I haven’t seen “The Watchmen”, but I’ve read it, so if you haven’t done either, spoilers.
I didn’t get to see “The Watchmen” when it opened, because I was traveling, so I have tickets to see it late tonight so you can have a proper review tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it, since it got such mixed reviews, which means that you really do have a chance to decide for yourself who’s crazy and who isn’t. But I have to say, there’s one indication that “Watchmen’s” bid for world domination might have run into a huge obstacle, which is that it’s being marketed as a straightforward superhero movie, and many people who watch it are bewildered and upset by it. For instance, Antigone at Punkassblog finds the movie incredibly upsetting, because she didn’t realize going in that it’s a send-up of superhero movies. And thus she makes the mistake of assuming we’re supposed to identify with the protagonists, which isn’t the worst assumption to make, since that’s true of 100% of superhero movies before this one, I’m sure. And if you watch the movie assuming that you’re supposed to be siding with Rorschach and the Comedian or even Dr. Manhattan, I suspect you will wonder what kind of topsy-turvy fucked up world the writers and producers of this story live in. That’s her reaction:
The movie seems to be pretty harsh on “liberals” as well, though I don’t necessarily know what that says about the politics of the creator. At best, they are seen as ineffective and weak, derided as “Intellectual eggheads” and at worst they are seen as a force to destroy society (we see a hippy mob protesting the masks, for one, which the Comedian gleefully starts shooting with tear gas.) Nixon doesn’t come off looking good, but he doesn’t really come off looking bad either…...
There is a lot of sexism in this movie. The Comedian is a way over the top example, but Rorschack seems pretty fond of calling all sexual women whores, and Dr. Manhattan breaks up with his long-time girlfriend because she aged.
In another post, she decries the fact that Silk Spectre both I and II wear ridiculous, skimpy costumes, and of course that the first Silk Spectre is the victim of an attempted rape. (We argued about this in comments, and it really isn’t the point of this post, but Antigone really wanted to see Silk Spectre flip out and whomp the shit out of the Comedian, which would, in my opinion, be a completely ridiculous fantasy and go against the grain of the entire story. The point of the character Silk Spectre is that she is not a superhero, but that she has a talent for self-promotion that is actually more relevant than superstrength or some other fictional power would be.) All of these points and hopes and fantasies are completely valid when referring to a modern, straightforward superhero movie. Should Catwoman be unable to defend herself in the next Batman movie or should Batman start railing against evil liberals, I’m going to get angry. But the point of “The Watchmen” is that it’s about juxtaposing the myth of the superhero with certain ugly realities, and the conclusions reached—-especially about how the profession would attract mostly sociopaths and self-promoters, how women’s success would be related to their sex appeal over their skills, how sexism and homophobia would still touch you even if you were a masked vigilante—-strike me as entirely realistic. But this post isn’t about the themes of the story, which I think I’ll be able to explore more in tomorrow’s review.
No, I think my question is how do you characterize a story like “The Watchmen”? I called it a satire at Punkassblog, but it’s not funny in any way, shape, or form, so it’s not recognizable as a satire, even as it fills all the other requirements. It plays with common tropes and exposes them to a dark form of ridicule, or at least examination. The other movie that comes to mind that’s analogous is “No Country For Old Men”, which uses the format of a crime thriller to question the narrative structures of a crime thriller, particularly the way that your typical crime thriller uses the darkest parts of humanity to guide you to a place where you feel pretty good about yourself and the main characters. Instead, you’re asked to consider violence something to truly despair over and identify with a protagonist who has no power in the world to stop it. Needless to say, the book of “The Watchmen” does the same thing, except I think Alan Moore is overtly hostile to comic book conventions, whereas the Coen Brothers were just trying to look at the same kind of movie from a different angle in “No Country”.
Is it satire when it’s not funny? I think that’s the best word for this kind of story-telling, even though it’s actually pretty rare (maybe commenters can come up with some more examples). Because it’s rare and because it doesn’t give you yuks to fall back on and comfort yourself, I don’t think something like “The Watchmen” is going to be able to translate to audiences who aren’t already primed for a bluntly post-modernist assault on comic book superhero traditions. The movie is being marketed as a straightforward superhero movie with “dark” overtones, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot to potential audiences. Superhero movies have played with conventions and played on the dark side for awhile now, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all that subversive.
Take “The Dark Knight”, for instance. Really enjoyable, and I think they explored some interesting territory with the reimagining of the Joker character. But anyone who thinks that movie was subversive is kidding themselves. Even the scene where Batman breaks his own moral code and spies on people (just this once!) to finish his job is something of a false dilemma, added to increase the darkness of the tone and the suspense. Batman ends up being right, of course, and our faith in the character is never really in any danger. More to the point, when compared to “The Watchmen”, our faith that superhero movies are about putting our allegiance with the hero is never shaken. The whole flipping of Two Face is far from subversive, but standard genre fiction fare. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of this. Most of us can only take so much delving right into the heart of darkness, and glancing off it in order to add some spice to escapist fare is much more manageable on a regular basis. That said, it needs to be examined on occasion, and Moore did everyone a great favor by asking some hard questions in “The Watchmen”.
But will it translate? The issue with storytelling is that falling into a narrative has the potential to be very disconcerting. Storytellers of any sort try to throw up a lot of signposts to indicate exactly what sort of story they’re about to tell, so you the audience will be ready to accept it for what it is. If you start to see the pacing and cinematography of “The English Patient”, but then everyone breaks into song and dance, you won’t know what the hell is going on. With books, you can throw a lot of curve balls, because the reader can skip back and figure it out. But I don’t know so much about movies. So “The Watchmen” has a real obstacle to communicating to the audience, which is that every signifier it can lean on has been used by other movies, especially “The Dark Knight” to indicate a dark superhero movie that has some uncomfortable scenes in it, but is fundamentally not going to question the narrative conventions or break down the fantasy and throw it in your face.
In the book, the attempted rape of Silk Spectre is deliberately hard to understand. It doesn’t fit into either neat box assigned narrative rapes, which is that they are either a way to take a female character down a few notches or they’re a plot device to allow the male characters (or, in some cases, like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, the female character herself) a moment to act boldly and decisively to stop the rape. No, in “The Watchmen”, the assault ends up playing out like it does in real life, as does the gay-bashing incident. People don’t like it, but they don’t really do much about it. Even the victim herself can’t contextualize what happened and ends up engaging in self-defeating behaviors that are inexplicable to outsiders. It doesn’t make us feel very good about ourselves. But in that sense, I think it’s highly responsible, because both misogynist representations of rape and uses of it as a point of heroic intervention distract from the reality at best, or in many cases, reinforce victim-blaming narratives. I don’t know how it turns out in the movie, but I’ll report back. The point is that it’s deliberately resistant to traditional narrative tropes about rape, because the whole point of “Watchmen” is to alternate between questioning and laying waste to these traditions. Thinking back to the book, it really is a scorched-earth approach.
Can such non-funny satires ever really take hold at the cineplex? I don’t know. Perhaps there will be enough conventions that build up around questioning conventions that we audience members who sit down to watch it will be able to catch on much quicker. Right now, I’d say there’s a definite language that movies draw on to let you know that they’re more about other narratives than about their own story—-hyper-stylized language, set design, costumes, etc., or at least a mugging, comical tone that tells you not to take anything you see too seriously. Critiquing narrative conventions like “Tropic Thunder” does with broad satire is easy to understand. Even “Pulp Fiction” does it by embracing a hyper-stylized approach to pretty much every element of the film to signal to you loud and clear that you are not watching a conventional mob movie. But can a more straightforward use of conventions to deliver an unconventional and upsetting story work?
I don’t know. After tonight, I’ll have a better idea.
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This is the smartest thing I’ve read about Watchmen. I wonder just how many people will understand it at the cinema. I don’t think I would have unless I read it or something like this first. Thanks for offering it out.