The Lingering Power of Watchmen

I first read Alan Moore’s Watchmen three years ago – at the time, it was a profoundly effective piece of media, and from my experience, it defied categorization as a work of fiction based on the its innate tactile and visual qualities.  I have always enjoyed the comic as a literary form, but Watchmen made me reconsider the medium entirely.  Simply put, I’d never read anything like Watchmen, and it has since taken on very powerful connotations in my own breadth of literary consciousness.

Reading it a second time, Watchmen loses little steam.  As a whole, it as an epic, transcendentally imaginative story that speaks volumes about the human condition – but I’ve found that its most resonant impact is derived from Moore and Gibbons’ deft blend of imagery and text in specific moments.  Specifically, the end of Chapter XI (pages 27-29) and the opening image of Chapter XII, which when viewed in succession are chillingly significant and utterly despairing.  Moore’s seminal work was born out of postmodernism’s heyday – the late 1980s – when pastiche, irony, and disillusionment with traditional ideals were characteristics of the forward-thinking media of the day.  These ideals – not to mention Watchmen’s own apocalypse – are presented in a distinctly postmodern manner that rejects deities and conservatively defined archetypes that have pervaded popular media in the past.  Its protagonists are flawed, and in some cases, criminals.  Its antihero is in many ways an idealist.  Watchmen is a product of skepticism and intelligent discourse on the nature of power, and the fact that Moore and Gibbons accomplish all of this in a medium that many view as immature and childish only speaks to its heavily postmodern content.  Watchmen visually and textually quotes countless references, from the costumes of its heroes to its divergent storyline that sees the United States winning the Vietnam War, among other historical alterations.  It is an amalgam of telling allusions that is chillingly familiar, despite its sci-fi qualities.  That’s not to say that Moore’s creation is prophetic, but its honest – and at times, brutish – depiction of humankind is at least refreshing.

In Chapter IV, the reader flits through an amorphous version of time with Dr. Manhattan, who ultimately hovers, cross-legged, on Mars.   As a recurring motif in each chapter, Moore inhabits the final narrow panel with a quote, typically from a well-known source (Bob Dylan, Nietzche).  Chapter IV is a pivotal piece of the Watchmen saga, but the quote that Moore chooses to conclude it with speaks volumes about the incredibly fickle nature of the End of Days.  “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking . . . The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind.  If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker,” attributed to Albert Einstein.  Einstein’s quote effectively portrays how responsibility is manifested in the modern apocalypse.  Ultimately, perhaps the only truly unbelievable thing about Watchmen is that its Doomsday is orchestrated by one individual driven by selfish motives.  Ozymandias, “king of kings,” is an homage to the black-and-whiteness of evils past.  Now, as we discard postmodern notions for even more, apocalyptic fiction has become even more vague, as evidenced by our next reading, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  The Road, and its contemporary ilk in apocalyptic fiction, like Don DeLilo’s White Noise, affix no certain definition to the downfall of the status quo.   Moore’s vision of the apocalypse is horrifying in it calculation, but these days, there isn’t a countdown clock or a “red button” in engaging apocalyptic myth – post millennial audiences are disengaged from the tangibility of defined affectations.  Now, the world ends in a dizzying haze of nothingness or undefined horror.  As a concept, it is no longer manifested empirically in our culture.

Zack Snyder’s 2009 Hollywood adaptation, however, has left little residual effect in my memory other than a distinct lack of interest in all things attached – an any capacity –  to his name.  Snyder’s film tackles the source material in the most superficial sense.  Sure, the film aesthetically mimics Gibbons’ distinctly 80s palette and tone, and many panels were recreated within scenes in painstaking detail.  Thematically, and even plot-wise, the film lumbers stubbornly along like any of-the-moment “superhero” movie.  Most glaringly, Snyder took so much freedom with the original novel’s apocalypse that it might as well have been omitted entirely.  In the film, the apocalypse is rated-R – literally, thanks to the MPAA – but also because its childish reduction of Moore and Gibbons’ poignantly horrifying original offers nothing in the way of substance.  Snyder’s film merits little mention in an analytical context, but I reference it because of its validity in the scope of Western apocalyptic belief.   While the graphic novel’s powerful depiction will retain its power for decades, the more recent cinematic version that most people chose, and will continue to choose, is certainly a whole lot easier to swallow.