I'll Have Some Watchmen - But Hold the Squid

Posted 09:12 (GMT) 24th May 2011 by David J. Bishop

Let’s talk about Watchmen. Chances are you’ve seen the film or read the book or both. I’m probably not spoiling anything. If for whatever reason you’re unfamiliar with the story, please experience it in some form or anther before reading what I have to say about it. The film alone was three Goddamn years ago. I’m trading up-to-the-minute relevance here with the ability to discuss all aspects of the plot and the ending of this wonderful work of art. You have been warned.

As with V for Vendetta, I prefer the film adaptation to the graphic novel, although I get the impression that I’m not supposed to. My high-brow graphic-novel-reading friends are horrified when I tell them this. Then again, people are often horrified when I tell them things.

Alan Moore, the writer of both graphic novels, has been very vocal in condemning the mistreatment of his life’s work at the hands of Hollywood film-makers. And, let’s be fair, it has been rough. As in ‘prison shower room’ rough. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen springs to mind as a particularly hateful example. If I was Alan Moore and someone’s first move when adapting a book I’d written for the screen was to retitle it LXG I would start to get the feeling impression that the nuances of my opus would not remain intact.

But V for Vendetta and Watchmen are different animals altogether. I’m the proud owner of both graphic novels and in both cases I saw the film counterparts first. I immediately decided that they were both great stories without realising I was picking a side. When I picked up the V for Vendetta book I was bitterly disappointed to find all my favourites lines of dialogue and scenes were missing from the book, with few exceptions. Imagine my embarrassment! I bought a book so I could club people over the head with how obviously superior the novel is, don'tcherknow only to discover that the V for Vendetta I fell in love with was the one written and produced by the men responsible for the loathsome Matrix sequels. On the other hand, when I picked up the Watchmen book I was delighted to find all my favourite lines of dialogue and scenes were present and completely unchanged, to the point where the book can serve in large part as an extended version of the film.

Finally, then, an adaptation of an Alan Moore book that he can be proud of! Is he? I haven’t really been paying attention. Please tell me, someone, if Alan Moore is happy with the film version of Watchmen.

Now I’m in a difficult position. I generally resent film adaptations that just take the source material as a jumping off point and create their own work of art that ends up only sharing character names and a title with the original, but in the case of V for Vendetta I believe the result was a superior work of art. Then Wathmen comes along with the opposite approach, the most slavishly faithful adaptation of a film I have ever seen, and yet I still prefer the adaptation for all the little changes it makes. And wasn’t I complaining just a few weeks ago about the horrible abuse of Norse Mythology by Marvel comics?

What’s the lesson here? Should adaptations be faithful to the original? Yes, but only if I like the original. And even then, only to the parts I like. There!

Anyway, I assumed that the Watchmen film would be welcomed by fans of the book in the same way that I would welcome a wholly accurate Þrymskviða movie. But all I hear is “Where’s the giant squid?” “I want a giant squid.” “I can’t believe they blah blah blah.” Enough! We get it – a Watchmen sans squid is a wholly different Watchmen to one that keeps its squid in tact. Did you ever stop to think that might be a good thing?

I can explain exactly why Watchmen is better without its squid. My argument is fourfold!

I Understand the Principle of 'Chekhov's Gun' and I Don't Remember Anyone Placing a Squid Over the Mantelpiece
It’s just rushed in there at the end – look, I know that isn’t the fault of the comic because it wasn’t allowed to extend its print run but if the climax of your story focuses on an enormous mollusc with mind powers you need to set up the ingredients for that shit in act one. You can’t just slip in at the last minute that all this was possible because psychics exist. Because people are going to, quite rightly, think “They do? Since when?”

If this is a world with psychics and they will be important to the story at any point you really need to mention them before the half-way mark. Considering the world-building of Watchmen so thoroughly explores the game-changing consequences of all of its supernatural aspects, why does it so completely ignore the ramifications of there being psychics?

Huge chunks of exposition need to be just dropped into the reader’s lap to justify the squid, leading to many lots scenes of superheroes standing around talking and not punching each other. The film has an exposition-heavy climax too, of course, but at least it mixes things up with some dramatic fighting to give you a sense that characters are doing all in their power to stop shit from going down. Especially Night Owl, who actually gets upset and chastises the villain instead of his response in the book which is to shrug, have sex with his girlfriend and fall asleep. Yeah, it’s not exactly the Battle of Pelennor Fields.

I can't say how much of this is the fault of the space restraints and the deadlines etc. but they must have had some idea how they were going to end the book - the result was a load of clunky dialogue that only serves to explain a squid they don't even need.

Squid, This is Not Your Time to Shine
A squid simply does not belong in this story. Is there a squid motif? Is this actually a comic about a squid and I’m too stupid to pick up on the nuances? In my ignorance and knuckle-dragging thickness I was under the impression that Watchmen was an uncompromising deconstruction of superhero tropes, exploring what would motivate somebody to dress in a skin-tight costume and hit people, considering the people who do so in real life are all people with very specific sexual fetishes.

In the same way the Shaun of the Dead asks of zombie films “What if this really happened in England?” and is hilarious, Watchmen asks the same of superheroes and is nightmarish, except replace “England” with “alternate-history Cold War Nixon presidency”. Doubly nightmarish.

I might be getting side-tracked. I’ll start again. Watchmen is really about how scary Superman is. Not just a superman, but the Superman. By having so many powers – super-speed that borders on omnipresence, super-hearing that borders on omniscience and indestructibility that borders on the ridiculous (I mean, how does he cut his hair?) – Superman has been elevated to godhood, or something unsettlingly similar. Superman is God, basically, so the fact that he’s such a swell guy rescuing people all the time means that the writer of that issue believes in a loving God who intervenes in people’s lives. You only need to call out his name and you will be saved, my child.

Right, so in a world where 90,000 people can be vaporised by one nuclear bomb, Alan Moore proposes that we might need a new model of God and therefore a new superman – Dr Manhattan is Superman for a world threatened by nuclear holocaust: towering, aloof, calculating and frighteningly detached from the human condition. Dr Manhattan doesn’t really care about saving the world and therefore neither does God. But of course Dr Manhattan isn’t literally God, he’s just a man who, through science, has been granted terrifying destructive power and international respect – kind of like a country with a massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. And, in fact, Dr Manhattan is even used as a deterrent against Soviet aggression and he helps America win a war.

So Dr Manhattan is Superman, he’s God and he’s the atomic bomb.

But the bomb motif doesn't end there. The constant threat of nuclear war hangs over all of Watchmen and, with the growing sense that a nuclear war is inevitable, the already fucked-up characters begin to feel increasingly powerless. The only people capable of decisive action are the sociopaths like Rorschach and, yes, Richard Nixon; everyone else remains helpless and inert, including (frighteningly) Dr Manhattan.

At its core, then, Watchmen is a story about people anticipating a horrible disaster which they feel powerless to prevent, which concludes with (spoilers) a horrible disaster nobody prevents. That disaster needs to be a bomb. And it needs to be directly linked to Dr Manhattan. Otherwise you’re left with a story about everyone waiting for a bomb to drop in which no bomb drops. It's as simple as that, if everyone is scared of nuclear war, just have the character who represents nuclear weapons be the culprit for the scary thing. No squid.

Isn’t Ozymandias Supposed to be the Smartest Man in the World?
You’re Ozymandias. You’ve tricked Dr Manhattan into helping you replicate his power in the name of scientific advancement. You can teleport anything you like. Why is the first thing you went to a big genetically modified squid?

Yes, your fake alien is a delicious deception. He just teleported into the middle of New York. But don’t you think someone is going to even suspect that Dr Manhattan could have teleported it, given that everyone knows he can do shit like that? And no-one will suspect your creation is the product of genetic engineering; they’ll all buy the ‘alien from another dimension’ angle? Dude, you have a freaking purple tiger strolling around your bloody living room. I think the purple cat is out of the bag. And nobody will suspect that these psychic visions of an alien world could come from a human psychic when, ostensibly, people know about those guys too? Sure, it’s never been mentioned before but nobody balked either when you slipped it in there. I mean, I can only assume the existence of psychics is common knowledge. Is the secret to your genius, Ozymandias, your ability to bring together three elements into one thing and thus render them untraceable?

And I’ve heard it argued by staunch opponents of the film that the threat of Dr Manhattan’s god-like wrath falls apart at the end because he leaves Earth, so it’s only a matter of time before people realise the hammer will never fall. Oh, and when no alien invasion materialises things will be any different? Couple of things, okay? Firstly, in our world the last time God destroyed the world was, if you believe such things, when Noah built his ark and yet as recently as last Saturday people were pissing their pants over the end of the world at his hand, even after he promised he would never do it again and invented rainbows as a visual reminder. Secondly, Dr Manhattan can duplicate himself. Motherfucker is to all intents ubiquitous and he can remember the future. You can’t sneak shit past this guy without giving at least two people cancer and creating a shit-tonne of tachyons. And everyone knows Nixon is really bad at making tachyons. If he can simultaneously gang-bang Silk Spectre and do his physics homework I think he can explore space whilst keeping an eye on international politics. Hell, we already saw him visit Earth whilst remaining on Mars. This is not a big stretch.

Smartest man in the world my pasty white ass.

You’re Forgetting About 9-11
I don't want to be crass about this but it needs to be said. The whole point of the squid is that it gives the nations of the world a common enemy. Superficial tentically details aside, it’s a horrifying attack on New York by a threatening force with a clear message of hate. This is what provokes America and its enemies to set their differences aside.

We’ve already seen how that pans out in real life. The first thing America did was invade Afghanistan on the basis that this would lead to captured Osama Bin Laden. A short while later they went after Iraq, even though everyone knew at the time they didn’t have shit to do with any of this. Maybe Iran would have been next if McCain had been elected. Cut to ten years after original attack. Obama kills Bin Laden with a small strike force 160 miles away from Afghanistan and 1600 miles away from Iraq.

What I’m saying is, all it takes is for Nixon to make up some nonsense about how Russia is hiding aliens and it’s nighty-night to world peace. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie, we’ve already seen that people will go along with it anyway. There’s no way they could have gone with the original ending to Watchmen, it’s far too optimistic.

Wow, that is saddening. Quick, need to end on a happy note. Kittens!

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