"The medium is the message" Part 1 of 2

Note: I am so sorry, but this is only the first half of a longer treatment of Watchmen. I am currently working on the second section, which goes into greater depth and focuses on how the film misses several of the points of the original book, but the past week has been insane, and I wanted to have something to post in the meantime, so:

Let me say one thing as a prolegomenon: this posting is not a fanboy rant. I'm not really a fanboy, though I do like Watchmen, sc. the book, a great deal. I understand Alan Moore's frustrations over the way his work has been treated in the past, but then again, once your art has been exhibited or published, it doesn't just belong to you anymore (I'd argue it doesn't even mostly belong to you), and while, unfortunately, Hollywood isn't on balance a good steward of other people's stuff, these are the realities of creating a mass-audience work. So I wasn't ever aggressively against the idea of Watchmen becoming a movie (for what it's worth). I figured it was inevitable, given that it seemed like a sure bet. That's been especially true since 2002, when Spider-Man turned comic book movies into the new hot shit. I guess I was sort of agnostic, kind of non-committal, like John Hodgman, quoted in an article from last month's Wired: "The movie can be good as long as it appreciates that it has no reason to exist." Or like Joss Whedon, ibid.: "It's a comic book about pop culture as viewed through a comic book, so I didn't see the point of making a movie." I should point out that these two both qualify these cool stances, with Hodgman adding that Watchmen deserves an homage and that Snyder's role as director gave him some hope, and Joss Whedon adding that his first impression of the trailer was that it "looked phenomenal." But without much enthusiasm at all, there's Brian K. Vaughan, and I probably fall closest to his position: "I'll go see it if it doesn't feel like a betrayal of what Alan Moore wants. But it's like making a stage play of Citizen Kane. I guess it could be OK, but why? The medium is the message." Granted, any filmed adaptation of Watchmen is probably a "betrayal of what Alan Moore wants," but basically I think Vaughan's right.

So, okay. Make it a movie. I'm not the kind of person who's going to say that something like that is going to be a failure no matter what. But that's not to say that there's no such thing as hubris. Here's a synopsis (from the same article again) of Snyder's relationship to Watchmen, the movie:

In early 2006, Warner Bros. approached Snyder [to offer him the position of director on Watchmen] ... Snyder loved Watchmen, but his first impulse was to say no. Then he had a frightening thought: If he didn't make it and someone else did and messed it up, it would be his fault. He said yes.

This from the man who directed the Dawn of the Dead remake and 300! I admit that I might have missed something, because Watchmen ads around the city right now tout Snyder as "The visionary director of 300." Did something happen to that word, visionary? I didn't think it meant "stylish out the wazoo, may or may not give a damn about substance." Snyder is the kind of person who says the following about upcoming projects: "I just want to go crazy and shoot some shots that make me remember why movies are badass." Which, I guess that I was under the impression that if it was badassery you were shooting for, probably 300 would pretty much do you. This is the sort of director who chooses Bob Dylan for the opening credits of an action movie (surely there's a subtler, more artful, or less sentimental way to convey changing times than "The Times They Are A-Changin'"?) and "The Sound of Silence" for a funeral scene. He visually quotes (and indulgently abrogates) the old picture of the returned sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square—and this is only one among many. He thinks, having adapted the right-wing Frank Miller, he's a natural choice for the strongly left-leaning Moore (and let's remember his directorial debut was the at least formerly left-wing Dawn). His is not a delicate touch; sometimes, when I think of Zack Snyder, I think of what Flannery O'Connor once said: "to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures." That sounds like Snyder all over, but the crucial difference is that O'Connor wasn't herself insensate. But whatever. The point I'm making is that Snyder doesn't seem like the kind of director who really deserves to assume that some other person is so much likelier than he to screw up a particular movie, but that is what he thinks.

That said, Watchmen, the film, is pretty okay. And that's all. If all you read this for was a statement on whether the movie is viewable or not, I think it is. It isn't the morass of visual incomprehensibility that The Dark Knight was, and just as importantly, I didn't feel like any material was in there that threw off the pacing or the balance of the whole, also unlike that other movie. Of course, it's my opinion that this is because the strength of the original material shines through what's been changed and what's been lost in adaptation, so I'm not entirely unbiased. More reliably, several people of good taste, friends of mine, have watched the movie without having read the book, and they liked it, too. Apparently for some, it's a bit confusing. I understand that. For others (cf. Anthony Lane's New Yorker review), it's too sadistic and nihilistic. I get that, too. What's exciting to me is the spread of opinions on the film: Metacritic's rundown shows Roger Ebert and Andrew O'Hehir giving it great reviews, Richard Corliss and Keith Phipps giving it decent reviews, Owen Gleiberman, James Berardinelli, and Peter Travers giving it middling marks, and A.O. Scott, David Edelstein, and Anthony Lane tearing it up (to one extent or another). These are all reviewers I tend to read and respect, and they can't agree at all. That may be the sign of something worth seeing, regardless of how much you end up liking it, and I guess for someone like me who doesn't see movies in terms of stars or percentage scores or however many boxes of popcorn out of five, there really may not be a higher recommendation for Watchmen than that.

I'd suggest that if all you care about is the movie, you should get out now. Stop reading. What I have to say in the next part of this dissection has much more to do with where the movie misses the point, and I assure you, I spoil the hell out of book and film.

(image swiped shamelessly and unsubtly from www.fasthack.com)