Watchmen and the scene of reading (being a response to Anthony Lane's review of Zack Snyder's adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' novel)

(Before I begin: Lane casually spoils the film, so do not click on that link if you want a virginal viewing experience.)

Anthony Lane would forestall serious criticism of his Watchmen review by characterizing defenders of the genre as "masonically loyal, prickling with a defensiveness and an ardor that not even Wagnerians can match." Anyone who reads a comic not written by Art Spiegelman is a—but why go there? Lane's acknowledgment that Moore wants nothing to do with Zack Snyder's film seems a concession, but in the end he returns to throw a few roundhouses at Moore:

Amid these pompous grabs at horror, neither author nor director has much grasp of what genuine, unhyped suffering might be like, or what pity should attend it; they are too busy fussing over the fate of the human race—a sure sign of metaphysical vulgarity—to be bothered with lesser plights.

To belabor the obvious: Watchmen is a book of the 1980s. Complaining about its concern with issues like containment, nuclear escalation, and mutually assured destruction would be akin to kvetching about the dowdiness of suburban American life in Far From Heaven—and Lane did not. So why fault Watchmen for being insufficiently universal in its appeal? Why insist that a film based on a graphic novel be of the moment the former is produced instead of the one represented in the latter?

Because Lane is an ignorant bigot.*

Not that I want to defend Snyder's film. As will become apparent, I think the film will fail because it is fundamentally unfilmable. But for someone who complains about the lack of subtlety in film and novel alike, Lane punts some rather obvious points. Foremost among them, he attributes the flaws of particular characters to the author, as when he chastises Moore:

You want to hear Moore’s attempt at urban jeremiad? “This awful city, it screams like an abattoir full of retarded children.” That line from the book may be meant as a punky retread of James Ellroy, but it sounds to me like a writer trying much, much too hard; either way, it makes it directly into the movie, as one of Rorschach’s voice-overs.

Why assume that Rorschach's a proxy for Moore here?  Why not assume Rorschach's narration is intentionally blinkered and overblown?  Consider these panels:

 

Rorschach's statements are—to borrow Lane's characterization of the entire film—grimy with misogyny, but more revealingly, they are also self-evidently delusional.  Rorschach numbers himself among the psychologically healthy.  Even within the fiction of the novel, Rorschach's narration belongs to "the crank file":

 

Yet Lane would have his readers believe that the self-important and overwrought prose of Rorschach's journal stands as an indictment of Moore.  Mistaking the flaws of a character for those of his author is argument Lane would rightly criticize were someone else to forward it.  He would also take issue with a critic who denigrated as derivative a film which openly played with generic conventions.  For example, were someone to slag Todd Haynes for directing the aforementioned Far From Heaven in the style of Douglas Sirk, I would expect Lane to dismiss this someone on the grounds that their unfamiliarity with the genre and period have led them to confuse the enlivening of a cliché for another unthinking repetition.  To wit:

There is Dan (Patrick Wilson), better known as Nite Owl, who keeps his old superhero outfit, rubbery and sharp-eared, locked away in his basement, presumably for fear of being sued for plagiarism by Bruce Wayne.

You want to talk about missing the point?  Because I could keep it up all day.  Only not about Lane this time: now I want to focus on Snyder.   I'm less concerned with his film than its conceit: that through slavish imitation Moore and Gibbon's novel can transition from page to screen. The central concern in Watchmen is with the experience of reading comic books.  The scene of reading is of obvious import: the youth reading Tales of the Black Freighter reminds the reader that the thing in their hands was shaped by an escapist tradition.  As the world marches to war this kid reads about a marooned mariner who "saves" his home by becoming the thing he sought to save it from.  Moore interleaves this narrative such that it comments on events outside of it. 

That is to say: Tales of the Black Freighter reflects for readers of Watchmen the process by which cultural artifacts acquire meaning in the larger world.  The message here is quite direct: escapist literature tells us something about the world readers want to escape.  To wit:

While the vendor boats about never retreating from reality, the black youth "retreats" into a narrative which speaks more directly to the situation in the world than any newspaper.  (Spoilers to follow.)  While the newspapers track world-historical negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union, Tales of the Black Freighter narrates the story of a man whose good intentions lead to unspeakable horror.  The mariner's plight directly parallels that of Ozymandias: therefore readers of Tales from the Black Freighter better understand why the novel ends as it does than "well-informed" citizenry whose reading was limited to Platitudes of State and their daily repetition. 

Moore champions the unserious—a category that often encompasses the whole of literature—and does so in a way particular to the medium of comics.  The average reader cannot follow the narrative complexity of a William Gaddis novel because it depends too heavily on a Jamesian ear for vocal peculiarities.  But the value of a Gaddis novel is not solely located in the virtuoso performances of its author: the complexity created by the overlapping narratives produces a more Talmudic world.  No statement exists in isolation.  Every comment is a commentary on every other comment past and future. 

Hence Dr. Manhattan. 

(But as this post has gotten prohibitively long, I will save the rest of it for later.)

---

*Not really.

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

*?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Thanks. It's been fixed.

[Brennen Bearnes]

Man, I didn't even enjoy the book all that much, but I sure do appreciate the takedown of a review this painfully devoid of a goddamned clue.

[tomemos]

Thanks for this, Scott. Lane's review made me so angry (in its slagging of the book, not the movie) that I forgot that you had linked to it, and so it was a real relief to come back to your site and read your deft takedown. Far From Heaven was a particularly nice catch.

Not much to add to what you said, but I also love how his review isn't just aimed at the movie and the book, but at comics in general. He even cites the Two Comic Books that Grown-Ups Are Allowed to Like (Maus and Persepolis, both excellent) as a prelude to "But actually most comics are stupid in all the ways you'd think." You know, film—there's a genre that almost never lets you down.

(By the way, slight typo: "a critic would denigrated" should probably be "who denigrated"?)

[Vance Maverick]

either way, it makes it directly into the movie, as one of Rorschach’s voice-overs.

This is really weird. Lane is a literary, sophisticated sort of movie critic, yet he writes as though sentences in books are autonomic emissions of the author-function, unlike in movies, where they're contextualized by speaker and setting. I do think he's smart enough that if an editor had challenged him on this (as Kael remembers Shawn doing, for matters of diction) he would have seen the lapse...so evidently nobody did.

[Ahistoricality]

The review does serve something like it's fundamental purpose, though: it tells the reader that those who liked the comic book might well like the movie; those who didn't get the comic book the first time, should stay away. Those who haven't read the comic won't really understand the review, except that Lane didn't like it -- if they trust his judgement, they'll stay away; if they don't, they won't.

You get the impression that he really didn't want to write the review, which forced him to read the comic, or at least talk about it as if he'd read more than the publicity materials. I can't actually tell if he has read the comic.

[tomemos]

"You get the impression that he really didn't want to write the review…"

I doubt that. There's nothing Anthony Lane loves more than panning a movie. How else did the same guy get picked to review Transformers, Sex and the City, Star Wars Episode 3, and Speed Racer? Seriously, the New Yorker thought its readers might be thinking about seeing Speed Racer?

Sometimes he's great—and as far as I know all those movies were terrible, as the Watchmen movie probably is—but the underlying current in all the reviews is, "Look what you disgusting slobs are making me watch. How can you be so tacky?" As soon as he saw that they made a blockbuster out of a well-regarded superhero comic, I imagine he couldn't wait to get his hands on it.

I can't actually tell if he has read the comic.

I think he read just enough to draw his shallowest impressions from it and move on.

[Vance Maverick]

Also, I don't remember him complaining about bogus, pretentious voiceovers in Apocalypse Now. (To be clear: I like them even though they're bogus -- though Herr's book is a bridge too far.)

[StevenAttewell]

Interesting takedown.

One thing I'd add - to give Snyder some credit, he did film an animated version of the Black Freighter as a separate movie, and the special edition DVD of the movie is supposed to interweave the two as intended. I think part of the lesson here is that some things are not necessarily unfilmable as they are very difficult to move through the studio system.

[StevenAttewell]

Just noticing some things from the review:

"Whether his fellow-Watchmen have true superpowers, as opposed to a pathological bent for fisticuffs, I never quite worked out, but this guy is the real deal." - not paying attention, the fact that Dr. Manhattan is the only true superpowered being in the world is the damn point.

"President Nixon (Robert Wisden), having used our blue friend to annihilate the Vietcong, wins the Vietnam War and, by 1985—the era in which the bulk of the tale takes place—is somehow serving a third term." - again, not paying attention; Nixon's serving out his fifth (?) term, because he engineered a constitutional amendment to allow him to do so.

Yeesh.

PS: To give Snyder credit, he did film Tales of the Black Freighter as an animated movie, which will get a separate release. Apparently, the special edition of the Watchman DVD interweaves the two as intended.

[StevenAttewell]

Oops. I thought I hadn't posted at 9. Apologies.

[aislingeach]

Hello Scott:

I am only an occasional visitor, but I wanted to thank you for so articulately explaining some of the problems with the very concept of a Watchmen movie. It is quite refreshing after the dull incomprehension of many of my friends. So, cheers!

[Rich Puchalsky]

It takes a poor critic to confuse an unreliable narrator with an authorial stand-in.

But since I couldn't care less about the film, I'll go back to the "fate of the human race" comment, which appears to bear on the book. It's really, really ignorant to call this "metaphysical vulgarity" in this instance. And it's not actually that great to historicize this as a period piece of the 1980s either. It's about a fit of sustained insanity that really does threaten life on Earth since before the 1980s, and still does. All those weapons haven't gone away.

And Watchmen makes no sense unless you're willing and able to take this seriously. Dr. Manhattan, Ozymandius, Rorschach, The Comedian, Nite Owl: all of them illustrate ways in which this insanity is justified as being sane. Of course it's insane to blow up half New York to ensure world peace. But that's really not so different from risking blowing up the world in order to ensure world peace. Dr. Manhattan enables, Rorschach with his right-wing beliefs justifies, The Comedian gives a note of nihilist cynicism, and Oymandius is the technocrat who reluctantly carries it all out. The most sympathetic character to the ordinary reader, Nite Owl, stands in for the ordinary citizen -- he just hides in his basement and doesn't think about it, and when he finally does decide that he can do something, his reaction to confronting the system is to accept its reasoning.

One weakness of the book is that its sole female main character(s), Silk Spectre mother and daughter, are subsumed into their chosen roles as relatively passive sex objects, and thus stand for the part of the system that ordinary patriarchy would have them stand for. I'm not sure how Moore could have written it differently, but that always strikes me as a major flaw of the work.

All that sounds chilly, and, worse, naive -- you're not supposed to have art works refer to reality in that sense. Tomemos mentions that Lane cites Maus and Persepolis -- both easier works because of their essential sentimentality. A critic who can appreciate them but not Watchmen just reveals his limitations as a critic.

[JPRS]

"He writes as though sentences in books are autonomic emissions of the author-function, unlike in movies, where they're contextualized by speaker and setting"

I wonder, anyone noticed this more generally among film scholars and critics? Is there some deep institutional compulsion to deny continuity from literature due to early anxieties of influence?

I remember my first introduction to academic film, watching Citizen Kane in Mass Communication. The professor noted that never before had a film begun at the end and then filled in the viewer through flashbacks. I (a sophomore English major who had just come from World Lit) raised my hand and proposed that this was merely the "in media res" narrative structure that Homer used. The professor actually waved his hand at me, pooh-poohed me: "This is something completely different!"

[Jake]

Anthony Lane's approach to film criticism is the equivalent of stand-up comedy.

[Anderson]

Lane knows some Elvish. That explains his eagerness to excoriate childish/geeky films. Overcompensation.

... The allusion to Dr. Manhattan at the end is interesting as an implied criticism of Gaddis-style modernism. The book may have all kinds of intratextuality that makes it as intricate as the universe seen from Dr. M's mind. But can the rest of us live, or read, like that?