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Mar. 10th, 2009 12:26 amWhen I read The Watchmen as a teenager my interest was held but I remember thinking it had a pretty dickhead view of the universe. Not a dark one, which I'd have been fine with, but a dickhead one. Neatly confirmed by the absurdly faithful movie.
One complaint specific to the adaptation, though: '80s 'adult' comics used R-rated movies as their standard--since R-rated movies were theoretically only to be watched by adults, whatever was exclusively found in them was clearly the essence of what would and should entertain grown ups, including unrecognized precocious ones. (Everyone in the entire 1980s knew that, and if you've forgotten it it's because they ended.) But drawn things generally aren't as vivid as cinematographed ones, so to be like The Movies and Not Just Kid Stuff the ante had to be raised. Hence all the yucky exploding people and massive amounts of shattered glass and the ubiquitous naked blue guy. And probably hence all the dickheadedness, all the reaching after the horrible to inspire faint alarm. To faithfully film all that is to misunderstand what translation is for. To those of us who are not fans who have been dreaming of how it might miraculously be exactly the same, like the director clearly is, the movie became numbing, and in ways totally counterproductive to what Moore was shooting for.
(Why'd everyone get injured on the same part of their face? Because they were all flawed the same way, all liable to the same high from having power over others? Or was that just a coincidence.)
Actually though: I don't remember the very end, with the journal, playing out quite that way--I thought the implication was no one was ever going to look at it? It got lost and forgotten, justly rendering Rorschach's whole enterprise pointless. A mismemory?
I also don't remember the notion that 'they'll behave because they'll never know whether Dr. Manhattan might be watching' being part of the rationale for the big plan's success. That's one of the oldest and most distasteful excuses for religion--Grand Inquisitor's logic. Maybe it followed from how the specifics of the plan were changed, but if it is new it casts what's-his-name, the blond guy, in a worse light than was originally intended.
My impression half a lifetime ago was that Moore was completely, juvenilely enamored with the notion that that plan could succeed and that it could not be rationally condemned (the jaw-dropping silliness of the plan in his version just made it more blatantly provocative).
I wonder if my memory of the details is wrong, and thus I wonder if that assumption was wrong (though it fits V for Vendetta and Miracleman quite well). The movie seems after a direct critique of the superman notion: just as the Comedian couldn't actually successfully live outside of human morality, as compared to trying to and paying for it, the rich blond guy couldn't overcome the limits of human knowledge and execute a perfect plan with irony-free consequences (while the blue man couldn't overcome human limits without losing his humanity). The journal, published, will dispel the fear of Dr. Manhattan; this isn't a 'truth will set you free' effect, though, since the implication is that we will then all be at one another's throats again.
The point of which is what? That we can't get past what we are, and we are therefore, in the long term, doomed? But the whole point of this alternate universe where supermen exist is that they've fucked everything up much worse--this is the given at the beginning, isn't it? I took the end of the graphic novel to be the other shoe: we come in ready to assume that actual supermen would be a terrible thing, so the big twist was what if they weren't--what if the blue guy attuned to the universe could accept humanity as a neat part of it, what if the smart guy could solve all our problems. Am I wrong or does the film make all this incoherent? Did Nite Owl's final castigation of--oh yes (and it's clear why I'd repress it)--Ozymandias (pronounced Ozzy-man-DAY-us in the movie for some reason) even occur in the graphic novel? If so, did it get such a this-is-the-last-word-on-it framing? Someone in the know straighten this out for me--is Moore actually being subverted, here? Though apparently by someone just as much of a dickhead.
One complaint specific to the adaptation, though: '80s 'adult' comics used R-rated movies as their standard--since R-rated movies were theoretically only to be watched by adults, whatever was exclusively found in them was clearly the essence of what would and should entertain grown ups, including unrecognized precocious ones. (Everyone in the entire 1980s knew that, and if you've forgotten it it's because they ended.) But drawn things generally aren't as vivid as cinematographed ones, so to be like The Movies and Not Just Kid Stuff the ante had to be raised. Hence all the yucky exploding people and massive amounts of shattered glass and the ubiquitous naked blue guy. And probably hence all the dickheadedness, all the reaching after the horrible to inspire faint alarm. To faithfully film all that is to misunderstand what translation is for. To those of us who are not fans who have been dreaming of how it might miraculously be exactly the same, like the director clearly is, the movie became numbing, and in ways totally counterproductive to what Moore was shooting for.
(Why'd everyone get injured on the same part of their face? Because they were all flawed the same way, all liable to the same high from having power over others? Or was that just a coincidence.)
Actually though: I don't remember the very end, with the journal, playing out quite that way--I thought the implication was no one was ever going to look at it? It got lost and forgotten, justly rendering Rorschach's whole enterprise pointless. A mismemory?
I also don't remember the notion that 'they'll behave because they'll never know whether Dr. Manhattan might be watching' being part of the rationale for the big plan's success. That's one of the oldest and most distasteful excuses for religion--Grand Inquisitor's logic. Maybe it followed from how the specifics of the plan were changed, but if it is new it casts what's-his-name, the blond guy, in a worse light than was originally intended.
My impression half a lifetime ago was that Moore was completely, juvenilely enamored with the notion that that plan could succeed and that it could not be rationally condemned (the jaw-dropping silliness of the plan in his version just made it more blatantly provocative).
I wonder if my memory of the details is wrong, and thus I wonder if that assumption was wrong (though it fits V for Vendetta and Miracleman quite well). The movie seems after a direct critique of the superman notion: just as the Comedian couldn't actually successfully live outside of human morality, as compared to trying to and paying for it, the rich blond guy couldn't overcome the limits of human knowledge and execute a perfect plan with irony-free consequences (while the blue man couldn't overcome human limits without losing his humanity). The journal, published, will dispel the fear of Dr. Manhattan; this isn't a 'truth will set you free' effect, though, since the implication is that we will then all be at one another's throats again.
The point of which is what? That we can't get past what we are, and we are therefore, in the long term, doomed? But the whole point of this alternate universe where supermen exist is that they've fucked everything up much worse--this is the given at the beginning, isn't it? I took the end of the graphic novel to be the other shoe: we come in ready to assume that actual supermen would be a terrible thing, so the big twist was what if they weren't--what if the blue guy attuned to the universe could accept humanity as a neat part of it, what if the smart guy could solve all our problems. Am I wrong or does the film make all this incoherent? Did Nite Owl's final castigation of--oh yes (and it's clear why I'd repress it)--Ozymandias (pronounced Ozzy-man-DAY-us in the movie for some reason) even occur in the graphic novel? If so, did it get such a this-is-the-last-word-on-it framing? Someone in the know straighten this out for me--is Moore actually being subverted, here? Though apparently by someone just as much of a dickhead.
