For Korean Eyes
So here are a few quick thoughts about Watchmen for purlypuss, even though I haven't seen the movie yet.
I'm pretty concerned that the cultural critique will be lost in the movie. As I see it, the comic book is (obviously) about many things, but the two primary focal points are the critique of American cold war culture and the comic book as a generic category.
I hear you about the violence (particularly the Dr. Manhattan scene with the VC, which I assume is the one you responded to in your wall post). I think in the comic book it's clearly an indictment of a specular culture that has transformed a neo-imperial brand of violence into a commodity ready for consumption. Is that critical veneer missing in the movie? Just as the violence is representative of a cultural ideology the comic book is openly indicting, Ozymandias gives us the totally amoral (or really, immoral) core of capitalism as a cultural virtue. I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know what they changed about the ending (don't tell me!)
The Watchmen was a comic book series that was originally designed to use classic characters that DC comics had bought from Charlton comics, which had just gone bankrupt. While they may not be household names, they were hugely famous and, certainly, iconic in their roles. So even though non-comics folks may not know Phantom LAdy, The Question and Captain Atom by name, their roles are eminently legible becasue of the iconographic conventions that they helped to establish.
Unfortunately for Alan Moore, DC decided they wanted to use those characters in the mainstream DC universe, so he had to come up with new characters, each of whom clearly connects to a Charlton character (Dr. Manhattan=Captain Atom, Rorschach=The Question, etc.) All that matters is that they connected to these archetypal golden/silver age characters, each of which was deeply steeped int eh rigid formal and thematic conventions of nuclear age American culture.
Watchmen was a meta-textual comic book, insofar as it wanted to announce the death of the comic book as a clearly ideological product of a postwar America. The earliest super-hero comics (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) had a clearly progressive, pro-Union inflection that was a product of the waning Popular Front in 30's American politics and culture. Once the US got involved in the war, however, there is a clear shift into a bellicose nationalist rhetoric from which comic books (and arguably, American political culture generally) never emerged. The result is the stark division between good an evil, the rigidity of the roles, the Pollyanna quality of "comic" books, etc. In my reading, that's why "The Comedian" dies in the first frame--he represents the death of this older culture, which is, of course, a culture that was never innocent to begin with, merely an ideological phantasm to be consumed as such (hence the characters truly rank core as a character).
I think the gender stuff is a product of these two critiques. The Silk Specter is a character bound to a kind of Lacanian symbolic production of subjectivity: she is a product of the discursive field allowed to women in traditional comics, and, ultimately, set up to fail (as female characters were meant to do in comic books until around the time of the Watchmen).
These are just some scattered thoughts, but I'll write more when I actually see the movie.
I'm pretty concerned that the cultural critique will be lost in the movie. As I see it, the comic book is (obviously) about many things, but the two primary focal points are the critique of American cold war culture and the comic book as a generic category.
I hear you about the violence (particularly the Dr. Manhattan scene with the VC, which I assume is the one you responded to in your wall post). I think in the comic book it's clearly an indictment of a specular culture that has transformed a neo-imperial brand of violence into a commodity ready for consumption. Is that critical veneer missing in the movie? Just as the violence is representative of a cultural ideology the comic book is openly indicting, Ozymandias gives us the totally amoral (or really, immoral) core of capitalism as a cultural virtue. I haven't seen the movie yet so I don't know what they changed about the ending (don't tell me!)
The Watchmen was a comic book series that was originally designed to use classic characters that DC comics had bought from Charlton comics, which had just gone bankrupt. While they may not be household names, they were hugely famous and, certainly, iconic in their roles. So even though non-comics folks may not know Phantom LAdy, The Question and Captain Atom by name, their roles are eminently legible becasue of the iconographic conventions that they helped to establish.
Unfortunately for Alan Moore, DC decided they wanted to use those characters in the mainstream DC universe, so he had to come up with new characters, each of whom clearly connects to a Charlton character (Dr. Manhattan=Captain Atom, Rorschach=The Question, etc.) All that matters is that they connected to these archetypal golden/silver age characters, each of which was deeply steeped int eh rigid formal and thematic conventions of nuclear age American culture.
Watchmen was a meta-textual comic book, insofar as it wanted to announce the death of the comic book as a clearly ideological product of a postwar America. The earliest super-hero comics (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) had a clearly progressive, pro-Union inflection that was a product of the waning Popular Front in 30's American politics and culture. Once the US got involved in the war, however, there is a clear shift into a bellicose nationalist rhetoric from which comic books (and arguably, American political culture generally) never emerged. The result is the stark division between good an evil, the rigidity of the roles, the Pollyanna quality of "comic" books, etc. In my reading, that's why "The Comedian" dies in the first frame--he represents the death of this older culture, which is, of course, a culture that was never innocent to begin with, merely an ideological phantasm to be consumed as such (hence the characters truly rank core as a character).
I think the gender stuff is a product of these two critiques. The Silk Specter is a character bound to a kind of Lacanian symbolic production of subjectivity: she is a product of the discursive field allowed to women in traditional comics, and, ultimately, set up to fail (as female characters were meant to do in comic books until around the time of the Watchmen).
These are just some scattered thoughts, but I'll write more when I actually see the movie.