Who's Watching the Watchmen? I Am, Unfortunately

I love Watchmen. I teach a Writing for Comics & Graphic Novels course at the Bethesda Writer’s Center and I constantly use Watchmen as an example of sequential storytelling techniques. How to lead the eye. How to use the symmetry of the page (and the entire book, for issue 5) to create a thematic crescendo that flows through your work. How to pack panels with subtext and back story to create a storytelling experience one can only achieve in comics. The story itself is at times uneven and outdated but it’s not the Big Picture that makes Watchmen so groundbreaking. It’s the attention to detail. It’s treating the comic form like a piece of art that shouldn’t be lumped together with movies, TV, comic strips, and wall hangings. It’s about the small; Watchmen’s plot is just the canvas that Moore and Gibbons paint an intricate masterpiece on.

Having said that, I’m not excited about this movie at all. The first trailer gave me a bit of a geek-on, I’ll admit. The teaser where no-one talked and the visuals coincided with my favorite moments from the book.



And then there was the second trailer.



My first real problem with the second trailer might sound kind of…fan boyish? Rorschach, Nite Owl II, etc – they were never part of a team called The Watchmen. Now that might sound like I’m nitpicking a small point but, the thing is, the fact that the superheroes aren’t called The Watchmen is part of the essence of the book. A major thematic thread in the book is ego and the superhero. Everyone thinking they can solve the world’s problems their own way (or not caring enough to even solve the world’s problems). You read the book expecting the usual superhero conclusion, where the good have to come together to fight evil. Put their differences aside. Form a group – you expect The Watchmen. But you never get it – you get to the end and you realize the superhero can never exist because they can never work together. They’ll end up destroying each other and us, in the process. The Watchmen can never exist.

Who watches the watchmen? No-one does, yet we put our lives and our fate in their hands. That question is the meaning of the title – it’s not because they’re some costumed superhero team. The Minutemen struggled through it. The Minutemen II never got off the ground. The Watchmen can never exist.

It’s not a minor point – it’s the point. And calling the group of heroes The Watchmen kind of leads me to believe that the movie’s just going to be about superheroes going bad – the Big Picture – and will never handle the subtleties and storylines that makes Watchmen great.

Which brings me to the rest of trailer two. And everything that’s been released or said about the movie since.

It looks visually stimulating, sure. And I’m sure it’ll be a good movie in its own right. But everything I’ve seen from it so far has been big, nosy, and ham-fisted. Every critic that hated it (every critic that never read the book) has called it loud and uneven. Every critic that loved it (every critic that read the book) has remarked on how true it was to the visuals and the plot. They talk about the violence and the balls it took to show Dr. Manhattan’s tremendous wang (which, I should point out, was small in the book to highlight his emotional impotence – the most powerful person in the world has a small penis. Skyscrapers, small dicks, etc).

The plot. The canvas. The background noise. That’s what the Watchmen movie looks like so far and thats what every review has pointed to. Comic fans love it because of the background noise and critics don’t get it because of the background noise. And everyone sees it being touted as the GREATEST GRAPHIC NOVEL EVER and fanboys say how true it is to the book and the newbies say, “Well, if that’s true than the book sucks.”

I got free tickets to go see the movie so I’m going to go. Maybe my opinion will change. It’s happened before. Robin’s excited to see it because she knows how much I admire the book. I showed her issue 5 (“Fearful Symmetry”) and explained to her how meticulously Moore and Gibbons broke down the pages and why they did it. I told her they can never reproduce something like that on film and that’s what makes me admire Watchmen so much. She told me that I’ll probably appreciate the movie in a different way…

We’ll see. Either way I'll be sure to post my opinion here.

Labels: editorial, movies, watchmen

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