WATCHMEN - the movie

[K-Box]

My parents saw Watchmen.
Well, technically, so did I, but that's not really the point.
After all, I'm already indoctrinated.
Let me back up just enough to give you a proper context.
I'm in my early 30s, and my folks are right on the edge of their late 50s and early 60s.
This means that, for roughly the past dozen years, they've been putting up with my bullshit about how superhero comic books can be culturally significant and legitimate works of art and blah blah blah, and their attitude has generally been one of quiet, patient, but sometimes weary, indulgence.
In short, they look at my love of the potential inherent in superhero comic books the same way that you or I might look at the guy who's obsessed with collecting model train sets ... he's not really harming anybody, and it's not like his hobby is unpleasant or anything, but it's simply Not Your Thing, no matter how much the guy might try to evangelize the joys of constructing an entire scale landscape for his toy train tracks.
This is compounded by the fact that my folks are the sort of people who see a clear dividing line between Entertainment and Art, and while they're not nearly such snobs that they'd turn down decent Entertainment (they quite enjoyed both The Incredibles and The Dark Knight), they'll still always see mere Entertainment as ... lesser than full-fledged Art.
To them, the book is always better than the movie, the movie is always better than the TV version, an author cannot be considered "classic" until he's dead, and comic books are certainly not "real" books, so even when I've recommended critically acclaimed comic books to them in the past, including the works of Alan Moore, I've been met politely humoring rebuffs ("We're glad that you like them").
V For Vendetta cracked that wall a bit.
They wound up watching the film version on DVR, without me even recommending it to them, presumably because they'd seen complimentary reviews of it from The Right Critics.
They were surprised and impressed when they learned that it was based on a comic book, and they actually engaged me in a brief bit of conservation about it (rather than the other way around, which is how it usually works), but it didn't lead to much more than that.
When Watchmen came out, though, I saw my opportunity.
I reminded my folks that the guy who wrote the comic book that the Watchmen movie was based on was the same guy who wrote the comic book that the V For Vendetta movie was based on.
I passed on some of the more glowing reviews that the comic book had received from The Right Critics.
And I pointed out that it had made the TIME list of "Top 100 Novels."
To my mom, the English teacher, the fact that a mere comic book had been ranked by literary critics among the likes of "real" books was stunning.
But I sensed that might not be enough, so I made my finishing strike.
I offered to pay for their movie tickets, so that all of us, plus a friend of the family who had gotten involved in our online discussion about it, could go see it together.
This family friend, by the way, is in her 70s, and like my mom, has an extreme aversion to violence.
In a very real sense, I was relying on Zack Snyder (yes, the man who managed to make the movie version of 300 even less subtle than the Frank Miller comic book that it was based on) to sell the artistic legitimacy of ALL superhero comic books to my parents, a pair of upper-middle-class liberal intellectual Baby Boomers with a mild distaste for modern popular culture, inspired in no small part by their pronounced chauvinism toward their own culture.
And holy shit, what do you know.
The kid came through in the clutch.
I can't begrudge any fellow fans of the comic book who don't care for the movie, either because of the inherent compromises required to translate a 12-issue comic book into a two-and-a-half-hour movie, or else because they don't care for the stylings of Snyder in particular.
On the one hand, I don't think anyone can doubt Snyder's genuine love for, and devotion to, the source material, but on the other, there were indeed moments when it seemed as though he didn't entirely understand the source material, and was simply recreating onscreen what he saw on the page like an illiterate copying the words of a book, or perhaps he simply loved it too non-ironically, since Moore himself was offering such an ironic commentary upon superhero comic books.
And yet, in spite of my own quibbles with some of Snyder's choices, I found myself loving the fuck out of this film.
And guess who else loved it, too.
No, they didn't care for the dead dogs, the brutal superhero fights or the prison bloodshed.
And no, they weren't terribly impressed by the acting, either (with the exception of Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley, both of whom they thought were very good, and Billy Crudup, who my mom liked because "he reminded me of HAL from 2001." Believe it or not, she didn't even notice his big blue penis).
All that aside, though, my folks could not stop talking about how "amazing" the characterizations and world-building and politics and philosophy and ... hell, even the zeitgeist were.
Yes, I grew up during the '80s, but my folks lived through it as adults, and they were taken back by how much it felt like the '80s to them.
"There was just so much ... detail," my mom said. "I never knew a superhero comic book could be like that."
And there it is.
Much like Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore is one of those writers who, even when his work is being bastardized by Hollywood, still manages to be smarter than 90 percent of the storytellers out there.
Oh, and the family friend who joined us?
The woman in her 70s, who doesn't like onscreen violence?
She bought a trade paperback copy of Watchmen online, for her and my folks to share, so that they can take turns reading it.
I've already traded an entire series of e-mails with her about the comic book, and all the little details that Moore and Gibbons managed to hide within it.
"WOW!" my mom said, when I opened the book to the pages with Walter Kovacs and Malcolm Long. "They're, like, TWINS of how they were in the movie."
This movie is being marketed to the wrong people.
We have the potential to turn an entire generation into nerds.
But even if we don't, nerd culture has finally won out.

[Anders]

That's a truly heartwarming story.

I don't think it would work with my parents, though. They're not snobs so much as... well, old-fashioned, I guess.

[jarddavis]

On the other hand...

Absolutely hated it.

Oh, I can admit that it's a technically well made film. I can admit that the actors who played both the Comedian and Rorschach were both absolutely brilliant.

This movie is killed by it's pacing.

The first hour literally only comprises the first two issues of the series. The remaining hour and 47 minutes covers the remaining 10.

This is a HUGE problem with the movie. And the reason being, by the time you wade through the rest of the movie, you get to 35 minute revelation, no one cares anymore.

Obviously they had to remove material to make a 2 hour movie. Unfortunately this requires removing certain characters who die in the explosion in new york. Consequently, you don't feel the emotional impact that should come when the paperman and the kid reading the Black Freightor comic die.

Snyder does a great job of putting as much of the story into that movie as he can, but at the same time, he fails to bring out the necessary emotional responses from certain actors, notible Maleen Ackerman or whatever her name is, to certain situations. Most notably after she and Manhattan return to New York from Mars.

And then of course, the sex scene. Halfway through it my 17 year old daughter yelled for them to just continue the story. And I couldn't have agreed more. Because it was excessive. Snyder filmed an extremely erotic and tasteful sex scene for 300 that tells you yes, it's sex, yes, it's hot, yes, they're enjoying themselves, yes, she's taking it doggy-style, and it still wasn't as remotely graphic as the sex scene from Watchmen.

[jensaltmann]

You want to see the Watch-Wall*E trailer.

[K-Box]

A lot of intelligent essays have already been written, by folks much smarter than myself, about the appeals of Rorschach from Watchmen, ranging from his qualifications as an embodiment of the Objectivist ideal to his status as a dark lens of the deconstruction of the superhero genre, but as well-reasoned and interesting to read as these thoughts have been, I can't help but feel like they're ... well, missing the point a bit, because as Alan Moore himself has noted, Rorschach has demonstrated a proven ability to draw in a wide variety of fans, including those who don't analyze his character to anywhere approaching that degree.

So, why do so many folks go for Rorschach?

I believe it's because he's a dark mirror of Peter Pan.

Depending upon which shrinks you listen to, people have the potential to become emotionally frozen at whatever ages they experience their most severe traumas. In fandom, there's a tendency to think of the Blair Roche case as Rorschach's most severe emotional trauma, simply because, as Rorschach himself told Dr. Long, that was the night that Walter Kovacs "died," but I'd argue that this take overlooks the fact that, as horrible as the discovery of what had happened to Blair Roche must have been for Walter Kovacs, it's not necessarily the sort of event that would have automatically turned just ANY person to go through it into Rorschach, which leads us into the OTHER most notable trauma in Walter Kovacs' life, which is HIS ENTIRE GODDAMNED CHILDHOOD. More specifically, when he was 10 years old, Walter was finally removed from the "care" (and I use that term loosely) of his mother, and while we as adults might see that as an END to Walter's traumas, considering how much Sylvia Kovacs' mistreatment of her son justified his hatred for her, the fact remains that, to 10-year-old Walter, Sylvia was the only world he knew, so to be removed from that environment (even if it was in his best interests, which I don't doubt it was) must have been terribly traumatic for him. So, even though he grew up into an adult who was, for a few years at least, able to be passably rational and appropriately socialized, as he was during the Crimebusters meeting, this is why I contend that a part of Walter Kovacs never outgrew being that angry, afraid 10-year-old boy that he was when he got sent to the Charlton Home.

In short, 10-year-old Walter was Walter Kovacs' emotional floor, and when the trauma of learning Blair Roche's fate tore down all the emotional growth and progress that adult Walter had made, 10-year-old Walter was all that was left. Walter Kovacs didn't "die," as he claimed, but instead, he simply ... regressed. Consider how much Rorschach's behavior and attitude resembles some of the worst traits of 10-year-old boys, and how they'd act if they had absolutely no parental supervision whatsoever. He's stubborn, callous and vindictive. He doesn't like to bathe or change his clothes, he snacks on sugar and doesn't bother cooking his meals, he thinks girls are gross, and he resorts to kicking, hitting, shouting, screaming and throwing tantrums whenever he doesn't get his way. Why does Rorschach appeal to so many fanboys, including me? Hell, why wouldn't he? After all, he's the part of us that still wishes we could indulge our own inner children in such a fashion, and every time he successfully kicks the asses of people who are bigger, stronger and more powerful than him, it can't help but feel a little bit like ... vindication to us. As Rorschach, Walter Kovacs is all the short-tempered, single-minded willfulness of a small child, fused with all the well-honed combat and strategy skills of an adult who's survived decades of Hell, and if he was a real person, I'd argue that this should scare the shit out of everyone who understands what that actually means, because the only prospect that could possibly be WORSE would be Rorschach with all the powers of Dr. Manhattan, and if you want to know what THAT would be like, just watch The Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life," with an eye on Bill Mumy's character.

TL;DR: Rorschach is basically the bad little kid in all of us, and that's why so many of us love him.

[K-Box]

How could I have not noticed this article before?

Book Vs. Film: Watchmen | A.V. Club

The single best review of the Watchmen film, and its merits relative to the book, that I've seen. I can find absolutely nothing in this article that I disagree with. It mirrors my thoughts exactly.

[Anders]

Around ten kids also tend to be very aware of morals: they take moral slights and wrongdoings very seriously, which also fits.

[K-Box]

Under the Hood: The whole damn thing, from the Tales of the Black Freighter DVD ...






Poor Hollis.

It probably says as much about me as about the video that seeing this made me ship Sally and Dan even more than I already do.

Because Sally is awesome, and even though she should have hooked up with Hollis, it just feels ... right, somehow, that she'd pick up with Dan, after Hollis' death.

Yes, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are OTP, but Dan and Laurie ... aren't, to my mind.

[K-Box]

So, THE QUESTION ...

... No, not the character created by Steve Ditko, although I don't doubt the Objectivist philosophy of both the Question and his creator will be brought up in the comments.

But I digress.

It's like this.

Since the Watchmen movie came out, there's been a resurgence of discussion about this story and its characters, and indeed, I don't doubt that more people have talked about it since the premiere of the film than have ever done so before.

In that time, I've seen scores of commendably creative, compelling, insightful and articulate writing done on this subject by fandom, right here on the Internet.

There's been well-researched, in-depth analysis of the characters' psychologies and philosophies, passionate and persuasive arguments on both sides of the debate weighing the respective merits of the source material versus the adaptation, and fun, inventive reimaginings of the story's relationships, ranging from gender-reversed fanfic and fanart to all the countless ships, including Captain Metropolis/Hooded Justice, Mothman/Dollar Bill, Sally/Hollis, Sally/Ursula, Sally/Eddie, Eddie/Laurie (OH JOHN RINGO NO), Dan/Laurie, Dan/Walter, Jon/Laurie, Jon/Adrian, Adrian/boys and even Adrian/Bubastis (YIFF IN HELL KARNAK FURFAG).

But I'm surprised by how rarely, on all the comms, I've seen anyone pose THE QUESTION:

In the end, who was right, and who was wrong?

Rorschach, or Ozymandias?

And yes, I get that the Alan Moore of yesteryear, who wrote Watchmen, explicitly intended for us as readers to recognize that both sides of this argument were inherently flawed, imperfect and compromised, either logically, ethically or morally, but relatively speaking, which character's position is more right, or less wrong, than that of the other?

Give your reasons. Argue with each other.

But play nice.

Fair warning; I already have an opinion on this, which I'm not going to tell you yet, because I'm more interested in seeing what you have to say (although, if you go back far enough, you'll probably find that I've already revealed my position in a previous post).

Maybe something you say will change my mind, but to be honest, I doubt it.

Still, I'm interested to know where you stand on this issue, and why.

[paulpogue]

Adrian Veidt was very wrong. Rorschach was somewhat wrong.

Rorschach was right to do everything he could to stop the conspiracy, even though he didn't know its true horror until too late. But he was also wrong to try to go reveal it to the world. The nastiest part of the trap -- and the reason Adrian let Dan and Laurie live, despite butchering every single person who even had the slightest hint of what really happened -- was that a rational person would know that revealing it would make it all meaningless. The millions are ALREADY dead, and nothing will bring them back, but MAYBE keeping the secret will make it worth something in the long term. Rorschach would never subscribe to this theory -- he's largely defined by Kitty Genovese's death, to the point that he wears her dress on his face, which means that when you strip everything away from Rorschach, right at the core, is someone who will NOT STAND SILENTLY BY WHILE EVIL HAPPENS. Adrian SHOULD be punished for what he did, but at this point, it's too late, which makes Rorschach sort-of wrong.

But Veidt was extremely wrong. He made the mistake of every utopian thinker and every leader with too-big plans: thinking that his short-term solution would make a permanent change. Yes, the "alien attack" united the world -- for a while. But as we learned in real life, a lot of things can happen that nobody expects. Adrian's trying to apply psychohistory and expects everything to go to hell in the mid-1990s. In reality, the Soviet Union was only a couple of years from complete economic collapse, and by the mid-1990s, the world was enjoying prosperity on a never-before-seen level. 25 years later, as the US and Russia work on cutting back their nuclear arsenals, worldwide nuclear destruction is further away than ever. (Even India and Pakistan haven't managed to blow each other to atoms in a decade of having the bomb.) Hell, for sixteen years the world had REAGAN and BUSH II at the helm and we're all still here, despite Reagan being a moronic lunatic and Bush II being ... well, whatever particular kind of moron he was.

Plus, there's all sorts of unintended consequences of ideas that seem good in the short term. You can draw a pretty straight line from arming and supporting Afghan muhajadeen all the way to 9/11, for instance, and the Soviet Union's ability to think ahead more than six months was always highly questionable.

Also consider that to people who are GRADUATING COLLEGE THIS YEAR, the idea of nuclear armageddon is so far removed that it didn't happen in their own memory. That's how quickly the world turned it around without any alien attack. In 1985 it seemed inevitable.

That said, even if Adrian WAS right and nuclear armageddon was inevitable, his idea didn't stop it; it only slowed it down for a few decades. No matter how awful something is, people forget. They always forget. After 5 years, they'd seriously doubt that the squid race was going to return; after 10 years, people would start forgetting the details of what happened; after 25 years, they wouldn't fear the squid any more than any of us on this forum fear being drafted to go fight the Viet Cong. (We have other fears, but that's a different matter.) 50 years and it's ancient history. 100 years and every person who actually remembers it happening is dead, and they all still have nukes and they'll think of reasons to aim them at each other.

Change happens slowly and incrementally in real life; when it APPEARS to happen quickly, it's because of years and years of effects that hadn't been thought about until then. (Our current economic crisis has roots many years old.) Adrian wanted to turn around an ocean liner in one stroke. All he really did was distract people from the navigational system.

Yes, this conflicts with my statement up above about why it should remain secret, but at that point it's the lesser of two evils. Adrian should never have gone through with it, but once he pulled the trigger, one might as well take advantage of the years of peace it WILL bring. Plus, if it comes out that the alien attack was man-made, both sides would blame the other and it'd be five minutes to midnight again. Adrian DID buy perhaps a generation of peace, and to reveal the secret ruins that.

I believe that ultimately, this is Moore's viewpoint as well, due to two important clues. First is Adrian's code name: Ozymandias, king of kings while he lived, look up on my works, ye mighty and despair, but what's left of Ozymandias now? Dust and a shattered statue. Ozymandias is nothing but a long-forgotten memory amidst a blasted wasteland.

Second, of course, is that near-final line: "Sometimes I dream about this freighter, and I'm swimming toward it -- never mind." The entire purpose of the Black Freighter is about a guy who got so disconnected from reality that he killed everything he loved for no reason, left nothing good behind, and ultimately damned his own soul. Unless there was some subtext to "Black Freighter" that I missed -- some way in which the protagonist's actions were somehow worth it in the long run -- I can't think of any other reason for Moore to devote such huge amounts of space to a gigantic metaphor.

[paulpogue]

That said, Adrian is a bigger thinker than we give him credit for. He had an intrinsic field subtractor sitting in his main lair. He uses it to try to get Jon out of the picture, but that's not what it was there for. It was very clearly marked for what it was, not hidden in any way, and he never expected Jon to be there anyway. He even admits that firing it on Jon was a desperation move; he didn't know if it would work, and in fact, it didn't, for reasons that Adrian must have at least suspected.

So why have an intrinsic field subtractor just sitting around? As a backup plan in case the entire plan DOES go bust. The only possible way out of the worldwide mess is to create a power that can make BOTH sides sit down and play nice -- and the only known way to create a godlike power is to subtract the intrinsic field from a super-genius. We have a subtractor ... we have a super-genius ... and thus we have the ultimate "in case of emergency, break glass" scenario.

And to be honest, wondering what Adrian would do with Osterman's power is DAMNED interesting. Osterman wasn't as smart as Adrian; how much of Adrian's desire to remake the world would survive such a conversion? Osterman was an easily led automaton; he did whatever the hell Uncle Sam told him to do, and otherwise was completely disinterested in human affairs, to the point of letting Blake commit cold-blooded murder in front of him. But we have plenty of reason to believe that pre-godhood, Osterman wasn't a particularly driven person himself; he had smarts, but no ambition. Adrian has endless ambition.

[Anders]

I'll just contribute a couple of minor points.

* IIRC, Dan and Rorschach didn't fully know what the conspiracy was about until Adrian told them. I think it's hard to make a moral judgement on whether that was right or wrong considering the information they had. Trying to expose Adrian after the fact was definitely wrong, though.

* Adrian was definitely wrong in doing what he did. As smart as he was, he should have been able to come up with a more longterm, constructive solution, but he was stuck at trying to turn the whole problem into a Gordian knot that could be solved by one clever move.

* I think the Black Freighter story can also be read as a metaphor for superheroes in general: in the end, they become what they're trying to fight.

* In the end, the one who is most wrong is Jon. Being so passive when you have the ability to take direct action against so much of what ails the world is unforgivable.

[K-Box]

Having said all of that, I think you'll be very interested to read my own thoughts on this, Paul.

[jensaltmann]

I just posted the following in response to someone's comment to Kirk's thoughts on this on his LJ, and it occurred to me that it might be relevant to this discussion.

"I still don't believe that Rorschach telling the truth would necessarily save the human race"

I agree. I think, actually, that Rorschach felt the same way. He knew that he couldn't remain silent about this, but he knew that if he revealed all (which his journal didn't -- thinking more about that in a minute), any hope of Ozzie's gamble succeeding would he lost.

I mean, at the end, he practically begged Doctor Blue Dongle to kill him.

Okay. Now. Rohrschach's journal. Rorschach knew Ozzie was up to something, but he had no idea what. The journal reflects that. If the New Frontiersman actually published the journal, that might prompt an investigation into Ozzie's activities. Or not, Ozzie being a Captain of Industry, and we all know what happens when there are allegations of wrongdoing against those who pay enough campaign contributions (not just a US problem, that's an international problem). Besides, from the feel of it, the New Frontiersman wasn't exactly painted as a trusted news source. It seemed more like the kind of paper that Conspiracy Theorists would look to.

I can easily imagine it: "Mr. Veidt, you are aware of the allegations published by the New Frontiersman?" "Yes, I find their latest conspiracy theory very entertaining."

Beyond that... As I said, Rorschach had no idea what Ozzie was up to. And Ozzie had taken great pains to prevent the squid being connected to him. So even if anyone linked Ozzie to the murder of the Comedian, that wouldn't affect the squid situation. Of which Rorschach, when he mailed the journal, hadn't known anything.

[paulpogue]

Heck, even if people actually believed the New Frontiersman was onto something, you'd have the double-unreliable-source problem of everything coming from Rorschach. People are about as likely to believe the Veidt theory as they would a David Ickes column in Worldnet Daily about Obama being a secret Muslim ... from SPACE.