Watchmen Pt.3: Conclusion

The story that's being told of the making of this film is almost super-heroic--lost in the wilderness for 15 years, it finally landed in the lap of Zack Snyder, who fought and won against the Big Bad studios to realize his vision and bring the film to light.  Given that narrative, it's easy to sympathize with Snyder, and give him a pass on the few minor (and even one or two major) changes he made to the plot.  Patton Oswalt made this point, as has my friend the Minister of Intrigue.

To be honest, I didn't mind the changes either.  The film was an almost perfect simulacrum, down to individual panels lovingly recreated as panning shots.  It even included aspects which, upon reflection, work as comic panels but not so well as movie scenes (especially Watchmen's love scene--much better in text and image than in sound and movement).

Given how hard he fought, this film must be the product of Snyder's white-hot purity of vision--it's the film he wanted to make.  And it was lovingly rendered, even beautiful at times, but Snyder filmed Watchmen with the eye of a curator.  The film was so authentic that, in my mind, it lost what made it unique as a graphic novel.  What filled the space between was the entertainment world to which Watchmen was prologue, and even presaged--the rise of superhero movies, MTV's stylistics, CGI re-shaping what could be shown on screen, and maybe less consciously, hyper-individualist consumerism, popularity politics, and all of the other prickly cactuses of the 20th/21st century flip.

I don't begrudge Snyder for that--this is where the line between source material and material conditions gets hazy.  But where Moore took what came before him and was around him, and tortured it into a horrifying truth, Snyder lovingly cultivated and curated its every jagged contour. And in the end the film becomes a celebration of what the book was parodying--a huge, powerful mythology, self-sustaining and un-interrogated.

Or maybe I'm just a sinner quietly casting the first stone.  It's not like I picked up the first issue in 1985 after reading Secret Wars II, the concluding issues of the Dazzler, or the soon-to-be-eradicated clusterfuck that was the Flash.  Despite my first encounter with it, I only read Watchmen after falling in love with the comics that were made because of it--Sandman, Preacher, Transmetropolitan, etc...   I also grew up on all the stuff that I mentioned as filling in the gaps between book and film.  Who am I to declare this movie a deviation from a pure form?

But then, of course, Alan Moore was just feeding on his influences too--pop music, Mad magazine, noir fiction, cold war geopolitics, anarchist theory, etc.... and mixing them all into a superhero parable. What's essential and the "true core" of that? If I keep searching for something pure to measure against what seems so patently false, will I ever find an island to rest on, like the protagonist in Tales of the Black Freighter who comes ashore on his raft of bodies with the intent to kill those who wronged him? Or will I find that that very quest is fruitless; a contradictory need, inherited from the world I'm in, to seek solace in a mythical purity?  Is the whole search just a way for me to escape my conditions?  Is that all we are ever doing when we complain about film adaptations?

Watchmen the movie doesn't answer any of these questions, and Watchmen the comic gives what I think are actually pretty shitty answers (that's for another day).  And yet both are still great, and I love both, though in different ways.  But I still feel unsettled, and I wonder whether that says little about the film, and more about me...