Acephalous

The Dark Knight Returns and The Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking

Not wanting to spend the entirety of my life figuring out how to put the entirety of my life into boxes and move it across the country, I decided to watch the animated adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Directed by Jay Olivia and released in two parts in 2012 and 2013, it belongs to the Zack Snyder School of Literal Filmmaking, in which the idea is to replicate particularly stirring comic panels on the big screen by unwittingly mangling the elements that make them stirring.

Consider Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen. We don’t even need to venture past the opening credits to see where the film misses the point. But before we do that, I should note that I’m not complaining generally about a lack of faithfulness in adaptation. Comics and film are different media and ought to be treated as such. I don’t mind if changes are made that alter the narrative in an interesting fashion. But Snyder preaches fidelity as his ethos, so taken at his word, deviations from the comic in his films aren’t “interesting alterations” so much as the “necessary accommodations” of adapting any medium into another. These changes are being made by a lover of the source material who would never be unfaithful to the “spirit” of the original. For what it’s worth, I think Snyder’s dead honest about his commitment to accurately representing both individual panels and the “spirit” of the original work on screen — he simply happens to be terrible at doing so. Back to the opening minutes of Watchmen, in which Rorschach’s investigating the Comedian’s murder. Both the novel and the film begin with a close-up of the Comedian’s iconic image before pulling back to the skyscraper window from which it fell.

Book:

Film:

I’ve turned on the subtitles in order to make the difference between the novel and the film clear. Although both pull back to great heights, in the novel the emphasis during the slow transition from the ground floor to the Comedian’s apartment is on the content of Rorschach’s journal. You can tell because it occupies a little more than a third of the first three panels and the other visual information is merely repetitive. This isn’t necessarily the case when a camera zooms out — and readers of the novel recognize that there is relevant information in the third panel — but in this case seeing some anonymous man walk through the pool of blood isn’t necessarily useful information. (Readers might associate the anhedonic tone of the journal and the callousness with which the redheaded man walks through the pool of blood, but who among us was that clever at eleven?)

Point being: Snyder’s made the minor directorial decision to move the interior narration of the journal to when Rorschach actually appears:

Same lines from the first panel of the comic, they’ve just been shifted forward to remove the mystery of their author. There’s just one problem: in the film, the implication is that Rorschach’s thinking about the awfulness of the city when he discovers the Comedian’s badge. His behavior’s motivated by his disdain for the people he deigns to protect. His anger drives his actions in a very conventional manner: this man named, clearly identified as Rorschach, is a moralistic vigilante who prowls the streets at night preventing crime, picking up shit from sewer drains and inexplicably using grappling guns. He’s in a mood — the only one he ever has — and he happens to find something that sets him off again. Not so much in the novel:

Notice how quiet Moore and Gibbons’ panels are. By shifting the narration from the zoom out to Rorschach’s discovery of the Comedian’s pin, Snyder’s demonstrated that he fundamentally misread those three panels. The point of them — which will be made more strongly shortly — is to establish Rorschach’s skills as a detective. It’s too easy to turn a character of Rorschach’s pedigree into a mindless vigilante, which is why Moore and Gibbons use Watchmen‘s opening pages to establish his credentials as a detective. He finds evidence of the Comedian on the street; stares it down in attempt to ascertain where it came from; then decides it must have fallen. Only then does he look up at the building. It’s a slow and contemplative progression of panels that the film turns into an minor action sequence complete with “all the [drowning].” And of course once Rorschach arrives on scene:

He says nothing, because he’s investigating. He’s thinking his own thoughts about what he sees. If he had a Watson or a Wilson or a companion he’d be vigorously shushing them at this point because he needs to think. In the film?

He’s thinking that right there as he’s perched in the window. He’s not being an effective detective — he’s being a bitter blogger stuck doing something else but silently composing posts he’ll write when he gets the chance. Even though they made the juxtaposition of the journal clear when he first opened his mouth by having him “think-read” “Rorschach’s journal, October 12, 1985,” the manner in which Snyder uses the non-diegetic voice-over in the scene makes it appear to be a interior monologue, right down to the emphatic eighties-action-hero-overstatement of his final “No.”

It’s actually a little more complex than that. Interior monologues are typically considered to be non-diegetic — in that they don’t come from a source visible on-screen — but I’d argue that, in film generally, they’re diegetic inasmuch as they are coming from a visible source, e.g. I can see Rorschach’s head and think I’m hearing his thoughts as he’s having them. Which is why this is a little complex: he’s not actually thinking the thoughts the audience is attributing to him, unless he’s got an perfect recall and is reciting his journal to himself. In 1985. Or possibly later if this is a flashback. All of which is only to demonstrate how needlessly complicated Snyder’s made this scene in order to streamline it: now Rorschach’s journal is introduced while he arrives at the Comedian’s apartment. He thinks nothing’s lost by transposing Rorschach’s mad rantings onto his work as a detective. He’s wrong.

The point of keeping Rorschach’s journal distinct from his detective work in the opening pages is to create, in the mind of the audience, a distinction between the man and the mask. The man, Walter Kovacs, is a violent sociopath; the mask, Rorschach, can channel the man’s tendencies into productive policing and temper his violence. This distinction indicates that he’s going to be a character whose psychological state is difficult to read. It’s almost like people will see what they want to see in him because he’s wearing a fucking Rorschach test. By which I only mean to suggest that despite his fidelity to the panels, Synder’s missed the entire point of the scene in order to make it more conventional. That’s why his Rorschach says quite a bit more than Moore and Gibbon’s:

Rorschach’s “HUNH” and “EHH” are thinking noises of the sort people make when lost deep in thought. In the third panel, Rorschach recognizes that the size of the interior of the closet seems odd; in the fourth, he improvises a means of measuring the closet’s depth; in the fifth he measures the exterior; in the sixth he measures the interior. And Moore and Gibbons are clever enough to emphasize the crook in the hanger. It’s literally in the dead center of the fifth panel — meaning it’s in the dead center of a page scripted by Alan Moore and therefore quite important:

Only when he compares the location of the crook on the interior in panel six does Rorschach realize that there’s a secret compartment. These panels are evidence of a process of deduction at work. He’s more than a vigilante obsessed with a citizenry slipping into sin — he’s a proper detective who’s capable of improvisation in the course of his investigations. Or he opens a random closet, slides the clothes aside and sees a button:

Then he presses it. Great work there Detective Rorschach! Not sure how you thought of that! I think my point is obvious: Snyder may be faithful to the design elements of particular panels, but more often than not he entirely misreads the significance of the work he slavishly imitates. Now that I’ve established that, I can say that a similar dynamic is at work in The Dark Knight Returns: panels from the graphic novel appear on the screen in a manner that demonstrates the Olivia, the director, didn’t quite understand their import. Consider this action sequence in which the Batman runs across a tightrope from one building to another:

Is shot square in his symbol and staggers:

Begins to fall:

Then fires his grappling gun at an escaping helicopter:

This sequence seems like typical heat-of-the-moment Batman: expensive body armor and years of training allow him to routinely do the impossible. He doesn’t need to think — he’s a man of pure reaction. Even after all these years of not being the Batman — the word “Returns” is in the title for a reason — his instincts allow him to act unconsciously. Such is the impression created by the adaptation. One problem: although that last capture above does reproduce an iconic silent splash page, the rest of those panels should sound, via interior monologue, like this:

Whereas with Rorschach there should’ve been no interior monologue, in The Dark Knight Returns there should have been. The point of the book is that Batman’s falling off buildings worried about having a heart attack and trying to console himself on the dignity of his impending death. Those are very un-Batman-like things to be thinking in the middle of a fight. Eliminating the interior monologue has reduced him to his body — which I grant is the point of many a Batman story, e.g. Bruce Wayne escaping the vaguely Asian pit in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s just not the point of this one. It’s the opposite of the point. But as with Synder, the desire to be faithful to the original work has resulted in something utterly different and more mundane. I led with the discussion of Rorschach because I don’t want people to assume that I’m making the common criticism that comics handle interiority better than film because we can “see” people think in them. That’s not the point — especially not with a Frank Miller book, since the tone of the interior monologue comes straight from film noir’s tradition of voice-overs — which, of course, comes from the first person perspective of the detective novels on which they were based, but that’s not the point either. The point here is that the films of two of the greatest graphic novels of the 1980s are both significantly worse than they have to be because they were adapted by people who fundamentally didn’t understand how they worked.

They’re the equivalent of a parrot trained to greet visitors with a hearty “Hello! Good to see you!” It doesn’t have a fucking clue what it’s saying but somehow we’re convinced we hear language.

I am become History

It just dawned on me that I asked my students to write about the historical context of race and gender relations in 1996.

They have no idea what it was like to be beaten up for being gay—despite not being gay, just reading books, which same difference—in high school, and when I tell them that there wasn't a single person out in my entire high school, they stare at me in disbelief. And with good reason: when I ask them if they attended a school in which no one was out, no one raises their hand. They live in a different—and frankly better—world, and they have no idea how historically unique their lives are.

All of which is me building up to my point, which was that after I informed them that when I started college I couldn't buy books online because the Internet wasn't robust enough to accommodate tiny pictures of book covers, one of my male students looked at me, horror in his eyes, and asked "Then how did you get your porn?"

Which is the second-best porn-related question I've ever been asked in a classroom. It fought the good fight, but I think we can agree that the champion retains her belt.

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium Now Easier than Ever to Find!

It's a permanent fixture in the right sidebar now, and I'll continue to update it regularly. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a terrible cold to attend to. (Stupid midterms wreaking havoc with stupid students' stupid immune systems ...)

Scott Eric Kaufman's Visual Rhetoric Compendium (as of 11/28/2011)

(For the record, many more [and all future] updates can be found here.)

By request, below are the links to all of the visual rhetoric exegeses (a.k.a. McCloud or Bordwell-inspired "lecture notes") I've produced in the past few years.  I would say I'm surprised there aren't more of them, but then I remember 1) how labor-intensive they are to compose and 2) the number of drafts I've deemed insufficient for public consumption that linger unfinished in assorted folders.  So here goes:

Films:

• Batman Begins (classic horror) - Christopher Nolan 
• Blow-Up (I) - Michelangelo Antonioni 
• Blow-Up (II)- Michelangelo Antonioni
• The Dark Knight (I) - Christopher Nolan
• The Dark Knight (II) - Christopher Nolan
• Fight Club - David Fincher
• Fight Club (II) - David Fincher
• Fight Club (III) - David Fincher
• Ghost World - Terry Zwigof
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki
• Superman - Richard Donner
• Superman Returns - Bryan Singer
• 30 Days of Night - David Slade

Television Shows:

• Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Ember Island Players"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Hush"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels"
• Doctor Who - "Time of Angels" - Buckling the Frame
• Doctor Who - "The Eleventh Hour"
• Doctor Who - "The Pandorica Opens"
• Leverage - "The Van Gogh Job"
• Mad Men - "The Grown-Ups"
• Mad Men - "Shut the Door.  Have a seat."
• Mad Men (I) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Rejected"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword"
• Mad Men (I) - "The Suitcase"
• Mad Men (II) - "The Suitcase"
• The Walking Dead - "Days Gone Bye"

Comics:

• American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang
• Blankets - Craig Thompson
• Fun Home - Alison Bechdel
• Ghost World - Daniel Clowes
• Kick-Ass (I) - Mark Millar
• Kick-Ass (II) - Mark Millar
• Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth - Warren Ellis
• 30 Days of Night - Steve Niles
• The Walking Dead (word-specific panels)
• The Walking Dead (picture-specific panels) - Robert Kirkman
• Watchmen (panel construction) (I) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (panel construction) (II) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (responsible film criticism) - Anthony Lane
• Watchmen (unfilmable film filmed) - Zak Snyder vs. Alan Moore
• Watchmen (students as murderers) - Alan Moore
• Watchmen (Dr. Manhattan as a figure of the reader) - Alan Moore

 Themes:

• On Poorly Executed Claustrophobia in Film and Television
• On Effectively Executed Claustrophobia in Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot

A list of people whose deaths I have permission to mourn.

An annoying anonymous person writes:

Why is it any time anyone hipsters or academics are supposed to like dies, they just so happen to be very important never-before-mentioned influences on your life? Are you really so needy that there's no death you won't use as an excuse to call attention to yourself?

Although this comment belongs to the tedious category of "complaints about bloggers having blogs and writing about stuff on them," it nevertheless struck a chord: first, because the size of the community grieving for Alex Chilton surprised me; and second, it seems to be a dangerous time to be a living artist or academic who changed my life.  That said, this annoying anonymous person is reading in bad faith: not everyone who influenced me did so greatly or uniquely, which is why I noted Kurt Vonnegut's passing in passing, as a "Vonnegut phase" is required to join the community of readers.  The same cannot be said of those academics and artists with whom I shared an intimate relationship over many years, which is why I wrote individual remembrances of Octavia Butler, David Foster Wallace, Howard Zinn, or Alex Chilton. 

If I seem to be too familiar a type, blame central casting: academics play the part because that's the part they've been asked to play.  That there seems to be a wider community of similarly interested intellectuals is, to my mind, a sign that while academic disciplines may be irrevocably balkanized, something resembling a larger intellectual culture still exists.  Whether this cultural homogeneity is a good thing depends on what it actually contains, and given how surprising Chilton's inclusion image was to me, I probably should refrain from saying much more about it. 

However, in light of the recent proliferation of lists like this, I think I'll take a moment to silence future scolds by listing all living authors, musicians, and filmmakers with whose work I feel a deeply irrational kinship.  They may not still move me as they once did, but they once did and when they die a little bit of me will too.  

Stuff White People Like Stealing

Considering that

• two Jews from the Bronx, Bill Finger and Robert Kahn (Bob Kane) created Batman
• two Jews in Cleveland, Jerome Siegel and Joseph Shuster, created Superman
• a Jew from Washington Heights, Mortimer Weisinger, created Green Arrow and co-created Aquaman
• another Jew from Washington Heights, Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee), teamed up with a Jew from Brooklyn, Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), to create the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, Galactus, Doctor Doom, and Iron Man
• a few decades earlier, a Jew from Rochester, Joseph Simon, had also partnered with Kurtzberg, and together they'd created Captain America
• another Brooklyn Jew, William Eisner, is possibly the most important comic artist ever (dayenu); arguably invented the graphic novel (dayenu); wrote two of the most influential theoretical books about comics (dayenu); and has the award for creative achievement in the medium named after him

would it be fair to say that white people stole superheroes from the Jews the same way they'd stolen rock 'n roll from black people?*

*Not really.  This is territory is trod plenty and well, but it's worth rehearsing: Elvis Presley borrowed rock 'n roll from black people, and always returned as much of it as he could promptly and with gratitude.  But he could never give it all back, because from the perspective of white America, it tainted him: anyone that the New York Times could call, as it did Elvis in 1956, a "blues shouter ... imbued with the spirit and style of those Negro singers" clearly had dangerous and unsavory associations. That same year, the Chicago Defender pushed the issue of this affinity to the fore in articles like "Arrival of Elvis Presley No Puzzle to T-Bone Fans," in which Presley's speech was rendered in Negro dialect: "Yew-oo ain't nuthin but a houn' dawg," the paper has him singing; later, he explains his style by saying "Ah'm jus' singin' the only way ah know how."  Claiming, as Eric Lott did in Love and Theft, that Elvis was no better than a Nineteenth Century minstrel; or, as people generally do, that he stole rock 'n roll from black people, misses the point: many black intellectuals, following the lead of black musicians, not only praised Elvis for respecting their tradition, they loved the fact that, via Elvis, that tradition had been embraced by the sons and daughters of die-hard Dixiecrats.  One editorial in the Defender (that I can't relocate at the moment) was a series of winks, nods, and nudges about ceremony in Tupelo at which John Rankin, reputed to be the last white man to utter the word "nigger" in anger at a black man on the floor of the United States House of Representatives, was forced to bestow some sort of honor on Tupelo's most famous son.**

**I'm not sure why the footnote is that much more substantial and academic than the post it qualifies, but I figure that if I can get away with it in a dissertation, I can get away with it on a blog.

On the persistent metafictions of Alan Moore

(Because Amazon's taking away your almost-free books, I thought I'd offer up a free excerpt from mine.  It's neither finished nor particularly good, but turning stacks of virtual notes into viable prose is a messy process and what's the point of even having a blog if you can't ask your readers to help straighten up your mess?  It ends rather abruptly because I need to mark essays, but rest assured, it will arrive at the obvious destination soon enough.)

The inaugural issue of the British comic anthology Warrior, published in March of 1982, contained two stories scripted by a 29-year-old Alan Moore that could not have been more different in tone or conception.  The first told the story of an attempted rape in a dystopian future: corrupt police accost a young woman, but before they can rape her, they are murdered by a man who explains, in iambs, why he came to her aid and why he is about to blow up the British Parliament.  In stark contrast to the opening chapter of V for Vendetta, Moore’s second contribution comes from “an age of lingering innocence, an age of golden dreams,” and recounts how, in 1956, “the Miracleman Family” repelled the invasion of a terrorist organization from the future called the “Science Gestapo.”

These serialized stories represent two possible career paths for young Moore: he can become a writer who creates and develops original ideas, as he does in V for Vendetta; or he can become the kind of whose genius is particular to comics, i.e. one whose talent lies in the ability to transform a caricature into a character of compelling psychological depth.  (Characters in mainstream comic books are, after all, a form of communal property: they belong to a company, and are subject to regular refashioning and repurposing.)  Although its cartoonish art and quaint language could hardly differ more from the harsh lines and sharp tongues of V for Vendetta, the final eight panels of the Miracleman story depict the process that, over the course of the decade, will become Moore’s signature style. 

Reunited after preventing the “Science Gestapo” from traveling to the past by defeating them in the future, the Miracleman clan shares a laugh: “S-so…Garrer was never here, because he never left 1981!  It sounds unbelievable,” says Kid Miracleman.  “Maybe so, Kid,” Miracleman responds, “But that’s the way it was…or was it?”  As they laugh, the focus shifts from the family to Miracleman alone and the narrator, whose role up to this point had been providing linguistic gristle for the duo-specific word-picture relations—in which the words and the pictures say the same thing, as in books designed to teach children to read—begins quoting an ominous-sounding passage from Nietzsche:

Let the circle be unbroken.

From a thread about Michael Steele's "white Republicans are afraid of me" remarks on Sunday:

I’m terrified of Michael Steele the same way Mary Jo Kopechne was terrified of Teddy Kennedy.

This ride is flat scary, and I want off.

In less than 30 words, this commenter compresses the conservative response to white liberals and all blacks into the singular image of a threatened white woman. I would stop and note that the white female martyr in question worked with the man who supposedly terrified her and willingly entered a vehicle with him on that unfortunate evening, but that would be beside the point. It is not the woman herself to whom conservatives appeal when they utter her name, but what happened to her as imagined through their eyes.

Their horror at Kopechne's death (and their subsequent insistence that in it can be found the root of all ideological evil) reminds me of nothing so much as the origin story of Rorschach in Alan Moore's Watchmen. (Such obsessions happens when writing a book.) His moment of decision—the moment he became, a la Bérubé, outraged by Chappaquiddick—was when he discovered some fabric that had been purchased by Kitty Genovese shortly before her murder:

What turns Rorschach into the misogynistic psychopath deplored by a witless Anthony Lane but beloved by many a conservative? The seventh and eighth panels tell you all you need to know. They are not presented from Genovese's perspective: the scene-to-scene transition from panel six to panel seven clearly indicates that they're Rorschach's reconstruction of the indifference she witnessed as she bled out before the eyes of friends and neighbors. She is no more a person to him that Kopechne is to those who claim to speak for her and yet, like conservatives, Rorschach claims her death for his own purposes.

I would continue, but I don't feel comfortable speaking for the dead. Would that others shared my discomfort ...

On informing your students that they're murderers

(Being another post in this vein.)

In a famous (and surprisingly controversial, for reasons I will tackle later in the week) section of Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the act of moving from one panel, through the gutter (the white space between panels), and into the next as "closure."  Unlike film, in which closure is made unconscious by the persistence of vision and the limitations of our perceptual apparatus (such that twenty-four frames per second is automatically perceived as motion), closure in comics is a collaborative effort between author (or artist) and reader.  Take a scene in which one person threatens to shoot another:

What happens (at least in my tweaked-for-maximal-classroom-efficiency sequence) between the second and third panel there?  Put differently: in order to achieve closure between the second and third panel, what do Moore and Gibbons compel the reader to imagine in order to make the transition through that gutter make sense?  The answer, of course, is that they force the reader to imagine murdering a pregnant woman.  That is, they make the reader a silent accomplice to the Comedian's crime per McCloud:

Just in case the awful complicity of the reader failed to sink in, McCloud draws himself hugging his knees in a dark corner (and undoubtedly near tears behind his grandma glasses):

Students absolutely loathe the possibility that McCloud might be correct.  They claim they are the victims of a sick manipulation on the part of the author; that they were tricked into imagining this terrible crime and therefore aren't culpable; that they never knowingly sin in their hearts unless someone forces them to do so; etc.  I then show them the omitted panel:

And after they express how much better they feel for not being an accomplice to a fictional murder, I ask them why witnessing a crime is better than imagining one and we turn to a slightly more thematic discussion of Dr. Manhattan's culpability here.  But they remember McCloud's point, which was why I implicated them in the Comedian's crime in the first place.

By request: my visual rhetoric course

As requested in the comments to my last post and via a couple of emails, here's a general outline of the course I teach on visual rhetoric. (If you find it interesting or just want to give me money, the book I'm co-writing with my course director should be available early next summer.) I'm more than happy to debate the merits of teaching rhetoric and argument through popular culture or the validity of any of the particular readings I put forward; however, keep in mind that those readings are presented in the classroom and, as such, are designed to be arguable instead of definitive. I want them to argue with particular statements because I'm teaching them how to argue, so there are moments (particularly in the readings of the films) that I'm deliberately wrong. Those moments will likely be obvious to you, but you're not an 18-year-old undergraduate on the short end of an institutional power imbalance who's afraid that, should they contradict me, they will fail the class, lose their scholarship and spend their days toiling away in the service industries.

That said, here are links to the analytic portion of the course:

1. I introduce them to the idea of the overdetermined image, because nothing is accidental in an Alan Moore script.*
2.  Nor, for that matter, is anything accidental when it costs $80,000 per second to film it, which is why we then discuss how Christopher Nolan turns Batman into classic horror monster in Batman Begins. The point here is get them fluent in the language of film, so that they might make arguments about how directors manipulate the camera in order to appeal to the audience. (We also discuss what is and isn't in the diegetic space, e.g. music, which is heard by the audience but not the characters.)
3. Then it's on to The Dark Knight. That link goes to a reading of the interrogation scene; this one leads you to a similarly thorough analysis dedicated to proving the controversial thesis that Batman is really fast—because demonstrating that even the simplest of claims require evidence and careful argument to be taken seriously is the point of the course.
4. Now that they're relatively fluent in the language of film, we try to prove something a little more complex; namely, that Superman Returns is very much about 9/11. First, I take them back to September morning; then we analyze the action sequence that's about planes slamming into NYC landmarks, lest they think I'm reading too much into the anxieties the film taps into.
5. Now that they're comfortable with film, I get them to apply that knowledge to comics via the comic that's about the conventions of comics and is therefore utterly unfilmable, Watchmen. I begin by reminding them of the overdetermined nature of the image, then we discuss panel transitions and word-picture relation, move on layout and narrative flow, then I try to prove what I stated in the second sentence about Watchmen being a meta-comic. My argument's deliberately argumentative, because Dr. Manhattan can also function as a figure of the reader as well the author, but that's an argument I want to have. From there, it's onto the unfilmable film itself.
6. Now that they can break film and comics into their constituent parts, I re-orient them in an explicitly rhetorical direction. We talk about the rhetorical situation, which is, of course, a triangle. (For the record: that silliness is me teaching myself to manipulate images in Photoshop for my book on teaching visual rhetoric.) Then we situate the rhetorical context in the historical context via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
7. From there on out, it's all about the writing.  I teach them about paragraph burgers, which, while silly, is the single most effective means I've found to teach paragraph structure. Students intuitively understand that you don't call a pickle with and a piece of a cheese a "hamburger." For the remainder of the quarter, we use the tools from the beginning of the course to make sophisticated arguments about the rhetorical stakes of what they'd otherwise dismiss as pop culture ephemera. 

*I've never written up my notes on getting them to think about structure via punchlines, which begins, not surprisingly, here with The Killing Joke. The gist of it is that jokes don’t work if you only provide the punchline, which is my way of introducing them to the notion of process: this shot in a film or panel in a comic or argument in an essay only works as a punchline if the joke's been properly set up. Basically, I try to get them to think about argument in terms they intuitively understand.

Why even fight if you don't fight dirty?

I always have a hard time convincing students that the violence in Watchmen is categorically different from the chompurfzung violence traditionally featured in comics.  Dave Gibbons draws Watchmen in the same style he used in a previous collaboration with Alan Moore ("For the Man Who Has Everything") to depict Wonder Woman thrutching Mongul:

I give you permission to indulge in your basest voyeuristic urges...

. . . but only if you promise not to comment on my shiny new course blog.  I'm experimenting this quarter with placing all my lesson plans online before I teach and requiring my students comment on them the night before class.  My thinking is that all my classes will traffic in reinforcement instead of introduction.  This idea could be genius and lead to more rigorous and intellectually stimulating classroom discussions . . . or it could make for painful dull classes in which I reiterate what they've already read.  I'll keep you posted. 

More evidence Zack Snyder's Watchmen misses Moore's mark.

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:

The opening shot, with Nite Owl giving a fist full of justice[,] has a big Batman reference.  First, check out the posters to the right.  Look familiar?  And isn't that Mr. and Mrs. Wayne at the back entrance of the opera, being saved from a bloody death?  And . . . the opera bills say: "Die Fledermaus" (The Bat).  So can we safely come to the conclusion that the original Nite Owl stopped Batman from popping up in their universe?

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:

I mentioned to [Alan Moore] the idea of pirate comics, reasoning that a world with real superheroes would have no need of them in comics.  Alan later took that throwaway idea and constructed an entire allegorical narrative from it within the main story.

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? 

Does Dr. Manhattan act as a figure of the reader in Alan Moore's Watchmen?

(This post picks up right here.  Turn that double em-dash into a colon and forget you read the rest . . . but for continuity's sake I will rewind one sentence.)

Unless you happen to be Dr. Manhattan:

 

For brevity and bandwidth I'll skip the move into this flashback and focus on the one out of it.  In the left panel you have Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam.  The fireworks behind him celebrate V.V.N.  The body before him carried the child of the man in the coffin on the right until said man shot it in the chest [thanks JPRS] and turned that woman into a body.  Note that unlike the panels discussed earlier the expression on Manhattan's face doesn't change.  What has happened has already happened and he cannot change it without changing what has already happened.  Make no mistake: he can change it.  He can prevent the Comedian from shooting a pregnant woman in the chest.  He even tells the Comedian not to do it:

But as the Comedian does it anyway . . . then complains because Manhattan didn't turn the bullet into water.  The conventional reading of the novel stipulates something importantly philosophical is behind Manhattan's reluctance or refusal to act here.  I think the answer is much more mundane: unlike Ozymandias, who experiences in memory the emotions he felt in the moment, the unmoored-in-time Manhattan feels nothing not because he has abdicated moral authority before the throne of universal indifference, but because for all his power within the novel he merely functions as a figure of reader.  (To answer Rich's creepily accurate pre-emptive criticism, I would say that Manhattan doing nothing with his power trumps its potential.)

In the narrative present he amounts to little more than a M.A.D. weapon that maybe leaks carcinogens.  The conceit that he can be anywhere at anytime structures the fourth issue of Watchmen and calls into question whether Manhattan's flashbacks are actually flashbacks.  More constantly forces us to consider the status of what we see.  Take these panels from the first issue:

What is the relationship between the central and flanking panels?  Are we getting the detective's mental reconstruction of the struggle based on the evidence at the scene?  Is Moore juxtaposing the actual struggle with the detective's reconstruction of it?  What about these panels from the sixth issue:

Does the narrative jump to the perspective of a dying Kitty Genovese there?  Is that Rorschach's reconstruction of the last thing she ever saw?  Point being: throughout the novel Moore exploits the then-to-fore unexamined conventions of comic transitions.  He literalizes the oldest of the old standbys—the scene-to-scene transition—by granting Manhattan the power to teleport from one scene to another.  These characters have been transported from one scene to another via this transition the whole book to no ill effect.  But when Manhattan transitions them from a studio to a parking lot or New York to Los Angeles, their stomachs bark and they vomit uncontrollably.  What the reader painlessly accomplishes—what you, dear readers, painlessly accomplished when you scanned the panels above—requires godlike powers to be effected by characters in the novel. 

Watching Watchmen: How unfilmable novels become unwatchable films.

(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.)

"READING IS FUNDAMENTAL. WITH DUMMIES LIKE YOU, WHO NEEDS THE MENTALLY DISABLED?"

(My actual review of the film can be found here.  That post I'm holding off on is still M.I.A.)

I’m holding off on that other Watchmen post because I think I might, um, be wrong about something fairly central to my argument. In the meantime, I have a declaration to make: I love Debbie Schlussel. Her review of Watchmen is simply to die for. To wit:

If you take your kids to see “The Watchmen,” you’re a moron. If you see it yourself, you’re also probably a moron and a vapid, indecent human being.

Set aside the fact that she punts the film’s title. Set aside the fact that she punts the film’s title even though the poster is included in the post. Concentrate instead on how she castigates hypothetical parents who would take their children to an R-rated film. Who is her audience? Who does she imagine it is?

I know, it’s being heavily marketed as a superhero movie, with action figures for your kids.

I see now—her audience consists of people who never click on links. Because if they did, they’d see Schlussel links to a limited run of 5,000 figures designed for I-buy-Power-Girl-statuettes crowd. But what about the hypothetical children? Who will care for the hypothetical children?

But then, we see cops looking over their naked, bloodied, dead bodies on a bed, with the words “LESBIAN WHORES,” written in blood on the wall.

Mommy, mommy, what’s a lesbian? What’s a whore?

So our hypothetical terrible parent takes her hypothetical toddler to see an R-rated movie and—what’s an R-rated picture again?

An R-rated motion picture may include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements, so that parents are counseled to take this rating very seriously. Children under 17 are not allowed to attend R-rated motion pictures unaccompanied by a parent or adult guardian. Parents are strongly urged to find out more about R-rated motion pictures in determining their suitability for their children. Generally, it is not appropriate for parents to bring their young children with them to R-rated motion pictures.

Thank you, official Motion Picture Association of America guidelines. Let’s compare rubric of the R-rating to Schlussel’s litany of offensive scenes in the film:

Schlussel: Two superheroes have an explicit sex scene in a spaceship–she’s on top, then he’s on top, awesome–you can teach your young kids multiple sexual positions before they even reach puberty, by taking them to see this (there’s a less explicit sex scene between the slutty superheroine and another superhero not long before that).

MPAA: . . . sexually-oriented nudity . . .

Situation normal.

Schlussel: Superhero “The Comedian” (a bad Robert Downey, Jr. look-alike) brutally beating and raping another superhero[.]

MPAA: . . . adult themes . . .

Situation normal..

Schlussel: [S]uperheroes hurling obscenities[.]

MPAA: . . . hard language . . .

Situation normal.

Schlussel: A man’s hands and arms being sawed off with an electric saw–we’re shown the bloody stumps and the bloody sawed off limbs in close up shots[.]

MPAA: . . . intense or persistent violence . . .

Seems Schlussel has been offended by the very elements the MPAA guidelines predict will be in an R-rated film. Her whole argument, then, is that some parents would be dumb enough to take young children to a film that no one believes young children should see—and that only Debbie Schlussel can save them from their own craven stupidity. That can’t be right. She can’t possibly fashion herself Debbie Schlussel: Defender of the Morbidly Obtuse. Or can she?

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.*

More on Watchmen: Dave Gibbon's layout and John Higgin's ink in the age of mechanical reproduction.

(A reader reminds me to link to the first post, because "[this one] makes no sense without it."  Earlier post today notwithstanding, I have the most considerate readers.)

Vance and I have been back-channeling about Watchmen this past week.  It occurs to me that there's no sense in wasting my brilliant thoughts on an audience of one (!?!) when I could be sharing them with all the world.  Vance agreed.  Our first quibble concerns the look of Dave Gibbon's panels.  Vance insists the panels looked dated.  He's not wrong.  But before we discuss some of his limitations, we should attend to Gibbons' strength: layout.  Consider these panels again:

Lesson Planning 101: How to teach comics responsibly in a composition class (Watchmen)

Same thing I did with The Dark Knight, only this time about the fourth issue of Watchmen.  The same caveats apply.

Alan Moore's Watchmen: The Rhetoric of Heroism in a MAD World

(The following is a collection of rough notes for a class I'm guest-speaking in on The Rhetoric of Heroism.  The intended audience is a group of freshmen composition students.  Just something to keep in mind.)