Who watches the Watchmen?

Recently rewatched Hollywood’s 2009 (re)production of Alan Moore’s 1986-87 twelve-issue comic book series Watchmen. I first saw it at the cinema after recently reading the graphic novel, which I loved. Whilst it was obvious the film wasn’t particularly great, it was nonetheless a thrilling companion piece to the graphic novel and its mis-en-scène recreated the comic’s panels so perfectly it was hard not to be disappointed. Of course, the ending was different, but it had to be, there was no way it could have been credibly recreated on film, and they alternative offered worked just as well.

But re-watching a couple of years later, with the novel not so fresh in my mind, the movie comes across differently. It’s hard to see anything beyond its Hollywood gluttonous sheen. The characters appear desperately shallow, and the actors seem aware of this. Patrick Wilson just about manages to bring Night Owl II together, but for people who don’t know the book (or the actor for that matter) he would seem out of place. Malin Åkerman fails abysmally as Silk Spectre II, but the script hardly helps. So trapped is the character in a masculine construct she is never allowed to breathe.

This is all a shame because the graphic novel was so revered, intelligent, and seminal. Moore’s writing adjusted superhero diction to destabilize generic expectations and questioned the politics of traditional comic book writing. The heroes are constructed precisely in order to deconstruct the ideas of what a superhero actually is, and heroes, be they fictional or real, always have social or political implications. More than this, in its staggering self-consciousness, the comic was about comics. It even had a comic-book written and drawn within its panels. It doesn’t get more meta than this.

However, Zak Snyder’s film eschews much of what makes Moore’s work still great. The then refreshingly contemporary cold-war context was of course important, but emphasising current affairs in such a way always runs the risk of making a work age irreversibly. This is not so with the Watchmen because of the points I made above, as long as there are comic books around, and as long as we continue to write heroes into films, books, games, and TV shows, the Watchmen will always have a place. Snyder, however, preferred to focus and enhance the story’s cold war setting, its violence and sex. This might have been great, the film could have taken an ironic approach to Hollywood’s appropriation of comic book material, in the way, James Gunn’s Super tried (and failed) to. Yet, Snyder is not intelligent enough to have done this. Instead we are left with a film that only entertains as long as there are bad guys being beaten-up on the screen. Moore awoke his readers to a brutal nihilism-- the only thing appropriate in a world which daily woke up to the threat of total extinction. With Hollywood’s Watchmen the nihilism can only be created by the viewer, and it comes in the form of despising and lamenting yet another rehash of comic-book adaptation.