Clown Time Is Over

Well, I liked it.

Very much, in fact. The main criticism I've seen seems to be that the movie version of Watchmen doesn't carry the same emotional or intellectual heft that the graphic novel version has. To me, this is no more or less a criticism than suggesting that the Mel Gibson Hamlet or the Elijiah Wood Adventures of Huck Finn don't quite encompass all that can be found in the source materials.

That the movie is not as good as the book is a trope long accepted. That the movie is not as good as the comic book is a notion that film critics seem to be having trouble with. There seems to be a prevailing sense that movies, which are a mature and nuanced art form, should be able to accomplish more than comics, which are supposed to be juvenile and gaudily-colored. It may be that these film critics are equating comics with storyboards, but the two things are very different, which I hope to demonstrate.

I'd like to skip over the requisite bit where one argues that "Bang! Pow! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Anymore!" If you're unconvinced that the printed combination of words and pictures can't, in some combinations, carry the same literary/intellectual/emotional/whatever impact as words and pictures are thought to convey separately, then there isn't any point in reading further. Watchmen, as a comic book originally printed in twelve monthly installments between 1985 and 1986, is as good a consideration of mid-eighties nuclear paranoia and post-Watergate politics as any novel, despite -- or indeed because of -- its cast of costumed superheroes.

Moore and Gibbons draw connections between costumes, secret identities, and sexual peccadilos in a way that reflects and comments upon the clandestine geopolitical acts of the nation and it's (super-powered) armed forces. At the same time, the graphic novel reflects and comments upon the history of the comics medium, in an equal-and-opposite attempt to portray that history with enhanced "realism" but also to use the medium's tropes (the super-powerless costumed vigilante, the millionaire's gadget-filled basement lab, the god-like and alien powers of the Super-Man) to take a short-cut towards the earth-shattering political consequences.

Film, an entirely different medium, can't do many of the things that comics can do. (Just as surely as comics can't do things that film can.) Film is limited to what can be captured in motion and sound, and requires a fluid continuity of scene, while comics can force a perspective that allows the reader to only get part of a scene or to force the construction -- between comics panels -- of a larger picture. As one example, the comics version of the death of the Comedian is dealt with in flashback panels which simultaneously suggest how the Comedian actually dies and how the character Rorshach imagines the death, all without showing the form of the Comedian's attacker. That is, you essentially see things from the attacker's point of view. So the panels are doing at least three things at once. The film version can really only do the first thing: show you how the Comedian dies.

The storyboard, a comics-like medium that can establish shots and sequence and camera angles to later be utilized in filming, is constrained in the same way that film itself is -- that is, it's limited to what a camera is able to show. Films can't get at interiority -- a character's thoughts and feelings -- in the same way that text-based mediums like novels and comics can. Film depends almost entirely upon what can be shown, whereas comics can get great mileage out of what is not shown. (Early in Acme Comics #19, Chris Ware illustrates a character with red hair while the text identifies the same woman as a brunette. Rather than a mistake of coloring, this inconsistency is borne out later in the over-arching story, and we come to understand that what we're seeing is a difference in how an author envisions a story and how it is borne out in text. I can't think of any other medium that can traffic so well in classical definitions of irony.)

So, as a translation from one media to another, I found the Watchmen film successful and engaging, faithful to the original in important ways, and making its own road when it made better sense to shed the original. If all the concern about nukes and Nixon and "truth" seem a bit past their sell-by date, or perhaps even quaint in the era of global terror networks and worldwide recession, that perhaps may be the Comedian's ultimate joke.

I should note that, after the movie, the first feedback I heard was from a guy in the men's room at the Rosebud Theatre who, after he'd finished peeing in the urinal clearly marked "DO NOT USE," said, "Well, that was a waste of time." When I said that I'd liked it, he complained that it took too long to get to the action. And I suppose I can see the point of that criticism, from those who thought they were going to see a "comic book movie." There's not a lot of Pow! Bam! Socko! in the movie, nor in the comic book. As a story, it's definitely closer to The Manchurian Candidate than to Batman Begins. On the other hand, that guy was a Bluetooth'd, leather jacketed cyborg who clearly doesn't respect the indie theatre owner and their faulty plumbing, so who cares what he thinks?

A next-to-final note: the Foley sound effects -- slamming doors and kicks to the jaw and cracking finger bones -- were way too loud in the mix.

A final note: Jackie Earle Haley, I'm your fan.