el-remmen
Moderator Emeritus
Reposted from by blog:
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People keep asking me if I plan to see Watchmen. . . Wait, I take that back. People keep assuming that I will go see the film adaptation of Watchmen and therefore ask if I am excited to see it.
It is starting to get a little annoying.
At the risk of revealing the fanboy aspects of my personality, let me just say that Watchmen is not only among my favorite comic books, it is also among my favorite works of literature (even though I consider that a false distinction). I first read it as it was released issue by issue back in 1986-87, and I can't say that I really "got it" back then, despite enjoying its grittiness. I have always been an impatient comic book reader, more concerned with the words than the pictures. The various panels make impressions on me as I read, but rarely do I actually stop and look at them carefully unless there happens to be a complicated layout that requires extra thought to put in proper sequence - thing is, that kind of layout while occasionally interesting can also just mean it is a poorly assembled comic - the sequence of words and pictures should flow so that you feel no disconnect between the melded media.
With multiple re-readings Watchmen taught me patience. Nowadays, when I read comics I still do my quick read through like I always did, but then (assuming the issue held my interest) I immediately go back to the beginning and go through again more carefully, examining individual panels and trying to figure out how action and change is articulated by the collected sequence.
I have not been a fan of the comic book movies that have been made in the last however-many years. I just don't find one medium converts to the other very well. This may seem counter-intuitive as comics appear to be a visual medium and thus should be ideal for films' visual overload, what with its larger-than-life bright-colored costume heroes in constant movement - but I think that is just a a superficial understanding of how comics work. They are equally a textual medium (regardless of their often overwrought and/or turgid dialogue and narration). Word balloons and captions (though I am not happy with the term "captions" for the little boxes on the sides or corners of panels that provide narration or internal monologue (the latter in the absence of thought bubbles), but it is the best I could find) interact with the visual in ways that are integral to the comic book reading experience, not to mention a variety of meta-aspects of comics such as editorial notes that help massage the current story's place in a larger continuity and things like the letters page (a comic staple that has made a recent come-back despite the web's inundation of messageboards where comic fans discuss each issue ad nauseum). Movies can't include this stuff, nor can they ever successfully cram into two or three hours what has taken years of monthly issues to develop in haphazard, arbitrary and slapdash ways. One of the best things about comic books to me are the very inconsistency that many fans (and non-fans) bemoan, but I guess I can't blame movies for trying to avoid them - even though they often fail regardless.
Watchmen, however, is its own case. Alan Moore wrote it (and Dave Gibbons drew it) to take full advantage of the medium.
Look at it this way (and this is what I have been trying to explain with dorky precision to anyone who asks me about it, some of them not realizing what they are in for by bringing it up), movies move at one speed and in one direction. This is determined by the director (and whomever else is involved in crafting the film). Even when a movie has flashbacks or a circular or non-standard sequence of events (such as Momento), it still unfolds at the pace that the movie is projected and watched in a sitting. Comic books, however, unfold at the rate the individual reader, and the reader also determines the direction they go in. The ability to easily move back and forth through the sequence, spending time with any particular panel, suggests simultaeneity and allows for a density of symbols and meanings that film is too expeditious to effectively include.
Watchmen is packed with symbols and layers of meaning. I am re-reading it now in hopes of presenting a paper on it at a conference (having abandoned some other ideas I was playing with) and spending more time than ever examining panels and noticing how the juxtaposition of dialogue with alternating images create echoes of meaning that reverberate through the text. Case in point, issue #5, "Fearful Symmetry" (named for a line from Blake's "Tyger" poem): for the first time I noticed how the thick the issue is with reflections - reflections in the diner window, reflections in mirrors, reflections in fountains and in the sea (in the concurrent "Black Freighter" narrative that is being read by kid hanging out at the newstand). There is unknown symmetry developing between that pirate story and the story being told about the plot to take out the world's remaining super-heroes/costumed adventurers that will not become apparent until much later, and the beautiful symmetry of the layout of pages 14 and 15 with its tall central panel split by the book-binding as Adrian Veidt fends off his attacker. "I bet there's all kinda stuff we never notice," says the newstand guy and in background we see the "The End is Nigh" sign carrying guy looking through a garbage can across the street - a garbage can that has been mentioned earlier and that a careful reader could use to make a realization of something that will not be revealed until later the same issue (I am jumping through hoops here a little bit to avoid spoilers - I love moments of "reveal" too much to ruin them for others). The last words spoken in the issue, "Everything balances."
There is no way a movie can capture some of this. . . the majority of this. One of my favorite examples are Dan Drieberg and Laurie Juspeczyk talking at the Gunga Diner. The majority of the scene is seen through their reflection in the diner window, with the word balloons coming from off the borders of the panels. In a film, we would just hear them talking and see their lips moving in the reflection. The static nature of a panel simultaneous with the change and motion the sequencing suggests allows for a reinforcement of a disconnect between these silent images whose body language might be suggesting one thing and the discussion something else.
When Terry Guilliam was trying to get a version of Watchmen to the big screen, he eventually decided "Reducing [the story] to a two or two-and-a-half hour film [...] seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about." Of course, Alan Moore agrees, "There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't."
Ultimately, I think the primary arc of the story of Watchmen can be filmed and made into a dark and grim superhero depiction (of the kind that were birthed after its publication and that took its brutality and grittiness as its point), but that primary story is actually kind of contrived, and by itself is never going to convince an audience of the greatness of Watchmen touted since 1987. It is not in the story, but in how it is implemented. Heck, the fact that the article excerpt at the end of issue #5 reveals the conclusion of the "Black Freighter" narrative before we see it in the comic itself indicates that the story itself is secondary to how it buoys the sargasso of meaning. As Geoff Klock (a literary critic who has a lot of insights on comics despite his depressing adherence to Harold Bloom's 'Anxiety of Influence' BS wrote, "Throughout Watchmen it can be seen that meaning is elsewhere, deferred and very often unaware of its relevency" (Klock 67).
Watchmen is the Moby Dick of comic books. How compelling, really, is the story of a man obsessed with hunting down the whale that chewed off his leg? It is the pastiche that makes it work, using the various and contradictory iterations of the whale in bible, myth and legend, and the detailed near-scientific information on sailing to undermine the authority of that tireless vengeance that seeks only to destroy - that is absurd in its absorbtion of all other goals and desires - its eschewing of evident self-contradiction. A film version of Moby Dick could never capture that, and Watchmen does the same thing with superheroes. It deflates their romance and problematizes their heroics. It shows us that superheroes are nothing without supervillians, and true villains are ubiquitous and rarely very colorful.
So it comes back to the question: Will I watch Watchmen? Probably. Eventually. Though I am not sure if I will do so in the theatre. For a while I thought perhaps the film could do for me what The Lord of the Rings movies had, capture a feeling even if it could not capture the depth of place and history that makes Middle-Earth compelling to me, but then I saw a preview for it recently that I had not seen before and it suddenly struck me that this was impossible. As much as I love Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings is no Watchmen. It is no Moby Dick. And the preview just seemed so slick, so Hollywood slow-motion. . . and a minor detail, there was piece of dialogue in the preview where someone is saying something about "Watchmen" - the word "watchmen" is never actually spoken in the graphic novel. It appears as grafitti several times in the background of scenes, and once left incomplete by some punk smashed in the face by Rorschach in a flashback - it is left unspoken, a suggestion - a question that bites at the heart of the very concept of authority. All I could think of was the kind of thinking that led to the insertion of that dialogue. "We can't have the very name of the movie not mentioned in it! Who is going to pay attention to some minor detail in the background of a frame to notice some grafitti and even think it might be important?" The pleasure of Watchmen is in the details, not the bombast.
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People keep asking me if I plan to see Watchmen. . . Wait, I take that back. People keep assuming that I will go see the film adaptation of Watchmen and therefore ask if I am excited to see it.
It is starting to get a little annoying.
At the risk of revealing the fanboy aspects of my personality, let me just say that Watchmen is not only among my favorite comic books, it is also among my favorite works of literature (even though I consider that a false distinction). I first read it as it was released issue by issue back in 1986-87, and I can't say that I really "got it" back then, despite enjoying its grittiness. I have always been an impatient comic book reader, more concerned with the words than the pictures. The various panels make impressions on me as I read, but rarely do I actually stop and look at them carefully unless there happens to be a complicated layout that requires extra thought to put in proper sequence - thing is, that kind of layout while occasionally interesting can also just mean it is a poorly assembled comic - the sequence of words and pictures should flow so that you feel no disconnect between the melded media.
With multiple re-readings Watchmen taught me patience. Nowadays, when I read comics I still do my quick read through like I always did, but then (assuming the issue held my interest) I immediately go back to the beginning and go through again more carefully, examining individual panels and trying to figure out how action and change is articulated by the collected sequence.
I have not been a fan of the comic book movies that have been made in the last however-many years. I just don't find one medium converts to the other very well. This may seem counter-intuitive as comics appear to be a visual medium and thus should be ideal for films' visual overload, what with its larger-than-life bright-colored costume heroes in constant movement - but I think that is just a a superficial understanding of how comics work. They are equally a textual medium (regardless of their often overwrought and/or turgid dialogue and narration). Word balloons and captions (though I am not happy with the term "captions" for the little boxes on the sides or corners of panels that provide narration or internal monologue (the latter in the absence of thought bubbles), but it is the best I could find) interact with the visual in ways that are integral to the comic book reading experience, not to mention a variety of meta-aspects of comics such as editorial notes that help massage the current story's place in a larger continuity and things like the letters page (a comic staple that has made a recent come-back despite the web's inundation of messageboards where comic fans discuss each issue ad nauseum). Movies can't include this stuff, nor can they ever successfully cram into two or three hours what has taken years of monthly issues to develop in haphazard, arbitrary and slapdash ways. One of the best things about comic books to me are the very inconsistency that many fans (and non-fans) bemoan, but I guess I can't blame movies for trying to avoid them - even though they often fail regardless.
Watchmen, however, is its own case. Alan Moore wrote it (and Dave Gibbons drew it) to take full advantage of the medium.
Look at it this way (and this is what I have been trying to explain with dorky precision to anyone who asks me about it, some of them not realizing what they are in for by bringing it up), movies move at one speed and in one direction. This is determined by the director (and whomever else is involved in crafting the film). Even when a movie has flashbacks or a circular or non-standard sequence of events (such as Momento), it still unfolds at the pace that the movie is projected and watched in a sitting. Comic books, however, unfold at the rate the individual reader, and the reader also determines the direction they go in. The ability to easily move back and forth through the sequence, spending time with any particular panel, suggests simultaeneity and allows for a density of symbols and meanings that film is too expeditious to effectively include.
Watchmen is packed with symbols and layers of meaning. I am re-reading it now in hopes of presenting a paper on it at a conference (having abandoned some other ideas I was playing with) and spending more time than ever examining panels and noticing how the juxtaposition of dialogue with alternating images create echoes of meaning that reverberate through the text. Case in point, issue #5, "Fearful Symmetry" (named for a line from Blake's "Tyger" poem): for the first time I noticed how the thick the issue is with reflections - reflections in the diner window, reflections in mirrors, reflections in fountains and in the sea (in the concurrent "Black Freighter" narrative that is being read by kid hanging out at the newstand). There is unknown symmetry developing between that pirate story and the story being told about the plot to take out the world's remaining super-heroes/costumed adventurers that will not become apparent until much later, and the beautiful symmetry of the layout of pages 14 and 15 with its tall central panel split by the book-binding as Adrian Veidt fends off his attacker. "I bet there's all kinda stuff we never notice," says the newstand guy and in background we see the "The End is Nigh" sign carrying guy looking through a garbage can across the street - a garbage can that has been mentioned earlier and that a careful reader could use to make a realization of something that will not be revealed until later the same issue (I am jumping through hoops here a little bit to avoid spoilers - I love moments of "reveal" too much to ruin them for others). The last words spoken in the issue, "Everything balances."
There is no way a movie can capture some of this. . . the majority of this. One of my favorite examples are Dan Drieberg and Laurie Juspeczyk talking at the Gunga Diner. The majority of the scene is seen through their reflection in the diner window, with the word balloons coming from off the borders of the panels. In a film, we would just hear them talking and see their lips moving in the reflection. The static nature of a panel simultaneous with the change and motion the sequencing suggests allows for a reinforcement of a disconnect between these silent images whose body language might be suggesting one thing and the discussion something else.
When Terry Guilliam was trying to get a version of Watchmen to the big screen, he eventually decided "Reducing [the story] to a two or two-and-a-half hour film [...] seemed to me to take away the essence of what Watchmen is about." Of course, Alan Moore agrees, "There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can't."
Ultimately, I think the primary arc of the story of Watchmen can be filmed and made into a dark and grim superhero depiction (of the kind that were birthed after its publication and that took its brutality and grittiness as its point), but that primary story is actually kind of contrived, and by itself is never going to convince an audience of the greatness of Watchmen touted since 1987. It is not in the story, but in how it is implemented. Heck, the fact that the article excerpt at the end of issue #5 reveals the conclusion of the "Black Freighter" narrative before we see it in the comic itself indicates that the story itself is secondary to how it buoys the sargasso of meaning. As Geoff Klock (a literary critic who has a lot of insights on comics despite his depressing adherence to Harold Bloom's 'Anxiety of Influence' BS wrote, "Throughout Watchmen it can be seen that meaning is elsewhere, deferred and very often unaware of its relevency" (Klock 67).
Watchmen is the Moby Dick of comic books. How compelling, really, is the story of a man obsessed with hunting down the whale that chewed off his leg? It is the pastiche that makes it work, using the various and contradictory iterations of the whale in bible, myth and legend, and the detailed near-scientific information on sailing to undermine the authority of that tireless vengeance that seeks only to destroy - that is absurd in its absorbtion of all other goals and desires - its eschewing of evident self-contradiction. A film version of Moby Dick could never capture that, and Watchmen does the same thing with superheroes. It deflates their romance and problematizes their heroics. It shows us that superheroes are nothing without supervillians, and true villains are ubiquitous and rarely very colorful.
So it comes back to the question: Will I watch Watchmen? Probably. Eventually. Though I am not sure if I will do so in the theatre. For a while I thought perhaps the film could do for me what The Lord of the Rings movies had, capture a feeling even if it could not capture the depth of place and history that makes Middle-Earth compelling to me, but then I saw a preview for it recently that I had not seen before and it suddenly struck me that this was impossible. As much as I love Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings is no Watchmen. It is no Moby Dick. And the preview just seemed so slick, so Hollywood slow-motion. . . and a minor detail, there was piece of dialogue in the preview where someone is saying something about "Watchmen" - the word "watchmen" is never actually spoken in the graphic novel. It appears as grafitti several times in the background of scenes, and once left incomplete by some punk smashed in the face by Rorschach in a flashback - it is left unspoken, a suggestion - a question that bites at the heart of the very concept of authority. All I could think of was the kind of thinking that led to the insertion of that dialogue. "We can't have the very name of the movie not mentioned in it! Who is going to pay attention to some minor detail in the background of a frame to notice some grafitti and even think it might be important?" The pleasure of Watchmen is in the details, not the bombast.
