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[Mar. 8th, 2009|04:56 pm] |
CHAPTER 666, IN WHICH JACOB WATCHES THE WATCHMEN
So I found the Watchmen movie to be very very bad. I have thoughts about it and-- oh boy!-- I will tell you some of them.
Before I get going on it, I'll offer what I suppose is some kind of halfhearted disclaimer, being that I am kind of a grump and also a kind of snob about these things (so much of a snob, in fact, that instead of telling people that I like watching movies, I generally refer to myself as "being into cinema." I mean, who says that kind of shit? What an pretentious asslord!). So admittedly this might be just another case of Old Man Jacob shaking his fist at those goddamn kids and their ways. I'm going to get pretty savage here.
But if you will allow me just one more moment of self-righteousness, I also want to offer a defense for my chronic uptightness and bad attitude. I am interested in that great nebulous concept 'Art,' and my belief is not only that art can be enjoyable and even in extreme situations enlightening, but also that it is important. And so I tend to take bad art very personally, not only as a degradation of something that is meaningful and urgent to me, but in the embodiment and perpetuation of a greater laxness of the mind and heart. And to me, this is a condition to which one cannot in good conscience acquiesce, but must stand against and oppose at every turn. As M. Cohen says, there is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn't. We shall return to dear Leonard in due time, and for now I'll get on with it already. There shall probably be some spoilers along the way...I shall try to be discreet but I might as well say right now, SPOILER ALERT I GUESS.
Watchmen is predictably big-dumb-cinema at its most extreme. Here are some things you can expect from the movie:
1. At every point in the narrative where one could possibly insert an extended fight scene, there is an extended fight scene.
2. During fight scenes, the film will go into slow motion at the money-shot blow, in which the action slows, the speakers fill with a whooshing sound as the fist or bludgeon or whatever it is approaches its target, then will suddenly speed back up at the point of impact with a huge resounding SLAM! This happens several times in each fight scene, and there A LOT of fight scenes.
3. This slow motion effect will also occur every time somebody throws something, or jumps somewhere, or anything dramatic happens.
4. Speaking of jumping, if a character is jumping in the foreground, one can reasonably expect some kind of an explosion in the background with a plume of flame bursting after them as they leap.
5. Speaking more of jumping, if a character is on one ground and wants to move to a position on different ground, they will get there by jumping.
6. The movie will not, under any circumstances, forgo a cheap shot when one is readily available. This seems to be the guiding principle for the whole production, but this is apparent most in its deployment of music, which is unapologetically heavy-handed and tacky.
To enumerate some examples:
During the film's opening credits, which takes us through the alternate history of this universe from the more innocent days of the Greatest Generation into the more morally ambiguous Cold War era, Director Zach Snyder chooses to use...drumroll please...BOB DYLAN'S 'THE TIMES, THEY ARE A' CHANGIN'!'
Or, during the funeral of the slain Comedian, as the black limos slide up and the mourners file toward the plot (no pun intended), Mr. Snyder rolls out...cue Strauss' 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'...SIMON AND GARFUNKLE'S 'THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE!'
This pattern continues for the duration of the film, both in its use of iconic pop songs as well as its very condescending score (for example, as the Silk Spectre roots through Nite Owl's dusty gear from his superhero days, we get a sort of blossoming ambient bubbling. And the audience says, "Oh, I see, she's experiencing a sense of wonder!")
Bonus bullet point 666. (I must confess that during the hysterically terrible Owl Ship sex scene-- scored of course with Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," a brilliant song which has been treated very poorly by pop culture-- that I suffered some sort of schizoid embolism and lapsed into a deranged idiot bliss for about three minutes until just after the fat guy had had his arms severed with a circular saw. After that, I fell into a deep depression.)
Let me digress for a moment to lecture about the cinema form. Back in the early days of the medium, my birthday buddy Man Ray commented on the power of cinema to conjure a state quite close to that of dreaming. When the elements-- time, image, color, sound, and on and on-- align in proper constellation, a mood is created and one is enfolded into this cinematic trance, which is to me a revered and even holy state. Here one can experience heightened emotions and powerful feelings.
Spectacle cinema like the Watchmen film does totally away with this experience, replacing it instead with a different kind of trance in which the mind is battered with intense stimulus until it effectively flatlines and enters a reptilian state which can respond only to more blunt stimuli, like Pavlov's, er, lizard. The tools of the mystical cinematic trance which combine to create a space in which the viewer may have their experience are replaced by a series of bullying cues that act like cattle prods to signal whatever mechanical idea or tone the now zombified audience is supposed to latch onto. This is not only bad for art, but bad for our condition as humans.
As for the rest of the presentation, it's all pretty terrible. The film has that unbearable digitized sheen to it, which makes everything look cold and plastic. The actors deliver their lines across the board with all the nuance of a somnambulist. Jackie Earl Haley flatly monotones his way through the Rorschach role, transforming Alan Moore's pulpy vivid narration into over-the-top drivel (it's worth checking out Moore's own reading of the text, posted below, whose mannerisms Haley lifts while leaving behind all of the subtlety and character). Billy Crudup mistakes playing an alienated character for not acting at all, though we are treated to copious time with his great cerulean dong, a-swingin' to and fro like the pendulum of a grandfather clock (there is a really next-level pun built in hear, get it?). As for Malin Akerman, who limps her way through the Silk Spectre role, who the fuck let her out of her daycare? The only proper performance to speak of is Jeffery Dean Morgan as the Comedian, who manages to blow only about 50% of his lines.
But these are all essentially formal criticisms, and now we make our way around to the inevitable question, which is how it relates to the brilliant sacred cow source text, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic book. Is it a faithful adaptation? Well, sort of. Snyder painstakingly recreates a lot of the details of the comic, imports much of the script directly from the book, even stages many of the scenes around the images from Gibbons' art. But ultimately all of this resolves to what NPR's David Edelstein called "an embalmer's reverence." The spirit, the heart of the piece is from instant zero dead in the water.
I am truly not a purist about adaptations. I don't think a piece of art has a duty to recreate or even stay true to its source text; rather, my demand is that it succeed within the medium on the terms it has set for itself. A perfect example is Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which significantly departs from both plot and theme from its source (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep by my beloved Philip K. Dick), but manages to create a powerful vision of its own and turns out to be a terrific film. If the Watchmen adaptation was to have any hope of succeeding, it should have pursued an embodiment that played to the strengths and acknowledged the constraints of its medium. Instead, it attempted a sort of dumbed down facsimile, and it falls flat on its face.
For those of you with interest in the movie who haven't read the comic, I highly recommend reading it before going to the theater. This is not only in defense of the honor of the story, but because I suspect one needs to enter with a familiarity with the plot in order to follow the movie at all. The comic is quite long and incredibly dense, and in Snyder's attempt to pack in all of the iconic scenes, he tears the narrative to shreds. Scenes rush by too quickly; characters are wheeled onto the stage to make a token appearance or advance the plot then are wheeled off and never heard from again; threads of the plot are put down and abandoned for thirty minutes or an hour before they are brought back in. I went to see the film with Jill and Carin and Matt, and all of us were fairly alarmed by the audience, who giggled and hooted gleefully through grave moment after grave moment ("He's gonna rape her! That's HILARIOUS" etc.). Disturbing, definitely, but in a sense I can't blame them. Assuming that most of them are not familiar with the source text, what did they really have to latch on to but an over-the-top, hyper-kinetic gorefest?
The movie is definitely made with fans of the comic in mind, and it plays off an all too common dynamic in adaptations, especially those directed at the comic book reader demographic (who unlike the establishment critics seem thrilled by the movie). This mode of engagement is based not around any genuine feeling or even translation, but rather a dynamic of recognition in which one looks up to the screen and thinks, 'look at that! I know that thing! I understand that thing!' The thrills of this are twofold, and both are depraved. First, the viewer experiences a validation of their imagination-- because of this recognition, they can identify with the iconic projection and in a sense become bigger themselves. The second thrill is an insectoid sensation of community, the feeling of being of the caste that is in the know and therefore on higher footing than the rest of the doofuses watching the film. These are both low pleasures and must be rejected.
The whole preceding has a feeling of echoing emptiness, due much to the film's inability to grasp any of the actual ideas that the underly the plot. Indeed, the movie seems to have little vision beyond the superheroes-with-neurosis dimension of the text, and other than a few token nods to some of the ideas about time and synchronicity-- which are just that, token nods, with no actual exploration of their substance or significant in the grander scheme-- the thing chugs on mindlessly. The motifs and recursive images that are so charged in the book-- the smiley face, the gears, the kissing shadows, etc.-- come across here as gimmicky wankery.
Many critics have noted the unremitting pessimism of the film, and this struck me too. On one hand, I found the film so flat that there seemed little point to trying to exact an ideology or perspective out of it; it played more like a cartoonish violent fantasy. But on the other hand, I kind of took issue to it. Certainly the subject matter is dark and should be treated as such, but the angle the film takes on it has all of humanity as essentially savage irredeemable beasts on a path toward their own destruction, and any attempt to derail the annihilation drive will be just as corrupt due to the inherent depravity of people. Well, I'm as misanthropic as the next guy, but I must say this doesn't ring true to my experience of my own humanity, or even my impressions of the species and civilization at large. The book's approach is to me a little more resonant and compelling, which instead considers humans as flawed beings each with their own nobility and savagery, dwarfed by the forces of history which are really beyond anyone's control. One of the most stirring moments in the text to me is SPOILER ALERT at the moment of the squid's materialization in New York, when all of the smaller characters whose dramas have been slowly unfolding in the background converge to break up this fight that breaks out on the street and it is this vision of a touching, valuable aspect of human nature in the face its incomprehensible horror.
I'm not even sure I take the bleak reading of the Watchmen film that seriously. Check this out: media communicates simultaneously on several levels. One has to do with the suggestions of the narrative, and another (a much more crucial level) has to do with the tone in which it is related. And for a story that so consciously eludes an easy morality, the film does a pretty impressive job of moralizing anyway. SPOILER ALERT BLAH BLAH BLAH. Ozymandius is treated in a villainous light pretty much from the get-go, and this is only emphasized more by his little punish-me-now-off-to-skulk-in-the-ruins shtick at the end. It's fortunate that the movie came out when it did while it is still able to ride the 8-years-of-Bush-let's-pretend-to-have-a-conversation-about-power wave. As a bonus, it manages to cram a rebuilding-after-9/11 and arebuilding-after-Bush/we-elected-Obama-aren't-we-great sentiment all in one in its final minutes. Twofer!
Anyway, I can't say the experience was totally unenjoyable. There was one really great part where just before the movie started, this super decrepit old guy wearing a plaid shirt, suspenders, and thick glasses stood up in front of the audience and said, "This is a digital presentation. The movie, the projectors, the sound is all digital. There is no film. This is a completely digital presentation." That was pretty cool to begin with, but then I starts thinking, wouldn't it be great if this old dude didn't actually work here and was just some guy? Then I started thinking, this would be even better if we were on the bus or at the grocery store or at the post office or something. Wouldn't that be terrific?
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