Watchmen

Reading ahead isn't recommended for those who are not intimate with the book.

Having never shared the same blood that binds many to the quirk of graphic novels, the origins of Batman as a comic book character seem in disregard to the latent image I have of him in the cartoons and movies. I suspect that most people also think of Jack Nicholson's (or Heath Ledger's) Joker before they think of the comic versions. I think this is a part of a larger social progress that recasts these characters as film stars and detaches them from their comic heritage, which has mostly become an intramural medium.

The term graphic novel is a neologism. Comic book seems to suggest something comical, but the more I interchange the words, the more I am sure that I'm staring at a fractal pattern, each the same as the other. I'm not sure if a graphic novel is a comic book or a comic book for adults. Preceding Watchmen I have never actually read one from cover to back, and I am not aware of the state of the graphic novel industry. I have treated it over the years much as I treat anime: an interesting medium without the creative engineers to exploit it. There are exceptions, but on each occasion that I pick one up it seems to be malleable to the same superhero mold that permeates the genre, its story another tired spin on that same archetype.

Enter Watchmen. The graphic novel came out during an age when I would have been too young to understand it, and it's always interesting to reach back knowing what I know now to try to put myself in a time where this was still the present. Twenty two years in the wilderness hasn't brought with it much absolution, but it has made me question my beliefs. A book is a medium of art through language, and a movie uses the aesthetics of visuals and sound. Much heat has been given as to the superior medium, but comics are unique and proprietary by their use of communication and thought through static images. Films are similar, but all of the images must flow together in a harmonic wavelength. Comics can be striking from one panel to the next through the use of different images, and Watchmen uses this to good effect, even going so far as to mirror two different stories on top of each other. This is a distinctive style of the comic book.

Style is often misrepresented as visual flair - art, special effects, etc. But style also exists to turn simple themes into emotional resonant patterns (Rorschach's famous opening lines for example). When Zach Snyder directed 300, I think it was his mission to use style to communicate blunt, visceral ideas of brutality and honor. A lot of films have pretty faces but are ugly underneath, or, in other words, the visuals barely communicate anything thematically to the rest of the movie. They simply exist to provide something cool to look at. But great films use style to tell a story. 300 can be dumb, but it also can be very striking. Great camera work, good set design, those things help too. What really defines Watchmen, however, is its structure, its complex pentameter. Situations are not grouped by chronological events. Things go out of sequence, out of order, and it retells some events from the perspective of different characters. As the characters of the Minutemen and Crimebusters mingle, their stories intertwine. Many events are also linked for thematic purposes only. There are stories in here of crimes that are only meant to represent the senseless brutality of the world, and there are swathes of symbols and allegories to go around.

Most stories begin with a simple idea and turn it into something emotionally profound; style gives you something digestible up front on a more visceral level, and structure is the totality of organized events designed to reveal information about the story and its characters. Watchmen is so full and complex that the totality isn't always clear. Personal interpretation of the moment becomes important. A lot of people debate their own interpretations. I personally don't care what it says as long as it has something to say.

Watchmen willingly divides itself into chapters; there are films that follow a similar stricture, essentially those christened by Tarantino. With so many calories, however, the Watchmen film might have to cut down on the amount of recurring flashbacks, synthesizing repeat sequences into one, and splice all of the stories together. If the film can improve on anything, it would be a slightly more coherent and evenly paced vision. The symbolism is so ubiquitous in the comic that I feel it sometimes is diluted; there are connections everywhere that are only established because they have some common visual or dialog bond, not because there is any real meaning. The corollary is that there are some interesting transitions between panels. The comic might transition to the past by using two panels that look similar but are obviously different in place and time. Second issue: there is such an onus on the first nine or ten chapters that the last few feel disjointed. Veidt's misguided and destructive diplomacy is kept from the reader so that it will have more emotional resonance, but I think that it comes at the expense of the murder mystery, and his plot is so shielded from the light that in its hole it leaves a vociferous shout, obvious and apparent. Veidt is mysterious (I don't even think that he's given a chapter until the end), so I could only conclude that it was him behind it all. I would opt for better pacing rather than a sudden surprise.

Watchmen is an incredibly well spun tale, and its praises have been sung down in a chorus for decades. However, there are a few weaknesses within the comic attended to by its strengths. For example. It's easy to write about evil deeds. It's hard to write a character who does truly evil things. The Comedian is only efficacious partly in my mind. He ultimately works because of Dr. Manhattan's apathy to his actions and the portrayal of the Comedian as a true nihilist next to Rorschach's codified but out of date methods of brutality. There are a lot of Vietnam movies that depict the American soldier slaying the innocent, but I had to buy into their desperation first. I understood the characterization of the Comedian's nihilism, but it never really touched me.

There is other borderline ambivalence. Rorschach is sent to prison and threatens to destroy the mental well being of his therapist. This could have turned out wrong since there is some dissonance in the idea that a prison therapist could have the structural integrity of his world destroyed.

If I may delineate for a moment: Rorschach's story is meant to be shocking, but I wasn't shaken to the core. Just like the Comedian was supposed to be shocking. These characters are set up from the start as people who would commit indecency, and you wouldn't be paying attention if you didn't see that, so it's not shocking to me as their actions unfurl. I have some partiality to the Taxi Driver approach: the movie establishes an evil character and shows his entire fall from grace. I am not talking about backstory but rather what pushes him over the edge. Taxi Driver, coincidentally, also deals with the line between hero and villain. Watchmen obviously doesn't have the time to painfully establish all of its characters to that degree. But these isolated stories are fragmented so much that I feel they could have benefited from the emotional resonance that a properly paved and paced storyline can bring. Not everybody will share that opinion, and I myself admit that there is some solidarity in repudiation if I someday change my way of thinking. Perceptions alter upon further readings, and Watchmen is a comic that is meant to be mined.

End my long slide into the sea. What really makes the therapist scenes evocative, however, is not that the therapist is brought down, but that those around him live in a bubble where people like Rorschach don't exist. And then his wife leaves him. To break her link with her husband is to break her link with Rorschach.

Chapter IX brings with it one of my most hated cliches. Exploring the meaning of life brings with it so much faux philosophy and pseudo intellectualism. It's a blunt question with no answer. I feel that the chapter works, however, because of the layers, the symbolisms, the style, Dr. Manhattan's penchant for relating everything in scientific metaphors. Coincidentally, Dr. Manhattan is probably the closest approximation I have seen to God in fiction without actually being related to a god. Why should anything matter to him when he can create life? He marvels at it and appreciates it but does not love it.

Finally, the dying chapters narrowly avert another awful cliche, the bad guy who wants to remake the world in his own image and weathers the immolation of lives. Like Heroes, it ultimately works because the underlying story is compelling even if the plan is convoluted. The final words between Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias are especially evocative too. "Nothing ever ends," which is why I am distrustful when someone breaths the old line of thinking that stories need to be neatly wrapped up. Thematically? Perhaps. But there needs be a hint that things go on. Unfortunately, articles don't always have that luxury.