I read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Watchmen for the first time when I was 15, in the summer of 1996, a decade after the 12 issues of the series were originally published. I found its admixture of superhero deconstruction, social critique of U.S. power in the late cold war, and interrogation of the meaning and history of the comic book fascinating, moreso than any other comic i'd read, and from the first comic i'd ever bought, an noirish John Byrne/Jim Aparo issue of Batman involving the murder of costumed impersonators, I'd read superhero and "nonsuperhero" comics voraciously throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. I have read Watchmen again several times in the last 13 years, so much so that my old trade paperback visibly demonstrates its wear. These subsequent readings have impressed upon me the work's concern with the parameters and implications of its genre and the narrative possibilities and politics therein, the interspersed panels from the black freighter story, the tijuana bibles, the flashbacks to the golden and silver ages (employed even more dramatically, perhaps, in Moore's noteworthy deconstruction of Rob Liefeld's odious Supreme years later) and the textual prefaces to each chapter (Hollis Mason, the physicist who writes about Dr. Manhattan, the interview with Adrian Veidt, etc.) Watchmen is a book about reading, about what it means to read, about what it means to read (superhero) comics. It is a comic book about comic books, a comic book about being a comic book about comic book about comic books.
And it is masterfully told - Moore and Gibbons both employ and exceed genre conventions, introducing, along with their now-compromised contemporary Frank Miller new "cinematic" narrative forms, but also playing, subversively, with the temporality and spatiality of the comic panel, the spatial and temporal organization of the page. One issue is entirely symmetrical to itself. Another plays with time in sophisticated and unprecedented ways for comic storytelling. Watchmen is Moore's magnum opus, still one of the most thoughtful accounts of what comics are, what it is they do, and how the superhero functions ideologically in 20th century U.S. culture. We get nerd masculinities and sexual (and commodity) fetishization, fascist revanchism and/as Randian objectivism (never unproblematized, never romantically embraced), cold war nuclear post-humanism planner states and Richard Nixon.
Zack Snyder's film abandons most of these things. Its social critique is far less complex, the intertextual metacritique gone altogether. Each panel becomes three minutes of bloody, aestheticized gore. Rohrshach's fascism becomes the director's and the viewers'. The adulteration of the film's politics is dramatic and has real consequences for how we must understand its project. The characters in the film are not archetypes to be critiqued and deconstructed and poked and prodded but rather static, commodified objects of the Warner Brothers gaze, not multivalent and ambiguous echoes of obvious tropes to be picked apart and read politically but instead crude exemplars of exactly the sort of mawkish, reactionary frames which the comic tears apart. This is Watchmen as Rob Liefeld himself would have staged it, watchmen as celebration of the grim and gritty, Watchmen as blooddarkstabstrikeforce ascendant, Watchmen as something which can be read as and only as clumsy noir. The extended and aestheticized violence is important here. We celebrate blood seeping under doorways and oil burning the skin of prison inmates rather than recoil at them, or recoil at our excitement, as occurs at least in my reading of the original material. Snyder's Watchmen operates as a justification for fascist superheroics rather than a critique of them.
Except for the Tijuana bible scene which makes no sense absent its place in the original text, the comic book is largely absent here as it has been for so many of the recent wave of superhero films, which i have discussed elsewhere on this blog. But Snyder's film does not engage this wave of films critically, as some critics suggested - rather it functions parasitically, proceeding from the assumption that dark sells more tickets to transform perhaps the most nuanced and intentionally ambiguous superhero comic ever into an empty, vacuous, univocal testament to the politics of a Michelle Malkin or Ann Coulter. The directing deals poorly with Moore's dialogue and the "new stuff" is too horrendous to merit the designation 'risible.' But if anything the film's failure proves Moore's contention that his work is "unfilmable" to be an insightful claim, cognizant of the very different narrative structures employed in comics and on film, that adaptation is a political process, and that while 300 was fascist garbage in the original Frank Miller graphic novel, Zack Snyder's notion of how to do Watchmen "right" says more about the director than about the work.
More on this later, maybe, though i'll be spending the entirety of my "break" writing, with hopefully some grading thrown in as well. Ugh.
EDIT More on Moore, and the great Grant Morrison on what comics (can) mean.
No comments:
Post a Comment