| Wednesday, March 5, 2003 |
12:29 - The Spandex no longer flatters
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I just finished reading The Watchmen. I'd given some early impressions last Monday, but it's taken me until now to get all the way through it. Late nights. Bah.
Anyway-- multiple people mailed me to tell me that I should register my final thoughts on it after I finished it, and now I see why. I have to give away the ending in order to comment on it: Ozymandias, the playboy-superhero-turned-messianic-supergenius decides to save the 1985 Nixonian world portrayed in the book from certain nuclear annihilation, via an ingenious plan to-- to... eliminate all the superheroes (er, masked adventurers) capable of stopping him, and then to conjure up a gigantic, city-sized alien life form which he would teleport to New York City, upon which it would die, its brain in its death-throes broadcasting chaotic imagery throughout the city, causing three million citizens to go insane and die in the cataclysm.
...Upon which, the aggressive Soviets would halt their march through Afghanistan, draw back their weaponry, disarm, and enter into a sympathetic accord with the thunderstruck America. Leading to a new world order of peace and prosperity, Soviet and American harmony.
All I can say is: Osamandias didn't quite get it right, did he?
As I said before, The Watchmen is a fascinating time-capsule of a piece, set in a pre-fall-of-communism world in which the writers (how come the best comic writers are all British?) couldn't seem to find plausible the peaceful end to the Cold War. (Odd how exactly that happened not four years after the book's publication.) It's full of the political vocabulary of the times, back when conservatives were the conspiracy-theorists and the word "lesbian" hadn't really entered common discourse. The book is written from a complex perspective, portraying the many-term President Nixon as a gruff but sympathetic figure, and ascribing to his heroes-- Nite Owl, Rorschach, Sally and Laurie Jupiter, and Doc Manhattan-- a decidedly black-and-white, good-and-evil outlook, while at the same time giving them all the humanity-- while placing Ozymandias at the bohemian Left, remaking the world in his postmodern image, secure in the perfection of his intricate plans. The "happy ending" the book gets is one in which the bad guy wins, and the world is safe and peaceful-- at least until someone figures out the truth.
The politics of the book are neatly summed up in the internal basement rag The New Frontiersman, which is both a parody of conservative thinking (1980s-style) and a validation of it. An excerpt from it toward the end, while it espouses a completely reasonable and well-intentioned rebuttal to fabricated accusations leveled by a rival leftist magazine (a proto-Fisking!), and seems to be founded on solid principles to which it adheres fanatically, it nonetheless betrays the writer and editor of the magazine as a classic Red-fearing conspiracy-monger, pointing fingers everywhere and demonizing blacks and Jews and the like, while saying things like "Might I point out that despite what some might view as their later excesses, the Klan originally came into being because decent people had perfectly reasonable fears for the safety of their persons and belongings when forced into proximity with people from a culture far less morally advanced." A synthetic political cartoon, in the lost old 40s style, shows a square-jawed American superhero in a boxing ring menaced by towering caricatures of Big Biz (complete with Star of David), Juvenile Delinquency, Pop Culture, Hippies, and Crime, while John Q. Public dozes and Lady Liberty weeps.
And here we are in 2003, where the conservatives are pro-Israel, pro-black, pro-gay, pro-end-of-War-on-Drugs, pro-miscegenation, play mean electric guitars, and get up in arms over the suppression of ideas opposite their own.
As to the storytelling itself-- it's quaint, I must say. I'm sure it must have been revolutionary in its time, being as it was the forerunner of all of today's accustomed Vertigo titles, the first of the genre of edgy adult comics. And it's extremely well-written. But I find myself grating a little at the forced cleverness of the writer, juxtaposing the storylines of the main plot and an unrelated pirate/horror story throughout common panels just to drive home the irony and magnitude of the characters' lines and the scenes they're in. Each episode ends with a literary excerpt from some in-story text or other, further fleshing out the realism of the gritty New York setting and providing character context. Now, while this is all extremely clever, and in 1986 it must have seemed ingenious, from today's perspective-- where storytelling of this type has matured a bit-- it looks pretentious. I suppose I can't fault it for that, but I did find myself going, "Yeah, yeah" once or twice as I saw the castaway on his corpse raft reappear next to the newsstand owner's dialogue, or Doc Manhattan's time-shifted lines pull themselves together from the far corners of the scene and resolve into a coherent internally-consistent narrative. Yes, you're very smart. Now shut up.
But that said, it's an outstanding piece, superbly written; I called it "prescient" last week, but until I got to the end I didn't realize just how prescient it was. I have to wonder how the writers feel about current events, and how they would have written The Watchmen in 2003 or even in 1996. This world really has changed a lot lately, hasn't it?
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