(This beast began as the post I promised last week. Now that I've played hooky all my points about the uniqueness of Watchmen's narrative mode seem more salient in light of their absence from the film. So I decided to fold my review into the half-composed post. But for the record I still never get around to discussing my larger theory of Manhattan as readerly proxy.)
Some books teach you how to read them: Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, JR, and Infinite Jest spring first to mind. From a purely formal perspective Watchmen belongs
in their company. It does to the conventions of comic narrative what
Joyce did to realism, Pynchon did to pulp, Gaddis did to dialogue and
Foster Wallace did to sentiment. All the techniques discussed in the
following had been used in comics before—there is nothing new under the oxen of the sun—but
never in the service of creating a new breed of reader. Consider the
following sequence of panels from the funeral of the Comedian:
The
first three panels transition moment-to-moment. Such transitions slow
down the action by forcing the reader to observe actions divided into
their constiuent parts. They typically depict a realization on the
part of the character which the author wants the reader to linger over (for example)
or a demonstration of how fast or powerful someone is. But the
"action" that Moore slices into its constiuent parts consists of
"listening while standing still."
For a hack like Mark Millar the amount of dialogue squeezed into the slow zoom of those panels would stretch credulity.
But Moore is no Millar. (How better to compel readers to pay attention
to a face than four consecutive panels that zoom in on it?) Moore
wants the reader to focus his attention on the expression Ozymandias
wears and the pat content of the eulogy. The payoff of the latter is
dialogue-driven and immediate; the former, however, pays off in a way
only comics can. When the moment-to-moment transitions give way to the
scene-to-scene transitions in the third and fourth panels the change in
Ozymandias's expression is as subtle as it is important:
As
the scene moves from the present to the past the vacant expression
Ozymandias wears in the third panel gives way to weariness in the
fourth. Pay attention to the eyes: somehow neither the mask nor the
adhesive with which he glued it to his face can hide the bags beneath
his eyes in the fourth panel. The moment observed by the steely eyes
in the third panel brims with resignation and despair . . . and yet
those eyes reveal nothing but cold resolve. Whatever flashback the
reader witnesses will involve some sort of transformation from the man
in the fourth panel into the man in third. Ozymandias later confirms
this suspicion:
That
meeting catalyzed Ozymandias. It changed him into the man who could do
what he eventually did. While serving witness to the burial of a
brutal man, Ozymandias remembers the moment he realized his ends were
incommensurate with his means. And though he recalls his despair in
the fourth panel with resolve in the third, remembering the moment in
which he decides what he must do brings him no joy:
The
scene-to-scene transition out of the flashback is a mirror image of the
one that brought us in. The memory of the moment he sternly turned to
genocide causes a swell of unwanted emotion and his mask cracks. Seems
like juxtaposing the magnitude of the scheme he set in motion and the
hardening of heart required to do so saddened him. His eyes soften
once deprived of the contrast the regal purple of his mask provided.
Devoid of the flushed conviction that drove him to this moment, the
corners of his lips turn down. The past is the past and cannot be
undone. Unless you happen to be Dr. Manhattan—about whom more
momentarily. (That odd-looking link allows you to choose your own adventure.) Now to the film.
Zack Snyder's dogged dedication to
the panel makes those moments in which his film deviates from the book
all the more apparent. My first (and minor) complaint is that he
shoehorned the Twin Towers (formerly located in Lower Manhattan) into
what had been in the novel a shot of the Chrysler Building in Midtown Manhattan:
Enlarge
if you can't see the Twin Towers to the right of the priest's
umbrella. I'm not such a stickler for fidelity as to be annoyed by the
fact that Snyder buries the Comedian in Jersey City instead of Weehawkin or Hoboken.
(The establishing shot puts the Midtown skyline on the left side of the
screen, so we must be looking at Manhattan Island from New Jersey
instead of Brooklyn.) But I am bothered by the fact that Snyder moves the Twin Towers in order to keep them in-frame both in the establishing shot and the
long-shot of the priest approaching the grave. This undue attention to
the Towers continues throughout the film. When Dan Dreiberg first
arrives at Adrian Veidt's office, the Towers are clearly visible
through the window. One of the ubiquitous Veidt Industries blimps
creeps from the left side of the screen to the right and is seemingly aimed directly at the Twin Towers. (Avoiding even the appearance of a collision is likely the reason for the second continuity error listed here.)
If Snyder had done something meaningful with 1 and 2 World Trade Center
that would be one thing. Sticking them in as many shots as possible is
little more than an undignified grasp at an unearned gravitas.
My
second (and more significant) complaint is that for all his literalism,
Snyder completely punts the unique formal elements I discussed above.
All the transitions that distinguish Watchmen from its lessers
are gone. For example, during the funeral he cuts from a close-up of
Ozymandias (shot straight-on) to the flashback of the inaugural (and
only) meeting of the Crimebusters from the Comedian's perspective.
That they are now called the Watchmen and helmed by Ozymandias instead
of Captain Metropolis matters less than the fact that Snyder chucked
the original transitions (which focused on mourners engaged in acts of
remembrance) in favor of transitions that focused on what the Comedian
did.
Why is this significant? Because it demonstrates that
Snyder never grappled with his source material in formal or structural
terms. The narrative techniques that contributed to his own sense of
the book's significance went unrecognized; in their place is the kind
of fanboy literalism that compels people to write open letters to Peter
Jackson accusing him of assaulting Tolkien. Snyder recognized the genius of Watchmen but never learned where it originated. As Dana noted, the narrative itself is as inherently compelling as a novel about a man who spends the day trying not to think about the affair his wife is having. Put differently:
The experience of viewing Watchmen resembles what it would be like to watch an adaptation of The Bloomsday Book.
(Note: I chose to air these complaints because I haven't seen
them out there yet. I could've complained, for example, about the
pornographic violence and listless pornography. Who charges fight
scenes with erotic energy but shoots sex scenes as if they were moving diagrams of
a V8 engine? That would be Zack Snyder. I have many more complaints
of this sort, but as you've already read variations of them elsewhere,
I see no need to pile on.)
(x-posted.)
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