Be sober and watch...

Rating: Null/10 (27 September 2009)

I did read "Watchmen" when it first came out but I wasn't amazingly impressed by it. Best "graphic novel" of all time? Really? I may have been too young to appreciate it, 22 or so.
(I'm re-reading it now and it really is ground-breaking. I WAS too young or stupid.)
In the comic, there was more of an emphasis on "The End Is Near" doom-sayers in the streets with only one example in the film, the billboard that the unmasked Rorschach carries. OK, 2 examples.
To me, the movie came off as a superhero soap opera with some dark moments and bone-crunching. Rorshach and The Comedian were dark and driven and gave good performances.
There seemed a huge contradiction at the end where Doc Manhattan acknowledged that he couldn't change human nature but that if no one told the truth about the nuclear event, peace would reign. Depending on your point of view, war is in the hands of mankind, God or the gods and presumably, if human nature doesn't change then we can expect war to pick up again after everyone catches their collective breath. World peace is a pipe dream and if Doc Manhattan buys it, he's not too bright.
Since the ax I like to grind is male/female relationships and the lies we tell ourselves re: that subject, I have to say I was astounded by the fight/rape scene between the Comedian and Miss Jupiter. He says "yes", she says "no" and gives him a powerful sock to the jaw with all the usual Hollywood sound-effects. He falls to the ground. In any other film, he'd get up, say "...but, BAbydoll..", rub his jaw and walk out angrily. Not here.
The Comedian punches her in the stomach, gets up and hits her twice (?) in the face, HARD, kicks her while she's down then picks up her up, slams her into a pool table and smashes her face on the table.
Huh? Life is complex and I'm not an advocate of easy solutions. I don't believe in male violence against women or female violence against men. Both genders are violent, stupid and emotional and men are usually stronger.
HOWEVER, I was astounded to see a scene in a Hollywood film where a woman strikes the first blow, as is often the case, and the man gets up and beats the crap out of her. Do I advocate it? No. But, here in this fantasy film, we are seeing more realism than all the other idiotic films where a woman hits a man, knocks him down and he gets up and apologizes to her.
A woman hits a man and a man hits her back, beating her up! A Hollywood revelation! THEN, we find out that she has sex with him years later, consensual presumably, that they conceive a child and that the Comedian has warm feelings for the grown-up daughter, which the aging, possibly jealous, wife attacks as sexual when they probably aren't. (There are also about 214 visual cues that the Comedian is in love with Miss Jupiter but doesn't express it very well.)
A rape scene where a woman gets beat up followed years later by consensual sex.
THEN, Miss Jupiter graces us with the well-observed revelation that "...the future keeps getting darker while the past, even the grimy parts, get lighter." She then feeds us the pap that she's thankful for the Comedian for giving her a daughter but there's no acknowledgment of why she went to a man who tried to rape her to conceive that daughter.
The message here is undesirable but clear. Miss Jupiter is sexually intrigued by the Comedian because of, or despite, his violence. When she hit him in the rape scene she probably got more in return than she bargained for but, if it's reasonable for her to hit him, it's reasonable that he'll hit her back and defeat her.
Is the Comedian a good guy? Well, he may be an anti-hero, a sign of the times but he's no hero. The pregnant Vietnamese woman rips his face with a beer bottle and he kills her. Was it a reasonable reaction on his part? No. Was it a reasonable ACTION on her part? No, it was a stupid action and she paid the ultimate price.
Hollywood owes me an apology for making me thankful for a scene where a woman hits a man (Miss Jupiter) and he actually HITS HER BACK. It's DARK, it's SCARY but it's realism.
You can't cry out for the end of domestic violence while female characters in Hollywood are knocking out men with a right hook. What kind of message does THAT send?