Who Watches the Watchmen, Pt II.

Posted in Mike Wood's blog on ,

A large part of the brilliance of Watchmen is the sheer scope of it, and the seamless way in which the variety of subjects it touches are blended together into one work. It builds from an analysis of individuals and the smallest of events in their lives, and connects this to a commentary on the nature of society in the twentieth century. Nothing special for literature I suppose, but remember that this is still essentially just a comic book.

The story builds from simple, small scale, issues, like a pushy mother pressuring her child to follow her into the family business. It just so happens that the family business in question is dressing up in skimpy costumes to fight crime and then have a spin-off modelling career. What Moore is doing is putting all the messy bits of humanity back into a subject that has notoriously left them out or dealt with them only in an idealised fashion. The point of the whole work is to wonder out loud what the combination of superheroes and reality would look like, and to do that you have to treat them as real people, with real motivations. Those motivations range from the extreme, like Rorschach’s brutal childhood, to the mundane, like the Silk Sceptre’s relationship with her mother. This kind of stuff is now run of the mill for superhero stories, but it started right here and no one has done it better since. The impact of this take on the subject can be seen in the current crop of superhero films. Particularly stuff like Bryan Singer’s X-men. The skill in the writing comes in the blend of this look at the individual humanity of the heroes with the look at their effect on global political relations. Moore has said he wanted to create a multi-faceted gem, with a different face to the story depending on how it is viewed. I think he undoubtedly succeeded.

This is really a, necessarily simplistic, attempt at a deconstruction of the idea of superheroes. It is uncovering the presuppositions of them; looking at what we have to consider the world like in order to accept their existence. The point was to try and show people that there was a lot of quite disturbing politics underneath the genre. Moore wanted, he later said, to create the comic that would end the genre completely. He believed that after Watchmen nothing could be done with the genre as there would be nothing left to say. Instead it ushered in a new age of ultra-violent comics, and started a new trend for morally dubious heroes. Rorschach wasn’t taken to be a warning, just a cool character with a hundred catch-phrase chanting imitators. The staggering misjudgement represented by Moore’s admission of his aims makes me think they have possibly become slightly exaggerated in the telling. The idea that Watchmen was intended to kill off the superhero has reached almost urban-legend like proportions over time, but certainly the effect Moore desired was completely different from the one it really had.

There was talk, a little while ago, of a Watchmen film adaptation, although that has now fizzled out. It was originally intended to be written by David Hayter, who scripted the X-men films, and directed by Darren Aronofsky, who directed Pi and Requiem for a Dream. Then Aronofsky pulled out and Paul Greengrass stepped up to direct, before more recently the studio put it on the back-burner entirely. There have been several Alan Moore adaptations in the past few years, but generally they’ve been bungled. They ranged from the mediocre (From Hell), to the downright awful (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), and none of them have done spectacularly well at the box-office. Also the script would presumably have to be updated out of the Cold War era, and would have to really sink its teeth into current political issues. The very idea of the book is so founded in politics that it couldn’t avoid being controversial, and that is going to scare a lot of financial backers. The only light at the end of the tunnel for those of us who want to see this on the big screen is that another of Moore’s most controversial works, V for Vendetta, is currently in post production and will be released next month. If that does well and doesn’t kick up too much of a stink in the wrong circles then Watchmen could miraculously find its way back onto the table, I imagine. Lets hope so, because this deserves a much bigger audience than it has received so far.

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