I’d been thinking a bit about Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation (original review here) over the past week in a very particular way, and a chance to see the movie again last night with a friend who hadn’t seen it at all yet sort of reinforced what I was thinking.
Basically, take The Godfather–not as an adaptation, because I don’t think Mario Puzo’s novel was nearly as highly regarded in its field as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen was in comics, but as a gangster movie. My understanding from reading about Francis Ford Coppola’s film (and the last time I did that was years ago, so my memory could be fuzzy) is that prior to its release, gangster pictures were considered strictly b-movie territory. But nowadays, you’d be very, very hard pressed to find someone who’d say something like “Well, The Godfather Part II was pretty good for a gangster movie” or “as far as mafia stuff goes, The Sopranos was great.” Thanks to the first Godfather film, great art about mobsters–from Coppola, Scorsese, Chase, whoever–kind of gets considered as “great art” first and “about mobsters” second.
Longtime readers of this blog know what a skeptic I am regarding the notion of “transcending the genre,” but in this kind of case I can understand the utility of the term. The idea isn’t that The Godfather transcended the limitations of the the gangster genre–it’s obviously just as much of a gangster picture as anything, and it doesn’t make sense to claim the genre is limited if a movie like this can be constructed out of its component parts, since then you’re pretty much saying a genre movie can’t be a great movie without no longer being a genre movie. The idea is that The Godfather transcended the appeal of the gangster genre, for want of a better word. You don’t need to be someone who just loves him some tommy-gun-toting greaseball action to really get a whole hell of a lot out of The Godfather; if you’re a critic, the presence of tommy-gun-toting greaseballs won’t put you off the film, most likely.*
In that light, it seems safe to say that Moore & Gibbons’s Watchmen was the Godfather of superhero comics. It also seem safe to say that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen was NOT the Godfather of superhero movies. I think many fans and critics expected or hoped it would be, I think Zack Snyder may have thought it was, but it wasn’t. It was more like, I don’t know, The Warriors, or maybe Tim Burton’s Batman–a zesty, creative, exciting, violent, funny, sometimes lovely, and deeply, deeply weird genre movie. Its pleasures are really firmly rooted in the pleasures of genre movies. As much as it monkeyed with the usual superhero-movie tropes, as much as I think it put a lot of things on screen that no one had seen in a superhero movie before, I don’t think it transcended the traditional appeal of the superhero movie so much as it pushed the existing appeal of superhero movies in a bizarre direction that people who appreciate the bizarre could appreciate.
Now, I really enjoy stuff like The Warriors and Batman. Off-kilter genre pictures are my bread and butter. That’s why when I watch and think about the movie I don’t dwell on Snyder’s overall stylistic and tonal differences from the comic–as Tom Spurgeon has said, Peter Jackson made the boy’s-adventure version of The Lord of the Rings, and Zack Snyder made the weirdo-edgy-action version of Watchmen, and that’s fine with me. Instead, what bugs me are the “unforced errors,” simple changes that add nothing and detract from what could have been (and often what was, in the comic). Stuff like turning Ozymandias from a chiseled, beatific all-American captain of industry into a hawk-faced, preening gay Nazi; having Dan and Laurie do so much lethal damage to their would-be muggers that Rorschach’s sui generis status as the ultraviolent vigilante is lost in the shuffle; cutting the flashback where Laurie angrily confronts the Comedian after reading Hollis Mason’s book, so that her devastation upon realizing he’s her father would have more impact; not having a reaction shot of Doctor Manhattan’s face when he has his eureka moment regarding the miracle of human life; not casting better actors for Laurie or the child killer who Rorschach murders; cutting some of my favorite lines (“Somebody EXPLAIN it to me”); and so on. Of course, a lot of movies I like a lot are lousy with flubs of that magnitude, and that doesn’t stop me from liking them a lot any more than I like this one a lot. As I said, I’m pretty much fine and dandy dandy and fine with a Watchmen movie that’s more like, uh, Aliens than 2001, even if the source material could have brought you in a 2001 direction had the filmmakers so chosen and been so able.
As I’ve mused before, would it have been interesting to see Watchmen in the hands of a realist rather than a stylist, someone who could have muted the material’s more outre aspects instead of heightening them, someone who could have crafted the Godfather of superhero movies? Absolutely, though I think in that case it would work better as a 12-part HBO miniseries, say, than a feature film. A lot of the lurid melodrama, groany puns, and other stuff that people decried in the movie is right there in the comic, and I think that if you’re going to diffuse that you need time to let dialogue and performance breathe in lieu of that overheated directness, more time than even a really long feature would give you. I think we can all fantasize about David Simon’s Watchmen, just like I know Tolkien fans who fantasize about a lengthy, serious BBC adaptation of The Lord of the Rings regardless of whether or not they liked Peter Jackson’s blockbuster version. (Which, now that I think about it, straddled that line between transcending its genre label so that people who’d never give elves the time of day get a lot out of it and making a just-plain bugfuck adventure/horror/war genre movie with trolls and ents and whatnot about as well as anything has done.) But I’m perfectly happy with what we got.
* To use a more recent and perhaps even more directly applicable example in terms of its place under the fantastic-fiction umbrella, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is the Godfather of post-apocalyptic fiction. Maybe Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the Godfather of horror films, or perhaps it’s something by David Lynch. You get the picture.
“As I’ve mused before, would it have been interesting to see Watchmen in the hands of a realist rather than a stylist, someone who could have muted the material’s more outre aspects instead of heightening them…”
Yes! I was having trouble articulating this to some of my friends who loved the movie (I found it to be terrible, but I like your take[s] on it). I think Christopher Nolan mentioned somewhere that he used Dog Day Afternoon as an inspiration for the opening to The Dark Knight (a “stylized” realism, but I suppose everything ultimately ends up stylized to some extent, broadly speaking). I wonder if Paul Greengrass had planned to take this direction with the film, given his M.O. I guess we’ll never know!
“Instead, what bugs me are the “unforced errors,” simple changes that add nothing and detract from what could have been (and often what was, in the comic).”
Completely agree. I do think it’ll be interesting to see what his Director’s Cut will look like.
Jimbo: I think The Dark Knight is as close as we’ve come to what I’m talking about here, stylistically. And yeah, I know pretty much abusing realism when I use the term in conjunction with comparing stuff to The Godfather–Gordon Willis’s cinematography is a lot of things but realist is pushing it. What I mean is stuff is done straightforwardly, more or less–there can be some exciting editing, some bold lighting, but not (say) the stop-start fight sequences and slow-mo and scenery chewing and such that Snyder uses. I used to know what the word was for elements of a film that convey meaning above and beyond whatever diegetic role they may play and now I’ve forgotten it. Goddamn I’m getting old.
Shags: Dammit I meant to point out that I’m curious as to how many of those unforced errors get fixed in the Director’s Cut. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were quite a few.
I’m pretty sure Snyder said he filmed the entire book, right? I wonder if he filmed alternate versions of some of the more drastically changed scenes like the alley fight. Probably not, but could be interesting.