An Elegy to Comic Book Mythology

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2014)

THE WATCHMEN presses all the most hallowed cultural buttons with its imagery, and even takes some of the charge off having to grow up in the optimistic sixties only to be gradually disillusioned from there on out. It is brutal and violent in a way that the Comics Code would never approve of, but it leaves no doubt that it is about the death of heroes and perhaps even the deconstruction of Modern Western Mythology. These are heavy, adult themes for a medium ostensibly advertising itself from its very beginnings as being primarily for the amusement of children. You could easily say the adults have hijacked the Comic Book medium for the sole expression of their own angst and concerns and you would not be far from right.
I leafed through the graphic novel by Dan Gibbons and Alan Moore, but I am afraid that the aesthetics of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee have probably prejudiced me in my view of other Comic Book universes. I found the novel dense and difficult to get through and not visually stimulating enough to compel me to make the effort. My intuitive understanding of the Comic Book medium is that the visual is the primary emotional carrier wave and the written text serves to underline and give a thought context to the action being presented. I always thought of Comic Books as storytelling on the cheap; something that was highly derivative and unashamed to borrow heavily from other mediums like film and television. But this was alright, because in it's derivative thinking it was gently pointing to deeper experiences of its subject matter once you were more mature and adult. I fondly remember the trauma of reading 'The Death of Superman' in the comic book and then discovering years later that the ending came pictorially from a movie with William Holden and Jennifer Jones entitled 'Love is a Many Splendored Thing'!
Zack Snyder's film version of THE WATCHMEN is satisfying to me because it makes this constant reference between the surfaces that the medium so successfully explores, and also exploits in many cases, and the darker objectives that often manipulate the display of these surfaces for mass consumption and indoctrination. Nowhere is it written that the employment of words and images must serve the aims of Manifest Destiny or cultural domination or be used to launder the dirty activities of covert operations, but in the universe of THE WATCHMEN this is implied from the first frame onward. The heroism of THE WATCHMEN is flawed and corrupt from the outset and is shown to accrue a force that eventually eats away at itself. This is not your father's Superhero Team, and we come to find out eventually that even they were not all they were cracked up to be.
I liked the ending merely because it makes the subtle suggestion that the truth is not to be found ultimately in the physical forces of this world, but in the voice that resides on the printed page and refuses to be stilled.
This is still a cliché' that I find palatable and amusing when freshly presented.