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Wednesday, March 4, 2009

History / Books / Film / Nerd Who Reads the Watchmen?

Posted by Jonathan Golob on Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 1:05 PM

watchmen.jpg
I just did, finishing the entire novel last night. As reputed, it's a masterpiece. I wish I had read it in childhood, at the height of the Cold War, when it was written.

One line particularly resonated with me, distilling a premise down to a phrase suitable for the motto of the (then and also now) Republican party: "God [is] real and he's American." Watchmen is just as sharp a critique of neo-conservatism, the Palins, McCains, Limbaughs and Ws of the world, as it is of Reaganism and Thatcherism.

In my mind, this fictional story settles comfortably next to RFK's non-fiction memoir Thirteen Days, dark and light visions of the same nihilistic Cold War era. The fiction required humanity's salvation, at atrocious cost, from outside super beings (or humans who anoint themselves as super beings); the non-fiction, the peaceful resolution of the promised horror in the chop of the Caribbean sea, demonstrates salvation from within.

1736/1236200527-cubanmissilecrisis.jpg

Swirling close to the surface of the novel, for me, was the insanity of mutually assured destruction.

The idea is a game. If both sides cooperate, we both win a little. If both defect, we all lose everything. The insanity comes from assigning value when one side defects while the other cooperates.

Is it really desirable for one side, our side, to successfully annihilate the other? What would victory, in the context of large-scale nuclear war against the Soviet Union mean? What would victory in Vietnam—a continued fever dream of American conservatism to this day--look like? The novel explicitly depicts the last, with it the implicit destruction of the Vietnamese people by our private, American, God.

Watchmen is less dated, in our post-Cold War era, than it should be. The ideas explored within are equally applicable to our present predicaments: What would victory in Iraq have looked like? What if the neoconservatives were correct? What would such a world look and feel like? How would the meaning of liberty and freedom change if we could successfully make the Iraqi's love us by pointing a gun?

With this load to bear, the movie cannot help but be terrible. I'll watch it anyways.

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Comments (25) RSS

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1
nobody cares.
Posted by Keep Fapping on March 4, 2009 at 1:21 PM
2
Eh, I read it a few months ago when a friend lent me his copy. I don't think it qualifies as a masterpiece or deserves all the accolades that it's received... but it's an OK read.

I was somewhat disappointed to find out that my thought that mankind-won't-ever-get-its-collective-act-together-until-some-other-life-form-scares-the-living-shit-out-of-us-or-simply-shows-us-we-aren't-alone isn't an original thought. The disappointment was mitigated by realizing I wasn't alone with a thought that was a bit embarrassing to bring up in serious discussion.
Posted by Davey 'n Casey Jones on March 4, 2009 at 1:25 PM
3
Post "Cold War" question: if an entire culture went insane, how would it know?
Posted by Andy Niable on March 4, 2009 at 1:25 PM
4
Post-cold-war question: If an entire culture went insane, how would it know?
Posted by Andy Niable on March 4, 2009 at 1:26 PM
5
@2: I read the ending differently than you. Like most of the rest, I took the application of that cliche as darkly satirical. If anything, the authors are emphasizing the idiocy of such a notion--that humanity must be saved by all-powerful supermen, or that humanity must be duped into sanity.

Taken that way, it's the most strident anti-RAND / MAD / Conservative bit of art to which I've been exposed.

Part of what worries me about the film is the inevitable glorification of the (anti-) heros.
Posted by Jonathan Golob on March 4, 2009 at 1:36 PM
6
Just finished reading it this past weekend, also my first time.

At first there was a bit of a disconnect, until I remembered that what feels like the present/future is really the 70s. And some of the attitudes and characters are formed in the 50s/60s.

I hope they kept the ending.
Posted by Will in Seattle on March 4, 2009 at 1:39 PM
7
Just the fact that a bunch more people have actually read the graphic novel as a result of all the noise about the film makes me qualify it as at least a minor success.
Posted by Billy Nilly on March 4, 2009 at 1:51 PM
8
I always thought that the insane game was nuclear war, and mutually assured destruction changed the rules in a way that brought it some sanity. Nuclear war without MAD has a potential outcome where one side cooperates and the other defects. And that, as you said, is insane as it's not clear how that counts as a success for anyone. MAD takes that option off the table by allowing each side to credibly play "I'll cooperate if you cooperate, and I'll defect if you defect." Then, it's not possible for one side to cooperate while the other defects. Either they both cooperate or they both defect, and that drives them both to reliably cooperate.
Posted by mchk on March 4, 2009 at 2:01 PM
9
Post-Cold-War question: if an entire culture went insane, how would it know?
Posted by Andy Niable on March 4, 2009 at 2:03 PM
10
The whole pathetic state of affairs in our Christo/militarist nation can be summed up by Crass' "Reality Asylum."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_HOYk9ED…
Posted by Original Andrew on March 4, 2009 at 2:05 PM
11
Most of the best things about the graphic novel have to do less with politics and more with the semiotics and incredible use of the medium to tell the story. Gibbons drew that central few blocks in Manhattan over and over again from various angles and character viewpoints, and it was fully realized in a way that few if any comic book worlds are, and this was still years before 3D rendering software.

The original work was a miniseries, spread out over a year, with each issue a month apart, so picture that when you're reading it all in one sitting.
Posted by sad fanboy on March 4, 2009 at 2:07 PM
12
As I stated in the comment in Paul's review, I think the movie did a great job communicating a lot of deep thoughts, at many levels. It's hard for a movie, with the limited time that it has, to have an impact as deep as a book. I thought it was an exceptional movie, and I will definitely be seeing it again in theaters.
Posted by Original Monique on March 4, 2009 at 2:07 PM
13
The original work was a miniseries, spread out over a year, with each issue a month apart, so picture that when you're reading it all in one sitting.

And each chapter gets progressively darker, so we had a month to ruminate on the blackness between shots. Also, -at the same time- this was coming out, Miller's Dark Knight was coming out, and the very best material from Beto and jaime Hernandez' first run of Love and Rockets, including Jaime's darkest piece, "the Death of Speedy" was coming out, regularly even. It was quite an experience to come back from the shop with these flimsy two-dollar masterworks in your satchel.

I was in college, so these things are mixed in with Plato and Hitchcock and Maupassant in my taste-formation area.
Posted by mike on March 4, 2009 at 2:38 PM
14
@ Will in Seattle:

If you follow fandom...the ending was altered (or at least, the event was altered), much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone who ever read the thing.
Posted by j.lee on March 4, 2009 at 3:13 PM
15
I for one welcome the different ending. The result is the same, just a different mechanism. Plus, I never liked the squid.
Posted by akbar fazil on March 4, 2009 at 3:33 PM
16
I like psychic squids as much as anyone, but I thought the movie's ending was fine.
Posted by Monty on March 4, 2009 at 3:47 PM
17
Comic books are for children.
Posted by Bacon on March 4, 2009 at 4:07 PM
18
@14 - dang, wish you hadn't said that.

You could at least have said:

***** SPOILER ALERT ******
Posted by Will in Seattle on March 4, 2009 at 4:18 PM
19
The changed ending has been in the news for quite awhile, Will...there's still a climatic event though.

and, it took longer than a year for the original series...Moore ran over a schedule as the series progressed and it dragged on a good 6 months longer than it was supposed to...I wasn't a comic book fan at the time, but my roommate was, and he was going insane at the delays...
Posted by michael strangeways on March 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM
20
@19, are you sure you aren't thinking of The Dark Knight Returns? That other big 1986 miniseries had a huge delay between the 3rd and 4th (final) issues, though I don't know if it was as long as six months. It's been a long, long time since then, so I may just have forgotten delays in Watchmen issues back then.
Posted by sad fanboy on March 4, 2009 at 5:43 PM
21
I like that everyone is referencing the squid, but not what replaces it. GOOD JOB, INTERNETS!
Posted by Soupytwist on March 4, 2009 at 5:43 PM
22
I also read the book recently. They do critique the right severely, but the ultimate villain is a liberal intellectual who enjoys dub and techno music.

Billy Crudup has said in interviews that he interpreted Dr. Manhattan as a man who came of age in the Eisenhower era, and would have naturally helped the American government, because it was the right thing to do. Somehow, I don't think that was the interpretation of Moore and Gibbons.
Posted by kebabs on March 4, 2009 at 6:03 PM
23
Post-Cold-War question: wasn't the height of the Cold War the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Posted by --MC on March 5, 2009 at 8:41 AM
24
Oh, Pauuuuulll -

- http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/48…
Posted by COMTE on March 5, 2009 at 11:55 AM
25
For anyone not totally dismissive of all this, here's an interesting list of novels, graphic and un-, on the superhuman condition:

http://shelftalk.spl.org/2009/03/05/watc…
Posted by Rich on March 6, 2009 at 12:20 AM

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