Alan Moore's Watchmen comic series (illustrated by Dave Gibbons) was released as 12 issues in 1986 and 1987, before being collected in its more familiar form as a graphic novel, whose cover you see here to your right. It was fairly immediately hailed as one of the greatest accomplishments in comic book history, and is still thought of as such today.I didn't read it until COVID-19 quarantine, finishing earlier this week. Which was after I'd already seen Zack Snyder's film version, which I love, three times, most recently back in 2017. (The first two were both within six months of its release.)
What finally prompted me to get this from the library -- and I'll have it out until at least May 18th, as they keeping changing the due date in expectation of a long-term closure of the library system -- was my wife and my intention to watch the popular Watchmen TV series from last year. The friend who first told me about Watchmen loves that series, a reaction he shares with many others of course, but he suggested that it was a sequel to the graphic novel, not the movie.
A subtle distinction, I figured, but there are some small differences between the two versions, which he'd already summarized for me years ago. And if he felt it was worth recognizing the distinction between the two in terms of my preparedness for the TV show, I figured it was time to finally correct this oversight in my comic-reading history and read the graphic novel. (In truth, there are many oversights in my comic-reading history, as I have not read many comic books at all in my day.)
I thought the idea would be to have the graphic novel be the version that was most recently in my head when I watched the TV show, but the truth of the matter was, reading it so whetted my appetite for another viewing of Snyder's movie that I had to program it for the very first weekend night after I finished reading. (We just started a four-day Easter weekend last night, not that weekends mean all that much right now in terms of our mobility.)
In only two years and eight months since my last viewing, somehow I'd already forgotten that my only option on my Watchmen BluRay was to watch the full three-hour director's cut. Looking back to the last time I wrote about it in 2017, that was apparently my experience then as well. Well, as I wrote then, it didn't bother me as a) Snyder was still a good director in 2009, and b) the extra scenes did not stick out like sore thumbs. Anyway, I didn't finish until 1:15 a.m., so good thing for that long recovery weekend.
Actually, the director's cut this time was instructive as it allowed me to see even more scenes from the graphic novel, some of which I knew had been cut to make the original theatrical release at least marginally digestible by a mainstream audience. In fact, as far as I could tell, almost the entirety of the first two hours was untouched, with only a few later gestures here and there to things like the death of Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie), the man who preceded Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) as Nite Owl. I'm also pretty sure the original theatrical release contained no passing shots of the character reading the in-comic pirate comic Tales of the Black Freighter, an annoyingly disproportionate section of the graphic novel.
As sometimes happens when you consume the source material after you've already consumed the cinematic adaptation, reading Watchmen was a good opportunity to marvel at the skills of the adapter. As it turns out, writers David Hayter and Alex Tse had a really good sense of what parts of Watchmen would not translate into a movie version. The pirate comic is a good example of that. For, I assume, purely world-building and atmospheric reasons, Moore intersperses scenes of this pirate comic with action that is actually taking place, mostly around this newsstand that is a regular spot for us to experience the lives of regular people -- dispiritingly regular people, with all their crassness, self-interest and casual bigotry. It makes for difficult reading as the panels frequently feature the pirate comic character's internal monologue, as well as the conversation among characters at the newsstand, so you have to read the narratives in parallel. Since the pirate comic ultimately had little payoff for me, I can see why it was never included in the theatrical version and only appears in the director's cut as a kind of Easter egg for fans of the graphic novel. (As to why it was included in the graphic novel at all, my friend argues that it's part of fleshing out this world -- in a world where superheroes are a part of mainstream society, you would not read comic books about superheroes, but maybe, pirates.)
Another benefit of reading the graphic novel was to appreciate the talents of the casting director. Patrick Wilson, an actor I have come to adore after not thinking much of him when I first met him, is like perfect physical embodiment of Dan Dreiberg, though of course he had to put on a few pounds to look like a middle-aged schlub, or at least the Hollywood movie version thereof. Similarly great casting choices were made with Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Eddie Blake/The Comedian and Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/Rorschach. I have frequently described Haley as my favorite part of the movie, and that's probably still true. Actually, I don't think there's a bad casting choice in the bunch, though my friend was a bit down on Malin Akerman as Laurie Jupiter. I disagree with that. Though, as with Wilson, I started out lukewarm on Akerman when I was first introduced to her, I've really come around on her. You should watch her in Wanderlust, if you haven't. Even Matthew Goode, who my friend also dislikes as Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, works for me as I think the character is supposed to be a bit of a cipher, and Goode really communicates that. Just so we're sure to cover off all the main characters, I should say that Billy Crudup as Jon Osterman/Dr. Manhattan is a cipher in a different way as a post-human all-powerful being, and perfect in the role.
I enjoyed reading Watchmen quite a bit, but because I knew the story and because this adaptation is quite faithful to that in general, at times I was impatient for it to move along faster. I ended up reading it in less than three weeks, so that's pretty quick, especially by my standards. But maybe it felt like a long time to read a comic book. You can tell I don't have a lot of experience with this.
I did think it was worth commenting on the big difference between the book and the novel, which is the attack on New York that ends the novel and ends up purging the threat of impending nuclear war from this world. I had always known it as the equivalent of a nuclear blast, only with Dr. Manhattan's energy signature so the world could blame him for the calamity, and unite against him as a common enemy. In the comic, though, it's weirder -- or seems weirder to me, anyway, given that I've lived with the other version for 11 years. In the comic, Ozymandias causes a giant tentacled alien to materialize in the middle of the city, as though the common enemy the world needs to unite against is an alien species invading Earth. This was the difference my friend presented me with years ago, though I didn't remember the specifics until reading.
Even though he was initially down on the movie version (he's since decided he's quite fond of it), he had always described the movie's ending as possibly better, given that it gives a reason for Manhattan to exile himself from Earth. In the comic version, he's not intrinsically linked to the supposed alien invasion, so his "fatal flaw" of being an all-powerful being who has lost his sense of human empathy does not figure into the climax the way it should. The movie gets that right. The movie gets a lot of things right.
Do I have any more takeaways or is it time to let you get on with your day?
I guess the one final thing I should mention is that the graphic novel includes pieces of first-hand source material that helps build out the world, like excerpts from Hollis Mason's autobiography, memos to and from Veidt about his toy line and other various commercial enterprises, newspaper interviews with Sally Jupiter (Laurie's mother), even part of a novel about owls written by Dan Dreiberg. At first I thought I was going to be annoyed to wade through these in order to get to the next comic book material, but I enjoyed them without exception, particularly as they are relatively brief, usually about four pages each.
Okay, so I guess now it's on to tackle the TV show. How soon, though, I'm not certain.
We do have access to it as it is available to purchase directly through our TV, so it couldn't be easier. The difficulty lies in our collective motivation.
See, as I mentioned at the top, I prepared for watching the TV show by reading this graphic novel. But so did my wife. And she was not, is not, as favorably disposed toward the property as I am.
She actually watched the movie with me during my second viewing back in 2009, though she does not remember that. But she heard the TV show was great, and as TV is a bit more her medium nowadays than movies, she was eager to get up to speed in order to watch it.
Unfortunately, she found the novel unremittingly dark, feeling particularly disturbed by Rorschach's at times right-wing perspective on the world. I mean yes, the novel is supposed to be unremittingly dark, but I guess she found it a bit misogynist, which is the bigger problem. And yes, it's true, Moore probably does not portray the female characters -- there are really only four -- in a particularly flattering light. Laurie Jupiter is a bit of a mixed bag I feel, but her mother, Sally, does come across as quite crass and unredeemable, even as the victim of an attempted rape by the Comedian. Janey Slater, Jon Osterman's original girlfriend, is portrayed as a bit vindictive (even considering that she thinks she got cancer from him), and even the psychiatrist's wife, a character who does not appear in the film, is a bit of a nag in that she tries to forbid him from helping the mentally disturbed people he's tasked with helping and focus more time on her.
Here, I think, is something that Snyder et al get right. Although Snyder is thought of as a bit of a low-level misogynist himself -- whether that's deserving or not -- he benefits from the 20-year span between publishing the comics and releasing the movie to have become more woke. The movie portrayal of all the female characters seems a bit more charitable, without sanding off their rough edges that firmly entrench them as part of this misanthropic and dyspeptic world. I no longer think you can say, if you ever could, that Synder is a misogynist just because he chooses to show Akerman's breasts in her sex scene aboard the airship Archimedes. I feel like this is a decently complex portrayal, at least when compared to the source material.
But that source material -- since she has no memory of the movie -- may have put my wife off of the upcoming TV series a bit. We'll have to see how it goes.
Me? I want to see how they picked up the pieces of this world and went forward, especially since everyone says the show does such a good job of continuing the material's world view. It's already a world I knew I loved, not because it was lovable, but because there was something honest about the way it peers into the dark soul of humanity.
Now I feel like I know that world even better, and am ready for more.
No comments:
Post a Comment