inspired some critics to wonder if this material is really in tune
with the zeitgeist. Supposedly, now that we are in the Great
Recession we're supposed to have lost interest in dark, noirish visions,
presumably in favor of all-singing, all-dancing entertainments like
American Idol and Dancing with the Stars.
This is nonsense in about eight
different ways. For one, Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight,
which is as freakish and pretentious as anything by Moore, just got
finished reaching #2 in the all-time box office rankings. For another,
with Hollywood now is a fever rush to produce so-called "origin
stories" (upcoming installments include a Star Trek origin
story, and an X-Men/Wolverine origin story), Watchmen
trumps them all: a superhero epic that packs in about five distinct
origin stories. For yet another, in a time when almost everyone in Obama-nation
is tired of shrill political ideologies, Watchmen is nothing
if not post-ideological. The heroes here (or, more correctly, the "masked
adventurers") range from politically correct to just to the right
of Al Haig, yet they pull together when it counts. Now there's a lesson
for the costumed freaks in Washington, isn't it?
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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