- (Electronic Music)
- (Jared) Hey, Wisecrack. Somehow even longer-haired Jared here and today we’re talking about
a movie that bitterly divides the Wisecrack team. We’ve spent hours going back and forth
in our self-isolated Skype calls on whether the film is deep, or dumb. ... Zack Snyder’s
Watchmen.
Those of us on the pro Watchmen’s ‘deep’ side contend that Zack Snyder playfully twists
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s seminal comic, injecting his own signature style to satirize
pop culture and comic book films nowadays. However, those of us that think Watchmen’s
dumb claim Snyder not only completely missed the point of Moore’s graphic novel -- but
betrays everything Watchmen originally stood for.
So who’s right? Well, let’s dig in with this Wisecrack Edition on Zack Snyder’s
Watchmen -- Deep or Dumb?
A quick note before we begin-- there are three different cuts of Watchmen available. For
the purposes of this video, we’re going to go with Zack Snyder and analyze his preferred
version--
- (Snyder) So for me, the director’s cut is really the - you know which has Hollis’s
death, and other things like that.
- (Jared) Alright let’s get into a quick recap: The film opens in an alternate timeline
where the emergence of anonymous heroes has dramatically changed the world as we know
it: the US won the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon is now serving his third term as president
in 1985. But Cold War tensions between the Soviets and the US have reached a tipping
point, each side on the precipice of firing nuclear warheads. Making things worse-- former
vigilantes are beginning to mysteriously die. The Comedian, an early masked hero, is found
dead, flung from his apartment window. The murder prompts another masked vigilante, Rorschach,
to investigate and warn other prominent crimefighters of the impending danger. These include: Nite
Owl ; Silk Spectre; Ozymandias; and the superman himself, Dr. Manhattan-
Turns out, all these murders were a distraction for Ozymandias’s master plan: to kill millions
of people and frame Doctor Manhattan. Why, you might ask? Well, to unite the Soviet Union
and the United States against a common enemy, thus averting nuclear holocaust.
Now, before we can determine if Snyder either betrays or skillfully adapts Watchmen, first
we need to understand the comic book that serves as its basis. At its core, Alan Moore
and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is a deconstruction of superhero comics. Comics prior to Watchmen
were made in the Bronze Age, which came directly after and largely mimicked the Silver Age,
a time when they were at their height of popularity yet were stifled by government regulations.
During the Silver Age, the Comics Code censored them so that they adhered to strident rules:
advocating that good should always triumph over evil and forbidding any sexual perversion
or excessive violence. The Bronze Age largely replicated many tropes of the Silver Age,
though its comics were darker and more laden with social commentary.
However by the 1980s, comics were beginning to more meaningfully rebel against these restrictions--
giving way to Watchmen, which obliterated these rules altogether. Watchmen depicts a
world where things aren’t black and white. The so-called heroes are morally-conflicted
and sometimes downright awful. Even the villain’s nefarious plot is all in the name of averting
nuclear armageddon. Just take it from Alan Moore--
I think with… things like Watchmen, if they succeed it is because they transcend the superhero
genre. They take it somewhere where it had not previously been...The more hopeless the
genre the better, really, because people are gonna be more surprised if you do something
good with it.”
Zack Snyder’s Watchmen emerged at a similar period to its namesake comic -- superhero
films had been dominating the pop culture landscape. X-Men, Spiderman, and later, Iron
Man ushered in a resurgence of family-friendly, superheroes at the multiplex. These films
dominated the box-office, in turn leading to darker, more adult superhero stories like
The Dark Knight. So the time was seemingly perfect for Snyder to obliterate the family-friendly
reputation of superhero films and adapt Watchmen not as a satire of comic books but of comic
book movies.
Snyder does so by filling his version of Watchmen with graphic violence. Most superhero films
eschew the inherent violence their so-called heroes cause. Batman punches thugs senselessly,
Iron Man blasts bad guys with his rays… And yet -- we never saw any of the carnage
these violent acts would naturally cause. Everything is 100% PG-13. But in Watchmen,
we see everything.
Take for instance the scene where Dan & Laurie are attacked by a gang in an alleyway. In
the comic, this scene is just Dan & Laurie punching a few goons. We see a few bloodied
faces, a broken arm… But that’s it. In Snyder’s version, however, this scene is
depicted in exacting detail, detail that YouTube will probably flag us for showing uncensored
- sorry.
One could argue that all this gore was intentional. Snyder, commenting on the dark nature of the
film, said:--
"What's popular about The Dark Knight is that it's a superhero movie at its core. When Batman
puts on his costume, that's badass: 'Yeah Batman, go kick some ass'. Watchmen is an
entirely different experience: it punishes the audience. It says: "Oh you like the Comedian?
Oh, he's a rapist, by the way… I wanted people to think it's going to be a standard
superhero movie, and then they're confronted by all these ideas."
By showcasing this violence, Snyder draws attention to how comic book films refuse to
acknowledge the destruction and darkness implicit to the idea of vigilantism, satirizing superhero
films just as Moore did to comics before him…. So pretty deep, right? Well...
Look, there’s no denying that Zack Snyder is a gifted filmmaker who can stage an action
sequence like no other…
But these intricate fights are a significant departure from the graphic novel, which in
comparison is fairly light on action. Yes, of course, there are fight scenes scattered
throughout the book; but they’re always depicted in hyper-realistic fashion: Quick,
brutal, and over in less than a page or two. Moore here lampoons the typical long-winded,
elegantally-staged superhero fight by depicting what these fights would actually look like
in reality. By contrast, as YouTuber Kaptain Kristian notes the most vivid depiction of
violence comes not from traditional superhero antics, but as a result of Ozymandias’ destruction
of New York.
Moore never wanted to glorify Watchmen’s heroes or their antics. When heroes look back
on their past, it’s a pathetic form of nostalgia. The comic even frequently invokes a perfume
called nostalgia to drive the point home.
As such, all the present-day fight scenes in the comic deliberately don’t match the
rose-tinted way the supers view their past heroics.
The best example of this is Hollis Mason’s death. Moore juxtaposes Mason getting beat
to death with the old-man flashing back to his glory days, beating up the baddies and
saving the day. Yet in the present reality, not a single punch of the elderly Hollis is
shown, only his fantasies of youthful violence.
However, in Snyder’s version of Hollis Mason’s death, the elder crime fighter goes out with
a bang, landing a series of punches and dying with a kind of macho dignity.
The fight scene only reinforces Mason’s rose-tinted vision of the past-- he really
was just as heroic as he thinks he was, which is the antithesis of what Moore was saying
in the comic. By giving us a veritable show of bad-assery, Snyder doesn’t so much as
subvert the genre… he reinforces it. Whereas the comic was anti-nostalgia, the film is
adamantly pro-nostalgia. When Silk Spectre and Nite Owl don their capes again, it’s
a moment of triumph in Snyder’s version. There are even hero shots of the two--
comic features Silke Spectre and Nite Owl reliving their glory days by having a nerdy
discussion about how to accommodate fire victims by moving a steering column. The rescue culminates
in them serving coffee to their wards. By contrast, Snyder has Nite Owe epicly shred
a water tower with a gatling gun
(Bullet Sound fx)
- (Jared) While Silk Spectre does a bonafide “super hero landing”
- (Deadpool) Superhero landing! She’s gonna do a superhero landing!
- (Jared) Whereas the comic depicts an impotent nerd needing to play with his gadgets to feel
like a man, the film cures this impotence with actual bad-assery.
By glorifying these superheroes' actions both in the present and past, Snyder undercuts
the moral ambiguity of the original Watchmen, glossing over many of the less desirable traits
of the characters.
Take Rorschach, a character the anarchist Moore created to make fun of Steve Ditko’s
Ayn Rand-inspired “The Question.” Moore portrays Rorshach as a misanthrope who is
obsessed with other people fucking. He reads the New Frontiersman, a far-right paper that
supports the KKK, echoes Reagan-era talking points about “welfare queens,” calls the
Silk Spectre an “bloated aging whore” and just generally stands for everything that
Moore personally detests.
Snyder keeps a few of these flourishes
- (Rorsach) The first Silk Spectre is a bloated aging whore
- (Jared) But keeps mostly to the more appealing nihilistic journal entries. Even the questionable
comments Rorschach makes are repurposed in Snyder’s version. For instance-- in the
comics and the movie, Rorschach speculates if Ozymandias could be a homosexual.
This was meant to be more of a critique on Rorschach’s obsession with so-called deviant
sex… but in Snyder’s version-- Rorschach’s belief is taken as fact: Ozymandias is revealed
to have a hidden file on his computer labeled Boys--
Thus Rorschach’s world view is given more extra legitimacy. Instead of the morally-complex
weirdo from the comics, Rorschach becomes the voice of reason and the audience surrogate
of Snyder’s film.
So we’re stuck at a bit of a stalemate between deep or dumb… which means only one thing--
Watchmen may have started out just as a lampoon on the superhero genre, but as Moore wrote
the series, it began to become something far deeper.
“[Watchmen] started off as a silly-ass superhero story… [But] what I eventually came to the
conclusion of about Watchmen was that the most important thing in it was its structure.
And I think, at the end, that Watchmen's structure was what it was about. It was about a certain
way of viewing reality. It was about a kind of perception which I think was perhaps not
as prominent in 1985 as it is now, and as I think it will be in the near future. It's
not a linear perception of things that we do increasingly have in the 21st century.”
See, Moore wanted to challenge readers’ perception. He believed in a post Relativity/Einstein
world, time could no longer be considered a linear construct. How we perceive the world
was inherently incomplete. Events don’t occur linearly but are happening simultaneously.
Through the structure of Watchmen-- and in particular through Dr. Manhattan & Ozymandias,
Moore sought to prove this point. Just as Dr. Manhattan views time non-linearly, the
comic is structured so that the past, present and future are constantly blurring together.
Quote Moore, “...We tried to make Watchmen structured so that images recur all the way
through, linking the present with the past and the future, giving foreshadowings of things
that have yet to come, giving echoes of things that have already happened.”
And later in the comic, Ozymandias watches events unfurl on multiple television screens,
mirroring how a person would read the comic itself.
“Adrian Veidt is watching six channels at once and so, at various points in Watchmen,
are the readers. It's multi-channel viewing.”
By exposing readers to a non-linear comic book, Moore sought to challenge how readers
perceived their own reality. Similarly, Snyder uses his version of Watchmen to comment on
the same. Except for Snyder-- he isn’t interested in how time and space shape perceptions of
reality; instead the filmmaker zeroes in on how pop culture and media have warped people’s
perceptions.
“With their comic, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons were saying, ”Superheroes are kinda funky,
aren’t they?” We build upon that with a movie that acknowledges that superhero movies
have affected pop culture.”
To prove this point, Snyder fills Watchmen with touchstones from pop culture with one
crucial addition-- superheroes.
By doing so, Snyder literalizes the impact of comic-book films on viewers, showing how
the emergence of superheroes changes familiar moments in pop culture (that we all know and
remember).
“[Watchmen] almost superimposes its heroes on your world, which then changes how you
view your world through its prism. That’s the genius of this book. That’s what we
try and do in the movie. The movie is a challenge — sort of like the book is a challenge — to
your icons, your morality, how you perceive pop culture, how you perceive mythology, and
for that matter, how you perceive God.”
Everything in Watchmen is filtered through pop-culture… even history itself.
When Dr. Manhattan fights in the Vietnam War,
(Flight of the Valkyries plays)
- (Jared) Snyder recreates this historical moment through the prism of the most famous
Vietnam War movie ever made -- Apocalypse Now, using the same music cue from Coppola’s
film.
(Gunshots, Flight of the Valkyries soars in the background)
Later, Snyder uses his soundtrack choices to reference the art film Koyaanisqatsi: Life
out of Balance.
(Organ music plays)
That non-narrative film juxtaposes beautiful scenes of nature with the chaos of modern
life, an apt choice for a man who left Earth because of the mayhem of humanity.
(The same organ music plays)
Even the war room Richard Nixon and his generals use is modeled after a famous film…
- (President Muffley) Gentleman you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!
- (Jared) All these examples expose how we perceive and filter the world through media
and pop culture. It’s not just a meta-wink that Hollis Mason has a copy of Moore’s
Watchmen on his shelf; it’s yet another example of how pop culture (a comic book like
Watchmen) influences and shapes Snyder’s (and by proxy our) perception of the world.
This theme culminates with Ozymandias, watching dozens of TV screens (a la the comic book).
But unlike Moore’s original intent (Ozymanidas watching these screens mirrors how viewers
read the comic), Snyder instead uses this moment to play on how reality is warped by
pop culture. All the images on the screen reference different films and programs that
influenced and shaped Zack Snyder, the filmmaker. There’s The Road Warrior, Looney Tunes,
The Day the Earth Stood Still, Fail Safe, and more.
So what are we to make of Snyder’s Watchmen? Has the filmmaker betrayed everything Alan
Moore’s comic stood for (glorifying its heroes and compromising the moral ambiguity
of Moore’s work)? Or has Snyder skillfully adapted Watchmen for our pop-culture saturated
times? Ultimately it all depends on your perception -- If you view Watchmen through the lens of
Moore’s original intent, then Watchmen’s pretty dumb. But if you view the film through
Snyder’s signature style and vision, then the film could be considered deep. Even after
all of this, we’re still pretty split on the merits of this movie, but for what its
worth, I tend to lean towards the “deep” side whereas many of our writers lean towards
“dumb.” But honestly, I can see both sides..
So, what do you think? Is Watchmen deep or dumb? Has your perception of the film changed
at all? Let us know in the comments below. Thanks to all our patrons for supporting the
channel and our podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe and we’ll catch you next time guys.