Watchmen and Me

Some of you may recall that, in a long-ago era known as 2009, the movie Watchmen was released in theaters. At the time, I was a senior in college, hellbent on expressing my passion for adaptation, cinema and comics in an academically-fruitful manner. I still remember the first time I saw the trailer, with its wrenchingly atmospheric visuals and haunting Smashing Pumpkins whine, and I had just read the graphic novel for the first time the summer before (and probably at least twice in the interim). Something exquisitely anticipatory happened in my chest when I gorged on those few perfect minutes, like a giggle trying to escape through my tightly-closed lips and humiliate me in my desire like an erection in skinny jeans. But I didn't see the film when it was in theaters. I didn't see it until last week, in fact. Why not, what I saw when I watched it and what happened when I did are not a mere review, but tell a story that is as much a part of my life and personality as film, comics and this comic in particular are the influences on my creative work.

Room 300

Snyder on the set of 300. Odd how much less ridiculous this looks than the actual film... 

A film I did drop a whopping $2 on to see on a big(ger) screen was Watchmen's director's oft-quoted blockbuster 300. I went by myself to see it, only the second time to date I have gone stag to the cinema (the other was Hotel Rwanda, huge mistake), and I had very little in common with my fellow revelers, despite the likelihood that we were students at Oberlin rather than residents of its surrounding town. For one thing, I didn't know anything about 300, other than that Frank Miller, whose ostensible magnum opus The Dark Knight Returns was about to become the focus of my academic pursuits had written/illustrated the source material. For another, I was stone cold sober. I folded my arms over my meal-plan-fattened chest grumpily as the clink of forties, already emptied before the two poorly-focussed previews were even over, filled the darkened Apollo. I was there on serious business, my expectations completely virginal, and I sat snooty in a den of vice! Then the film got rolling and I realized that by insulating myself from criticism or the plot, I'd come completely unprepared for how hilarious 300 was going to be. Had one of the best times I ever have at the movies, money and time well-spent...but I was filled with an almost instinctive sense of suspicion two years later when I heard Zach Snyder and Watchmen in the same sentence.

The opening scene of the film features a sneaky glimpse of Eddie Blake's apartment number, and regardless as to whether it was lifted straight from the GN or not (this trivia did not send me scrambling to the bookcase for verification, as other minutia eventually would), this time I knew what 300 meant. And it meant the joke was shortly about to be on me. In true Comedian fashion, I had already seen the bitter punchline coming miles away.

I Think He Got Away From Us, Jack.

Something for an executive?

One of my idols, on whom I later taught a class, Terry Gilliam, had called Moore and Gibbons' graphic novel "unfilmable." According to my spellcheck, unfilmable isn't a word, but if it were, its definition is not Watchmen. Certainly, Gilliam would have prematurely aged a decade, gone way over budget, started over, lost half the cast, barely managed to finish and then threatened to destroy the reels (despite the result having been a darkly whacky spectacular the likes of which few have ever seen and only a fraction of those few will appreciate), because that's what he does. I envision his rendering as a Brazil-esque romp through the hellscape of the alternate 1980s that falls apart at the end as it wrestles against its auteur's tendency toward comedic absurdity but somehow manages not to offend as much as its parts do when taken individually.

Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides,
looking like most of us feel watching Dune.

David Lynch's adaptation of Dune is an extant example of this phenomenon. There is so much wrong with that film, so many strange modifications, distractingly international casting, bizarre fluctuations in pacing and so on, but it feels so rooted in the spirit of the original that it still works out passably. It's not an adaptation of Herbert's novel, so much as it is a presentation of Lynch's imagining of it. Gilliam's Watchmen would doubtless have followed suit, had he ever dared to try. Another potential director of note was Darren Aronofsky, whose version I cringe to think of. Watchmen could never be so hopeless, so bleak, as to let its characters' demons triumph. As a touchstone of gritty, adult sequential narrative it is deceptively, nigh-subversively uplifting. (Where was I...)

But the veritable laundry list of false starts doesn't in itself suggest that Watchmen is even close to unfilmable, and likely that's not even what Gilliam meant. The book is quite consistently cinematic, deliberately framed and paced, illustrated in an intentionally stiff and ugly style. Crib away and no one would blame you. In fact, the legions of faithful might get ornery if the visuals strayed too far. No, you could film it; you could adapt the story, too, again, as long as you used a light hand... and that's the problem right there. I'd bet money that Gilliam's a fan, such a one that he doesn't want to risk messing up--as if he could hurt his own love of the text by being unfaithful, or worse, inaccurate. And then there come the Masses, never destined to be satisfied, some equally afraid (as I was) that a poor job could contaminate the wonder of the comic, others already angry at the presumption that an adaptation ever be tried. This tension begs many questions, any of them daunting enough cause a total creative shutdown. Is the spirit defined by technical faithfulness or is it freed by interpretation? What if you want to disagree with the source, or if even part of you does? What if there is a film in Watchmen, because the book itself is not perfect? It's a confrontation with the Devine, in no uncertain terms or exaggeration. And what do we do when we access divinity? Well, there are two schools of thought: Worship or rebel.

He's Not God, He's Just Drawn that Way

I find a comforting clarity in this analog, which leaves no room for agnostic dithering. There is, of course, no god, and zealotry is as ignorant as it is ultimately foolish-looking. As an atheist, I must therefore eschew suprematism, the concept dictating that there is an ideal form for a given idea. Before I get too carried away, I'm also a lapsed poet, and agree whole-heartedly with the notion of "perfect words in the perfect order." Adaptation, however, is most successful when it's iterative--a spiritual undertaking rather than a ritual one. Alan Moore's habitual "I was my hands of this" attitude toward screen adaptations of his work is a mindgame, and quite a harmful one to the art of interpretation, all the hard-learned skills requisite when working for, through, within and to deny someone else's creation.

The Watchmaker himself.
And no, I didn't go out of my way
to find the scariest picture I could.

It's like a passive-aggressive reverse-psychology that tells not only would-be adaptors but, just as importantly, the audience for said adaptation that no one else's vision has a place in the context of his ideas. We know this is patently false. Every person who flinches at the thought of their fantasy being "ruined" is actually an argument in favor of adaptation. Because, guess what: You aren't right!

You aren't wrong, either. If that's not Dr. Manhattan because in your head he sounded different, that's fine. Better than fine, it's the first step in creating something yourself, because it's imagination. We make Watchmen come alive, we share it and spread it not because we rely on the specifics of it so much as we relate to what those specifics happen to offer by way of resonance in our minds and lives. We argue and question and critique. That means we've been touched and Alan Moore can't take that back. This isn't to say that there is no intellectual property, nor that musing about how Nostalgia smells is on par with actually making Watchmen. But I do believe that anything that inspires even one person can be adapted into new form and version, that fans should have the permission to like them when they're offered.

This is one of the worst ways in which, all hypotheticals aside, the actual movie actually failed. For just as films like Dune can whiff on the specifics and come out close, Watchmen is virtually a treatise on how trying to do everything right can go terribly wrong. It was the easiest mistake to make, and given the above, I fully understand why it was made. Zach Snyder groveled at the alter and brought his own film to its knees to crawl along beside him. Ironically, it's more to Gibbons, who bestowed blessing on the superfluous Before Watchmen prequels, than to the unyielding Moore that he catered. I can't comment on Snyder's vision using just the film as my text, because it's so anal-retentively faithful to the comic that it was sublimated at almost every turn...unless of course his stated intention was "I want to make a moving copy of Watchmen," which is a) tragically redundant/underambitious and b) not even close to what he accomplished.

The upshot to such a reproduction was that the moments that differed were highly obvious. I liked a number of them, most of them incidental bits of dialogue like Daniel's reassurance that if Dr. Manhattan was bothering to pretend, that he still cared for Laurie. Nothing wrong with that! Kudos. Mostly, the changes disappointed, again on the level of incident. Of course the ending is quite a departure and a largely nonsensical one at that. I'm not that upset at the loss of the tentacle vagina monster; I was never that attached to that specific in the book. What did catch my notice was that, unlike so many wonderful works of iteration, these wholesale changes were shoehorned into the new narrative without consequence to the events they preceded. If you're going to change it, change it. If Dr. Manhattan sacrifices himself as the public knows him and his last Earthly act is to kiss Laurie good bye...

It's got "magical moment" written all over it. Come on!

why doesn't she still love him, forever pine for him, this heroic man who came to love the world so much he let it go? Yes, it's not what happens in the book, but that story went out the window twenty minutes beforehand so why not take a stand? It would have helped the film make sense and resolved some of the themes that were otherwise orphaned. Bottom line, the film was already its own beast, deserving of its own life in all its uniquenesses, such as they were.

Give Me Back My Face

A screed of criticism will serve no particular purpose at this late a date. Suffice it to say that the film dodges the story's most intimate moments, the broken ones that are still stuck in the hearts of anyone who opened up to its characters. If watching the Watchmen doesn't make you feel embarrassed, then something's gone awry somewhere. My belief in iteration taken to its illogical extreme suggests that the adaptation could have gotten closer to the soul of this lasting, impactful opus without including any of the actual characters, so long as it had the awkward sorrow, the frustrated love, the loneliness that permeates each rigid panel and uncomfortable full-on portrait.

That's right, he said it.
You just have to deal with it. Forever.

There's (obviously) plenty of theory to be spun around Watchmen, depths of critical analysis of casting and performance, adaptation, theme and form in the comic and beyond. There's book there, perhaps my own, someday.

And then there's me, just me, and reason I set out to write this in the first place.

Harken back to this post's beginning, and my enthusiasm, still evident, for basically everything involved in this movie. You name it, it's got it: It's an adaptation of a deeply complex comic book into a blockbuster-scale film, forecast by a trailer that it couldn't possibly live up to, that was probably doomed to fail, but by the strength/interest of the two actors I was familiar with (Patrick Wilson and Billy Crudup) might have some worthwhile moments! Whew! Why not! Who among the people who knew me then would have doubted I'd go see it, even out of morbid curiosity? Not even my then-boyfriend-now-husband would have guessed that I was too afraid to set foot in the theater.

That's right, afraid--like so afraid that even now my hands are getting numb in the anticipation of the paragraphs I swore to myself I'd write today. No one knew that the first time I'd read the book I'd had to stop, and that--illustration or not, actor or not--I was terrified to confront the face revealed beneath that mask of black and white, the one that looks so much like the man whose name I never say or write.

Nowhere to run. 

One detail's worth of difference and it would not have mattered. In truth, the resemblance is thin. But a short, curly-haired redhead with a snubbed nose and freckles once threatened to put his fist through me, and though he never really did, the wounds left the kind of scar that makes people drop books from fingers suddenly strengthless when they see a likeness, however far-removed. I still sometimes realize when I'm enjoying rediscovering my favorite comic book, that I am reading the speech bubbles without looking at the pictures. That although time and trauma have erased the specific truths of what actually happened to me and I no longer know exactly what was waking reality or a nightmare or a lie, that my brain remembers for me and helps me not to touch certain pages with more than my fingertips. How could I go and see that mask torn off, thirty feet tall? What if underneath, like when I read it first and every time since, there in a crowded megaplex, it was him?

We paused the movie several times when we watched it, my loving husband and me. We had to feed our pesky cats, for one thing, and grab the GN off our shelf to point indignantly at the evidence of missteps and reference. And as a film, it's full of as many of the former as it is the latter. I tried three times without success to tell the story you are reading now. Finally I did it, lying in bed, winding down Round One of our discussion of Zach Snyder's film. Yes, in the arms of the man who loves me, in the house I earn a living to help rent, with our pets and the promise of Tomorrow where I'm a writer and a lover and a friend, I called my fear silly and confessed it. Then I cried. I'm crying now, because I did not die all those years ago, like I thought I'd have to to escape him; because I picked up Watchmen again and read it through. I faced what scared me, knowing it would do little to lessen my fear.

And so I'm grateful to a flawed, hyper-slick action movie and all the ways that it missed the mark. It let me look at Rorschach--and smile. It was him (bravo to Jackie Earle Haley), yet I was safe: I could see no resemblance there at all.