Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Watchmen: A Book Review
Somehow or other, I managed to get through the 1980s without reading the Watchmen series, despite being at the time a rabid comic fan. With the much-heralded movie soon to be released, I had to correct that.
I really wanted to like the Watchmen, because it's all about a concept that I've often liked to noodle about: what would costumed vigilantes and/or superpowered beings be like in the real world? Several works have examined this question, such as the early episodes of Heroes and even the current Batman movie series.
Comic legend Alan Moore's take on this contains a lot of cool ideas. First, in this alternate but initially believable reality, costumed vigilantes emerged as media-inspired copycats. Soon after the notion of costumed crime-fighters appeared in comic books, some half-wits started to imitate it in real life. You can easily imagine that actually happening.
In the story, these vigilantes were initially tolerated by the authorities, largely because they served as a useful public distraction from the Depression and WWII. Eventually, though, the public tired of them and they became a nuisance to the authorities. They are first largely hobbled during the paranoic McCarthy era before finally being outlawed in the early 70s. The story picks up about a decade later, as former vigilantes slowly start to come out of hiding as members of their dormant fraternity start getting mysteriously killed off.
The story also maintains believability by allowing for only two super-powered beings, both of whose back stories seem fairly plausible. One super being, Dr. Manhattan, is so powerful that he is no longer really human and is manipulated by the US government as, essentially, a living weapon that allows American hegemony to extend even further than in our reality. No Superman code of ethics here - this is the "real" world.
The story contains all sorts of cool little well-reasoned tidbits. For example, Moore reasoned that, since comics are an escapist media, if superheroes really existed comic readers would lose interest in them. In Moore's imaginary reality, comics have instead focused on pirate stories.
Yet, for all of these positive features, I was disappointed. I had much the same reaction to it as I've had to other Alan Moore works: Great concepts, enthralling opening chapters, but as the series drags on it runs out of steam and becomes poisoned by too much of Moore's dark vision of the world. Moore is great at making imaginary things seem real, but piss poor at describing the real world in a believable or empathetic way.
There is a theme that runs through all his works: "the Establishment" launches horrifically evil conspiracies aimed at crushing personal freedom in order to fulfill their own greed and lust. Moore's obsession with this idea has become profoundly boring for two reasons. First, Moore is so naive about the way "the Establishment" actually operates that his outrageous conspiracy plotlines lack credibility. Second, Moore's characters - "heroes" and villains alike - are all so rotten - so murderous, valueless and sociopathic - that there is scarcely such a thing as a sympathetic character in any of his graphic novels.
This is especially evident in the scenes dealing with Dr. Manhattan, ostensibly the ultimate hero of the story. His ultimate power has left him completely emotionally detached, like Spock or the Borg on Star Trek. He no longer cares about life and death and therefore is unconcerned about an imminent nuclear war. His ex-girlfriend goes to try to convince him that human life is worth saving. Supposedly, Dr. Manhattan has an epiphany about this and decides to intervene, but it's hard to understand why. Moore's own view of humanity is so bleak and cynical that I think Jesus Christ might have second thoughts if he had to listen to Moore babble on.
Maybe they'll be able to fix these things in the movie. Maybe the scriptwriters will succeed in creating characters with whom we can identify.
But, whether they succeed or fail, one thing is certain: Moore will no doubt condemn the movie version of his story, but not before he cashes his cheque. I think that says more about Alan Moore in particular than it does about the human race in general.
posted by Mentok @ 3:45 p.m.,
3 Comments:
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At 5:54 a.m.,
said...
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Well. I have to say that I disagree entirely about some of your conclusions.. I think the issue with Dr Manhattan on Mars coming to terms with what's happened and then back there with Laurie as he comes to accept the value of things - I know it's dealt with through him in a detached and non-human way but I found it very powerful - a little like a number of modern humanist and atheistic writings about all of the reasons why life itself is worth it, why you don't need fairies at the bottom of the garden to know that it is beautiful and worth striving to save. And I don't think there's any suggestion that it's The Establishment who are running the narrative show in Watchmen, in fact I think far from that it's all about the role of one individual who is in his own way as anti-establishment as anyone in the story.
I like the use of anti-heroes, and I think you could argue that, eventually, the whole thing is Laurie's story as much as anyones, And I think the film will fail to deliver just because it needs to be a comic book to work as it does, and in fact the 'book' edition, which gives you the transitions between chapters in a more organised way and allows everything in them to feed into the themes and events of the narrative. The movement between the Pirate story (which is wonderfully bleak although it all ends far too quickly) and the events in New York are perfect but they tend to be perfect because of image matching and arrangement on the page and I think those things, which look wonderful on the page, would just look clumsy if you tried to do them in a film.
I can't imagine feeling that the film will really work, but then again I couldn't imagine the film of V for Vendetta working before I saw it and, for all of the bits and pieces that change in that, I think that in fact it works very well, so we shall see. That was at least a fairly UK project with different styles and priorities than a big hollywood movie. It's a shame that Watchmen didn't get made by Terry Gilliam. -
At 10:16 a.m.,
Mentok said...
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Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about Dr. Manhattan's epiphany on Mars. I re-read several times to try to find what I was missing, but each time it just seemed to me that he was changing his mind because it was necessary for the plot for him to do so and for no other clear reason.
I agree with you that the parallel pirate story, as well as the inter-chapter book excerpts, were the best parts of the series and will be very hard to reproduce on the screen.
The book is shot through with Moore's trademark suspicion of the Establishment, starting with his cartoonish depiction of Richard Nixon as the "Great Satan" standing behind all the allegedly bad forks in the road in this alternate reality. Frankly, a reality in which there never was a Cold War might well have been a demonstrably better reality, but Moore seems resistant to such suggestions.
Yes, the plot-line is driven along by a single individual staging a coup (which differs significantly from "anti-establishment")... Moore plotlines often involve such coups. But the character staging this coup, it's fair to say, is supposed to symbolize big business and the market system. What Moore seems to be setting up is the 70s era political establishment vs. 70s, or perhaps even 80s era business establishment, neither of whom are shown as having clean hands. -
At 4:34 p.m.,
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Back in August when I was completely running out of things to say I had a plan to blog about watchmen an issue at a time, with playlists and frame grabs and attempts at analysis and all, as a way of keeping blogging anyway, and then I just kind of perked up again and left the idea. It might be a nice thing to come back to now.
The book is very much a product of the cold war era although I think it could be argued that the evidence of the last ten/twenty years is that America can't really cope without some kind of evil enemy in place. Other than bolstering US pride (first helicopter into Saigon after the surrender indeed) I'm not sure that Dr Manhattan would have made much difference to US/USSR relations, he's just another weapon among many. I think his conclusion on Mars kind of hint at the sort of nod to the quantum that often passes in arts and literature as an effective understanding of science these days - that we fail to see the miraculous in the everyday because it's everyday, there's just too much of it to make sense of. It is a bit of a clumsy attempt, I guess, but it does work for me.
(Also, doesn't the first sentence of my first comment sound horribly stroppy! Sorry)
