Hunting around for an item required to address the comments on the previous post, I came across a still from Watchmen's credit sequence:
As Meredith Woerner writes:
No. If we could, there wouldn't be a poster for a comic book? film? play? radio serial? starring Batman in the background. There is Batman-themed entertainment in this universe. (And if the opera being exited by the Waynes is Die Fledermaus, Snyder alludes not to Batman lore but Batman Begins. Scratch that. The opera in Batman Begins is Mefistofele.) The larger problem with this scene neatly encapsulates the larger problem with Snyder's aesthetic. He is faithful in act but not in spirit. His heart sins. In Watching the Watchmen, Dave Gibbons says outright what every careful reader of the novel already knew:
So why did Snyder include an advertisement for some sort of Bat-themed entertainment in the credit sequence? Because it would be cool. Who cares if it violates the fundamental narrative logic of the work Snyder purports to love?
Um: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Fledermaus
Posted by: Minivet | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 06:18 PM
Wait, never mind. I can't really make out the posters, assumed you were talking about the opera depicted. Sorry.
Posted by: Minivet | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 06:23 PM
Don't you "wait, never mind" me when you're correct. Shows you how much I know about opera.
Posted by: SEK | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 06:28 PM
I think that's a bit strong, SEK. A tiny, background detail of an opera indicates sinning in his heart? I think it's a rather clever detail.
Posted by: StevenAttewell | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 07:33 PM
So what you're saying is, a movie failed to live up to the book? Wow, that is unusual. I'd devote two or three more blog posts to that one.
Posted by: JPRS | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 09:22 PM
And take these in the context of the credit sequence as a whole -- structured as a series of giant unmissable references. The bat-details here are microscopic in comparison, for fanboys and makars only.
Posted by: Vance Maverick | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 09:23 PM
I think that's a bit strong, SEK. A tiny, background detail of an opera indicates sinning in his heart? I think it's a rather clever detail.
I suppose I take it just another brick in the wall of Snyder's over-literal fanboy obsessiveness. Says nothing in itself, but added to the evidence presented in the other post, it becomes significant. Another way to say this would be:
Yes, it's clever, but it's only clever.
Posted by: SEK | Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 09:25 PM
Don't mind me, I was suddenly overcome with doubt that I could have caught SEK in such a basic error.
Posted by: Minivet | Friday, 13 March 2009 at 06:51 AM
"I mentioned ... the idea of pirate comics, reasoning that a world with real superheroes would have no need of them in comics."
I'm trying to get my head around the logic of this. As it might be: '... a world with real wars would have no use for war comics'; or 'a world with real weedy men and pneumatic women living in it would have no use for Robert Crumb.'
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 04:58 AM
I'm trying to get my head around the logic of this.
Don't ask me to explain your countrymen to you, Adam, as it seems they love something called "brisket."
Posted by: SEK | Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 05:54 AM
According to this, it's especially popular 'in the Southern States of the USA'. And with that, the pingpongball comes hurtling back at you, over the net.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 06:24 AM
And with that, the pingpongball comes hurtling back at you, over the net.
You mean "bowled," don't you?
Posted by: SEK | Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 06:38 AM
You can't properly bowl a pingpongbowl. No seam, you see.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 08:00 AM
it seems they love something called "brisket."
I always knew you were a self-hating Jew.
Posted by: Josh | Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 10:54 PM
Hey, Other Josh: he's talking about "brisket," which is a fixture of barbecues as well as of Jewish cuisine. Not bris kit, an exclusively Jewish tool which a mohel carries with him.
Posted by: Josh | Tuesday, 17 March 2009 at 03:05 AM
Except that Hollis Mason establishes (in Under the Hood) that he'd read a Superman comic, so we know that superhero comics did exist at some point in the Watchmen continuity. The first issue of Bat-Man came out in 1939; the pirate comics essay at the end of Chapter 5 says that pirate stories didn't come to dominate the medium until the end of the 1950s. That gives a two-decade range during which that opening shot could be set, and if it's the opening shot, that implies it comes early.
Posted by: Avram | Monday, 30 March 2009 at 02:06 AM