Spontaneous Musings

The WATCHMEN - the comic book and its road to become a film

In 1986, a 12 issue serial hit the area comic book stores with a vengeance, selling out as fast as it was ordered. I remember, at the time, the comic book store owner telling me that I really needed to try this thing - even though it was almost impossible to get a copy. I was fairly new to the medium (comics and graphic novels) - discovered it in the fall of 1985 in a college dorm room, as a friend pulled out her treasured comics and related to me the stories of each and every character - from Kitty Pryde, Logan, Scott Summers, Jean Grey, to Peter Parker. A sucker for stories, any story, particularly stories that took place in fantastical realms and had an element of science to them - plus a lover of art, I fell in love at first sight.

Comics back then aren't what they are today, the information revolution has changed how we percieve comic books along with a whole host of other information - as it has changed the distribution of that information. Back in the 1980s, sci-films, fantasy films, and well films based on comics - weren't as advanced as they are now, we simply did not have the technology back then to recreate the worlds depicted inside them. Also, when Watchmen first hit the stores it was different than anything out there. Watchmen came out before Persepolis was ever published, Maus (1992), The Dark Night Returns (Summer 1986, around the same time as Watchmen), or Sin City (1991). Sandman wasn't written until (1989). Sure V for Vendetta came out before it, but V was drawn mostly in Black and White and was not nearly as ambitious as Watchmen. And the Japanese Magna? Was hard to come by. It didn't populate the book shelves of libraries, book stores, and comic establishments in towns such as Colorado Springs, Kansas City or to my knowledge New York City, until the late 90s. I didn't see a magna comic book until 1998, after I'd lived in NYC for about two years. Nor were comic books for that matter treated as books and placed on the shelves of a book store until the turn of century.

Watchmen took an almost Citizen Kane perspective on story-telling. It told the story from multiple perspectives, jumping into backstories, doing a comic within a comic, providing extras at the back like an interview with one of the lead characters, and a psych profile on another one. Reading the comic was a bit like reading War & Peace by Tolstoy. It wasn't something you raced through, and if you took the time, or read it more than once, you picked up another layer each round. Also, unlike most of the super-hero action comics out there - it was directed at a male adult audience, as opposed to an adolescent male audience or pre-adolescent. I state male, because like or not, that was who the industry catered to back then. Women, like myself, who read comics, were few and far between. Oh, we were there, but weren't the big buyers and we didn't spend hours talking about it in a little huddle with the comic store owner arguing plot mechanics. So, the industry tended for the most part to ignore our existence, or assume we didn't read them. I have lost count of the number of men who told me that their wives/girlfriends got impatient with their comic habit.

The story itself, much like V for Vendetta, published just two years prior, and written by Alan Moore - was and is for the most part a political allegory.

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as charity, greed, or envy.
Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

defined here: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/allegory.html

Watchmen is not a story about survival or one told to comfort or make you feel safe. It is a horror tale told within the boundaries of the film noir/hardboiled crime fiction genre, that is meant to promote a specific theme.

And if you weren't cognizant or older than 13 during the 1980s, the political allegory may to an extent be completely lost on you. Not to mention some of the jokes. To an extent, not a great one, but to an extent, Watchmen is a product of its time period and as a result somewhat dated. I'm not sure people under the age of 31 can fully appreciate the jokes regarding Richard Nixon, the allusions to Regan (who Moore clearly thought wasn't that much of an improvement and they might as well be one and the same, can't say I completely disagree on that one), the whole Cold War era, the annoyance the rest of world had with "superpowers" who with a flip of a button could blow us all up (an annoyance that if anything has just gotten worse over time), and the constant threat of nuclear war - back then we were as terrified of nuclear war as we currently are of terrorists. The 1980s were filled with Nuclear War/Radiation Horror movies, both on TV and in the theaters. We were convinced in the 1980s that the end of the world was just around the corner and we would not live to see 1999.

The allegorical aspect is one of the reasons why I had problems reading the Watchmen way back in 1980s, because allegory can be a bit tough to stomach and a tad on the preachy side. It's not for everyone. I tend to like character driven stories, and allegorical stories aren't character driven they are thematically driven, the characters pawns to drive the theme. They also have be pretty tightly written to make any sense. Watchmen is considered brillant by a lot of people because not only is it tightly written, but the characters actually aren't just pawns, they have back stories and do to an extent live outside of their metaphors. Also, reading the series is a bit like playing with a puzzle box, you have to pay attention to a lot of things at once.

I'd have been fine with the puzzle box bit, but since Watchmen takes place in the bleak and violent world of hardboiled noir fiction, it's not necessarily the most pleasant place to be especially if you happen to be a 20-something woman, struggling to find her place in a predominately male world. I wish I could say it was worse or harder back then, but it wasn't, just different.

That said, I admittedly don't remember the comic that well. I haven't looked at it since 1989, possibly for those reasons. Or even really discussed it since that time. I do know, being a bit of comics/film nerd, that Hollywood has been attempting to make a movie out of it for the past 20 years. For a while they thought the movie was impossible to make. The comic is almost too convoluted and busy for a two-three hour movie. Also, the best part of the comic was the visuals. David Gibbons art changed how people did art. Up until The Watchmen - most comics kept within the constrained boxes. But Gibbons allowed characters to jump outside of those lines. Also it was graphic in its depictions of sex and violence. Most comics shyed away from such depictions due to guidelines regarding decency - set years ago. But, times have changed. In past six years, films based on graphic novels have done amazingly well - dark films, gritty hard-boiled action films. Most of Moore's work has made it to the screen as has, Frank Millers. V for Vendetta, Sin City, The Dark Knight, and The Spirit are just a few of them - and with possibly exception of The Spirit (which was not written by Moore or Miller, even though Miller did the film version) - all have done very well. So it was just a matter of time before the grand-daddy of novels, Watchmen got made.

I wasn't even sure it would make to movie theaters. Warner Brothers had bought, or so they thought, the property from Paramount, who in turn thought they'd gotten it free and clear from 20th Century Fox. But, apparently Fox never gave up its rights to the property. Fox got the court to issue an injunction until the case was eventually settled in February and the film got released as scheduled in March.

FILM REVIEW - WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN

I saw the film last night with a friend, who had not read the comic, but was a fan of that type of genre and about my age, so remembered the 80s as I did. We didn't talk much about it, afterwards. She appeared to like it well enough for what it was. Most of our conversation regarding the film was on the score - or music. Which we agreed was excellent. It may be the best use of music in a film of this sort that I've seen in quite some time. Not only were the songs perfectly chosen to reflect the plot, character, and themes the director wanted to get across, but they fit the time period (these were the songs I was listening to back then), and with their use provided us with another look at the meanings of the lyrics and song itself. For example - this is the first time I think I've seen Leonard Cohen's song Hallejuha, as sung by Cohen, used as the background music for a pivotal, graphic, and somewhat angsty (depending on how you interpret it) sex scene. The music added to the scene and the scene added something to the music. If you listen closely to Cohen's lyrics to that song - the Hallejuha is well, about sexual connection/disconnection.

My first comment to my friend, after the film was over, was: Well, it's like the comic.
I have the same problems with it that I had with the comic, and I like it for the same reasons I liked the comic. Granted it doesn't have everything that the comic had, but like I stated before - this is sort of impossible. Snyder, as with 300, is very good at bringing violent hard-boiled graphic novels to life.

The film is directed by 300's Zack Snyder, and stars Jackie Earl Haley (Rorschache), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Comedian), Billy Crudup (Dr. Manhattan), Patrick Wilson (Nite Owl), Matthew Goode (Ozymandias), Malin Ackerman (Silk Spectra) and Carla Gugino (as the original Silk Spectra - Spectra's mother).

The story is fairly simple - it's a detective story - Roscharch, performed brilliantly by Jackie Earl Haley, is hunting down the killer of his colleague, The Comedian. To find him, he follows and researchs each of his colleagues - the members of a superhero group called The Watchmen, whose predecessors, we are told were The Minutemen - who'd been set up by the police to catch masked villians. The only member from the Minutmen that is with The Watchmen is The Comedian. The superheros, much like other weapons including Homeland Security, were initially created to oppose and resolve a threat.
( cut more for length than spoilers, spoilers are vague and you can get most of them from the trailers )

[The problem with reading reviews, whether they are book, movie, music, or television is you have to figure out if you and the reviewer share the same tastes, attitudes, or interests. If you don't, chances are you will not agree with the reviewer. A good reviewer gives you enough information about the movie, book, what-have-you without giving away the story and enough to let you know whether or not you will agree with the reviewer's opinion on the work. Many professional reviewers, I've discovered, make the mistake of coming across too arrogant and appear to think their opinion matters far more than it does, much like the critic, M. Night Shyalaman successfully skewers in Lady in the Water. This review is no more or less than my perception of V for Vendetta and in some respects is more of an analysis than a critique. Take from it what you will.]

V for Vendetta is based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore and is directed/produced by the Wachwoski Brothers, the same guys who did the Matrix films. If you are familar with either creator and do not like their works, chances are you won't like this film. Moore's comics, including The Swamp Thing, The Killing Joke, Promethea, Watchman, and The League of Extraordinary Gentleman tend to be like most comics and fantasy novels written by men, a tad like a male romance novel - violent, the woman controlled or subordinated by the male (Swamp Thing/Watchman), or taught by him to be what she can be as if she were a child and he the adult (Promothea/League), or if she is an educated, powerful female in her own right, crippled (The Killing Joke) or seen as only powerful because she is "beautiful" (the beautiful but not overly intelligent woman with ugly man is a trend in the male centric romance novel). It's not necessarily misogynistic, no more so than most Westerns were and are, or for that matter Raymond Chandler detective novels. Frank Miller's novels do the same thing - violent, male centric novels, where the women are fantasy figures little more.

I tend to be more tolerant of these type of stories than many women are, since I adore Westerns and noir films -two genres that are not necessarily favorable in their depictions of women or depict strong women. In college, more than one female student or professor berated me for my love of the art form. How can you stand something that depicts women, people of your own sex, in such a derogatory fashion? Where women have almost no roles and are treated as merely sidekicks or romanticized objects? Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Ah, but I've read romance novels written by women and they are guilty of the same things, sometimes in reverse. I'm interested in the story, the evolution of the characters, the mythology or thematic meaning - I tend to not care that much about, since there are times that it is less clear and often up to the viewer/reader to interpret based on their own background and experience. That is not to say, I don't see it nor are not disturbed by it at times. Just that it doesn't always bother me. It depends. An example is Sin City, a film that can best be described as a hyper-realized male romance novel. I liked it for what it was. I did not bother reading the disturbing metaphors, but let it rest as just a fun cinematic ride. Did the same thing with the tv show M*A*SH*, which got better regarding the female roles as it moved forward, but much less fun and snarky. At any rate, I knew when I rented the film V for Vendetta that I would be disturbed by how Evie was handled, that comes with the territory when you read or see films based on noirish graphic novels written by Frank Miller or Alan Moore.

As mentioned above V for Vendetta is a film based on Alan Moore's complex political/noir/science fiction graphic novel that takes place during the Margret Thatcher/Regan era, which has been condensed and abridged for the screen as well as updated. It now takes place in the not too distance future, a future that could be a possible outcome of the Bush/Tony Blair era. The film pays homage to three works: The Counte of Monte Cristo, which it even refers to, 1984 (John Hurt who plays the dictator in V, plays the political prisoner in 1984), and Pgymallion.

( review for V for Vendetta cut for plot spoilers, since this film is impossible to analyse or discuss without them. )