Watchmen and Superheroes and the point behind the story

[Silvercrest]

Hollis mason was an honest cop and he figured the mask's were doing more law enforcement than the boys in blue.

In context, that doesn't make any sense. Every other mask was shown to be a weirdo of some kind. Hollis was a normal guy with few hangups. In that world, just like this one, normal people simply don't run around in costumes.

And pointing out how effective the masks were (right or wrong) doesn't work. Hollis only had one predecessor, Hooded Justice, to use as a model. How could he tell whether it would be effective?

Anyway, if Hollis really thought vigilantism was effective, he could have just put on a ski mask and carried a baseball bat. The comic story doesn't give him any reason to do more than that.

 

[Kaijima]

Hollis mason was an honest cop and he figured the mask's were doing more law enforcement than the boys in blue.

In context, that doesn't make any sense. Every other mask was shown to be a weirdo of some kind. Hollis was a normal guy with few hangups. In that world, just like this one, normal people simply don't run around in costumes.

And pointing out how effective the masks were (right or wrong) doesn't work. Hollis only had one predecessor, Hooded Justice, to use as a model. How could he tell whether it would be effective?

Anyway, if Hollis really thought vigilantism was effective, he could have just put on a ski mask and carried a baseball bat. The comic story doesn't give him any reason to do more than that.

One could argue that the reason why the "masks" didn't just run around in ski masks was for public image - a shadowy man in the alley in a ski mask seems like a criminal. And in point of fact, the closest "hero" to that, Rorschach, was the one most perceived as a nutcase and vigilante long before popular opinion turned against the costumed adventurers.

But then, all this may just be overthinking it. The reason why Mason dressed up in a costume is because Watchmen is about super heroes in the 20th century American comic book stylization of the idea; not just vigilantism.

It is why my view on it remains that Moore wasn't writing about how all super heroes would have to be insane to exist in the real world - odd, perhaps, unusual, yes, but no more odd or unusual than anyone who deviates from the baseline norm in public behavior. Rather, he was writing about the idea of the super hero versus the real world and what would be the consequences of that idealistic scheme when it crashed into reality - both for good and bad.

The real tip-off is the scene where The Comedian burns the young Ozymandias' map in the flashback adventurer meeting. Comedian, perhaps with intentional hypocrisy, derides the other "heroes" as silly and foolish for dressing up in costumes and believing their acts of heroism really did anything to change the world's fundamental nature. Which was, in Comedian's view, inherently destructive and twisted. In this scene, the other adventurers are not crazy, maladjusted, or even oblivious to the oddity of their passtime - they're just overly idealistic.

I think Synder got what the story was about. His take on Dan and Laurie does not scrub the characters of all their "oddness". For chrissake, Dan has a sexual costume fetish and Laurie labors under an identity crisis having grown up as the daughter of an adventurer perceived in idealized terms thanks to historical nostalgia and ignorance of her parentage. By the same token though, they're not delusional and aren't really busted people. They do the costumed adventurer thing because there's a historical precedent for it in their world, realistic as that world is - Watchmen may be about heroism and idealism versus the real world's complications, but it isn't entirely our world. It's an alternate history.

Now, Kick Ass, is your entirely literal examination of what would happen if people put on costumes and tried to be super heroes in our world - there, you only have two choices, extreme naivete that is quickly pounded flat, and genuine, deep dysfunction.

 

[Myasishchev]

That said, one need not be a genius to turn in great work: and I think Snyder did a very good job of making the world's most faithful comic-to-film adaptation while disengaging it from the stylistic tricks Moore and Gibbons employed in that medium.

The 'tricks' are the reason why the comic turned the medium inside out whereas 'disengaging' from it treats us to an offensively bland and empty piece of cinema that leaves one wondering "what was the point?"

I have long thought that Watchmen couldn't be effectively filmed because it intentionally violates so many conventions of comics. I figured they would either convey the "tricks", as you say, effectively and the film would flop (because the viewing public would say "WTF was that?"), or they would disengage from the "tricks" and miss the whole point of the story. The latter is what happened. Although not as badly as I expected.

That confuses, badly I think, the formalistic innovations Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons came up, with the innovations of the content, which I think came through quite well in the new medium, with the obvious caveat that Watchmen the Film is by no means as important a work in its medium as Watchmen the Comic.

 

[Silvercrest]

I'm not quite following.

 

[Myasishchev]

"The tricks are the whole point of the story." They are not.

 

[Silvercrest]

Perhaps we're referring to different tricks, or perhaps I'm just not phrasing it very well. If by tricks you're thinking of the Black Freighter episodes, the mirror-image issue, and the smiley Easter eggs: I agree, those are not the whole point of the story.

I picked up on what may have been a misuse of the term tricks by Shazam! and I probably misused it further. I was referring to all the inverting of comic-book storytelling conventions.

 

[Pauln6]

I thought that stylistically the movie was fabulous (the opening scenes are great). It was a tough story to tell on film and it held my interest. I did think that the decision to remove Laurie's chain-smoking dependence was a mistake as it did make her a bit too wholesome. I generally loathe smoking in movies unless it is relevant to the plot (I'm so sick of tough guys and sluts smoking on screen just to further their 'bad' street cred images). However, if it has story relevance then it should remain in and it was one of the defining parts of the character.

 

[Nick Ryder]

Yeah that Laurie chain smoking thing was supposed to make her go "Oh shit I could get cancer if I keep smoking these" as a sort of way to make her question if the others that 'got cancer' because of Jon was really their fault or if it was really Jon's presence.

Honestly even that part of the plot was pretty... easy to fuck up, even in the comic. I mean let's be honest here, back before the smoking causes cancer 70s, everyone smoked. It wasn't a huge deal. We know better now. But hey if I wanted to cause trouble and say 'hey all these people that were near you are dead because of cancer , it's your fault Jonny boy.' course did the movie actually show Veidt giving them something or causing it himself? Been a few months since I last saw it

 

[Shazam!]

"The tricks are the whole point of the story." They are not.

I'm not sure anybody said that. They're certainly integral to Watchmen as a concept though, otherwise we would've just had your bog-standard heroes running around in tights story. Like the film.

 

[Myasishchev]

Silvercrest said it; I was paraphrasing, but nearly verbatim.

Watchmen (either version) isn't a bog-standard superhero in tights story, for a half billion reasons. Especially placed in its historical context, but even removed from it, Watchmen has an introspective bent to it that few if any modern superhero books match. Offhand, I can only immediately think of Brian Bendis' Alias, which is already quite old. And no book, before or after, has probably acheived the same narrative and visual density (other than other Alan Moore books, and certainly not all of them).*

The film got those aspects mostly right.

What works best about the movie, I think, is that it occupies the same sort of historical place in the development of the superhero film genre that Watchmen occupied in the superhero comics genre. There hadn't been a superhero film yet which intelligently deconstructed the genre.** (Dark Knight? I said intelligently; pretentiousness isn't, exactly, the same thing.)

It won't be as influential in the superhero film genre--and, given how Watchmen affected superhero comics, that's probably for the best. Watchmen killed the thought bubble, you know; and it's hard to take Alan Moore seriously when he says that he wasn't trying to make Rorschach and his methods look cool.

*Ha, maybe Crisis on Infinite Earths. It achieves some kind of density, all right.
**Barring the Incredibles, which owes even more to Alan Moore than it does to James Cameron.

 

[crookeddy]

If Rorshack wasn't intended to be "cool", then Moore really doesn't understand what people like. How can a guy that doesn't "compromise, even in the face of Armageddon" not seem awesome? That's just a super bad ass way of thinking. (Even if it doesn't really work in real life)

 

[Silvercrest]

Even if we all agreed that Rorschach was "super bad ass", not everyone thinks that's something to be respected.

How can a guy that doesn't "compromise, even in the face of Armageddon" not seem awesome?

Consider that those words could be applied to David Koresh and Osama bin Laden. Then reconsider your definition of "awesome" and get back to me.

 

[Anwar]

If Moore didn't want Rorschach to be liked by the readers, he shouldn't have made him be RIGHT about the secret conspiracy thing or made him the viewpoint character for so much of the book. As it is, he came off as being the only one who suspected something was up, was RIGHT, and tried to do something about it while the others were too busy moping around and being apathetic. He was also the only to even consider telling the truth about Veidt's hoax, while the others hardly gave it a second thought.

 

[Lapis Exilis]

I think Moore did want Rorschach to be liked by readers, but for the purpose of making the readers question why they think someone like Rorschach is cool. He's clearly shown to be deranged, deeply damaged and hallucinatorily out of touch with reality. I think you're supposed to be attracted and repulsed by him at the same time. It's way of getting at the whole core superhero idea - why do I dig the idea of people who run around in silly costumes beating the shit out of people without due process? He's kinda pointing out how the basic concept of the superhero is immature and anti-social even as it is idealistic.

 

[stj]

I was repulsed by Rorschach and The Comedian in the process of reading the novel. I felt that Rorschach's coolness was thrust in my face even at the expense of taking his heroics at exactly face value. I mean, how does someone hurl a drainer basket of oil at someone? Since when does any cafeteria have actually cooking on the serving line? Plainly everyone was supposed to be so entranced by Rorschach that they forgot everything they know about the real world.

Veidt on the other hand gets the exact opposite of treatment from Rorschach and The Comedian. Everything about him is calculated to be uncool, from the effeteness to his consistent stupidity.

If you want to deconstruct superheroes, using simple physics and chemistry and biology will suffice. There's something else going on in Watchmen. I've been remembering Moore's interest in anarchism and magic.
Watchmen is probably an attack on the notions of social engineering and public morality. Rorschach's primitive notions of justice as personal revenge get a pass as rejecting high-faluting notions about a better world. And The Comedian gets a pass for expressing moral nihilism. It is notable that the man who shoots down the pregnant mother of his child is reduced to tears by the criminal vileness of Ozymandias' evil schemes.

 

[Stevil2001]

To be fair, Moore on principal hates every movie adaptation made of his work.

That is not true. Moore approves wholeheartedly of one adaptation of his work. Some Doctor Who fans (Altered Vistas) did an animated adaptation of one of his DWM comic strips, and Moore says that they "got" it. (See here).

Everything else? Well, not so much.

From reading that letter, I am wondering if Alan Moore even knows what an adaptation is.

(This is pretty ironic. And makes him look positively retarded.)