Watching the Watchmen
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is a curious film: a painstaking translation, from comics to cinema, of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s twelve-issue limited series (and later graphic novel) of 1986–87; the latest entry in the overcrowded genre of superhero films; and a monument to geek culture, embodying the obsessive love of detail and trivia, the fanboyish curatorial energy and drive, and the passionate partisanship of nerds, collectors, and devotees (and the marketers who prey upon us) the world over. Sadly, like many monuments, Snyder’s film is a cenotaph and mausoleum, an overdone, topheavy tribute that buries (rather than praises) the grandeur of the original under the weight of its own ambition. The story–an intricately detailed alternative-universe satire in which superheroes are real, the United States has won the Vietnam War yet careens toward a nuclear confrontation with Soviet Russia, and an unknown assailant is murdering the retired members of a band of crimefighters known as the Watchmen–fails to take life: embalmed by Snyder’s directorial ministrations, the film is an exquisite corpse rather than a living, breathing work in its own right.
Much of the film’s problems can be attributed to the now-legendary impossibility of the task of filming Watchmen: directors of no less a caliber than Terry Gilliam have proclaimed the feat impossible, and the property languished for nearly twenty years in various states of preproduction. Filming Watchmen is the equivalent of redoing any medium-specific masterpiece in another, quite different medium: if the original Watchmen is, say, the Citizen Kane of comics, then imagine redoing Welles’s Citizen Kane as a comic book; or, if you like, if the original Watchmen is the Ulysses of comics, then watch Joseph Strick’s 1967 film Ulysses, a plodding, meandering, overliteral mistranslation of Joyce’s great original. As with literary translation, a slavish fidelity to the original enforces a mistaken focus in the copy. The most basic disconnect between the media of comics and film would be that of time: comics time is theoretically endless, with the succession of panels enforcing a general forward motion through the narrative, but one that can be interrupted whenever for backtracking, slowing down, and rereading. Indeed, illustrator Dave Gibbons filled each panel of the original with such detail that he maximized the static visual impact of the medium: each image was a tiny tableau into which the reader’s attention was invited to disappear, thus investing Gibbons’s magnificent drawings with the reader’s own imaginative energies. Cinema–especially the unsubtle neo-visceral style of cinema favored by Snyder–allows for no such pause or reflection: the images unroll as if in real time, at twenty-four frames a second, and we are bound, watching them, to the filmmaker’s version of events, with comparatively little (or none) of our minds enlisted, to paraphrase Shakespeare, to eke out the performance.
If these yawning aesthetic and narratological gulfs weren’t enough, Snyder’s numerous cinematic infelicities–many used to fill in the necessary gaps between comic and film–further doom his quixotic project. The unmoving two-dimensional drawings of Dave Gibbons must now be made to move, have voices, exist in a credible simulacrum of three-dimensional space, and so on: but almost every cinematic strategy Snyder brings to bear deadens, rather than enlivens, the film. The constant use of pop music hits on the soundtrack as markers of emotion, which drowns the action in waves of readymade nostalgic bathos; Snyder’s now-infamous overuse of stop-motion photography and rapid-fire edits for his numerous action sequences, which renders much of the would-be-balletic fight sequences an incomprehensible flurry of bodies; Snyder’s near-total tone-deafness for acting, and the resulting loss of nuance and verisimilitude, so necessary to a dystopian, gritty tale like Watchmen: all of these render the film a hodgepodge of competing effects, nothing like the delicate balance of word, image, and color that is the comic. Much of the film, unmoored from the particularities of the comic form that made the Moore-Gibbons Watchmen such a joy, becomes a sticky sci-fi rehash, a dull grey paste that refuses to cohere into a compelling visual narrative. And despite the film’s lauded–and largely earned–fidelity to the original, there are added moments that don’t work at all, as with Snyder’s filming of President Nixon and the Joint Chiefs discussing nuclear war with Soviet Russia in the style of Kubrick’s famous war room from Dr. Strangelove, or the disastrous appropriation of Wagner’s “ride of Valkyries” for a short scene from America’s Vietnam victory. And an epic fail goes to Snyder for the opening shot of the film’s final scene, a view of the hole left in midtown Manhattan by energy bombs released by supervillain Ozymandias. The hole is unmistakably a huge version of the footprints left by the destruction of the World Trade Center; to ram home the point, the camera shows the digitally-added Towers to the south, standing once again like sentinels of an unharmed New York, symbolic watchmen of its prosperity and fortune. Snyder shows the Towers throughout the film, and most of the times it feels exactly right–this is 1985 in a parallel universe, after all–but this final juxtaposition is nakedly exploitative, a nasty, unnecessary grab at the heartstrings that feels more like a sucker punch in the gut. Internet commentary has been spot-on (geeks again!) about Snyder’s multiple sins in reworking the end of the graphic novel: the opening pages of the last chapter, for example, of the Moore-Gibbons Watchmen detail extensively a corpse-strewn Manhattan destroyed by Ozymandias’s masterplot (that giant telepathic squid you’ve undoubtedly heard about), thus humanizing the spectacular violence, showing the terrible cost of the machinations of grown-up boys in tights. Snyder denies the viewer even this glimmer of humanity, opting instead for Bang! Pow! CGI pyrotechnics and a crass display of bankrupt sentimentality.
Snyder’s film is also, paradoxically, a victim of its own conditions for existing, namely the two-decades-long exploration–in comics, movies, and other popular media–of the antiheroic, the morally ambiguous, the criminally pathological, and the psychotically insane. Moore has expressed repeatedly that none of this was his intention, that his Watchmen was intended to provide a critical break with an aesthetic tradition–the pulp glamour of superpowered heroes–not forge an entire countertradition. Yet that is exactly what Watchmen did, aided by Frank Miller’s 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: both detonated in the late-nineteen-eighties comics scene with the force of nuclear explosions, spawning a horde of imitators, and both mirrored other turns toward the dark in American culture and history, trends like cyberpunk and steampunk, the mainstreaming of goth and the resurgence of vampires and zombies, films like Blade Runner and Terminator–the list is long. We’ve been working through these obsessions for some time now, and Snyder’s entry in this vast public work of cultural mediation and negotiation of these archetypes–the demonic avenger, the crusading hero–is a bit late: even Jackie Earle Hayley’s terrific Rorschach can’t compete with last year’s revelation of Heath Ledger’s Joker, surely a benchmark among cinematic psychopaths. This is not to say that Watchmen, either the Moore-Gibbons original or Snyder’s bloated retread, lacks relevance, pace public scolds like A. O. Scott and Armond White: there’s more to either than simple Nietzschean-inspired rantings about the übermensch or the great responsibility that is attendant upon great power–all of that adolescent angst that Moore’s Watchmen deftly punctured and parodied. One thing that’s been lost in all the talk about Snyder’s film is the period-specificity of the original in pre-Giuliani New York City: facing massive budget cuts and reductions in services, with the entire nation teetering on the brink of economic collapse, Watchmen’s nightmare New York seems more topical, more possible, than anytime since its creation. (This must not be taken as an endorsement of Giuliani’s own vigilante-style justice, or of the massive waves of development and gentrification undertaken during his reign as mayor.) The turgid fight scenes, so unconvincing as cinema, have something to say about the objectification and reification of violence, if we’re willing to push past the glossy surfaces and bone-crunching sound effects. And even the film’s deus ex machina ending–in which Ozymandias destroys the largest cities of the world to terrorize humanity into not destroying itself–could be used to illuminate contemporary politics. Ozymandias’s argument is essentially that of the Chicago School writ large: that mankind needs to believe in some large, distracting (preferably frightening) myth, a lie that will bring peace and stability to a naturally fractious populace by organizing them against a common enemy, convincing them to fight and die in the name of an abstract political cause.
This plays as a bit dated during the first months of the Obama presidency–although Obama’s Justice Department’s recent adoption of Bush administration positions relating to state secrets and the rights of prisoners bears more than a disturbing whiff of Ozymandian ingenuity–but we’re close enough in time to the Machiavellian neoconservative ideologies of George W. Bush not to feel some frisson of discomfort when listening to the supervillain’s rationalized barbarity. Snyder’s Watchmen is by almost all standards a failure, but it’s certainly not a boring or irrelevant one.
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