Watchmen 2 discussion over on Mindless Ones
I contributed to the Mindless Ones’ post on the Watchmen prequels, or at least my swearier alter ego Andre Whickey did. That post was put together from what started as informal discussions between us, hence the writing style for my bits is very different and swearier than my normal writing.
Linkblogging for 10/08/09
I’m going to link to a few things here, but the only one I really care about is this – Andrew Rilstone’s new pdf ‘zine, with which he’s broken his five-month blog silence. I’ve only read the first quarter, but I can already say it’s one of the best things (if not *the* best) I’ve read on comics this year – a series of discursive essays on Watchmen – film and book, childhood, Stan Lee , silver age Supergirl comics and 1940s Superman radio shows sponsored by Kellog’s Pep (but mostly Watchmen). I think Pillock will especially like this, but everyone should have a look.
ETA After reading the whole thing, I can safely say it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever read about Watchmen, and one of the best things Rilstone’s ever done.
In other news – Charlotte Gore isn’t a witch, she’s a nutter.
A good post on women in free software, asking among other things what can be learned from the experiences of Dreamwidth.
I don’t know why I haven’t linked it before, but I hope you’ve all been reading RIck Veitch’s Subtleman strip…
And Bruce Schneier has a good post on risk intuition.
Some actual content tomorrow – probably comics-based – as well as my return to Twitter (I hope). Been a very busy week at work…
Linkblogging for 15/03/09
A few quick links here. Our home net access will be fixed tomorrow morning, so normal service will resume then…
Eddie Campbell has his daughter Hayley Campbell’s review of the film of Watchmen, along with a few comments of his own, especially on Dr Manhattan’s circumcision as it relates to Leonardo. Meanwhile Caleb has more on the message from David Hayter I wrote about the other day…
Civil servants can’t even be bothered to read emails from the public. And the same site also asks when we are going to impose regime change on Iraq.
Anton Vowel asks what the Daily Mail really thinks about racism.
I’ve been quite hard on ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy here at times (I think it’s a site with several wonderful writers but with a very strange overall editorial line, to put it mildly) but the briefing report on James Purnell’s DWP and their use of ‘lie detectors’ that has been being posted there and at Ministry of Truth is a great work of investigative journalism of the kind that we all could learn from. Here’s a link to part of it with links to more.
And Tim at the Hurting has a wonderful post on Rorshach.
Why you should not watch the Watchmen
(Warning – some of this may actually be triggering for some of you).
I decided long before the Watchmen film was even made, let alone released, that I wouldn’t be watching it. This was not out of some great moral objection or anything like that – I just didn’t want to see it. But now, I *do* have a moral objection to seeing it…
I already knew this film would be very far from my kind of thing – things like Jog’s review where he says
If, as artist Frank Santoro recently remarked, the original comics were “a Lutheran reformation text knocking on the door of the Catholic establishment by a devout believer,” then the movie kicks down the castle church’s door, leaps onto the altar and pounds all the wine in sight ‘cause it just don’t care and then it flexes its muscles and slips on its shades before saying “the treasures of the indulgences are nets with which they now fish for the riches of men.” Then it pulls out a skateboard and grinds down a pew out a window. Also, this happens after the Enlightenment.
show me that whatever merits it has are not ones I’m interested in. But that’s fine – I’m also not interested in seeing that film about lesbian vampires that’s coming out, or the one with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston. I’m not quite egocentric enough to think that every film should be made specifically for me. But having read a post by the hateful little turd David Hayter, I am convinced that there is a very strong case that seeing this film, and thus giving this ‘person’ any more money, is actually an immoral act.
The bulk of the post is basically what you’d expect – he, as writer of the film, believes it’s the greatest thing ever, and that if you don’t go and watch it and earn him more money then you’re sending a message to the studios that you don’t want to see films with ‘brains and balls’. He also manages to demonstrate that he completely, utterly missed the point of the original book with his talk about ‘Rorshach fans’, and compares this Zak Snyder film with works by Kubrick and Coppolla, thus demonstrating his utter lack of qualifications to work in the film industry. But that’s more or less what I’d expect from something like this.
But then we get to something that disgusted even me – his message to those who aren’t planning to see the film:
Because face it. All this time…You there, with the Smiley-face pin. Admit it.
All this time, you’ve been waiting for a director who was going to hit you in the face with this story. To just crack you in the jaw, and then bend you over the pool table with this story. With its utterly raw view of the darkest sides of human nature, expressed through its masks of action and beauty and twisted good intentions. Like a fry-basket full of hot grease in the face. Like the Comedian on the Grassy Knoll. I know, I know…
You say you don’t like it. You say you’ve got issues. I get it.
And yet… You’ll be thinking about this film, down the road. It’ll nag at you. How it was rough and beautiful. How it went where it wanted to go, and you just hung on. How it was thoughtful and hateful and bleak and hilarious. And for Jackie Earle Haley.
Trust me. You’ll come back, eventually. Just like Sally.
For those of you who don’t know, the ‘Sally’ he refers to here is a character in the comic, who was the victim of an assault and attempted rape but who much later had a brief affair with her attacker. This was one of the less savoury parts of the original work – Alan Moore does unfortunately have a tendency to overuse scenes of sexual violence in his work – but Moore and Gibbons definitely present it as a *bad* thing. You don’t come away from the work thinking ‘she wanted it’ (the character herself comes away thinking that maybe she had led him on, but that’s something that rings true) or that the Comedian’s actions are anything other than reprehensible and disgusting.
I don’t know… I know this doesn’t go well with my posts about Dave Sim, but I just have a hard time with the idea that someone who considers a rapist a character it’s a good idea to favourably compare himself to, and who thinks that the general public all secretly want to be metaphorically raped by him and his filmmaking friends, is someone who should be encouraged.
He’s asking people to send a message to the studios… well, I know what message *I* want to send, and it isn’t ‘make more films with David Hayter scripts’…
(Internet connection still essentially non-existent. TalkTalk still not bothering to do anything about this. We’re moving in a couple of weeks, so hopefully a new phone line and a new phone company will mean I’ll be able to update this on a more frequent basis again).
Filming The Watchmen
Before my enforced absence from any form of communication, thanks to the inaptly named TalkTalk (I now have a phone line that crackles so badly I can’t hear the other end of the conversation, I can’t receive incoming calls, and I only have internet access while actually on the ‘phone) I was going to write about why I wasn’t going to watch the Watchmen film. But plenty of people have been doing that, in quite exhaustive detail, and I don’t have much to add to that. Anyone remotely interested will have seen the arguments, and if you’ve read both the book itself and the reviews that have appeared on the net (including phrases like “it’s full of ass-kicking and explosions, and who doesn’t like that?”) you’ll be able to draw your own conclusions about the film, and I genuinely don’t want to spoil the fun of anyone who does go to see it.
Nor do I think Watchmen is inherently unadaptable. I doubt there’s such a thing as an unadaptable work, though sometimes the only way to do the work justice would be to create an entirely different work with only the faintest connection to the original – see for example the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufmann film Adaptation (and for those who’ve never done this, try watching that film back to back with Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, the Kaufmann-scripted adaptation of Chuck Barris’ ‘autobiography’).
The crucial thing to remember though when making a film adaptation is not to prize fidelity to the source material too highly. Fairly few films that are just straight adaptations of the source material have ever worked (the only one I can think of is One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest). To make an adaptation that actually works you must be ruthless with the source material. You can take a good novel and trim it right down, completely rewriting the plot, as in LA Confidential, or you can take a terrible novel, slice out the few bits that work and build an entirely new film around it, as in The Prestige. You can make a film about the unfilmability of the source material, as in Adaptation or A Cock And Bull Story, or you can transpose the events of the book into a different setting, as in Apocalypse Now. You can even take a terrible Harold Robbins novel and just stick in a load of scenes of Elvis singing Lieber/Stoller songs, as in King Creole, and get something watchable out.
But no matter what you do, the process of adaptation is one of selection and creation – no matter how faithful or otherwise you are to the source, you’re taking the elements that you think will work in the new medium and adding in elements of your own that you think will complement those.
With that in mind, here’s my idea of how you film Watchmen. The first thing to remember is it’s a comic, and it’s a collaboration, and that collaboration made it a success – this is something Snyder actually gets right, to an extent – he looked at the pictures. While you shouldn’t slavishly use the comic as a storyboard, you should at least look at Dave Gibbons’ art, and at the choices he’s made, and figure out why he made those particular choices – because everything’s there for a reason – and know why you’re making changes if you do.
My choice of director, were he alive, would be Robert Altman. Failing him, the Coen brothers would do a good job (as would Kubrick, though his films are probably too misogynist for what I have in mind). The film would be about 90 minutes long – I tend to agree with Hitchcock’s dictum that the length of a film should be proportionate to the size of the average bladder – and would be an ensemble piece. There are several threads going through the film, which never properly connect, but the characters bump into each other.
Our viewpoint character is Dr Malcolm Long, a middle-aged, overweight, friendly psychiatrist, a respectable black man of the kind usually played in films by Morgan Freeman. The film focuses on his relationship with his wife Gloria, and with one of his patients. While his relationship with his wife appears fine on the surface, he grows increasingly distant as he gets more involved in his work.
His patient, Walter Kovacs, is a serial killer who used to dress up in a mask and beat up – and eventually kill – criminals. In a series of conversations between him and Dr Long, we see in flashback the events that led him to be this way – his abusive mother, the Kitty Genovese murder (which in this film is the pivotal moment of the story) and the kidnap and murder of a small child. We also hear Kovacs talking about various other masked adventurers he knew in his past, but it’s never made clear whether these are real or people in his imagination. Kovacs has a nihilistic view of humanity, believing that nobody is truly good and that everyone is immoral – he thinks the Kitty Genovese story proves that humanity cannot be saved.
Every day Dr Long buys his newspaper from Bernard the newsvendor, who provides a sort of Greek chorus to the story, talking to the other Bernard who sits by the hydrant near his newsstand reading a comic. From him we learn that the world is facing nuclear holocaust any day, and that nothing appears able to stop it. Another customer of the newsvendor is Josephine the cabbie, who is having relationship troubles with her girlfriend (who I’ll call Geraldine because she’s unnamed in the source material) (ETA Actually she *is* named, once, in the comic, she’s called Aline), mostly because Geraldine is a very political gay woman while Josephine desperately wants to be ‘normal’.
As the story goes on Dr Long’s relationship with his wife weakens, as we see Kovacs’ history and his own mental deterioration, and this is paralleled by the news from the newsvendor telling us the world is close to an end. The climax of the film brings all these characters, except Kovacs, together – as Dr and Mrs Long are trying to reconcile their differences, Josephine and Geraldine Aline start fighting, very physically, and Malcolm has to choose between saving his marriage (his wife thinks he cares too much about people in general and not enough about her in particular) or helping someone who’s obviously getting hurt. He chooses the latter, thus proving that Kovacs was wrong and humanity *is* worth saving, just before a white light fills the screen and the sound of an explosion’s heard. We, like the characters, never know what killed them or why.
*THAT* would be a Watchmen film I would go to see. It would keep about as much of the material from the comic as Snyder’s version, be a hell of a lot cheaper to make, and almost certainly be a much better film.
What would *your* Watchmen film be?
Linkblogging for 01/03/09
A few links for you:
At Lib Dem Voice they’re wondering if the Fuhrerprinzip is now the basis for governing Britain. For all the fuss being made about the obscene amount of money that Fred Goodwin is getting in his pension, the fact is that it’s his money paid into his pension scheme, and that this is how our current economic system works. If you don’t like the fact that a retired usurer gets more in a year than my wife would get in sixty years working full-time in her job as a nursing assistant (and, as you can imagine, I don’t like that fact one bit) then try to change the system rather than singling out scapegoats.
As some of you may know, scans_daily, a livejournal community based around posting scans of comics, was recently closed for copyright violation after the comic writer Peter David complained. Chris Bird has the best take on this. Speaking of comics, I’ve recently got a sense of ennui about comics – there’s plenty I’m reading that’s pretty good, but nothing that’s grabbing me and insisting I write about it. I’m sure that’ll change when Seaguy 2 comes along, or Morrison’s return to Batman but in the meantime do any of you (Mindless Ones? ) have any suggestions for exciting four-colour adventure with enough in it for me to sink my teeth into writing about? In the meantime, I’ll post some more on Cerebus and some other old ‘art comics’, but the genre stuff is more my forte…
Bloggingthemail here eviscerates a column from Amanda Platell in the Mail saying fat people shouldn’t be treated on the NHS. As a fat person, I think Mail columnists shouldn’t be treated by public *or* private doctors, for the good of the species, but thankfully I do not have a column with several million readers from which to propound this view. Ms Platell, alas, does…
Bryan Hibbs has seen the Watchmen film, and from the review it’s clear that this was *exactly* the film I expected them to make, except that the new ending is even stupider than I thought it would be. Seriously, if you go to see this film, you’re an idiot. It couldn’t possibly be good.
The Mindless Ones present… Teal Kryptonite!
And continuing the theme from last post, the best roundup of the Convention On Modern Liberty I’ve seen is Alix’s liveblog.
Beyond Good And Evil Lies… Another Dimension
There are so many things going on in Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D 2 that I don’t know where to start talking about it. Even more than the main Final Crisis this is a thematic sequel to Seven Soldiers, and may be the ultimate ‘prismatic age’ comic, as well as being essentially an extra issue of All Star Superman.
Every line in here is packed with meaning upon meaning. Captain Atom, a character created by Steve Ditko, a follower of the crackpot ‘philosopher’ Ayn Rand, is here an embodiment of the thoughts of the German philosophers that Rand dismissed as ‘irrational’ (something she would know a lot about). He’s Nietzsche’s Superman – beyond the duality of good and evil, but he’s also talking like a pulp sci-fi Hegel – “A thought robot activated by the tremendous energies unleashed by collisions of fundamental opposing qualities. A new fission process powered by… dualities?”
We’ll leave aside the fact that he doesn’t understand what fission actually means (matter-antimatter collision is something rather different from nuclear fission, which is caused by small bits of matter colliding with slightly bigger bits) and notice that this is also a rather apt description of the vast majority of superhero comics – the ‘tights and fights’ base of the genre. New ideas being generated almost as an accidental byproduct of opposites clashing with tremendous energy…
His next line “Dualities? No, there are no dualities, only symmetries.” Again, this is a Ditko creation talking!
Except it isn’t, really, because this ‘Captain Allen Adam’ is of course ‘really’ Doctor Manhattan, from a world where the Charlton characters more closely parallel their Watchmen analogues. “I am the endgame of the idea that spawned the likes of you, Ultraman. I am above conflict.”
Here Morrison is taking Moore’s own interpretation of Watchmen – that it was meant to be the capstone of a particular approach to superhero comics, rather than a new way of doing them that everyone should follow. And while Captain Atom destroys both Ultraman and Superman, he uses that energy to move Superman (and not Ultraman) up to a higher plane. Superman takes on a ‘fiction suit’ to move to a ‘higher’ rather than a lower level of reality.
(Doesn’t a lot of the Bleed look like the astral plane in The Invisibles where Jim Crow goes? Been too long since I reread that…)
Superman Beyond 3D is in many ways the anti-Batman RIP. While Batman RIP was the ground-level story taking the place of American Gothic to Final Crisis‘ Crisis On Infinite Earths (except of course that here both stories were written by the same person – and the American Gothic/Crisis relationship is one that Morrison keeps coming back to in his recent superhero work), Superman Beyond 3D is the really big story to Final Crisis‘ merely gargantuan one, a reminder of the even bigger picture in much the same way as Mister Miracle was for Seven Soldiers. And this of course suggests that there are more layers yet – an infinite number of ever grander stories, with ever greater stakes, playing out all at the same time, with pawns in one story moving up the ranks and ending up in the story on the next level.
And it suggests, thankfully, that Final Crisis won’t be Morrison’s last work in the DCU – that, as Didio has been hinting, he’s got some big plans for the Multiverse following this. For all that I love Morrison’s creator-owned stuff, I wouldn’t want to be without his superhero work either. All of these comics have had a grand, Wagnerian feel to them (hardly surprising since this is Morrison’s Götterdämmerung) and so it’s only fitting that Superman’s story here should owe so much to Nietzsche while still repudiating the hatred so associated with his ideas.
And that last page. What a wonderful, inspiring, perfect page that is.
My brain is a little burned out on writing about Final Crisis after the recent comment thread of death, so I won’t go on any more. Suffice to say there’s a ton of stuff in here that relates both to the main story and to the very idea of stories – this is about optimism, and about pessimism, and about fighting the good fight. Those who disliked the last issue of FC as being just one big fight scene should love this, as it’s all idea and metaphor and symbolism – it takes several readings to really get all the subtleties Morrison is putting in here.
To be continued…
Adaptation and algorithmic complexity
Like everyone else who writes about comics, or even has ever heard the word comic in their life, I am obliged by law to have an opinion on the upcoming film version of Watchmen.
(I’m not even going to consider the ‘motion comics’ thing that just came out. This is partly because I couldn’t access it even if I wanted to – the combination of not being available in the country where I live and not being available for the operating system I run stops that – but also because it was a bad idea back in the late 60s when they did it with Jack Kirby Captain America comics, and doing it to Watchmen is such a horrible idea that attacking it seems both too easy and rather cruel, like kicking a puppy that’s lost its legs).
But the film version is interesting, because it appears to be an illustration of a hypothesis I’ve had for a while now – that the quality of an adaptation is a function of the quality of the source material and the fidelity of the adaptation to it. The function in question being an inverse one. The worse the source material, and the less faithful the adaptation, the better the result.
That’s not exactly true, but it’s a surprisingly good approximation, and the reason why is fairly obvious.
Imagine you’re a film director, and you’ve been asked to adapt a book or comic or whatever for the cinema. We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, as well, and assume that you actually intend to make a good film – that your motivations are primarily artistic, rather than the real motive of most makers of ‘comic book movies’ (wanting to be able to build a house entirely out of hundred dollar bills). We’ll also forget that you’re working in an industry that has an almost magical ability to carefully fillet out every trace of an idea from a film – the kind of industry where it was considered a good idea to make V For Vendetta but leave out the stuff about anarchy. How would you approach it?
There are roughly two approaches you can take. Let’s call them the babelfish and the Christopher Nolan.
The babelfish approach is – you take what’s on the page, and you put it on the screen. If you have to make cuts to fit it into three hours, cut the boring bits, but basically just put the source material on the screen. From the interviews I’ve read, from the photos I’ve seen, that’s what Zak Snyder trying to do with Watchmen. The director acts like a translating machine.
Christopher Nolan, on the other hand, is an extremely intelligent filmmaker, and he understands that the process of adaptation is one that must change the source material in fundamental ways. A film is not a novel or a comic, and The Prestige is not the same as the novel it’s based on, and Batman Begins has only a passing resemblance to Batman Year One (I’ve not seen The Dark Knight yet, but I imagine this applies there, too.
An intelligent adapter – whether Nolan, or Milos Forman adapting One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest or Amadeus, or whoever – will essentially ask “How do I create the same effect as the source material, given the different strengths and weaknesses of the medium?” (or, if the source material is terrible, “How do I create the effect that the creator of the source material intended?”)
The approach taken by most of them seems to be to find what one might call the core of the material – the reason it works as it does. In the case of The Prestige this might be the relationship between the two magicians, in the case of Batman it’s a bloke dressing up in a bat costume and punching people.
You’d probably go into more detail than that, but you’d be looking at something like “Batman is a billionaire who saw his parents murdered as a child, and as a result trained his mind and body to perfection and devoted all his considerable resources to fighting crime. He does this by dressing up as a bat and, with the aid of gadgets, fighting grotesque villains who are mostly in some way warped reflections of himself, in a city that’s part Chicago, part New York, and part Gothic nightmare.”
You then look through the source material for those elements – and only those elements – that reinforce that core in some way. You then construct a new story around those elements. New characters can be created, old ones repurposed or merged, all in the service of that core. This way you end up with a film that is true to the spirit ( not The Spirit – a whole other rant) of the original.
It would in fact have been more than possible to do this with V For Vendetta- The core there is simple – “there’s a gun to your head, and you have to choose absolute anarchy or fascism. Which do you choose?” The fact that the film-makers ignored that core doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been done.
But this technique can only take you so far. There’s an idea in mathematics called algorithmic complexity. The idea is that a string (a number, say, or a sentence) contains only as much information as the shortest possible computer program that could produce it as its output. For example the number 123123123123123123123123… contains only the information loop(print’123′). On the other hand the shortest computer program that could produce Finnegans Wake would consist of the entire text of the book – you couldn’t compress it at all and still recreate it.
By analogy we can talk about a conceptual complexity – what is the ‘core’ of Watchmen ? What is it ‘about’? Is it about its own formal innovations (I could make a good case that the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League is far closer to Watchmen than any of the grimungritty ‘serious’ stories of the same time)? Is it about power and responsibility? Is it about the limits of moral absolutism? The Cold War? What superheroes would ‘really’ be like? The way people’s lives are constantly affected by factors they don’t understand? The importance of love? The death of both the 50s ‘American Dream’ and the 60s counterculture and their replacement with Reaganism? The importance of the individual? How looking again at seemingly trivial childhood memories can reveal hidden depths? How even the most evil people can have moments of kindness, while the most decent are capable of horrors?
It’s about all those things and more. The only way you can sum up Watchmen is to actually hand someone the comic itself. In fact, arguably, you couldn’t do even that without handing them a bunch of other comics, a handful of newspapers from 1985 or 86, and a few decent books on mid-20th century history, to provide context… what Watchmen is about, fundamentally, is itself. Remove any of the elements – the page layouts, the pirate story, the essay about owls, the background story about Hooded Justice – and you have something significantly lesser than Watchmen, in a way very different from removing the framing story from The Prestige, which turned a mediocre book into an excellent film.
In particular, what Watchmen isn’t about is its plot, in a linear this-happens-then-this-happens-then-the-surprise-twist manner. The ‘A’ plot in fact is one of the weaker elements – taken out of the context of the rest of the comic it’s just another rip-roaring superhero yarn. Snyder’s film looks like it will bear the same resemblance to the comic as a transcription of the lyrics to Tutti Frutti would have to Little Richard’s primal yelling – it’ll be entirely accurate (apart from those terrible costumes) but nobody looking at it will have a clue what the fuss was all about.
I don’t consider Watchmen an Untouchable Classic – it’s not even Moore’s best work, let alone the Greatest Comic Ever as many would claim. But it’s unfilmable in a way many other works – even better works – simply aren’t, because it is so specifically itself. You might as well try to stage the Mona Lisa as a play, or novelise Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
leave a comment