Whenever a work with a cult following is adapted for the big screen there’s a lot of discussion of whether the movie gets it “right.” Mostly, this is understood to mean capturing what happens in the original work faithfully. At its most extreme, this way of thinking sees Sin City, which was such a faithful adaptation that the writer of the original books got a co-director credit, as the ideal. Sin City is a great movie, but it’s not a great adaptation; it’s really just a graphic novel done in video.
Much of the advance press on Watchmen made me think it would take the same approach, and I expected disaster. I’ve been saying for years that Watchmen couldn’t be made into a good movie. Now that there’s a pretty good Watchmen movie, I have some explaining to do. Without taking anything away from Zach Snyder’s achievement, I stand by my former opinion. That Snyder’s film does far more than treat the book as a storyboard only reinforces my point. Watchmen is a very good movie, but it’s not Watchmen.
I’ve been teaching Watchmen, the graphic novel, in my tenth grade literature class for several years, because it’s an excellent way to bring students to understand what a theme is, what irony is, etc. However good the film version is, it’s difficult to imagine taking it seriously as literature. This isn’t a point about the medium – I do show films in class – but about the use of the medium. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen makes a uniquely complete and complex use of the resources of a graphic novel. Though there are some clever moments in the film, perhaps even some worthy of study in film classes, the same cannot be said of it. Though “graphic novel” is these days used often to refer to trade paperback versions of comic books, Watchmen is one of the few to truly deserve the title; it has the complexity and narrative coherence of a novel, and it depends as essentially on its graphic elements as on its text (which separates it from works like Maus which, though it has often garnered more respect than Watchmen for its serious subject matter, is far inferior to Watchmen in terms of its use of images, depending on the visuals mainly for the occasional throwaway joke about depicting cats).
The most obvious aspect of this is the alternation between a more standard “comic book” format and the “text” sections at the end of each chapter. Though these were apparently not part of the original plan, emerging to fill unsold advertising space, they became an essential part of the novel. These mock documents add back story to many of the characters, but more importantly they help give reality to the world in which Watchmen takes place. The art of creating a consistent world is an undervalued one; it’s what generally gets a work dismissed as “escapism” but Watchmen shows how significant it can be. Watchmen is an alternate history, not a full world-creation like Lord of the Rings, but although this leaves fewer inventions to the authors it requires greater rigor of them, and this rigor is one of the qualities that marks Watchmen as a great work of literature. In one way of looking at it, the whole book is an exercise in figuring out how the world would be different if, after the release of the first “Superman” comic, people had tried to become superheroes themselves. The book delves deeply into the psychology of such people and their effects on the world. The 1985 in which the book is set is quite different from our world, but nearly all these differences can be traced to just two events, the appearance of Hooded Justice and the creation of Dr. Manhattan. The logical tightness with which the world is created is necessary for the philosophical depth the book achieves. It’s all the more impressive for having to be consistent across a number of media: superhero comics, obviously, but also autobiography, magazine interviews, scholarly articles and an alternate history of the comic book medium. The result would be impressive in its own right for its analysis of the fragile Cold War balance of power and its imagining of the effects on America of alterations in this balance. In Watchmen, however, all this is only part of the examination of much deeper themes.
The juxtaposition of all these “texts” within the graphic novel, not to mention “Tales of the Black Freighter” within the comic panels, is essential to the effect the book achieves. First of all, the alternate history works only because the fantastic content is presented in a realistic style. Including documents from Walter Kovacs’ psychiatric file and articles from magazines mentioned in the main line of the story is one of the crucial ways this realism is achieved. The graphic novel form gives Moore and Gibbons a unique means of doing so: in an ordinary novel one could include quotes from other sources, but not Rorschach’s childhood doodles or the differences between the New Frontiersman’s shoddy production and Nova Express’s smarmy gloss. In particular, including the advertising in the latter or the appalling racist cartoon in the former would be extremely clumsy were Watchmen only text. A movie of Watchmen can include pictures and advertising, but can’t hold text on screen long enough for us to read anything more than a headline, and so must convey the contents through flashbacks or dialogue, at the cost of the loss of significant detail as well as verisimilitude.
It’s rumored that the DVD of Watchmen will work “Tales of the Black Freighter” into the story; there’s no obstacle to doing so except time. However, it won’t work the same way; short of trying to realize Robert Altman’s Watchmen, which seems ill-advised, there’s no way a movie can set the text of the fictional comic against the events of the real comic as Moore and Gibbons have done. Parallel streams of dialogue don’t work the same way in film as on paper. This points to one of the potential pitfalls that the film version has avoided: since comic-like storyboards are a standard part of the production of films, the temptation is to treat the book as a storyboard and film the movie the book seems to depict. Since Gibbons’ art is very cinematic – the camera angle is always clear, and he makes extensive use of what seem to be zooms and pans in building the story – the temptation must have been particularly acute in filming Watchmen. It’s greatly to Snyder’s credit that he resisted this temptation, because for all the apparent cinematic aspects of the book, a graphic novel is a series of still images in a way that a film is only in principle. The film replicates the apparent long zoom shot of the opening pages of chapter one, but the effect is quite different. The version in the film is made of hundreds of images at very high speed, so the effect is continuous. In the book there are only eight images, and each has a distinct function. Though the words spoken over the scene in the film are drawn from the book, the book associates each fragment of Rorschach’s journal with a particular moment in the “zoom.” Though we gradually learn that Rorschach is not talking about what we are seeing, there are clear connections between image and text in each panel; though the film might be synchronized so that the words are heard over more or less the same images, the effect cannot be the same because the images are moving. In the book each is frozen, so we have to associate them in this way. The same is true of Rorschach’s mask. Though the moving mask in the film is undoubtedly very cool, the frozen images in the book carry specific significance.
Every moment of the book is carefully considered in this way. Though I expect the film will reward repeated viewings, the book literally cannot be understood on the first reading. The book is dominated by irony. I don’t wish to include significant spoilers here, so I won’t say anything specific, but if you reread page one of chapter one after reading the whole work you realize that many of the mysteries that dominate the plot are given away before we even know what the plot is, and far more subtly than in the film. Sometimes the ironies are very direct, as when Laurie’s lie to her mother about the weather in New York is placed over a picture showing the truth, but many are far subtler, like the way Black Freighter is used to comment on the events around the boy who reads it. Though irony is hardly unique to the comic form (or even commonly found there) the ironies of Watchmen are achieved through means impossible in any other medium. Not merely the interplay between word and image is required, but the density of information that can be layered into a panel, the spatial layout of the panels and the possibility of intercutting two scenes so they alternate panels are used extensively by Moore and Gibbons to twist our understanding of what we see into new shapes, to create and undermine new meanings.
This is all just a clever comic book, unworthy of being taught in a literature class, without what I referred to above as “deeper philosophical themes.” Though many who have discussed Watchmen (including Alan Moore) have described it as a rejection of heroism, it runs deeper than that. What’s at stake is not merely heroism but the meaning of life. This phrase sounds trite, but the book’s brilliance is not to let us take it that way. By tapping into the superhero tradition he assumes a context in which a purpose is assumed: costumed adventurers fight crime. This purpose, along with the meaning it provides to the lives of those who are guided by it, is progressively undermined in Watchmen. First, the Comedian points out the futility of beating up muggers when nuclear war might happen at any time. The Comedian himself is later undone by a joke too big and brutal even for a man who “saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a reflection, a parody of it.” The book digs deeper into this theme, through Dr. Manhattan’s progressive alienation from human beings (“which do you prefer, red ants or black ants?”) and other characters’ apparent impotence. The question gets taken to a deeper level in the middle of the book, in chapters five and six, which focus on Rorschach. The technical brilliance of “Fearful Symmetry” is stunning, but what does all the symmetry mean? The same can be asked of all the pairs of riders in “Two Riders Were Approaching” or of the recurring smileys and clocks throughout the book. Everything fits together, nothing, not the smallest detail, is an accident, but what does all this precision and order accomplish? Does it lead us to an understanding of the watchmaker, or is it merely a set of clever tricks?
Chapter six, “The Abyss Gazes Also” asks this question most directly, as indicated by its title. The chapter is organized around Rorschach’s responses to a series of Rorschach blots. These responses, of course, cannot be trusted. They reveal whatever Rorschach chooses to reveal about himself. He offers false interpretations of the symmetrical images and gradually undermines the confidence of his psychiatrist, who is eventually unable to offer ‘healthy,’ positive interpretations of the blots: “I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror. he horror is this:in the end, it is simply a picture of empty, meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.” As Mal says these words, the image ‘zooms’ in on the blot he’s looking at, closer and closer, until the last panel is simply solid black, without even text. his reminds us that it’s not just the Rorschach blot but the whole universe in which Mal lives that’s simply marks on paper, that’s empty, meaningless blackness. The book calls itself into question, reveals itself as just a huge joke.
Watchmen surpasses anything Camus or Sartre wrote to become the great existentialist novel. It not only shows us the potential meaninglessness of existence, it shows us convincing portraits of the ways we construct meaning from our “thrownness” into the world. Nite Owl’s heroic fantasies, the Comedian’s black humor, Rorschach’s uncompromising black and white morality and Ozymandias’ foolishly arrogant hope are all versions of stories we tell ourselves to try to convince ourselves that there’s meaning in the world. All the religious themes of the book (“The Judge of All the Earth,” “Watchmaker,” “God exists and he’s American”) serve the same purpose. No film adaptation can capture these themes in the way the book does, but this is not a criticism of the present film or of film as a medium. No conventional novel could do these things either. The graphic novel presents a unique set of resources and a book like Watchmen that uses them all to the fullest simply can’t be captured in another medium.
For this reason, the best adaptations are either adaptations of works which are not as deep and complex or adaptations that change the work significantly. Simply filming the action adds nothing, serves no purpose. The first Harry Potter movie is an example; it’s a set of pretty moving illustrations of the book, but no more. Alan Moore’s work stands out among comic books because his illustrator is usually involved in the creation process from the start, rather than being asked to draw pictures of what the writer has scripted, which is more common practice in the industry. For this reason, though, it’s essentially tied to the medium, and difficult to adapt. An adaptation of it must be its own work, must have something of its own it wants to show us through the story. On this count, however impressive and ambitious and entertaining it is, the film version of Watchmen fails. It is, in the end, merely an attempt to capture some of the greatness of an essentially greater work.
by Bob McCarthy
