Personal Responsibility

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2009)

I saw Watchmen in the theater, I'll see it when it hits our nearby second-run theater, and I'll buy the DVD as soon as it comes out. My bias is clear in discussing this movie.
Outside the theater, I heard various groups of people discussing the movie, and I don't think I'll ever forget what I heard. Teenagers who liked the Saw movies regardless of their gore hadn't enjoyed Watchmen much, although the violence certainly wasn't glossed over in what we'd just seen. Parents who liked bringing their younger children to "comic book stuff" looked like the audience in The Addams Family Values who'd just been sprayed with buckets of fake blood in the Shakespeare scene. In fact, the only people who didn't seem thoroughly disappointed were a few middle-aged people I saw who seemed quietly lost in their thoughts and a (very) few people who'd read the book and were at least enjoying an animated discussion critiquing it.
Standing outside the theater with my stepson and his dad, I was almost paralyzed listening to it all. It was surreal. All the complainers were missing the point by such a small distance it felt tragic, like seeing a brilliant child squander a future before it's even started through some silly and pointless mistakes. They were missing the class that really would have taught them everything because that day they felt like skipping and doing nothing they would ever remember later.
The teenagers missed the point that the blood was irritating because it was complicated by pesky reality. The bravado they assimilate like the air they breathe when they watch violent movies with dialog they parrot later for effect is satisfying because it doesn't come with consequences they can perceive. They don't want to think about how blood and bone really, truly factors into their lives. The impulse to beat a girlfriend really does look as ugly as we saw. Murdering a woman carrying your child is as ghastly as that, and so is standing by and doing nothing while someone else commits the act. War? The boys in the group I saw will encounter the Selective Service soon. Images of war directly relate to them. They could have absorbed the lessons of violence, of being with someone who is as unreachable as Dr. Manhattan, of attempting to control others rather than one's self (Ozymandias) and of the adult struggle to unite our compartmentalized natures while still being adults.
The stunned parents could have learned that surrendering the privilege of parenting to Hollywood is folly. People who wear masks and use violence to enact justice aren't easily understandable to children under the most clear-cut conditions. Teaching children to leave justice to our police and courts while showing them you approve of a SPECIAL kind of ski mask to do the job at the very least merits some serious conversations. Furthermore, bringing children to a movie with no research is like bringing them to a party whose content and participants you know nothing about.
The people prattling about Dr. Manhattan's nudity saddened me. Is the male body now only useful for sexuality? How sad that they couldn't see the symbolism in it, that he was so removed from humanity that even nudity taboos were irrelevant. How sad that they couldn't see the beauty of his form, his entire being. How do men feel, seeing their form as something to look away from with distaste? Not like the book? Since when is a moving picture exactly like a book? Differences always exist, because books aren't movies. That may sound obvious, but apparently some people are startled by it.
My family watched it. We were moved, horrified, and provoked. We were provoked to talk, to reread the graphic novel, and to watch the news differently. We didn't wait for a modern Ozymandias to tell us what the movie would be about, and we seized our personal responsibility to form our own opinions. I hope many, many more people do the same.