Graphic, but not so novel
Not all comic-book adaptations are created equal
By Dorothy Woodend
Watchmen, a graphic novel by Alan Moore, is something of a holy icon in comic book world. I have this on good authority, having asked a number of men (mostly in their mid-thirties) who maintain that when Watchmen was released, in the mid1980s, it was like a bomb going off. "We'd never seen anything like it before," is what most of their comments boiled down to.
Why do they love it so much? Let me sum up. A cold-war tale set in an alternate-history 1985, Watchmen is a peek behind the mask into the psychology of superheroes and heroines. The graphic novel — and it is a novel — is layered with multiple stories that cut back and forth, every frame jammed with inside jokes and visual puns. Running underneath each individual adventure is the gonzo hand of fate, like some great cosmic banana peel, popping up when you least expect it. (More than one critic has compared Moore to Orson Welles.) Watchmen is the only comic book to win a Hugo Award, and the coming film adaptation has already inspired wild speculation: will it be good or a terrible disappointment?
Certainly, the film adaptations of Moore's work have not served him well to date. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and V for Vendetta were variously dreadful. In an interview with film-buff website spout.com, Watchmen illustrator Dave Gibbons said that Moore has disowned this film too, on account of his bad cinematic experiences.
In trying to deduce why, we can learn something from another comic book-cum-film author: Frank Miller, who provides Moore with an odd kind of alter-anti-hero. The pair are contemporaries; Miller was born in 1957 and Moore a few year earlier in 1953. Miller is American, Moore is British. Watchmen should reach movie screens in March 2009 (although legal wrangling over the film rights may well delay the film's release, much to the screaming consternation of comic geeks everywhere). Meanwhile, Miller's film version of Will Eisner's seminal comic-book series, The Spirit, is planned for release in December 2008.
The pair also share a common link in Hollywood in the form of director Zack Snyder, who directed the film version of Miller's graphic novel 300, and is now directing Moore's Watchmen. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Moore expressed doubts about Snyder's ability to bring Watchmen to cinematic realization. "I didn't particularly like the book 300," he said. "I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: [that] it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid."
What Moore actually thinks of the finished version of Watchmen isn't known, since he won't talk about it and mostly appears to simply want to be left alone. But he has talked about Miller. "Miller's trapped in a teenage world of macho violence," he told The Word, a British magazine. "Look at Sin City. Every woman is a bloodthirsty, semi-naked whore; every man is a indestructible killing machine. It's nasty, misogynist, Neanderthal Teenage, but it sells."
Sin City, the film version of his comic book series, was Miller's directorial debut (he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez). Like Moore, Miller's work was incendiary when first unleashed. Sin City, with its neo-noir stylings and graphic sensibilities (and I don't mean simply in the aesthetic sense) was bloody, more than a little sadomasochistic and possessed of a nasty aftertaste that lingered in the throat.
In Miller's universe, men are men, women aren't wearing very much, and villains deserve whatever they get, which is usually some form of dismemberment. His female characters are predominantly prostitutes: glamorous, be-thonged and in need of protection by and from various hard men. Miller's appeal is that his black-and-white ideas about sex, violence and revenge — the triple threat of American culture — are mainlined into a sleek package, making his work ideal for film adaptation.
Transmuting Moore's work into cinema is much more problematic, not only because of its scope, but perhaps more importantly, because of its million shades of gray. Moore's work exhaustively explores not only differing political ideologies — fascism versus anarchy, for instance — but cultural, historical and social complexities.
To take one example, the amount of research involved in From Hell, Moore's retelling of the Jack the Ripper story, was chin dropping. Where Frank Miller has been accused of glorifying whoredom, Alan Moore crawls inside the seamy, despairing reality of prostitution in Victorian London. It is not a pretty sight, and a world away from the fantasy whores that populate Miller's work. In their original incarnations, V for Vendetta or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen functioned as thoughtful, erudite meditations on society at large. Although the stories were fantastical, the ideas and the culture they explored were very real.
Moore has argued that the main thrust of his work is to prepare people for an infinitely more complicated world. He has already achieved this multiple times — witness the prescience of the all-seeing security cameras featured in V for Vendetta, or even more eerily, in Watchmen, the devastation wrought in New York City in the name of a greater cause.
The most troubling aspect of adapting a literary work like Watchmen to film is that cinema, even good cinema, so often involves and even demands a type of reduction, stripping away density and replacing it with a one-dimensional world-view. The previous film versions of Moore's stories flattened out the complexities, and effectively made each intricately plotted marvel into a child's cartoon drawing.
Miller's work does entirely the opposite, in that it is a purposeful return to a simpler age, a step backwards into a time when good and evil were apparently well-defined. In a recent interview with NPR, Miller drew comparisons between the current U.S. involvement in Iraq with that of an earlier engagement. "Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany," he said. "It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism, we're doing the same thing now." The notion that things ever were, or ever will be that simple is, to borrow Alan Moore's words, "sublimely stupid."
The comic book, according to Alan Moore, has long been a degraded art form. His initial impulse in writing comics was ultimately a redemptive one, to take this most lowly of media, and charge it with greatness. I would argue that while Miller's intent is probably similar, what he achieves is reductionist, making comics even more like cartoons, through the forcible injection of extreme violence, heaps of plastic sex, and, most unforgivably, jingoistic propaganda.
If we need any more evidence of dumbing down of the form, witness Miller's newest graphic novel. It features Batman taking on al-Qaeda, and it's called Holy Terror, Batman! To borrow one of Miller's favoured words, "How retarded is that?"
