Who watched Watchmen? (complete with SPOILERZ)

Movies
501

Well, I already pointed out that 21 Grams is not linear in the same way Watchmen is, but perhaps I wasn’t clear. Watchmen goes from Point A to Point F and hits B, C, D, and E on the way. Actually, it goes from whatever time the book starts on, to midnight, but it does it in a straight line. It’s the most basic, conventional narrative arc since a villain tied a damsel to the railway tracks in silent movies and we cut back and forth between the approaching train and the struggling maiden. Pulp Fiction has more to say about the impermanence of existence (with its structure that has Vincent Vega popping up again after he’s been shot) than Watchmen does.

However just a moment ago you said it was meaningful because the reader can skip ahead 20 pages if they like. Now you say it’s because you can’t change the next panel. But skipping from panel 6 on page 14 to panel 1 on page 27 is doing just that: changing the next panel for you, the reader.

And if this is now your analysis: that the consumer of the comic can no more change the next panel that Doc M can change his future, then how is that different from film, which in a cinema at least, is less flexible than a comic; you can’t skip ahead 10 scenes. And if this makes us understand Doc M then why doesn’t it make us understand all the other characters? Doc M’s story isn’t presented any differently than that of any other character.

Your point seems to be that Doc M experiences things happening simultaneously and therefore can only work in a comic because… I dunno? Because the story is all there in one piece in your hands? And you can jump to any part in it? Seems like a pretty tenuous link to me.

502

That’s true. Moore is very good at tailoring a book to an artist’s strengths (Gaiman’s great at this too), but I’m sure the strict panel structure came from Moore. That said, one of the great things the movie does do well is underscore exactly how awesome Gibbons visuals are, something that tends to get overlooked when comics nerds like me get all moony over Moore.

503

It doesn’t change what’s on the panel. It just changes the order in which you perceive it. (I should note that I haven’t actually seen 21 Grams, but I assume you still watch the film in real-time, yes?)

And if this is now your analysis: that the consumer of the comic can no more change the next panel that Doc M can change his future, then how is that different from film, which in a cinema at least, is less flexible than a comic; you can’t skip ahead 10 scenes. And if this makes us understand Doc M then why doesn’t it make us understand all the other characters? Doc M’s story isn’t presented any differently than that of any other character.

It most certainly is presented differently, but the difference is subtle. Take a close look at the structure of the panels in the Manhattan issue.

A film is something you experience in linear real-time. You can’t change that, or rather you can’t until you get the DVD and can jump around from scene to scene, but even that is clunky. With a comic (and novels too, incidentally), you experience the book at your own pace. You can flip back and forth on the fly as you read. If you see an image that tweaks something in your mind, you can flip back and see what it is, instantly. You can take as much or as little time on each panel as you want.

Films, obviously, do not grant this. If you’re watching a movie in a theatre, you can’t demand that the movie rewind back to something earlier so you can sit there and contemplate it’s significance. You have to rely on your memory which, unless you’re a savant, is unreliable at the best of times.

As an aside, the emergence of DVD and the internet is changing things with regards to narrative. Look at something like Lost, a show that is able to cram huge amounts of detail into the background and margins because they assume a large portion of the audience has the ability to pause and rewind things at will.

Your point seems to be that Doc M experiences things happening simultaneously and therefore can only work in a comic because… I dunno? Because the story is all there in one piece in your hands? And you can jump to any part in it? Seems like a pretty tenuous link to me.

It might seem that way to you, but to me it’s at the very heart of what makes a comic a different medium than film. Which is what we’re talking about.

504

21 Grams changes the order in which you receive story information. And it doesn’t happen in real time. Almost no movies do.

When someone speaks about an event happening in ‘real time’ they’re referring to a 1:1 ratio of action to experience. Almost no film happens in real time. Most films have a character leave their apartment and arrive at work two seconds later, even if the office is halfway across town. Film works best when it’s compressing time. There have only been a few films that attempted to present a story in real time - Nick Of Time, with Johnny Depp is one: the story in the film is supposed to take place over the course of 90 minutes and the film is 90 minutes in length and tries to convince the viewer that the ratio is 1:1.

You’re speaking about continuous time, and yeah, that’s true: film takes place in continuous time, except when we get it home and into our DVD machines and run it back and forward and stop it wherever we like and jump around to whatever scene we want to see. Which is different from a comic book…how? I don’t see it. Jumping around in a comic book or a movie will net you a bunch of scenes with no context.

Anyway, so now this is getting nutty, and I don’t have the time nor inclination to play cut-and-paste call-and-answer with you :)

I’m glad you enjoy the comic book as much as you do.

505

It is impossible to read a comic in a way that doesn’t allow the time-insensitive jumping / lingering around. It is not impossible to view a film in that manner.

In fact, it’s impossible for a comic to exist that doesn’t allow that sort of skipping around, or more specifically, that doesn’t involve intentionality on the part of the comic artist with regards to what is in panels and what is not in panels. It an essential aspect of the format. This decision making process is not an essential aspect of the film format: ie it is possible to simply film 90 minutes of consecutive events in real time, and that will be a 90 minute film.

This is a distinction that is separate from any particular work within the medium. Whether or not this aspect has a material impact on a particular work is subject to individual interpretation, and I’m not speaking as to whether it affected this particular film at the moment. You seem to be arguing that there’s no essential difference between what can be done in comic form and what can be done in film, and I don’t believe that is true, or that that is a matter that is subject to interpretation.

506

Part of the craft of filmmaking is intentional decisions as to what’s in each shot, how it’s blocked, and editted together, and that intentionality is extremely important. It’s a different set of decisions, of course; the structure of cuts and edits being standard is what makes the occasional well-done tracking shot or single take or whatnot jump out, and that’s a pretty obvious parallel to things like Watchmen breaking the grid now and then. (As a last stretch of the analogy, oft-fairly-maligned shakycam jump cuts is the equivalent to, say, comics deciding that a 3x3 grid is too staid, and the way to really add zazz is to make it 9x9, only with the panels misaligned, some of them tilted, and others hiding partially behind others.)

Of course it’s possible to just film 90 minutes of whatever, but that’d end up being really crappy in much the same way a comic just consisting of X frames of careless whatever (Lookouts!) would be. The rare film that goes for 1:1–your Ropes and Nick of Times and Time Code (also noteworthy for having four frames simultaneously competing for attention)–are carefully constructed to achieve that illusion.

507

I’m not arguing anything CLWheeljack; I’m only trying to understand what Matt meant when he said that Watchmen is about comics. And I think now that it has to do with being able to take as long as you want, to linger or speed past, any particular panel in a comic book. Or that seems to be what madkevin is saying. I still don’t see how Watchmen exploits this function of all comic books better than any other comic but I think I understand more clearly what people are talking about.

Partly, my interest has to do with the fact that I’m a film editor. It is my job to decide how long you, the viewer, see this shot of the gun on the floor and in what shot size (a mid shot, a close up?) and how does this shot relate to the one before it and the one that comes after it? And with comics, the artist has decided for you the shot size and what you’re looking at but you get to go through it at your own pace.

That’s all.

508

I said you watch the movie in real time. If you’re in a theatre, and the movie is 100 minutes long, then everybody in that theatre will be done watching it in 100 minutes. But if you give a copy of Watchmen (or any book) to 100 different people, they will each read it in 100 different times.

A DVD allows you to jump around in the time frame of a movie, sure. But how often do you actually do this? How many times have you sat down and actually jumped back and forth between scenes? More importantly, how many movies have ever been made where they assume you’re going to be experiencing it in that fashion? (Memento, maybe, is the only one I can think of.)

Comics do this as a matter of course. You naturally read a comic by flipping back and forth between panels, to catch something you may have missed. (When I first read Poison River, my copy looked like it had been attacked by stack of wild, roaming Post-It packs.) It’s such a deep part of how people read comics that most readers take it totally for granted.

The reason Watchmen is so often compared to Citizen Kane is because, like Citizen Kane, it took a look at the structure of it’s medium and recontextualized it in a way not seen in the mainstream. Citizen Kane uses the viewer’s assumption of a camera that is objective and turns it around - in Citizen Kane, the camera is almost always subjective, showing you not the truth but rather a specific character’s memory of the truth. We never really see Charles Foster Kane - we only see how other people perceived him. Watchmen does something similar with comics, linking how we read a comic to a grander theme of how we view time.

In a normal, not-written-by-a-mad-English-genius comic, you’re right in noting that this peculiarity of comics is incidental or meaningless to understanding the comic. But in Watchmen, it is completely integral. Panels mirror other panels, motifs are repeated and distorted, details reveal associations and clues.

509

I don’t know nearly enough about film editing to be able to speak to how cuts and framing differ in the two media. I just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page, thanks for clarifying your question.

Because I don’t really know much about film, I’ll just give an example of a place where I think the difference is illustrated. When Rorschach breaks into Manhattan’s lab to warn him about the murders, Manhattan teleports him outside the complex mid-sentence. Snyder recreates this scene almost exactly in the film. In a comic panel, it makes sense that Rorschach finishes his sentence even after he’s outside because everything in the panel happens in one “moment”. Even though we know that it takes time for a person to speak, the words are all on the panel at once, and we take them in as though they were instantaneous. In Snyder’s version, Rorschach continues talking for a couple of seconds even after it’s clear to the viewer that he isn’t in the room anymore. It isn’t quite the same as physical momentum, which we can see and understand clearly. He doesn’t even trail off, he just finished the sentence. It feels strange as a result. You can argue around this in all sorts of ways (his mental state, whether there’s physical sensation to being teleported, etc), but to me that felt very strange and artificial. Rorschach wasn’t reacting properly to the events around him in the time frame in which they were happening.

In films, everything takes time: the time it takes the viewer to experience what is on screen. In a comic, everything takes both infinite time (the user’s experience) and no time at all (each individual panel is completely frozen). Manhattan’s powers and view of the world is an extension of this strange dichotomous nature of time in comics. As I said, I don’t really have a solid background to explain these differences, so that’s the best I can do. I hope that helps, somewhat.

510

@CLWhweeljack: That’s interesting. I’ll dig out the comic tonight and take a look. My wife and I just watched the movie yesterday so it’s fresh in my coconut.

511

Hopefully I’m not overstating my case. There are a couple shot-for-shot recreations of the comic in the film, and many of them felt awkward to me at the time (although i haven’t yet re-watched it since it was in theaters, so I couldn’t recall the others off-hand).

The only other one I do recall is the scene where Laurie visits Night Owl, and they have a long conversation in a hallway, or something. The shot is framed exactly like a comic panel, but as a result they are just standing, for an awkwardly long time, in a hallway talking, which people usually don’t do. I’ve since decided that this might have served, in context, to highlight Night Owl’s awkwardness, and the discomfort he felt due to his attraction to her. Of course, the framing works in either medium (showing physical space between them). But I recall thinking that it was just a little too drawn out to feel natural in context.

I may have been hyper attenuated for that sort of thing when going into the film (I admit I may not have been the most impartial viewer of that movie), but that was my recollection. Given your experience in film editing, I’d like to hear your views on the matter either way.

512

I had no knowledge of the comic – I actually thought Watchmen was more like a graphic novel – but I thought the movie got off to a bang (loved the alternate future references) and then squandered its goodwill by being too long and too focused on its blandest characters. I wish there’d been even more of Rorschach.

But to the extent that I did like it, I liked it more than I’ve liked a superhero movie since the original Batman and Superman.

Peter

(Edit: Oops. Forgot about the first Spiderman movie, which I did enjoy a good deal more (albeit in a less complicated way) than Watchmen.)

513

I didn’t have any of these complaints. I will admit that Veidt and Laurie were the two weakest links in the acting department, but I felt they both did a pretty good job. I hadn’t read the comic till after I saw the movie. Goode actually pulled off one of the more notable performances I felt. He seemed really detached the whole time, but I never thought he would have been the villian until you actually learned about the twist. I thought that was just the way he acted. And the attack on him in the office just sealed it for me. I thought he was the good guy. Maybe knowing the twist beforehand makes you think he is over-playing his part? But I didn’t see it coming. I definitely could tell from the book that his character in the movie was a big change.

Maybe reading the comic gives you a different expectation from those characters? I don’t know… I thought everyone was pretty much spot on.

514

Wow, that was painfully unfunny. You should re-edit your post to remove the link so nobody has to suffer through that again.

515

That’s a good point.

It seems to me – contrary to what I think Matt Keil was trying to say – that nothing central to Watchmen was lost in the adaptation to film. Instead, it just had to make some of the same sorts of compromises as any film adaptation, particularly in the way Moore used the medium.

Well, you could argue that from Moore’s point of view that’s the entirety of what makes his endeavors worthwhile.

Moore is constantly complaining that what he does is easy, and that if only everyone would do it comics would be much better. From what I’ve read he has a bit of a blind spot about his unique ability to blend together the ridiculous and the sublime.

One thing that I totally accept is lost in the film is an assumed familiarity with comic book and superhero motifs. All that stuff is lost on me, and I suspect it’s one reason I never really had the patience to read the whole Watchmen book. So I imagine Snyder can’t really hit on that stuff the way Moore did.

Right. The metaphors are (at least to Moore) largely a distillation of the medium.

I think there was a bit of that—like putting Batman & Robin nipples on the Ozymandias costume,. And I think the opening credits really were hitting some of the same notes. But in the end the need to slavishly recreate so much of the book may have worked against the film.

I also think the ending didn’t suffer from not being the same, it didn’t work because it wasn’t effectively written. Instead it became a ridiculous mish-mash.

But it was putting Dr. Manhattan’s signature “Nothing ends Adrian. Nothing ever ends,” line into Laurie’s mouth that really showed, to my mind, a complete misunderstanding of the story on a fundamental level. It undermines the nature of the characters (which I think happened a lot), and it misses the point that Watchmen is as much a meta-narrative about storytelling as it is a story. That moment where Dr. Manhattan basically collapses Veidt’s entire house of cards is something that would have translated beautifully into film, and the fact that it was so badly botched is literally tragic, in every sense, except in the most important one: that it undermines the true tragedy of the story of Watchmen.

  • Ha ha, I just compared The Watchmen to Chicago, a frivolous musical! Take that, comic book nerds!

And Chicago gets the same notes absolutely right, FWIW.

516

Sorry to have ignored the thread for so many posts now, but all I’ll say in addition is that I think you need to read Watchmen again, this time with an eye to what it is saying about its own medium.

This is really the core of what I was getting at but having trouble phrasing it as succinctly as this. To me the loss of that perspective robs the story of much of its appeal and impact. For others it may not, but the transition to film unavoidably loses what makes Watchmen great to me. As a movie fan I don’t often agree with the “I feel sorry for people who will never experience this in its original form” routine, but in this case I wholeheartedly do. It’s unfortunate that a large chunk of the audience will judge Watchmen by what they saw on the screen and not what they could have read on the page. I suspect it’s similar to what Tolkien fans might feel about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.

517

Hey Matt, well that’s going to be a problem. While I appreciate this discussion, I would never have gotten involved in it if Watchmen hadn’t been made into a film. That transition is the one I’m interested in. I don’t read comics, I don’t know enough about comics to be able to tell what Watchmen is saying about its own medium, and frankly, for reasons that I won’t go into here because of the epic backlash they will invoke, I find reading Watchmen to be a very unpleasant experience.

@CLWheeljack: I did return to the comic to examine that moment when Doc M zaps Rorshach back outside the complex and, it actually happens across three panels, which for me, makes it less instantaneous.

So, I dunno, I’m sure your experience of that moment is different than mine - which I guess is what you and madkevin are getting at: the pacing of film is prescribed while comics are described and you, the reader provide your own momentum. Which as an editor is terrifying to me because I’m all about building to moments and then reducing, a lot like movements in music - shot sizes and pacing and sfx and dialogue are all analogous to notes on a staff - I wonder if comic book artists find that lack of control scary?

Anyway, thanks for your comments and insight.

518

Fair enough. I didn’t find watching Watchmen to be unpleasant, but I did find it to be a rather empty experience, which was both surprising and disappointing. The skeleton of the comic is still present in the film, but it was stripped of so many of its layers that it just doesn’t work for me. The bare bones plot of Watchmen was never what attracted me to it.

@CLWheeljack: I did return to the comic to examine that moment when Doc M zaps Rorshach back outside the complex and, it actually happens across three panels, which for me, makes it less instantaneous.

I actually thought the zapping of Rorschach was done pretty well, but I did think it took too long to get to it. The impact of the scene in the book comes from how little is said between them and how quickly Manhattan just eliminates him. It takes a lot longer in the film than I ever envisioned it taking in the comic.

So, I dunno, I’m sure your experience of that moment is different than mine - which I guess is what you and madkevin are getting at: the pacing of film is prescribed while comics are described and you, the reader provide your own momentum. Which as an editor is terrifying to me because I’m all about building to moments and then reducing, a lot like movements in music - shot sizes and pacing and sfx and dialogue are all analogous to notes on a staff - I wonder if comic book artists find that lack of control scary?

I think there are enough visual and artistic tricks to keep your eye moving quickly or slow it down that a talented artist feels he has decent control over what the reader is experiencing. Obviously it’s not an exact science, but just like film, comics have a visual language of whose effects the reader may not always be aware.

519

It’s interesting to hear other people’s opinions on the matter. Individual scenes aside, the slavish devotion to recreating comic panels really highlighted the extent to which I’ve always taken for granted the instantaneous nature of the frozen time in a comic panel.

520

I saw the “regular edition” last night. Frankly, I was underwhelmed. The story is dodgy and many of the characters aren’t anything more than cardboard-cutout deep I liked the batman-looking guy and had some (minor) empathy for Rorschach, but that was about it. The chick was particularly heinous, but so was Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan was rather dull as well.

The plot was pretty convoluted and it wasn’t easy to follow. Not a horrid movie, but overall I give this movie just two stars.