I feel I owe a more articulate rationale to the people wondering why I have such a bee in my shorts over this new Watchmen movie. (I had a little rant about it at a party recently, but I don’t think I explained myself well.)
Anyhow – Watchmen, with a little historical context. During the 40’s to 60’s, a few of the small comic companies conglomerate and form the “big two” comic book publishers, DC and Marvel, and with their success comes a lot of attention and eventually regulation. The government would like very much to protect the children, and so we get a period of artistic expansion, but literary drought, where comics become tame adolescent power fantasies – ever-burlier-chested noble heroes gallivanting around in spandex saving the world from formulaic villains who rarely do any real harm. This infantilization kickstarts the reputation surrounding comics – that “comics are for kids” and starts a vicious cycle of turning more and more adults off of a really interesting medium.
In the 80’s, as the audience who grew up with comics is getting older and demanding more sophisticated realistic stories, the pendulum swings the other way, and indie studios start doing big business. The big studios, catching on, start letting “reality” creep into their stories as well, and plant the seeds for a number of darker themed comics. This is where all the stuff is being mined from nowadays for movies – from this period onwards, Alan Moore (and Millar, and Gaiman, and Chaykin) had a string of critical hits, and they get progressively more and more dark and bleak as he moves further and further from the rigid confines the other studios are stuck in and keeps getting praised for it. While he’s earning successes for breaking all the rules, the big studios decide Superman ought to start having a midlife crisis, the Green Lantern Corps are genocidally hunted down, the X-Men get -really- ugly, the universe is destroyed a few times, everyone starts sporting silly haircuts.
So – this is my beef with Moore – the guy is a virtuoso, and created really fascinating stories that I admit I admire and (sometimes) even enjoy. And he and his contemporaries brought a sophisticated level of storytelling to a long-neglected medium. But in Watchmen what he’s doing is taking everything I loved about superhero genre as a kid, and then intentionally running in the opposite direction with the genre, twisting it into an obscene, horribly bleak parody. And it’s just too much. He goes too far!
Watchmen pages stolen from Wikipedia
He goes to such enormous lengths to break all the rules of the superhero story (and cram in some bizarre story experimentation) that the plotline starts to come apart, all so he can cram a few more rape scenes, prison stabbings murdered prostitutes and vietnam flamethrower flashbacks in. It’s impossibly thick with backstabbing and shady family secrets, to the point where it’s beyond awkward, it’s just awful to read and full of contempt for decency. There’s no “action” or redeeming heroism on display – just scene after scene of this gang of misfits running eachother down, all boiling down to an ending that made me want to throw my book in a fireplace.
Is it brilliant? I guess so. Clearly this was the point of the comic – and people frustrated with cheesy comic heroics applauded. I can understand where all of this praise comes from, I mean it’s so clever to tear down heroes and mock the genre. But having read the comic or seen the movie, are you any better for it? Is watching 3 hours of bad people – really bad people, going to make you feel good? Shouldn’t art and storytelling elevate? All reading the book did for me was make me really mad – then regretful that I’d wasted so much time on so much unbridled negativity.
Worse, it opened the floodgates for the kind of negativity that’s now pervasive in comics – every writer seems to want to reinvent every character with even more tragic flaws. The superhero format, as a genre, isn’t the place for stories about genocide and rape. Superheroes are shining representations of our values – expressions of an ideal. The lesson from Watchmen should have been that we ought to better appreciate the sanctity and tremendous value of constructive, socially conscious, morally redeeming stories, and learn to better understand the lessons we impart through the actions of heroes.
… and don’t even get me started on Spider-Man’s organic web slingers!!!! 
(Just kidding)
11 responses so far ↓
1 Rusty // Mar 10, 2009 at 2:38 am
“All reading the book did for me was make me really mad – then regretful that I’d wasted so much time on so much unbridled negativity.”
That reminds me of a column I just read. Who are you to say what the superhero genre represents, or for that matter that the characters in the book are in fact superheroes? Watchmen is one of the best stories I’ve ever read. You know these characters in depth by the end of it, which brings the end that much more closure.
2 Mike // Mar 10, 2009 at 9:41 am
I would also put forward that for the “world’s most brilliant” man, Ozymandias, is really quite a weak creature. So he utilized the political idea of “the noble lie,” big deal. What makes him brilliant, did he take a philosophy 101 course in college? Because that is exactly where this stupid plot idea came from, The Republic or The Prince. Groundbreaking? I think not.
3 Garth // Mar 14, 2009 at 5:24 am
I googled ‘I hate Alan Moore’ and here I is. Jason, I couldn’t have spelled it out better myself. You’re honest about the formulaic underpinnings of Watchmen (and where some small merit may lie in the storyline) but understand all to well the clever-less ‘deconstructivist’ that Moore really is.
The movie was infantile…just sad…I needed a bath afterwards…and what a waste of time.
4 marcel // Mar 27, 2009 at 2:24 am
I felt exactly the same way. I was aware that it was a dense comic book, but it went too far. The idea here (that i hated the most) is that a hero is a disturbed, maniac person, and that’s the ONLY reason why they do what they do – their ideals are twisted, so are the characters. Either they are just bad because they want to (not because it’s sometimes necessary) , or they are a product of insanity, or they feel sexual pleasure in beating other people. To the point that it’s sickening, it’s just too hard to swallow. Unpleasant reading, I thought – I was even worried that I would start thinking that Superman or Green Arrow were sadomasoquists (Fred Whertham had a Moore-esque logic) it didn’t happen, tho. The geopolictic background is great, if he gave them less dosage of psychotic personalities or nasty actions, I’d probably enjoy. Dr. Manhattan is one character I like, the only good part of the entire novel is his . The other ones are terrible people, and not likeable ones, like Wolverine or Frank Castle – It would be good ideas for villains, but… come on. I accepted the Batman from the Dark Knight Returns much better, cause Frank Miller built a character that is obssessed and violent, but he punishes people who (clearly) deservd it. And not using methods that are worse than the bad guys… I mean, you HAVE to hate the Joker more than Batman, right? Watchmen isn’t a book of heroes and villains (and it IS possible to write a believable story of a real life do-gooder, even with a questionable modus operandi, and moral flaws, like Jack Bauer, for example), but that’s just a book of a mental institution in costumes.
5 Mark // May 11, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I think it was an interesting idea to depart from superheroes and their mentality. Peter Parker hit his wife Mary-Jane, Batman killed a person in the first issue of his series, and other characters we see as shining lights have done horrible things that make us surprised. Sure Watchmen does things that we normally don’t see in Superhero stories and that some of his characters aren’t likable, but their done in a way where they feel real and makes a question the superhero mentality.
6 JCB // Jul 30, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Good show, Gang – Taking a microscope to this mamoth.
My wife and I watched this last night, after staying far away from it since it came out.
Needless to say we hated it – Rorschach (Walter Kovacs), waas the ONLY character that we truly liked and he was “too good” to keep, apparently.
What a disghusting display. Seems that there’s a genuine bordem when good is good and bad is bad – Hard to enjoy anything when there’s not enough to truly enjoy.
7 Jessica // Feb 5, 2010 at 10:53 am
Thank you! I am a huge geek and the only one of my friends that doesn’t worship at the altar of Alan Moore. Moore is a self-righteous jerk who thoroughly “deconstructs” the superhero genre but then plays two of the most troubling tropes of comics/graphic novels distressingly straight – women as sex objects and Beauty Equals Goodness. Seriously, was Laurie there for any other reason? Except to cry a little, maybe. (And her mother, what kind of woman sleeps with the guy who had earlier tried to rape her?) And all the characters were drawn as very attractive except Rorschach and the Comedian, who are clearly Moore’s least favorites (ironically, I find Rorschach to be the only tolerable character). I haven’t forgotten that Moore is the one who put Barbara Gordon in a wheelchair and had her stripped and photographed for no purpose other than pissing off Comissioner Gordon and Batman, and he may say he regrets it now but his treatment of Laurie and her mother in Watchmen suggests otherwise.
8 Cyborger // Feb 23, 2010 at 1:01 am
I say the movie AND the comic both stink. I didn’t like Rorschach at first but I began to like him more as the story goes on. Why the heck did he have to die at the end? I hate Mr. Manhattan and his omni-powerfulness. Over-powered characters suck.
9 conno // Jan 29, 2011 at 4:03 am
I never read the comic but i did see the movie. The movie didnt make alot of sense to me plus it left alot of things unexplained for one why not put some of the story around mothman i am kind of curiouse why he went insane I thought the guy with the ink blot mask was kind of boring. The movie just seemed kind of slow dr.manhattan seems like a rip off of the silver surfer. the end was realy stupid the earth is on the brink of having a nuclear war and then in the last scene there is world peace? come on that is sooo dumb
10 Whatsit // Nov 19, 2011 at 4:29 pm
Agreed with everything here, save for the “Spider-Man’s organic webshooters are bad” point. Rape has no place in this or the DC world. Alan Moore seems like a complete low-life when you consider how much of the writer’s personality comes through in their work (see Sandman and Dark Knight Returns, etc.). Point being, don’t allow women, children or loose paper and ink anywhere near Moore and the world will be a better place.
That aside. Web cartridges suck. Give me webbing as a result of a retro virus over stupid artificial webbing any day. :-p
11 Jake // Jan 8, 2012 at 1:20 am
In response to Mark, Peter Parker did hit his wife Mary-Jane but that took place in the 90’s. If you remember, the article said that around the 80’s was when writers started making superheroes dark and I guess Spider-man would be smacking his wife out of frustration. Read any comics before that and he really didn’t do anything like the characters in Watchmen. As for Batman killing someone in his first issue, is it really that surprising? It’s not like other super-heroes hadn’t killed people before he did and the way he killed wasn’t even that bad.
Leave a Comment