Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

Who watches the watchmen?

So here's another facet of my geek nature - I really get off on the very particular thrill derived from encountering source material. For instance, aside from just being an amazing movie, Fritz Lang's Metropolis [1927] ushered scifi into an extraordinary era. This is where the movies I love today began, and 80 years later the genre continues to reflect the unique stamp of this seminal work. It's the same with fantasy; while it isn't a genre I'm all that hot for, reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time was quite an experience. There are so many things I love about the story, but a concurrent thrill while reading it was the enjoyment of recognizing it as the template for so much fantasy written in the past half dozen decades.

All this is tangential prelude to a little chatter about my recent re-reading of Watchmen, by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, and a few thoughts about the impending live-action movie. It's hard to talk about the modern age of comics without referring to Watchmen's influence. While I'm not inclined to delve too deeply into that arena - it's a thesis unto itself - I must stop and appreciate it.

So, I'm not going to try for any kind of in-depth analysis & critique of Watchmen; rather, I just want to talk about a handful of the many things I enjoyed about it.

I love the very broken nature of all these characters, how sincerely, deeply damaged they all are. Dr. Manhattan, the only character with extraordinary powers, doesn't even know what it's like to be human anymore. Of their romantic entanglements, even the healthier ones seem tinged with desperation. They're heroes, but very much at the whims of their humanity.

If I would level any real criticism as far as characters go, it's a comment on the imbalance caused by the strength of Rorschach's presence, which probably has a lot more to do with my reading of it than with the story itself. I read Watchmen as Rorschach's story, and somehow everyone else's situations pale in comparison. Maybe I'm just impressed by what a powerful character he is.

The parallel story in the comic being read by the young guy loitering at the newsstand makes me squirm. Like so much of Watchmen, it's laden with beautiful, grotesque irony. That sequence also contains some of the coolest artwork in Watchmen, wonderfully blending the subtly disturbing with the graphically horrific.

In a previous post, I mentioned enjoying some of the themes shared by Watchmen and Heroes, and talked specifically about the generational parallels. What originally brought any similarities between the two to my attention was a reference somewhere to the "blowing up half of new york to bring the world together" storylines. Linderman is Ozymandias without the costume; I wonder if Tim Kring [Heroes' creator] knew he was giving Linderman so many of Ozymandias' qualities, including his motivation. Unfortunately, I liked the ending of Watchmen so much better than the Heroes season finale. So, so much.

I have a few dozen other random thoughts, but I've spewed just about enough for the moment. At this point, there's not much to say about the upcoming movie. There have been lots of rumours, very little confirmation of anything, and innumerable fan exhortations not to fuck it up. It's being directed by Zack Snyder, the same guy who directed Dawn of the Dead a few years ago, as well as 300. This hurts to even repeat, but I am sickly driven - IMDB lists Keanu Reeves as rumoured to play Dr. Manhattan. Once I stopped laughing, I got a little sad. Frankly, it boggles the mind.

On that note, I'll bring this to a close with a quote from Alan Moore, responding in an interview a couple years ago to questions about the film adaptation: "I shan't be going to see it. My book is a comic book. Not a movie, not a novel. A comic book. It's been made in a certain way, and designed to be read a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cozy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee."