"Watchmen" (2009)

To begin to speak of Watchmen the film would equate to making a critique of the graphic novel itself, for reason that the film hardly strays from the original material in any major interpretative sense. There are a few touches of novelty, namely the opening credits sequence, in which the historical data leading up to the principal narrative is played out (to the music of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'") in a series of slow-motion stylized tableaux; the pleasant effect made by the tableaux is one attributable to the director's (Zack Snyder) penchant for liturgical compaction, of which his previous film, 300, embodies the ideal. Though Watchmen clocks in at nearly 3 hours, its ability to condense the essentials of the graphic original into a suitable film project is admirable, though by no means innovative; Snyder and his crew basically reprint the original graphic narrative & tableaux on 4515 metres of 35mm & 70mm celluloid, a task of which the difficulty was more assiduously involved in mimetic replication than in tangential conception. The film Watchmen thusly is not a film, but an inventory of parts which had been transplanted from a cohesive graphic work into a medium equally graphic: the differences between the original & the copy are hardly perceivable, and if they are, hardly mentionable (though the slightly tweaked ending in the film seems to improve on the original's by formalizing the ethos inherent in one of the characters, Doc Manhattan.) The aesthetic value of the original is neither lessened nor augmented by the appearance of its filmic other; Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' work does not elude nor is it preempted by Zack Snyder's reproduction; they share a sameness (in tone, meaning, & expressiveness) that contributes solely to the propagation of the work as an Idea in the outer spheres of the popular consciousness, the marketplace of 'capitalist reproduction'. The present discussion hearkens to Walter Benjamin's understanding of "the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility":

In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art - its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence - and nothing else - that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject. This history includes changes to the physical structure of the work over time, together with any changes in ownership. Traces of the former can be detected only by chemical or physical analyses (which cannot be performed on a reproduction), while changes of ownership are part of a tradition which can be traced only from the standpoint of the original in its present location.

If the original work is the 1986 Moore/Gibbons Watchmen, then it follows that its 'here and now' aspect (its placement in the mid 80s as a document of its 'period') is immediately, irrevocably lost in Zack Snyder's 2009 version; however, any competent historian knows that a passage of 23 years is barely a blip of historical pressure, not enough to account for tremendous alterations in the collective perception of our present situation. Benjamin's essay written in 1935 has perhaps more resonance now than the time it was composed in. Yet Benjamin does not mean by the 'here and now' aspect of a work of art to be its mere historical appearance; rather he draws attention to the hand-drawn constraints that brought to fruition the work of art: the medium, the measure, & the material that were coordinated by the specific demands on the artist of his age. In the epoch of stone, the sculptor was supreme, for his works embodied the medium - the rough solidity of pure matter - through which intellectual discovery coursed; in the age of mass print, Watchmen exemplifies the capacity of graphic art to contain giant forms & atemporal ideas. But even on its surface Watchmen (the graphic novel) presents difficulties of 'authenticity', which Benjamin stipulates to be the arch quality of the unique work of art:

The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity, and on the latter in turn is founded the idea of a tradition which has passed the object down as the same, identical thing to the present day. The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological - and of course not only technological - reproduction.

In relation to Watchmen, a seminal work in a nascent medium, the 'tradition' is still fresh, still slight; comic books are exclusively a western post-war phenomenon of the 20th century (with exception to the Far Orient, and Japan in particular, which had long before mastered the type of color graphic art so profuse in mass media today); even if we were to include the sparks of capitalist-advertisement art of the 19th century (i.e. Toulouse-Lautrec), we have a format that has not been to any definitive degree determined. In any case, comic art continues today to be as important as it was in the 20th with no sign of letup, and the nuclear themes of Watchmen are even more appealing, more relevant & fear-inspiring. The argument instead should focus on the difference in medium between Watchmen the graphic novel, and Watchmen the film. There is no question that film is the quintessence of Benjamin's thesis on the technological reproducibility of art; film does not only reproduce an objective toward art - the object itself -but it also self-documents its reproductive powers; film reproduces the very act of reproduction by supplanting the aesthetic object of its mechanistic drive with the technological process that works to capture the object. As a result, the native arrogance of film manifests in its disdain for mimicking other artforms, in its contempt for idle simulation, since film is more self-involved than the other pictorial artforms that sought affinity with the natural world (as classical painting had, or even as a good deal of early photography had.) Film is ultimately about film. Film does not strive to be a closed traditional model like the artforms that preceded its ascent; it seeks to usurp their formalistic powers while remaining permeable to the inorganic world that has itself usurped the natural order. As such, film is not concerned with authenticity because it deals precisely with a perception of the world as one founded on technological conceits and constraints; an information world made independent of its originary Adamic beginning, of its wilderness and of its incipient attempts at civilization, because it has been sterilized by the objective collocations of the lens-apparatus. Film is reality sterilized: selectively cut up, montaged, edited, & piecemeal'd.

(In contrast, the guardians of reality, the poets who delve into film art, are those who are aware of the mechanistic properties of the medium, and thus struggle against this material setback; the film poets, the auteurs, are exemplary because they do not worship the film medium; they work toward restoring the atemporal in the temporal fragment; like sculptors, they - the sculptors of time - do not worship stones: they chip them, carve them, they break the stone from its rude habit, and free the element from its prison...)

If film is the medium par excellence of technological reproduction, then it is capable of highlighting, at times even augmenting, the qualities of an original to such a degree as to become independent of it:

First, technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction. For example, in photography it can bring out aspects of the original that are accessible only to the lens (which is adjustable and can easily change viewpoint) but not to the human eye; or it can use certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, to record images which escape natural optics altogether... Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record.

So it follows that Watchmen the film may potentially highlight certain aspects of the graphic novel that weren't manifest even on subsequent readings; but this is not the case (acknowledging for instance that the slow motion mechanics of certain scenes in the film failed to improve upon what had been so carefully panelled out in the graphic work.) In every way, the graphic novel remains a solid construction that is only proven more stable by the transference of the narrative to the film medium; furthermore, the film version of Watchmen so thoroughly depends on the visual and textual arcs in the graphic novel that it quotes passages & visual data verbatim. Yet the film is fantastically watchable, and in some sense seems to neither expand nor shrink from the original conception, as if it were a third arm to an already functional body, made of the same skin, blood, and bone.

The question arises: where then does the graphic novel lie in terms of authenticity? Does Watchmen the graphic novel deserve placement in the traditional, historically-derived art that Benjamin describes? The answer would be no, for several reasons. Watchmen the graphic novel is one that has discursive purpose in our nuclear age world; the film perhaps less so, but the elements are still present whose relevance to our time is unmistakable. Yet Benjamin's concept of authenticity - what he more metaphysically describes the 'aura' - originates in the facticity of the artwork: in the fact that it is irreproducible and made unique by the historical pressure & signature medium in which it appeared (in the prehistoric age, no further technology other than the chisel and the stone existed, and so the measure of the stone figure back then is today immeasureable, inimitable, since our current technology would deface its authentic value through superfluous innovation). But Watchmen in all its incarnations is a work of tremendous reproducibility and tremendous inauthenticity. Firstly, in the realm of print media, there is no one original of Watchmen the graphic work: like a film, it was stitched together by a crew of artisans (Moore the writer, Gibbons the artist, and John Higgins the colorist) over several drafts and edits; a few different versions of the work likely exist, and it has been printed on its first run in a few thousand first editions, since then reproduced to alarming perfection in hardcover and special paper editions available at any major bookstore chain. Secondly, Gibbons' artwork was drawn in the usual comic book industrial way, so that the original sketches could be reproduced fairly easily (Gibbons stated for instance that to draw Rorschach, one had only to begin with a decent hat, and all the rest of him would appear: "You just have to draw a hat. If you can draw a hat, then you’ve drawn Rorschach, you just draw kind of a shape for his face and put some black blobs on it and you’re done.") Thirdly, the very themes in the narrative deal with the inauthentic: the Watchmen are superheroes demystified, whose psyches 'behind the mask' are brought to the fore, rupturing any semblance of their traditional codes of honor; their authenticity as heroes is brought into question. The narrative's denouement ends on a large-scale 'noble lie' constructed to great pains by Ozymandias, bringing to moral uncertainty the genuine beliefs of those who act as custodians to the world. Moore forges an assortment of documents, articles, essays, and reports that are included at the end of each installment/chapter in order to legitimize the historical probability of a world in which masked heroes could have existed; this world is itself a fabrication that takes place in an alternate reality in which the Vietnam War was won by the US, Richard Nixon is serving a 5th presidential term, and the threat of nuclear extinction looms nigh.

Finally, Watchmen as a work of art (in all its emanations) does not lay claim on authenticity - its 'aura' vanishes in its assimilation of and referentiality to the inorganic, information world at large (the pop media, the superhero mythos, the aspect of realism in an alternate reality, "The Outer Limits", etc.) In short, its peculiar aura is more akin to the mechanics of film than to the traditional function of literature; as film is always about the process of filming, Watchmen is also a "comic about comics" (per Dave Gibbons). Despite Alan Moore's assertions that he had conceived it to showcase the specific excellencies of the comics medium as opposed to other artforms ("What I'd like to explore is the areas that comics succeed in where no other media is capable of operating"), Watchmen's graphic techniques are decidedly cinematic: the use of transverse narration in its graphic panels (as opposed to the longitudinal planes of classical painting, in which the subject & narration fill a single frame simultaneously) is one similar to the storyboard blocking of visual data in a film's preproduction. (Not surprisingly, Zack Snyder & his cinematographer modeled nearly every shot in the film on what Gibbons and Moore had designed in the comic book, using the actual 9-panel structure as their prepackaged storyboard for the film.) The action in a comic book happens in a series of stills that simulate the flow of movement so readily created in film montage techniques: one panel leads to another, otherwise staying incomplete unless it is paired with other panels to speed the action along; so also in film must one filmed scene combine with other scenes filmed separately in time and space, to produce a semblance of action, of 'inauthentic' kinesis. Comics, like film, is as much about process as it is about its thematic formalities & narrative pretexts. According to Gibbons, the comics medium fundamentally does not rely as much on 'meaning' or 'story' as it does on the technical practicalities of the craft in which it takes form:

The main thrust of the story essentially hinges on what is called a macguffin, a gimmick ... So really the plot itself is of no great consequence ... it just really isn't the most interesting thing about Watchmen. As we actually came to tell the tale, that's where the real creativity came in.

It is interesting to note that Gibbons uses what is generally considered a properly cinematic term, the 'macguffin', to describe the fulcrum on which the craftwork takes shape. A macguffin is basically a plot device, more specifically an object, on which an entire narrative of mystery and uncertainty will take form in order to motivate the reactions of the characters and more broadly the action of the story; but the macguffin itself loses significance once the story gets underway and the characters become more situated; it is more or less a pretext for action, a way of getting people and objects to move. Or as Alfred Hitchcock described it:

[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.

In Watchmen the macguffin is the smiley face pin found on the Comedian's dead body; its significance is manifold, but its meaning is empty, the symbol of hysterical laughter in the dark, marked by the spot of blood on its yellow placid surface. Both the comic book and the film make great use of it as a way of initiating the action and resolving the symbolism on all fronts, without ever once having to explain away its denotation as a visual motif.

Watchmen the graphic novel was the point of departure for the comics medium to break away from its initial limitations: it surpassed the merely photographic, documentary concern for detail and accuracy, and brought into the literature realm aspects of the film realm: editing, montage, cross-cutting, simultaneity. Watchmen the graphic novel is seminal not just for reason of its particular excellence as a comic book, but also as the eminent conjunction in which literature at last came to touch base with the fleeting apparition of the cinematic. With this in mind, Watchmen as a film will appear for us to be something of a redundancy, but it is not a work that disappoints or betrays the source material: the film is a work of estimable analogy, since its original had from the first place been a work of tremendous cinematic proportions. Watching the former is no different from watching a film made about a film which had been also a book, both extensions of the same reproducibility in the new graphic art media.