Watchmen, and Watching
About Watchmen.
Full disclosure: I got up and walked out of the theater. Not for the reasons I think you expect, but my response to this movie is too complicated for me to unpack neatly, so you'll have to put up with some degree of untidiness while I sort it all out.
I did, in fact, walk out of the theater. I came back --I came back for the last third of Spiderman 3, too. In that case, I walked out on the sucking absence of plot and intelligent development that was the first half of the movie. During Watchmen, I walked out on the audience and the necessity of sharing the experience.
For the record, that isn't necessarily a compliment.
If I walked out on Watchmen, at least I put down the cash for a ticket at all. 98.9% of movies do not make it into my wallet, and I am particularly resistant to Movies of Meaning. This is because I am not the target audience for Movies of Meaning, or even really for movies: I don't go to the movies for catharsis, to take part in the emotion of the action. Actually, I find it painful to relate to a character and then to watch them be humiliated on screen --painful to relate to any character on a screen, in fact, because they are all on display, their thoughts and experiences reeled out for anyone willing to put down the eight bucks and change. These difficulties extend (unevenly) to plays, but not to the written word, because the page is a private space for me. What goes on there goes on between characters and me, and I'm not in the business of intervening or intruding in their experiences. I'm not even along for the ride: I'm watching from the edge of the track.
To put it baldly, then: watching Watchmen felt like being in the audience at a bear-baiting. This was particularly the case during the sex scenes and some of the more intense conversations between the characters. It probably did not help that the gentleman behind and to the right of me was drunk and audibly panting. I walked out because I had the sense I would have admired some of those scenes, that they might have moved me if I'd been able to watch them without the sense that I was participating in an act of mass voyeurism. Since I couldn't erase the rest of the audience, I took a stroll. I'll keep the full experience for later, and in private, when I can sort through what I'm feeling as I watch.
I have to add that I've never been more conscious of the personality traits that make me a writer than I am right now; introversion is too mild a word. The space between my ears is wholly mine and what goes on there may be bent or evocative or embarrassingly undigested, but I'm the only one capable of making that judgment until I put the product on the table and invite critique. I find it exquisite and awful to get sold on a story, to begin to identify with the characters, and then to end up exposed with them on the screen. I can't say whether the central romance worked for me --that I'm ambivalent on the subject argues not, but then, I deliberately missed half of that plotline's development, so I'm not in a position to judge. I suspect it was well-done, at least, and avoided many of the cliches that would have made it simultaneously less personal and more bearable.
So it is possible that if I'd seen Watchmen for the first time, alone, in the privacy of my own home, I'd have had a different experience. But if the movie is in any way accurate in its representation of the plot, I doubt that.
Still, although I walked out, I came back. And I think it says something about the payoff I perceived in the premise that I came back, rather than taking that long saunter around the block that I considered. I think there's a lot of worthwhile thinking in the story, a lot of realized potential.
I also disagree vehemently with what I take to be the conclusions of the piece, and I had to fight the urge to pull over and throw something on the drive home.
It's rare for a work of fiction (whatever the format) to make me angry. Watchmen did, because I went into the movie with a lot of buzz at the back of my skull: Alan Moore understands, Alan Moore is a genius, Alan Moore is a god. I was hoping to find something in his story that related to my views, riffed off them in an interesting and enlightening way. Maybe I did. Maybe I'm bitter because my horse went down in spray of entrails in the last five minutes of the story.
Now, we get into the spoilers.
Of all the characters I expected to identify with, I'd have to put Rorschach below Moloch. I remember jeering to a friend that I expected little of a character introduced --in a preview-- with a heavy-handed monologue. I expect little of a character who monologues, period. Monologues ought to stay in Shakespeare: he's the only author in the history of the language ever to do them properly. (Blog screeds, same. But if we only used the language for decent purposes, we'd have no language left at all.)
In fact, my expectations of Rorschach stayed low for the first half of the movie. I can't pick out the point where that changed, except that when I finally put that picket sign and the private litany and Jackie Earle Haley's childlike stare together and got Rorschach --about two minutes before they pulled his mask off-- I found myself in his camp. I hate conservatism. I dislike street angels and the arrogance that purports to Judge, that weighs and administers retribution. Men are not Ma'at.
If you're thinking that doesn't leave me terribly many horses in the Watchmen race, you'd be right. But Rorschach is different, how I couldn't have explained to you until I got home and it occurred to me that Rorschach alone of all the Watchmen cannot follow through on that threat he levels at the outset of the story; of all of them, Rorschach alone can't achieve the detachment necessary to forgive, to disregard, to forget.
That makes Rorschach an instrument, not a vigilante --and that put me in his corner.
Dan and Laurie? Bless them, they're too busy being human to be anything more. Adrian and John? The other end of the spectrum, inhuman to the point of caricature. If there's a continuum between those two pairs, with values other than the extreme, Rorschach's the only one on it. I'm Classicist enough to believe that heroism lies with the Mean, not the outliers. And, so that we're clear: I am not arguing here that Rorschach is balanced, unless we're speaking in weapon metaphors, of the balance of knives. Rorschach is not balanced. Rorschach is not even sane. But he is poised. (The Comedian is the same.)
Which is a good thing, because the story would be perfectly unbearable --collusion and collision of the omnipotent with the impotent-- if it weren't that Rorschach is prepared to act. Without him the story's wasteland, whatever might be zooming around in Adrian's brain, or John's.
But it's the ending that I find so wretchedly hard to swallow, and that inspired the brick-throwing urges. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding Moore's direction. I certainly hope that I am, but--
(here we arrive at Rantza's Issues with Vigilantism)
Rorschach dies, the Watchmen disband and diminish and go into the West --why? Adrian's lies and self-delusion are allowed to stand, John is martyred, Rorschach goes up on the cross why?
Because the public must be protected from the truth.
Don't tell me how you've shared in the suffering of those immolated millions: a man who flatters himself he has built a second Karnak, who uses and executes underlings and creates tigers with horns is incapable of partaking in anyone's suffering. All's incidental to his grandeur. But that's obvious enough, isn't it: "Ozymandias" isn't subtle. But while Adrian is a particularly petty tin god playing tin games for his own emotional aggrandizement, we can almost excuse him as an irrecoverable megalomaniac; John still feels and knows and whatever abstractions and fractal-puzzles of spirit and time engage him, he is fundamentally human and should know better. Dan is right, at the end: in their clockwork games John and Adrian haven't saved men, but debased them instead, stripped them of their choice and its attendant consequences. Whatever John says, God has more compassion.
So here you must ask me if I think Telling the Truth is worth a nuclear holocaust, and here I have to say no: I'm not Rorschach.
But what about choice, and consequences? Beyond aesthetics, what is the spiritual, emotional difference between a nuclear wasteland and a police-state pacified and patrolled by God? If we accept Laurie's reconciliation with her mother, then we accept that we face only those consequences we desire to face --or, to co-opt Milton, "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven." Lucifer chooses Hell and he must delight in that distance from God, or else wouldn't persist in rebellion. What else is left when that choice has been taken? You can't make a life from the remains.
So when John and Adrian conclude that fifteen million lives is a small price to pay for world peace, they make that choice for everyone else. From them that hubris is at least expected. But when the other Watchmen keep their silence, or else allow themselves to be silenced --et tu, Rorschach?-- then we are expected to find heroism in their patronizing and consensus?
I suppose my convictions become self-evident when I tell you I would have rather been one of those fifteen million Adrian sacrificed --about like you'd crack a bottle of wine over a hull, in fact. Obliteration, at least, has a certain directness; there's nothing honest about a cease-fire purchased with silence and preserved by fear. Then again, if the threat of an all-mighty enemy and the interventions of an all-knowing benefactor had ever sufficed to check human frailty, we'd all be sleeping in Eden still. So perhaps I presume too much success for John and Adrian's little soylent-green paradise. It's only that in all these best-and-flawed-intentions I see the foundations of hell, while the movie seems to find only personal tragedy and tenuous validations.