I Watch the Watchmen (But I'd Rather Read Them)

Apologies for the delay. I had planned a rather extensive theoretical entry on how I watch movies, but actually writing it turned out to be much more difficult than I had anticipated. So, I'm shifting gears with a topic that's near and dear to my heart.
Before we get to the meat of it, I've got a few autobiographical words to shed on The Watchmen. I saw the movie the week it opened, which also happened to be the week my squad and I dedicated to preparing for the National Debate Tournament. I kept close tabs on the legal disputes which preceded the movie, the trailers as they came out, and any other news I could find. I am a huge fan of graphic novels, and The Watchmen is, by most accounts, the gold standard. Further, 80's culture, the Reagan administration, and the cultural status of the bomb are all areas of strong interest for me. So, it's a bit of an understatement to say that I was excited about this one.
Given my expectations, it was probably inevitable that I found the movie disappointing. Strangely though, I thought the film was a fairly faithful adaptation of the graphic novel. Thus today's question: how can a film fail where its graphic novel equivalent succeeded?

The two main criticisms of the film version of the Watchmen I have are (1) that it was shot as a superhero movie rather than an antihero movie; and (2) that the relevant cultural references were not updated.

Beginning with the first point, let's first clarify the terms. The Watchmen graphic novel was by all accounts innovative, in large part because of the way it treats its superheroes. The mainstream superhero stories serialized by giants like DC and Marvel all tend to share certain characteristics. Here's a short list of relevant aspects of these hero stories:
Character focus: The story is driven by events surrounding a single character. I distinguish this from plot focus in that character-focused stories don't necessarily have a single defining conflict, but instead have multiple conflicts that intersect mostly based on the protagonist's interaction with them
Emphasis on origin stories: Spider-Man's radioactive spiderbite, Superman's exodus from the exploding planet Krypton, and the traumatic discovery of mutant powers in adolescence experienced by the X-Men are all memorable and crucial aspects of their respective stories. Superheroes generally get superpowers by accident, and also undergo an associated traumatic event that lands them squarely in the "good guy" column.
"Heart of Gold" moments: It's easy to be selfless when you're invincible. Heroes prove they've got hearts of gold by finding themselves genuinely threatened and acting super-heroic anyways.
The ways in which The Watchmen is not a superhero story, then, are legion. There is no single protagonist; if you were to contend that the story has multiple protagonists, you'd end up having to include at least four separate characters who work against each other from time to time. The origin stories for Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan follow the first and second parts of the origin story archetype, but neither follows the other and all the other heroes lack superpowers and owe their origin to nothing much more than a decision to dress in tights and kill bad guys. "Heart of Gold" moments are few and far between, and when they are present (Rorschach at the end, for example), they hardly resonate goodwill.
None of this is by accident. A defining aspect of The Watchmen was its deconstruction of the superhero. It is not primarily a fantasy about people with the power to fight evil, but rather a realistic story about what would happen if people who believed they had these powers existed.* The way the graphic novel did this was through chapter-ending sections of mock-archival information: a mock autobiography of a former superhero, a fake hack newspaper defending costumed vigilantism, and so on.
The movie did not incorporate these sections. It ran instead as what you would get if you used the traditional comic panels of the graphic novel as a storyboard for a film. The plot comes across loud and clear, and much of the tone of the graphic novel is captured. What is missing is the self-reflective sections which communicate the character backgrounds.
Further, the shot selections and directorial emphases the film uses are standard comic book fare and do little to go beyond them. The scene where Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II get ambushed during a night out on the town is a slurry of quick cuts and gore, almost like a lost scene from Kill Bill. It was not a particularly crucial scene in the graphic novel, important only in that it gave the two heroes a taste of the life they had left behind. In the movie, however, it reads as an imported trope from other comic book adaptations: the small-time crime thwarted by the heroes that points to a larger plot.
The movie further misses the satiric double entendre of these two heroes ending up in bed with each other. The movie gives us star-crossed lovers, doomed by Dan's insecurities and Laurie's relationship with Dr. Manhattan. Forbidden love is a well-known hero movie trope. Consider, for example, Spider-Man's prolonged debates over whether or not he can be a hero and date Mary Jane, or just about every girlfriend filmic Batman has ever had. Alan Moore, however, seems to have been reading Freud, not Shakespeare when he wrote his version of this scene. While both versions use sex to show Dan and Laurie's libidinal investment in super-heroing, the graphic novel goes a step further, saying that, for them, sex is the only reason they got dressed up in the first place. You can gauge this dynamic by the couple's interaction with Dr. Manhattan after the fact. Dan in the comic book is flustered and afraid--he acts as you or I might if suddenly confronted with a partner's ex. Dan in the movie is strangely cool and collected. This reaction seems unrealistic to me, but it is certainly in keeping with a typical hero motif.
The sacrifice of psychological realism for comic book style can probably be seen in other parts of the film as well, but I think you get the point. The net effect is that the movie stays a movie, and its characters stay characters. The movie doesn't stick with you like the graphic novel did, and it's because you've seen it all before.

My second problem with the film is the dated cultural benchmarks. Part two of the strength of the graphic novel was its commentary on the culture of the late cold war. The threat of nuclear weapons bred a culture squirming like a beetle on a pin. These days, mass annihilation is passé. I have more sophisticated words on the subject that could be spilled elsewhere, but it suffices to say that now the cold war fear has diffused into the terrorist threat--something no one is safe from because it can hit anywhere without warning, but markedly less devastating that human extinction.
Admittedly, it would have been difficult to rewrite The Watchmen to be about terrorism, and I'm not claiming I could have done it well. My claim is only that there's little to no contextual relevance to the movie, while the graphic novel will be useful to cultural anthropologists a millennia from now. Zach Snyder's position here was a difficult one given the graphic novel's cult following. Substantial changes to the plot would anger the fanboys, who constitute the film's core audience.
Those caveats aside, I present my exhibit B: V for Vendetta. The film was enormously successful, and, in my opinion, quite good. It was also an Alan Moore graphic novel in the 80's known for its commentary on political culture. The graphic novel commented on Thatcherite Britain by contrasting fascism and anarchism. The movie was successfully updated as a commentary on the Bush administration, and, though still set in Britain, discussed issues like suppression of civil liberties in the name of security and the state's mimicry of the terrorism it hunts.
The point is that The Watchmen could have done what V for Vendetta managed, but failed. The result, again, is that the film lacks contextual resonance.

Thus, we return to the opening question: how can a movie fail where its textual equivalent succeeded? The second criticism gives a partial answer. The time delay between the graphic novel and the film limited what the latter could say about its context compared to the former. This is more a problem of a too-long production process than an inherent problem to film as a medium.
The first criticism is more damning, and is difficult for defenders of film to account for. Where the graphic novel was critical, the movie was cliché. Imported tropes replaced psychological realism, and the result is a pale shadow of The Watchmen. The graphic novel's more brilliant sections required the reader's active engagement. Mulling over the nuances of Moore's created world brought revelations about its characters, and forced the readers to reconcile the Watchmen with their preconceived notions of what a superhero is. The movie affords no such time for thought. It captures your attention by keeping the plot moving at a brisk pace, with regularly interspersed action sequences.
My conclusion, then, is that discerning what’s wrong with Snyder’s version of The Watchmen also tells us how we should judge other filmic adaptations of graphic novels and comic books. That is, we all know by now that a conventional comic book movie will make money by sticking to the formula and keeping audiences entertained. A great one, however, will make us think as well. The Watchmen was good, not great, which is tragic considering the greatness of its source material.

*A quick aside here: if you apply my standard of "going beyond the conceit," this is one of the ways the graphic novel succeeds where the film fails. The film gets caught in the conceit by spending most of its time showing off people in costumes fighting crime, where the graphic novel transcends the conceit by focusing on the psychological question of who these people are and how they came to dress up and act like vigilantes.

Up: The Non-Conceited Conceit

Just saw Up last night, and, I'm happy to report, it lived up to the hype. My roommate Jason commented before the showing that Pixar has been very good at making movies that are compelling to children and adults for the same reasons. I agree. Today's entry will be a short one. I just want to present Up as a counterpoint to Pan's Labyrinth in that it uses its conceit effectively.
Slate ran a bit piece on how many balloons it would actually take to lift a house. The Slate article is good in that it approaches the subject of turning a house into a super-hot air balloon with the same sense of whimsical detachment to a rather silly idea as the film does. That is, from an engineering standpoint, the main conceit of the film is vaguely plausible, but tremendously impractical.
Of course the physics aren't the point. This is a movie about a love for adventure in the young and the old. The flying house is just a vehicle (pardon the pun) for the story, which is why it's an effective conceit.
Further, it adds to the story. Had the old man simply flown and discovered the kid as a stowaway, the sense that he was searching for one last great adventure would have been lost. His character was so effective because he was outwardly a tired, old man, but inwardly young at heart, someone who still has what it takes to hunt down one more elusive dream.

Pan's Labyrinth and the Overgrown Conceit

Well, I haven't made it to the theater yet, I haven't worked up the stomach to re-watch Hostel, and I haven't found anyone who wants to sit around and watch bad teen movies for a few hours, so my initial slate of posts is on hold...for now. But never fear! There's a lot more where that came from. Today, I'd like to talk about Pan's Labyrinth. Spoilers, by the way. I'll be talking about the ending.

Pan's Labyrinth was a difficult movie for me. The visuals were always compelling, the fantasy elements were well-executed, and juxtaposition of the girl's secret world with the war going on around her was poignant and compelling. Nevertheless, the movie strikes a dissonant chord with me. The girl is killed, shot by her stepfather, and yet, it turns out her fantasies were true: she really is a magic princess, and she lives happily ever after.
It could be that the film is suggesting an afterlife. For being virtuous, she is rewarded in death. But this is unprecedented by the rest of the plot. The girl's religious beliefs are not a major focus, nor is the subject of religion in general particularly crucial to the film.
It could be a metaphor, del Toro's way of giving closure to the viewer's cinematic experience of the death of a child. If this is the case, however, we are looking at a greatly overdeveloped filmic metaphor.
My position, then, is that the events of the film are meant to be taken as true; that is, magic is real, there really are fauns, and the little girl is a long lost princess. And this is my problem with the movie: it suffers from a severe case of an overgrown conceit.
We'll get back to Pan's Labyrinth momentarily. First, a few words on conceits. In fiction, and especially in fantasy, a conceit is the plainly unreal idea that the reader accepts as true in order for the story to work. Conceits are useful. They allow authors to shrug off the fetters of reality and explore all sorts of interesting literary territory. Indeed, to some extent, all fiction is "conceited" in that it asks the reader to imagine as real a whole menagerie of characters, places, and events that have at best marginal claims to reality.
Conceits can also be literary deathtraps. That is, authors can get caught up in their own conceit. They expound upon a created world for its own sake rather than the sake of the story. In doing so, they surrender something which I consider to be a critical component for successful art. Art should say something. The message doesn't have to be earth-shattering, mind-boggling, political, or even moral, but it has to get beyond itself.
A good, popular example is Star Trek. The series has a rigorously detailed fictional universe which can be investigated to no end by a fan, but it never was the parameter specifications on the warp drive that made it so enduring. The Star Trek universe is a means to an end, and that end was a hopeful vision of the future. The Trekkie who can quote from memory the star date of the Federation/Klingon alliance, but doesn't know the significance of putting the Russian Chekov in a leadership position misses the point. They are stuck in the conceit and missed the message.
The point of all this introductory stuff on conceits in a film blog is that I think the ending to Pan's Labyrinth is hardly an ending at all--it is merely the extension of the conceit. It's great for the girl (Ofelia) that, though she seems to have been killed in the world you and I might recognize as real, she's still alive in the one where everything turns out for the best, but for the story, it's a dead end.
What I found interesting about the concept for Pan's Labyrinth was it's positive perspective on a child's fantasy against the cruel reality of the Spanish civil war. Her fantasy world gave Ofelia strength, happiness, and a measure of hope when the real world provided no such things. The film's message was that imagination is not idle, that creativity can help us cope, and that even at its ugliest, life is not irredeemable.
There are limits to fantasy, though, and consequences for exceeding them. In fiction and in life, delusions of grandeur foreshadow a harrowing encounter with reality. Fantasy is a solace, not a solution, and to believe otherwise is to lose touch with the world and everyone else in it. Pan's Labyrinth's overgrown conceit breaks the rule by making Ofelia's fantasy the solution to her situation.
This is particularly problematic because the positive message of the film is softened by the overgrown conceit. The hope provided by the escape into fantasy is ultimately presented as valuable because the fantasy turns out to be real. While this makes narrative sense, it understates the value of fantasies that don't happen to be true. Guillermo del Toro is a famously imaginative filmmaker, and Pan's Labyrinth is supposed to be his magnum opus. But rather than a profound celebration of creativity as something valuable for life, what we recieve is another beautiful conceit.
I don't claim to be qualified to sit in the director's chair, or make the filmic decisions that make something like Pan's Labyrinth work. I still believe it to be a very good film; one worth watching more than once. But the overgrown conceit is what keeps it from being a great film, and I can't help but wonder how else the narrative could have been tied up.