I do, apparently. It's 11:00pm and I just got back from watching the movie version of Watchmen (my all-time favorite graphic novel and near-all-time favorite novel period). I'm feeling a bit down, as I often do after my occasional re-readings of the graphic novel. The themes Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons wove together so expertly lead my mind toward melancholy, but there's more to it tonight.
Let me get a few things out of the way first. As an adaptation of an iconic graphic novel, it was OK. I'm not going to go into the quotidian details. It was OK. I liked it. They were dead-on true to the original in parts, and omitted entire major and minor plotlines to make the thing fit into three comprehensible hours. It was an Olympian task, which explain why it took over twenty years to get to the screen. I don't have a problem with the film. It was fine. Job well done. Finis.
What's got me down tonight was my vicarious experience of the film. I saw the film in a small, local theater in the neighboring town in middle-of-nowhere New York State. Judging by previous films I'd seen there (usually with just one or two other patrons), Watchmen was a smashing success. There were dozens of people there! Behind me sat about eight or nine young people. They had all obviously read (and I dare say loved) the graphic novel and could not seem to contain themselves as they saw it brought to the big screen. I was fortunate enough to get a glimpse of the movie through their eyes, as they could not keep quiet throughout the entire film.
Don't read this as me complaining ("Drat those durned kids!"). I was actually glad to overhear their reactions to each scene and how it did or did not differ from the canon. It was eye-opening. Maybe I'm an old crank, but they just didn't seem to "Get It." They found the high-style violence satisfying enough, but they laughed in all the wrong places. There seemed to be a fundamental disconnect about the genre they were watching.
By my reading, the over-arching theme in Watchmen is impotence. Each of the main characters has lost control, is losing control or is desparately trying to hang on to control. Often the control they've lost (or they seek) is an illusion. Yet the story gives none of them real satisfaction. Each character comes face-to-face with powerlessness. Their different reactions shine a light on their basic personality types. The best example, in the novel and the film, is the scene where Dan and Laurie fumble on the couch. The scene is at the same time tender and awkward, and also frustrating as Dan's excitement gets the better of him before he can make love to this beautiful woman. In both novel and film, the scene is a metaphor for the impotence experienced by everyone in the story.
As I was watching this scene, I found the crew sitting behind me a bit distracting. They found it hilarious, missing the point entirely. They found a lot of scenes mysteriously hilarious. In one of the musical montages, a peace-loving flower child puts a daisy in the levelled barrel of a rifle, only to have the squad of young soldiers open fire on the hippie protestors. This seemed the height of comedy to my back-seat neighbors. Likewise, Rorschach's antics in prison were hilarious to them, as criminals tried to settle old scores and were put down one by one. The pathos and tragedy from which these scenes were built were lost on them.
If Impotence is a main theme of Watchmen, Irony is the writer's weapon of choice. Time and time again, characters discover (or we, the reader/viewer, dicover) that things are the opposite of how they seem. Power and powerlessness masquerade as one another. As former superheroes take off their masks, they actually lose their identities. We see that in several characters, literally and metaphorically.
Through the horrors of his violent crusade, Rorschach has become the mask he wears. His "real" face is the disguise he wears for the world. Overpowered and unmasked by cops, he screams "Give me back my face!" Dan Dreiberg, on the other hand, abandoned the life of the superhero. He lives a private, anonymous life, yet he is never free from the power of the mask. After his fumbled (and failed) attempt at lovemaking on the couch with Laurie, he and she are able to ignite the skies with their passion after donning their costumes. The irony is that they discover their true selves only when they put on their masks. Perhaps the greatest discovery of all is that everyone wears a mask.
So, with so much text and subtext, all the kids behind me were able to do was to laugh at the violence without feeling it's true force. What was that all about, I wondered. True, it's hard for a twenty year old to relate to Dan's pathetic, fumbled attempts at lovemaking. Maybe one has to have experienced some kind of helplessness to generate any real empathy. Still, I was their age when I first read the graphic novel and I didn't find that scene funny, I found it profound and revelatory. I could write them off as dumb kids, but I think that's too easy.
In the end, perhaps it's impossible for viewers who weren't even alive when Watchmen was written to really "Get It" (at least not without more advanced empathy skills). Cold war themes dominate the story and perhaps that experience is a necessary enzyme for connecting to the themes of impotence and powerlessness it presents. Thought I was their age when I first read Watchmen, I had grown up in the shadow of the cold war.
True, I was not around for the Cuban missile crisis, but Watchmen is not of a retelling the 1960s. It is all about the 1980s. At the same time that I received my U.S. government plans to build a nuclear fallout shelter in my backyard, I was reading books like Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, which painted a grim picture of the effects of nuclear war (quite unlike the image I had of me safe and cozy in my fallout shelter). On television, we watched Testament, while War Games kept us entertained in the theaters. The spectre of nuclear annihilation was in the very air we breathed.
Underneath all cold war thinking is futility, despair, and powerlessness. This is the zeitgeist tapped by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in Watchmen, and the kids who sat behind me in the theater know nothing of it. Small wonder that they laugh at the fumbling sexual antics of a forty-year-old man, they've never experienced the kind of helplessness that scene is meant to evoke. Even at their age, back in 1985, I'd had a taste of that. Everyone who grew up in the shadow of Manhattan had.
So, I'm sad. Not because kids these days are clueless chuckle-heads (they are), but because the aching beauty of Watchmen is beyond their ken. The irony out of which the story is built should have brought tears when it only elicited cheers. The Comedian is dead.
[As a postscript, just let me give a hearty cheer to Jackie Earle Haley, who played Rorschach in the movie. He brought a malevolent power to every scene he was in and I couldn't keep my eyes off of him. If the late Heath Ledger got the Oscar for playing the Joker, Haley deserves the Novel Prize for Acting. Kudos.]
