The Grim Reality of 'Watchmen'

Last summer, the millions who crowded into theaters to see the highly anticipated Batman sequel, The Dark Knight, saw a trailer for another superhero movie that might have confused some and delighted others. It was the first Watchmen teaser trailer and, for many, it appeared to be another tights and-capes feature, but this time, there was no one they recognized. Others cheered as images they had seen years ago in comic book pages came to life on the big screen. The film adaptation of Alan Moore’s pioneering graphic novel recently arrived to much publicity, testing how open we are to superheroes in the “real world.”

WHITHER COME THE WATCHMEN?
Let’s go back to the “origin” tale of Watchmen, since that is an essential part of any superhero’s story. It’s the story of the baby-boom generation of comic book fans who never stopped reading the three-color adventures of their youth. DC Comics’ stable of mythic heroes including Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, captured the imagination of pre-teen kids with these cool costumes and exotic adventures in crime fighting. Many a boy, like me, read these stories at the neighborhood pharmacy spinner racks, hoping not to be shooed off by the manager.

Then Marvel comics upped the ante in the early 1960s with Stan Lee’s idea of heroes as more human in their everyday struggles. Their heroics were tempered by the very human conflicts in love, acceptance and misunderstanding that the teenage reader could identify with, the best example being Spider-Man. Marvel’s readers included many a college student who wrote fan letters to their favorite books.

By the 1980s, these fans found that they could access their favorite titles and thousands of collectible back issues when direct marketing comic book stores spread across the country. Often musty and messy establishments situated in older strip malls, they weren’t just for kids anymore, and parents had to keep an eye on their children who might wander toward shelves with salacious covers intended for adult audiences but easy to spot by curious boys. This is the type of shop parodied on The Simpsons with Comic Book Guy and his Android’s Dungeon & Baseball Card Shop.

It was the mid-1980s that brought more stories with much more adult content as publishers felt their way toward the kind of ingredients that would hold adult readers’ attention. Meanwhile, it became harder than ever to find comics in local grocery and drug stores. Kids were watching television and, increasingly, playing video games, so the grown-up comic book fans were catered to with greater levels of sex, more brutal violence, political themes, and other “adult” content.

It was 1986 when the dam burst and Watchmen, accompanied by Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, both released by DC, stunned the comic book world. Miller’s book featured a middle-aged Batman, years after the government had chased superheroes off the streets, getting his mojo back and famously going all Dirty Harry on a new generation of punks terrorizing the city.

Watchmen had a similar impact. In the story, told in 12 installments, superheroes, long since forced out of business by an ungrateful populace, are being killed off by a mysterious adversary. Rorschach, the trench coat- and fedora-wearing vigilante with the mask that looks like the inkblot test, investigates the murders, pulling the plot along. This allows a series of beautifully integrated flashbacks that reveal the long history of the costumed group. We learn their glory days were never that noble.

The first to die is the Comedian, essentially a government mercenary in a mask to whom everything is a cosmic joke and who has assaulted and raped one of his female group members. Others, like the former Nite Owl, recall their adventures ruefully, astonished that they could have ever thought they could change anything and embarrassed that they were neurotic enough to run around in silly costumes beating up people.

There is, in fact, only one really super-powered character in the book. Dr. Manhattan gained his atomic powers in a freak laboratory accident, and the U.S. government makes him their ultimate Doomsday Machine. He makes short work of the Viet Cong and America rules in the 1980s, led by Richard Nixon, who, due to abolished term limits, serves unrestrained in his fifth term.

A LITERARY COMIC BOOK?
The characters and plot of the story were just the beginning of the innovations. The complex flashback structure was further layered by continuous returns to the pages of a pirate comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter, being read by a kid at a newsstand. The horrifically gruesome story comments on the “real world” story going on about the city. In each installment of the book, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons included facsimiles of newspaper, book, and magazine articles that further expand the story’s meaning and structure.

It was also possible to recognize various philosophical perspectives in the worldviews of several characters. When an imprisoned Rorschach is interviewed by the prison psychiatrist, he tells the doctor the story of the traumatic childhood that forged his violent persona and how his crusade against criminals only confirmed his vision of absolute justice. “Existence is random,” he tells the appalled therapist. “Has no pattern save what we imagine after starting at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.” This vigilante is a lay existentialist.

Dr. Manhattan’s transformation has made him a thoroughgoing materialist able to examine the atomic structure of any object but increasingly unable to grasp the value of human life. Yet his very detachment can be exploited by the real villain of the story, a man willing to killed hundreds of thousands in order to save billions and, through deception, bring his vision of peace to a world on the edge of nuclear war—the ultimate utilitarian solution.

In other words, Watchmen was like nothing anyone had ever seen in the comic book world. After much death and destruction, this modern tale was capped off with an uncertain ending furthering the subversion of the comforting form of the triumphant superhero’s tale. When I first read the book years ago, I felt like jumping off a cliff so depressing was its dystopian vision of the world of helpless or vicious “heroes.”

But this is what happens when you pose the question: “What would happen if you put superheroes in the real world, where people are deeply flawed? What kind of person dresses up in tights, capes and masks and goes out moonlighting as an extra-legal crime fighter?” Moore depicts such characters as brutal and fascistic, getting pleasure from snapping limbs and imposing their death sentences on criminals.

It’s now common to hear Watchmen referred to as the Citizen Kane of comics, a work of complex plotting and brilliant technique that influenced the direction of comics thereafter. Indeed, it and The Dark Knight Returns are credited—or blamed—with ushering in the era of “grim and gritty” comic book storytelling where formerly upright heroes go through hellish trials, are beaten and beat others to a bloody pulp, all in the name of heightened realism.

The growth of comics fandom’s influence in popular culture has led to the current era of comic book blockbuster movies—so lucrative to Hollywood that even Moore has dismissed the trend as the Hollywood tail wagging the comic book dog. He doesn’t believe his story should be translated into film and had his name taken off the credits for the new movie.

But as a film professor who has studied cinema classics, let me confess that I don’t love Citizen Kane—it’s unquestionably a masterpiece of design and innovative technique, but it appeals more to the head than the heart. Filmmaking is primarily a visceral experience, an emotional one.

Similarly, Watchmen demands my respect for its densely layered weave of character, plot, and themes, but I can’t love it because it the characters remain distant to me and the book tries so hard to prove that there are no such things as heroes, “super” either in powers or character.

The superhero genre doesn’t deceive its readers into believing that there can be nobility in the face of adversity—its symbolic characters incarnate the high ideals of what we can aspire to in our everyday choices in a complex world.

Maybe it’s just a matter of taste but I much prefer two other stories that borrow their plots from Watchmen, Darwin Cooke’s graphic novel DC: The New Frontier and, of course, Pixar’s The Incredibles. Give me joy and the triumph of the human spirit over dour defeatism any day.

COMICS CLASSIC ILLUSTRATED
Sometimes a review for an action/adventure movie contains descriptions like, “contains comic book violence,” wherein we understand that kids can watch it because there’s a lot more “Pow!” and “Wham!” than “Crunch!” and “Slash!” The Watchmen movie adaptation is even more violent than the source book, and the sex scenes more revealing, so it certainly earned its R rating. I found the film a more or less faithful filming of the book, too reverently exact in its following the comics panels to have much cinematic life of its own.

Can comic book movies move the genre to storytelling that is more than just juvenile in its appeal? Of course, it’s already happened—director’s Christopher Nolan’s hugely successful The Dark Knight showed how a more realistic vision of superheroics can remain faithful to its source and build a complex, challenging, mature and, yes, entertaining narrative that is artistically innovative without subverting its hero.

Alex Wainer teaches communication and mass media at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He is also a regular contributor to The Culture Beat. He can be reached at commdocalex@netscape.net.