Snyder’s adaptation fundamentally misinterprets Moore’s deconstruction by replacing psychological rot with cinematic spectacle. This critique sharply highlights how Hollywood’s obsession with "cool" inevitably hollows out the subversive core of its source material.
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Watchmen E119: No Moore HeroesAdded:
Oh no, Adrien. Looks like the reds are polluting the city lake. What do we do?
We call the watchmen. Strong together, united forever. They're the best of friends. But when troubles come out, you would best watch out for the watchman.
Now is their leader and he loves to party down to the animals.
>> Yeah, when he's not clowning around.
Beat up some thugs. Say no to drugs. Be in bed by 10. But if trouble's about, you'd best watch out for the watch.
>> Britney, [ __ ] >> And I rock everywhere like such a >> I supposed to be the franchise player and we in here talking about practice.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. out.
Charlie, >> our next door neighbors are foreign countries.
>> I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers.
>> Thank you.
>> Now watch this drive.
>> Hey everybody and welcome to Remember Shuffle. My name is Ben. With me as always is my co-host Roano.
>> I heard a joke once. Man goes to the doctor, says he's depressed. Doctor says treatment is simple. Listen to remember shuffle. That should pick you up. Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor, I'm Ben."
>> Yes. If you couldn't have guessed from impression, today we are discussing the 2009 Zack Snider adaptation of Watchmen.
And to do so, we are joined by Discourse Stew of Marvelous or The Death of Cinema.
>> Hi there. First time long time. It's a pleasure to be here.
>> Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I listened to your episode on Watchman in preparation and I think we're going to align on a lot of what makes this film mediocre and forgettable to be generous.
>> I'd say mediocre. Yes. Not totally forgettable, but that is in part, I think, because of the the benefit of the source material it's drawing off of.
>> Yes. Yeah. I've been listening to your show for the past year or so. Ever since we started getting into Marvel topics, I had found myself not as well-versed as you guys. And I always found that your criticism and our criticism were very much aligned. And so I thought it'd be a good match. And we'll be going on your show to talk about a 2000's topic shortly.
>> Oh yeah. Yeah. In a couple what two or three weeks.
>> So go subscribe to Marvelous and hopefully you'll hear us talk about Blackberry in the coming months.
>> I am super looking forward to that one.
>> It's great. We're both big fans of that film. So why talk about Watchmen? If you're tuning in hoping for another episode from our ongoing series on the Great Recession, we apologize. But in a similar way to how we took small breaks during the Iraq War series to talk about Iron Man or Robin Williams or V for Vendetta appropriately, we're also taking a quick side quest to talk about the 2000's reception of the work of Alan Moore again. Yeah, cut a break. I've been in Ethiopia for 3 weeks. I haven't been able to get to more recession stuff, but let's do this nice fun interlude on I would say the 2000's superhero work, which is maybe the highest brow superhero movie that came out. Yeah, we wanted to give you something for your bi-weekly release rather than leave you hanging. And the main reason to discuss Watchman is that the graphic novel [ __ ] rocks. If you've ever heard anything about it, you know, the fans will say it's one of the only graphic novels that time put in its list of 100 best novels since 1920 something as printed on every single paperback copy of Watchmen. And I think the movie itself is fascinating in that it is reverent. It is Zack Snider treating the source material like scripture, even down to individual shots being frame for frame comic panels. And yet, through what are relatively minor and modest tweaks, he manages to completely undermine the source material and not get it at all. Thank you, Zack Snder. Yeah, and I honestly think that this movie is underdised. I tried to look up Watchmen podcasts out there and like 95% of content surrounds the TV show, which we will not be discussing today. Maybe we'll get to on the Patreon hopefully. But Marvelous and Discourse Stew, you guys have done an episode on Watchmen, but I think that people are not really sure what to make of this movie. You know, it's both good and bad in many ways. And so, it's tough to sort of pin down, but that's why we're hoping to talk about it at length today.
>> Part of I think makes it interesting, like Ben said, is it's like if if I had gotten to make a Watchman movie at like age 15, it probably would have come out kind of like this. Like like I think it's Snider making the version of Watchmen as he understood it when he read it as a teenager, >> but without the more nuanced understanding you'd get from it if you go back and read it as an adult a little more critically.
>> Yes, absolutely. D is simultaneously both good and bad. It is simultaneously both attempting to be highbrow, grasping at the highbrow deconstruction of the superhero and simultaneously very pubescent lowbrow. These guys are [ __ ] awesome. Yeah, as we will see.
So, to begin, we're going to start by just doing a little character analysis cuz it's an ensemble cast movie and it has really memorable characters that stick out in your mind. And then we'll do a quick plot summary if you haven't read it or haven't seen the film in a while. And then, as always, we'll talk about style. We'll talk about deviations from the source material. And then we'll talk about our themes and big ideas. So, let's begin with everyone's favorite Roarshack. Or I don't know if he's everyone's favorite, but he's clearly Zack Snider's favorite. If I'm going to grasp for adjectives for Rorchack, he is antisocial and misanthropic. Right?
Despite his crusade for some sense of justice, you get the sense from his journal entries that he hates humanity.
You may remember some of the quotes from his journals that are often quoted or or clipped for memes. You know, the city is dying of rabies. is the best I can do to wipe random flexcks of foam from its lips. He's reactionary. He's frequently calling women [ __ ] He hates people with liberal sensibilities. I reread Watchmen in preparation for this episode. And there's a scene where they're going through drops that I believe Rorshack has left at the new frontiersmen in the crank folder and one of them says this one is addressed to the Jew United States of America, not a comrade. And he is this filthy antisocial guy who walks around with a sign that says the end is nigh when he's not crime fighting. He is not Captain America. He is not Bruce Wayne. I have to make this abundantly clear. And he, like many of the characters we're going to get, this is a thing that we're going to keep coming back to. He represents one of the possible logical end points of being a vigilante. to take law or justice into your own individualistic hands as opposed to something that's collectively administered by society and by institutions that are set up for society. It turns you into someone who actually hates humanity, who thinks they are superior to. Just that simple choice of saying that only I can do this puts yourself at a higher level than everyone else.
>> Rorchack is in part modeled on a couple of Steve Ditco characters, the the co-creator of Spider-Man, Mr. A and the question >> who were both at least in Ditco's hands tools to articulate his literal Randian objectivism.
>> Yeah. And I found this take on Reddit of all places. So take it with a grain of salt. But this person says that each of these heroes is meant to represent a different ethical school. And Roshchack is deontology. It's from a Greek word meaning obligation. So there's an absolute moral obligation to do what is right regardless of outcomes or consequences. There is a strong moral code and I think you can definitely read the character that way. But I find it so fascinating that I think there's another reading of this character you could do where he is motivated by a kind of primal violent id. I mean what is his mask? It's the blot test to check your subconscious. Like is it really all a code or is it just living out violent power fantasies? His mask represents it.
It's like he has a constant moral binary. There's him and what's right and there's everybody else, but how that binary is constructed is always shifting.
>> He has a code against compromising his binary, but how that binary is constructed is amorphous to the needs of his psyche at the moment.
>> That's a great reading.
>> And can you tell me, admittedly, I'm sort of the Ralph Wigum on this episode here having to ask, what does the Roarshack test have to do with his identity as a superhero? Like Peter Parker is a Spider-Man because he was bitten by a spider. Batman is the Batman because he got scared by bats and now he wants to turn that fear onto others.
What does the Warshack test have to do with his own personal sort of story or crime fighting style? I was never able to piece that together.
>> That's what it is. There's no person under there. There's this drive, this sense of never wanting to compromise this sort of absolutism in his personality, but it's not built around a core of anything. just this amorphous collection of memes he inherited from his absent abusive father that disappeared early in his life, which is what his reactionary politics are built around, which is just a bunch of notions that don't really add up to a coherent worldview. There's just him and something to fight.
>> So, he's sort of intentionally hypocritical or like not ideologically congruous, you think?
>> I don't know if it's intentional, but it's reflective of the lack of anything there. He is kind of like one of those guys that gets on the internet and yells and screams about all these different things because they hate themselves, you know? They're they're just blackpilled nihilists, but it doesn't add up to anything really coherent other than there's there's me and whatever I think is my stuff in the moment and then the everything else that I'm against, the the degeneracy.
>> I see.
>> I mean, he calls the mask his face at several points to this extent that there is no human underneath. There is only this.
>> I see. Because I've heard people say that, oh well the black and white shapes represent his black and white view of the world or whatever. But I'm like, well, that just describes the color. It doesn't really describe the essence of what a rorack test is, which is to like turn your projections into reality. And so it seems like there isn't like a great explanation maybe for for why he specifically is tied to this Roshack test.
>> It's because the black and white is a projection. His morality is always black and white, but what's in the black and what's in the white is always changing moment to moment.
>> I see.
>> Let's move on to character number two to discuss. And this is kind of order of appearance in the comics as I was reading. Ozamandas or Adrien Vite, the smartest man in the world. And he is the cynical sellout. Very much works within the system. He's one of the first capes to go work with the government in the backstory. This is the guy that Rochack says of him rather desparingly when comparing him to the comedian. The comedian never let anyone retire him.
Never cash in on his reputation. Never set up a company selling posters and diet books and toy soldiers based on himself. Never became a prostitute. It's so great quoting Rorchack. He has a very strong point of view in improv terms, you know.
>> Yeah. He seems to be the most on then criticism of superhero consumerism and like marketing.
>> Almost like Russell Brand being like, you know, don't you see? He sold himself. He understands that he is a product to be sold.
>> He is eventually revealed to be the architect mastermind villain of our sprawling conspiracy that drives the plot of the story. And he's contemptuous of humanity because he thinks that he's just that much better than them. mostly in the intellectual sphere. He's got a god complex, hence the name, if you remember, the poem is about the god king whose statue is in the desert and the traveler comes on. Did Aussie Mandas finished that poem? He based his superhero name off of it. I feel like maybe he didn't get to the end of it.
>> Well, he's so smart. He got four lines in. He was like, "Oh, I see where this is going."
>> Yeah, this is a poem about a guy who rocks. Not a poem about like the meaninglessness of the works of man on a large enough cosmic scale. But yes, he's got this god complex. And if we return to this view where all these guys represent different philosophical schools, Azamandius is the easiest to place. He represents a kind of utilitarianism. Do the thing that will do the most good for the most number of people, even if the decision that you need to make to get there might not in itself be ethical. Okay, our next character, honestly, maybe my favorite.
I think I've grown out of Roshchack being my favorite. It's Dr. Manhattan, aka Dr. John Austerman. Speaking of god complexes, this guy is quite literally basically a god.
>> You see, at the time I was misqued. I never said the superman exists and he is American. What I said was God exists and he is American.
>> He's the big blue guy. He's called the walking hbomb by a couple characters. To describe his powers is he can do anything. He can turn any matter into any other matter. He can teleport. He can make himself big. You can make it so small. He perceives time simultaneously.
The work does some really fun stuff with predestination and free will with him.
And he's the comics take on what happens when someone gets Superman level powers.
And the answer is that once you become that powerful, you become aloof and disinterested. I'm starting to notice a pattern.
>> Yeah. So far, all of our characters basically hate humanity in some way, shape, or form. He doesn't hate it. He just doesn't care. He can't bring himself to care. A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. He says structurally there's no discernable difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned? More like Captain existentialism. Am I right?
>> How familiar are you guys with Alan Moore's work in general?
>> I've read this. I've read V for Vendetta. I think that might be it. I never read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Oh, I think I read from hell back in the day as well.
>> There's a recurring theme in his work and in his worldview, which is this idea of sort of like ever read slaughterhouse 5 of all of time existing at once in a kind of like 4D crystal structure where everything's happening at once and has already happened and is happening. And Dr. Manhattan is in part just a vehicle to explore that idea with his sort of experiencing all of time simultaneously.
Yes, you've almost certainly seen the famous meme of him sitting on Mars used to poke fun at the fact that nothing ever changes in our world. You know, it's 1994, the president is a baby boomer. It's 2008, the president is a baby boomer. It's 2016, the president is a baby boomer. And so on and so forth.
He drops some just banger lines. One of my favorite alltime lines is, "I'm tired of Earth, these people. I'm tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives. I'm going to use that next time I need to get out of plans. I don't want to go to I'm sorry, gang. I just I'm tired of being involved in the tangle of your lives.
>> That's part of what makes him so interesting is to explore that sense of distance. I think even as a kid when I first read the book, I kind of related to it because I'm a god >> naturally, >> but because I was one of those kids, I just had like a slightly different perspective and way of thinking from a lot of my peers. And so I sort of related to that sense of alienation.
>> Yeah. I mean, I think he's supposed to be like an analog for Superman, right?
in the sense that Superman is like a god and then to what extent can he empathize with a regular person enough to have the same perspective as them. Like Peter Parker has a good sense of what's right and wrong because he is a regular guy and like lived his life as a regular guy. But it's like once you're a god, you could see how you might start to have problems with determining what's right and wrong if you're perspective of the universe has made the earth like a tiny speck of dust, right?
>> Yeah. Imagine you had like an ant farm and like you kind of cared about these ants and then you're helping them with when one ant is getting mugged by another ant, but then you have an ant farm for like 8 years and you're familiar with the rest of the world. You can kind of start to see that these ants their problems. You don't really have the same perspective that they do.
>> Mhm.
>> He's played by Billy Cra. Astute Remember Shuffle listeners will remember him from Eat Prey Love. He's Julia Roberts's ex-husband who wants to go to grad school and so she gets a divorce.
Much like Dr. Manhattan running from the relationship by going to Mars, he was running from the relationship to go to grad school in that movie.
>> This astute remember shuffle co-host did not remember that. But um >> you remember his song he writes on the guitar?
>> I do. It's all coming back to me now.
Okay. Our next character is the second silk spectre, Lori. Polish last name I won't try and mangle. Juice Petic.
Here's a fun twist. Instead of hating all of humanity, she just hates her mother and her partner. The first character we're introduced to in the book, who is a second generation cape, there's a rich backstory to the Watchmen. Her mom was the first Silk Spectre, and a lot of her plotline has to do with nostalgia living in the past.
She's bitter against the comedian for attempting to sexually assault her mother, against her mother for making her a superhero, against Jon for his aloofness and disinterestedness. And especially in the movie, she is kind of the flattest character in the work, but she's also given the least to do in the story. She's kind of like a plot device in that her birth, as we will eventually see, is the miraculous thing that is so chaotic and random that led to someone so beautiful that Dr. Manhattan can see the value in life again towards the climax of the thing.
>> But yeah, not a lot to do in this film.
>> I think she's maybe one of the weakest cast.
>> Mhm.
>> Me and Acriman really looks the part with a character that has less screen time and dialogue to clarify their character. You kind of need someone who can use the performance to find more there and I she doesn't unfortunately.
>> Yeah. Second last character to discuss is the second night owl, Daniel Dryberg.
He's kind of like this universe's kid gloves Batman, even down to the animal themes and vehicles and gadgets. He's the Adam West Batman. Roarshock is the well [ __ ] I mean, Zack Snder Batman, I guess, and that he kills people. He's an intellectual nerd. He went to Harvard to study ornithology, history, and mythology. He just decided to double down on birds as a major, hence the unified theme of all of his stuff. He's timu Batman, birdman, if you will. And he's driven by nostalgia, one of these key themes of the text, right? He's this flabby middle-aged man with nothing to do. He's bored. He needs the thrill of adventurism, even if it's bad for himself and society. He's living in the past. And if he has any kind of moral ethical system, it's a kind of basic pragmatism. Do what will be most effective in a particular moment for problem solving mostly. And that Reddit user that I crib that take from was named Gumby Pants.
>> Shout out Gumby Pants.
>> Yeah. You point out here that he comes around to Azie Mandas's side in the end.
He's like, "Well, I guess I mean if you already did it."
>> Yeah. Then we can't have all these people die for nothing.
>> Mhm. And finally, the last character is the comedian, Edward Blake. He's the superhero whose murder is the instigating event of the entire work.
His philosophical school is, of course, nihilism. He's witnessed the worst of humanity, especially in Vietnam. He's done war crimes. He's seen humanity at its absolute worst and has decided that that is our innate unchangeable nature which turns him into this violent fascistic wannabe cop psychopath who just thinks that it's all a joke. It's all a big joke.
>> He's a black belt.
>> Yeah. He decides to go with the state, right? He's like, "Well, I guess I'll just work for you and I'll be your instrument." We see him killing protesters in this movie. He's very much on the side of institutional power.
>> Yeah. He's the [ __ ] tip of the spear of the US Empire. They say he's knocking over Marxist republics in Latin America >> in the movie at least to make it explicit that he killed JFK.
>> Mhm. Yeah.
>> Only gestured to in the comic, but we see him on the grassy null.
>> Uhhuh.
>> And yeah, I mean, I'm sure somewhere deep in the lore, he killed Salvador Aende in Chile, too, right? Yeah.
>> Some of our faves. I think significantly he's a crime fighter who doesn't believe in crime fighting. There's that great scene where they flash back to the 60s where he basically says to everybody, "There are these big structural problems." Do you think busting Moolok matters? Do you think that solves anything? It doesn't matter because inside 30 years, the nukes are going to be flying like Maybugs. So, he just leans into that nihilistic violence.
Played by um Jeffrey Dean Morgan of The Walking Dead. And yeah, I think honestly probably my favorite character in this movie. Very well characterized. He's the oldest member of the Watchmen. And so he transcends both the Bronze Age comic iteration of the heroes, the Minutemen, and our modern-day heroes, too. A lot of times you're wondering like, why do they even let this guy in the club? I guess he's not technically a villain, so you're like, we got to let him in.
>> Mhm. So, those are your characters. We will kind of blitz through the plot. I did take down some beat by beats in my notes, but we can just kind of condense it as we go along. Watchmen opens with the murder of the comedian. We're in this kind of dystopian retrofuture 1980s. You said this on your episode.
It's way more retrofuturistic in the comic.
>> Yeah.
>> It's kind of gestured towards in the film. It's never really fleshed out enough, but you know, there are blimps.
There are airships. So, that's how you know you're in a retrofuturistic world.
>> The world is on the brink of nuclear war. Super high cold war tensions.
That's kind of the setting that we enter. Yeah. I think that what they say is that because the United States has all of these superheroes that eventually start to do the bidding of the United States, it leads the Soviet Union to be more desperate and erratic in their decision-m which explains why the nuclear tensions are closer to disaster in their world than in our own.
>> I mean, Dr. Manhattan wins Vietnam in a week.
>> Yeah. So sick. We see Roshchack, who's our initial point of view character.
He's investigating the murder. He's going around town warning everyone to introduce us to all of our other characters one at a time because he believes that someone is killing Capes.
We go through the comedian's funeral and then we have all these different interstitial flashbacks of the backstory. So, we see that scene I mentioned when I described the comedian.
We see the 1960s. They're trying to make the Crimebusters, as they're called in the comic, but stupid Zack Snder has to call them the Watchmen. We have to work in the movie title for the swine.
>> I would bet that was a studio note.
>> That seems like an exec note to me.
>> Yeah, true. We see the halting attempts to make the crime busters happen. We get the great Vietnam war flashbacks of Dr. Manhattan winning the thing as a 100 foot tall giant blue guy. And we see Blake shoot the Vietnamese woman who's pregnant with his child. And Dr. Manhattan stands back and lets it happen. Just this one little scene does so much to characterize these two guys.
The aloofness of Dr. Manhattan, which is commented upon by the comedian, and the nihilistic violence of the comedian himself. We get another flashback to the recent past of the 1970s when the cops went on strike, right? We live in a world where as capes do more and more, people start to get more and more frustrated with them. We see the iconic graffiti, who watches the watchmen, and we see these big riots before the government passes a law. the Keen Act, banning superheroes, which brings us up to the present. All told through flashbacks at the comedian's funeral. I got to take one quick classics tangent.
Who watches the Watchmen? Comes from Latin poetry. It comes from the Latin poetry of juvenile.
>> And when I was young, I was like, "Oh, this is such a deep line about power, right? It's about institutional power and the police, and we have these guards, but who watches them? It's about authority. It's about the panopticon."
The actual context is about a cheating wife where Juvenile says, "You may hire watchmen to keep your wife faithful, but who's going to watch the watchmen? Those watchmen are [ __ ] your girl, my friend."
>> Who [ __ ] the cocksman?
>> Exactly. So, we go through this sprawling conspiracy. Roarshack is eventually framed and is thrown in prison. Dr. Manhattan is essentially exiled from Earth by having the lion fake news media yell at him about having given every single one of his loved ones cancer.
This is another kind of chess move that we need to do for the plot to get Dr. Manhattan, the most powerful guy on Earth, off of Earth. He's on Mars now.
He's tired of living in the tangle of our lives. There's one scene that I want to talk about a little bit more at length, which is the attempted shooting of Ozamandias, right? We don't know that Osmandas is the big bad yet. And there's an attempted assassination on him where he's talking to these titans of industry, including Lee Aayakoka, a real guy who worked for Chrysler, helped save Chrysler by inventing the minivan, if I recall correctly. Y >> and he was still alive when Watchmen came out and Zack Snider shot him in the [ __ ] face on screen.
>> Not in the comics.
>> Really?
>> No. That scene feels like a very pointed war on terror peak oil thing where they're all like free energy that's socialism. You can't do that. We need our gas guzzling SUVs. Damn it.
>> Yeah. And you pointed out that's the scene where we see the twin towers in the background as well, right?
>> Yeah. Before we find out Vite is staging Mega 911 as an inside job.
>> Mhm. So, at this point, Roar Shack's in prison. He's getting psychoanalyzed.
He's still saying things like, "You're fat, rich, liberal sensibilities to his shrink." Great scenes of Roarshack in prison just for like stupid Roarshack badasserie, shouting things like, "I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me." Classic.
>> We check back in with Night Owl and the Silk Spectre. Once again, very true to the comic. She's gone to live with Dan once Jon is gone. And they start this nostalgic flirtation in his basement in the owl cave. She's poking through all the gears. They start talking about the good old days. They attempt to hook up on the couch with the news in the background, but poor Dan, he can't get it up. So, what do they do? They go out on patrol at 3:00 in the morning. This is where we get Silk Spectre in her latex costume walking in slow motion.
They go, they save some people from a burning building. And now they can have sex in a long much longer than in the comic sex scene set to the ultimate sex song, the original Leonard Cohen.
Hallelujah.
>> Well, I mean, if that doesn't get it up, what will?
>> Yeah, we're going to talk about adaptation in a second, but this adaptation is so faithful to the comic.
I would guess that 80 to 90% of the dialogue is verbatim, unchanged with the change in media. They go to rescue Roarshack because they're starting to think he was on to something and they need Roshchack to unravel the whole mystery. They go to the prison. There's a bunch more violence. Highly aestheticized. Very badass. Very cool looking. These guys are in it for the adrenaline and the hedonistic violence more than any sense of justice. But they still look [ __ ] cool while they're doing it. They get Rochack out of jail and Dr. Manhattan poofs Lori off to Mars to go have a conversation. This is where Dr. Manhattan points out that Mars is far more interesting to him than Earth.
And they really cut a lot of the fun geological content. She says like, "What about the high highs and the low lows of being a human?" He says, "Well, what about Olympus Mons?" And you get a nice little Martian geology lesson cuz on a large enough timeline, geological change can be just as interesting as a human life. In these Mars scenes, she finally breaks through Dr. Manhattan once she has her like psychoanalytical breakthrough that the comedian who attempted to rape her mother had consensual sex with her later. This man whom she had every reason to hate producing Lorie. This was the randomness that led to something so beautiful that can make Dr. Manhattan start to care about Earth again. Rochack and Night Owl try to find Adrien Vite, mostly looking for him to help them. He's gone. They break into his office. They break into his computer and they uncover the entire conspiracy, >> which wouldn't have happened if Bite had the sense to put like an exclamation mark or an at symbol in his password.
>> Yes, his password is Ramsy's II, the original Egyptian name for Ozamandi. And like two-factor authentication wouldn't have changed anything. He gets away with it in the end. He would have gotten away with it with even greater ease had he had two factor authentication on.
>> Yeah. And describe Ozamandios's plot in this movie that he pulled off here.
>> Yes. So, our figures go to Antarctica to confront him. They get to his Antarctic base and he reveals the entire plot.
This is the most significant change that Zack Snder makes in the comic.
Azamandias is going to teleport in a genetically engineered telepathic alien into the middle of New York City which will release a giant shock wave killing millions. And it's not just New York.
It's New York. It's Moscow. It's Beijing. It's Hong Kong. It's every major world power. And it looks like aliens attacked us so that all of humanity will put down their nuclear weapons, abandon the worst angels of our nature, and unify against a common enemy. Zack Snder thought that the alien would look [ __ ] stupid on screen. I assume. And so instead, they basically frame Dr. Manhattan and they make it look like Dr. Manhattan with his blue psychic power, energy, whatever, destroyed all of these cities in the world, framing him so that humanity can unite against him and end nuclear war. I think that choice is not one I like, but I think it's one of those like screenwriting economy moves because they're just like, "How do we fit in this whole sea plot where all the world's greatest artists and psychics and special effects guys were brought together to invent an alien invasion and then killed?"
>> Mhm.
>> That's what happens in the comics.
>> Yeah.
>> Oh, really?
>> Yeah. Mandas has to tie up all the loose ends.
>> Oh, okay. I thought he just like teleported a giant squid or something and said it was an alien. Yeah, but that's what all the world's greatest artists come up with because the idea is when they drop, they trigger like psychic shock waves that give the whole planet nightmares.
>> Gotcha. And so our heroes confront Ozamandas and basically the big drop is that he's going to kill a millions to save billions. And he says, "I'm not a comic book villain. Do you think I'd explain my master plan to you if there was any possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it 35 minutes ago."
>> I love that line. this sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that villains always do this where they explain the plot >> right before it's undermined.
>> Yeah, very meta. Very fun. There's some more fighting. He tries to vaporize Dr. Manhattan. It doesn't work. Silk Spector shoots him again beat forbeat from the comic. He catches the bullet. This is meant to be this huge reveal in the comics because nobody in the comics has actual powers. More on this in a moment.
But Adrien Vite in this climactic moment is able to like move fast enough to catch a bullet. And you're meant to be like h. And so the conclusion of the film is that everyone except Roarshack agrees to let Ozamandius get away with it. They all agree that to reveal the truth would have humanity fighting each other again on the brink of nuclear war again and all those people would have died for nothing. And Roarshack walks out into Antarctica knowing full well that he's going to get killed because he has now become a loose end. You know, he refuses to compromise. He does even say, "Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon. That's always been the difference between us, Daniel." That's what he says to Night Owl. And Dr. Manhattan just [ __ ] vaporizes him into a red splotch on the snow that looks like a Roarshack mask, appropriately. H that is the kind of anti-limax of Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan is going to leave the galaxy to create some life of his own now that he sees its value. Night Owl does get to lay a beatdown on Awesome Andy just to get out some feelings, which is something that's added. But he and Silk Spectre are going to live happily ever after. And we go out to My Chemical Romance's cover of Desolation Row. But what a twist. And I love this cuz it's so [ __ ] bleak.
Everyone has compromised their morals, but the final shot is Rorchack's journal that has the entire truth is about to be published by the tabloid rag, the new frontiersmen. He had the dead drop in the event that he doesn't come back. So, you're left with this ambiguous ending as to what happens after. I don't know.
Who knows? Maybe they all ignore Roch.
>> Yeah. Becomes Qanon.
>> Mhm.
>> Just about 30% of the population believes it.
>> Yeah. He is very Qinoncoded. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He would have been kicking in the doors of that comet ping pong or whatever.
>> Dead dog in the Comet ping pong pizza.
>> Sweet. Well, we've done the work of describing the plot. Let's do a little discussion of the style of this movie.
>> Mhm.
>> I think that Zack Snder, not his first work we've discussed on the pod, you know, we've also discussed 300 and Dawn of the Dead.
>> Mhm. He's approaching like Wes Anderson levels of aurism. I think he's got such a specific look he's going for. And he often does cover graphic novels, too.
So, he's got a style, that's for sure.
>> Yeah. A lot of slow motion, a lot of over-the-top violence, a lot of really gray color palettes.
>> Yeah. I think this movie looks I don't know if it looks like how I'd want a Watchmen movie to look. I think it looks pretty good. that he doesn't have the what Nicole, my co-host, called the wet concrete look of Man of Steel or that kind of piss yellow look of 300 that I don't love.
>> Mhm.
>> But I think he just he's often a mismatch for the material he chooses.
>> 100%.
>> I think on your pod you said that he almost has like a perfect recall for what a 15-year-old boy will think is cool. You know, like he has a bead on that for sure.
>> And that is the wrong way to adapt Watchmen. Ben, earlier you you described the cool fight scene, cool costume. Most of that stuff isn't cool in the comic.
>> No.
>> Like Silk Spectre's costume is not latex in the comic. As far as I could tell, the action scenes are very paired down.
There's not a lot to them. And they're presented fairly prosaically. Whereas in this movie, even though it's ordinary humans that are just fit and good at fighting, every punch is like a whoosh >> and a big slam. and he plays everything up very epic when it should be more sardonic and kind of undercut I think for this story.
>> Yes, precisely. There's this great YouTube video essay on this film called Watchmen Doesn't Get Watchmen and it brings up that quote from Terry Gilliam about how this is unadaptable. And part of what makes it unadaptable is that the work is so [ __ ] bleak and it is fundamentally an antis superhero work.
These people are psychologically damaged. They are pathetic. They are just like us. They are flawed, profoundly and deeply flawed in almost every way. But Zack Snider, because of those changes that you were alluding to, he basically gives them superpowers.
Like, no, there's no like radioactive spiders or whatever the [ __ ] but when the 60s something yearear-old comedian is fighting off his attacker, something where in the comic he just gets his ass handed to him and gets his ass thrown out a window. We see the comedian throwing knives. We see him punch through a wall. We see Night Owl break a mugger in the alley's arm and the bone pops out of his skin. Like, they are elevated. And even if it's not in the story, it's done through the visuals and through the action and it completely undermines a story that's meant to be anti-suphero.
>> I agree with your assessment of the movie and where it falls through the material. I would disagree that Watchmen is anti-suphero per se.
>> Okay.
>> I think Alan Moore has an uneasy relationship with superhero stuff, particular its modern cultural dominance and what that kind of says about where we're at as society, but he also loves that stuff. Like he started writing it for a reason. He loves pulp adventure.
He loves superhero stories. I think the takeaway from Watchmen, part of it is just him seeing, okay, well, what would happen if I transplanted these ideas into this setting, but I think the takeaway from it, a lot like the takeaway like a lot of the industry and fans of comics had after it came out was, "Oh, superhero stories should all be like this. They should be realistic and and gritty."
>> When the whole point of Watchmen is if you take superheroes outside their King Arthur fairy tale world they exist in, they cease to be heroic. And that's why you shouldn't do it.
>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, >> that's why every superhero shouldn't be Watchmen cuz he's also responding to a trend that was already kind of setting in in the mid80s where they were like, you know, doing the death in the family story in Batman and and stuff like that.
>> Yeah, maybe anti-suphero lacks nuance, but like I think he's definitely saying what you're saying. If you take superheroes and put them in a realistic world, they make that world worse.
>> Yeah, superheroes in our world are a net negative on society.
>> Yeah. emphatically. The point you're making about Zack Snider not understanding the source material is that it's meant to be critical of superheroes and their nature. And yet, because he's such a fan of them, like Zack Snder is such a fan of them, he can't help but embellish the story whenever he can to make them look cool, right? Yeah. Whether it's that mugging scene, right, with Owlman, like finding a way to make Owlman and the Silver Spectre like as cool as possible. His name is Night Owl Tornado. Please put some respect on his name. He is the second night owl.
>> And I was shocked when you told me that in the comics they don't actually have powers. That's a complete deviation from the movie. Like as somebody who had only seen the movie, I was like, they're kind of lazy with the superpowers. Like they all have super speed and super strength and are really tough, right?
>> And I had to be like, no, none of them are. Except for maybe Awesome Andy >> and Dr. Manhattan. Yeah.
>> Yeah. They're just guys. They're just guys in costumes, >> which is kind of way better. But like that's a perfect example of like Zack Snider. He can't help himself. He's like, "Well, what if I gave them just a little bit of super strength, you know, for cinematic reasons to make the fight scenes even more freaking epic."
>> That's the sense I get when you tell me that he's made a major change like that.
>> Yeah. He just sincerely believes in the superheroes so much. When Night Owl and Sil Spector get back into the costumes, he's like, "Yeah, they're saddling up and they're riding again." Whereas the comic, it's more kind of sad. These people can't move on with their lives and find something else to fill the void.
>> Yeah. And even like the change that I kind of like or I don't even know if I like it, but the change that I mentioned where after Night Owl has compromised, he's able to lay a beat down on Ozamandas. In the comic and in the movie, we see that Ozamandias just handles Night Owl with ease and Rorchack at the same time. They are not comparable. But we can't have this morally gray compromised ending for a Zack Snider. We just can't as much as he wants to. So, he has to have the good guy hero at least get some of his anger out and lay the smackdown on Osamands.
It's like emotionally satisfying for the character, I suppose, but it does kind of undercut that bleak ending that our moral light has compromised.
>> Yeah, he's just too much of a sentimental idealist.
>> And like Yeah, I love how you mentioned the costumes, too. I was thinking in the comic, the snow owl suit when they're driving across Antarctica on like hoverboards. They look ridiculous again.
Like all of the costumes are updated for this film. Even the Minutemen costumes, like we see their costumes in the 40s and the 60s and the 80s, and all of them in some way, shape, or form look cool or sexy. The first Silk Spectre, she's painted on the side of the plane that dropped the nuclear bomb. She's a [ __ ] pinup girl, right? The Minan costume in the comic look [ __ ] absurd because they're meant to recall the 1940s tights and underweares cereals, you know, >> but even down to the costumeuming, they just have to look cool. And by making them look cool, it totally detracts from what the text is trying to do. That is funny that Alan Moore like you look at who's interpreting his works and it's like the Zack Snder, the Wowskis taken up by a wide array of ideologies, you know, and he himself like Alan Moore is like an anarchist, right?
>> He's a left anarchist. Yeah. Out of a long tradition of UK speculative fiction, left anarchist writers like Michael Morco and Norman Spinrad I think is from the UK.
>> Yeah. And when we talked about V for Vendetta, we talked about how they took his criticism, his sort of ideology in the graphic novel and turned it into this liberal fantasy. The message of the graphic novel was completely ruined by the movie. So, it's good to see that happen again, but in a different direction from Zack Snder. It's good to see Alan Moore's works misunderstood and ruined in a different way. There's a take. No, I mean, I truly do think the work is kind of unadaptable, right?
There's a quote by Elmore that gets thrown around which is uh the only point in transferring something to a medium for which it was not intended is to make more money usually at the expense of the integrity in the work in question.
>> Mr. Moore, will you sign my DVD of Watchmen babies? Which of the babies is your favorite?
>> You see what those bloody corporations do? They take your ideas and they suck them. suck them like leeches until they've gotten every last drop of the marrow from your bones.
>> Watchmen is a comic about comics, even down to having a comic within a comic in the form of the Black Freighter.
>> Yeah, I mercifully did not watch the super ultimate cut, so I did not see the adaptation of the Black Freighter. I skipped through them to save a little time. Lucky you.
>> Can I talk about something on that note that's just sort of interesting, please?
I talked before about Alan Moore's whole obsession with this idea of time and how it's laid out, right? And the comic book reflects that because when you read a comic book, you kind of skim back and forth across the images to build a context versus a movie which is one image at a time in linear order. One of the issues the chapter is is named fearful symmetry after the William Blake poem. And if you look at it closely, the whole chapter is visually symmetrical. M >> the first page resembles the last page in terms of panel layout and staging and everything into the middle. So it's the storytelling is built into the form. The themes are built into the medium in a way that a film literally can't adapt.
>> Yeah. And he does so many clever things.
Little things like Dr. Manhattan's speech bubbles are always blue, right?
His speech bubbles are different from everyone else's. When Rorchack is in his like more Madden state, his speech bubbles are jagged as he speaks in that staccato way. But in the flashbacks before he starts killing people, he has regular speech bubbles. The attention to detail of the medium is so intense and it's just something that you cannot do in the visual medium of a film.
>> Yeah. You can't sit and scrutinize a single frame for a minute like you can with a comic.
>> Yeah. You were talking about that on your podcast about how like when you're dealing with a story that involves multiple time periods and like overlapping temporal lines, the ability to spend as much time as you personally want on a comic frame and consider what's happening changes completely in a movie where it's like it's going to move on with or without you. If you're confused, that's on you. Like >> you get 124th of a second.
Just before we move on, I have one more point about style. Just about Zack Snider's use of music I always find very good. You know, when we watched Dawn of the Dead, I thought that that Johnny Cash drop was excellent in the opening credits. And he does something very similar here with the Bob Dylan song, The Times They Are Changing, right?
Which is admittedly on the nose, but them moving through 40 years of history going through all of these plot points, I thought was was very good. I I genuinely enjoy his credit music sequences. We've talked a lot about how the 2000s feels very much like an attempt at doing boomer nostalgia. It's them looking back at the last 40 years.
We talked about this in our 2004 election episode in the number of reboots that came out. Catch Me If You Can, we talked about this extensively, but yeah, every music drop here is the complete boomer collection of greatest hits, you know, all along the Watchtower. The times they are changing.
Sound of Silence at the funeral.
>> The Sound of Silence.
>> That one made me laugh.
>> Yeah. I mean, those opening credits are incredible. I remember sitting in the theater in 2009, watching that, having already read the comic, thinking like, "Boy, am I in for a treat, and then being subsequently so [ __ ] bored." It has references to the source material, but it also adds to the source material in like a fun way. Like the famous victory in Japan kiss between the sailor is like a lesbian kiss with the lesbian member of the Minutemen >> silhouette.
>> Silhouette. Yes. They have the first Silk Spectre's pregnancy with the Minutemen is framed like the Last Supper for reasons. I think it's really Zack Snder being like, "Yeah, I know paintings. Here's a painting." You know, but also she is kind of the Christlike figure who's going to bring God back to the world in the form of Dr. Manhattan.
H. It's all of your favorite moments from your high school 20th century history class, but with the superheroes you remember from the comic book homework you did before watching this film. The JFK assassination with the comedian. It's the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with Silk Spectre as the pinup girl. It's all of these nice little moments where you get to point at the screen and say, "I know what's going on here." But it is more than a Marvel Easter egg cuz you need to do a little bit more work yourself. Yeah, that's all we got for the adaptation. How he took a work about heroes that were pathetic and contemptable and turned them into cool, sexy badasses. Okay, so let's talk themes and big ideas. And I think the number one theme, if there's a thing that Watchmen is about, it's the deconstruction of the superhero.
Superheroes in a world that recalls our own would be bad and they would be flawed and pathetic and traumatized and have contempt for humanity. And forgive me a second classic side tangent, but ancient authors kind of did. This is not exactly what Alan Moore was doing, but you know that there's a billion and a half versions of basically every myth, right? So you can take Hercules. Most of the Hercules stories are these funloving adventure stories. He has the 12 labors.
He's got to kill the monsters. He's got to bring them back. Hercules is like a hero of time. He uses the club generally. So he's kind of like a caveman. He's dumb compared to the other heroes. He can't really go into a town without sacking it with his borishness and his drunkenness and his gluttonous appetite. He's a hardrinking kind of Snorlax meets the Tasmanian devil in a lot of these myths. But you put him in the hands of Uripides the Tragedian when he's in the center of this tragedy that's about madness divinely sent against him where he murders his entire family in a family annihilation. So it can get dark, right? What do you do with a guy who's that powerful who goes mad?
Well, he [ __ ] kills his family and feels real bad about it after the fact.
And it's not a perfect one toone comparison in terms of like deconstructing broader tropes. Alan Moore isn't talking about one guy. He's talking about types, archetypes even.
>> Yeah.
>> But Uripides is extrapolating from the character and coming up with conclusions of like what would this figure look like in different scenarios? That's what Watchman is.
>> On that, just as an aside, I have a question.
>> What did Chris Benois do to piss off Hara?
And yeah, Washman says like to put on a cap or costume and take justice into your own hands is inherently and necessarily to put yourself above humanity in one way, shape or form. Like I said when I introduced all the characters, right? And this is also what the infinitely superior watchman TV series does. I haven't finished it. No spoilers. I'm only five episodes in. But in its world, we see the cops need to start putting on masks, right? It is also a form of masked justice. And the show is so [ __ ] preient. It came out in 2019. It's talking about the dangers of masked up law enforcement. What a time.
>> Yeah. And I think if you're going to come away with anything from this movie or from the graphic novel, this was the most profound thing it had to say, this sense that if somebody is going to be a vigilante with superpowers, it's so clear to us when Spider-Man stops a mugging, what should be done in that situation, right? Like, oh yeah, the mugger is in the wrong, the woman with the purse is in the right, and we need to stop this from happening. But like as you move up in crimes and especially if you're trying to solve structural issues, right, and not just, you know, have paleiative solutions to symptoms, but like treat real issues, there are way more opinions on how to solve things based on personal ideology and personal feelings. And it really complicates what should happen when we give someone this kind of authority, right? And you know, if you listen to our episode on Iron Man, we talked about this a lot, right?
Great. Tony Stark can now beat any military on Earth and can like unilaterally decide to show up in a conflict and wipe out one side, right?
And how problematic that is because what we've seen in the past is that we're not always sure what side should be helped, right? What happens when Tony Stark shows up in Iraq? Does he help the Shia?
Does he help the Sunnis? He can't solve all of the intractable social problems and political problems through sheer might, right? And what I thought this movie really did so well was say, "Okay, let's say you don't have someone with perfect morality like Peter Parker or like Superman." And you have someone who has like pretty good morality, right?
What should they do in a given situation where it's not as cut and dry as a mugging? You might say, "Okay, the closest thing we have in our society to like a judge, someone who's able to do judgment, is the state, right? So great.
So the superhero will just go along with whatever the state wants. But like Alan Moore, as someone who I don't think believes in the state at all, rightly points out, okay, well now the CIA has the power of a superhero. What does that actually mean?
>> It means that there's a 100 myi massacres a day, but now it's done by a 100 foot blue guy.
>> Yes, exactly. So he's helping the FBI spy on MLK on this pod. We talked about how the CIA is the one who gave South Africa Nelson Mandela's position, right?
Who gets to decide what is right and wrong? Who watches the watchmen, if you will.
>> Yeah, exactly. The state is the closest thing we have to some kind of generally agreed upon morality judger, right?
>> Or thing to administer justice, >> right? Exactly. And we know that they're very often wrong, incorrect, administering it unjustly. And so what do we end up with? Just like a supercharged state power, right? And I thought that that was a very interesting idea that I hadn't seen discussed in a superhero movie before. And like a sense of thoughtfulness that you don't get from Spider-Man or a Iron Man movie, right? What does all of this increased capability really result in?
>> America wins Vietnam.
>> Yeah. America wins Vietnam. Precisely.
>> And as the comedian said, could you imagine if we lost that what it would have done to this country?
So many of those winks towards, you know, what actually happened in the real world where they're like, you know, you know what happens and you're a smart guy. You know that we actually lost Vietnam.
>> Ah, some people would still try and dispute that, >> right? True. Red Foreman, they have McDonald's now. That was kind of the takeaway that I got from this, very in line with the criticism that we had of Iron Man, which is, okay, great. Now, how do we decide that this increased capability can decide what's right and wrong? And as the comedian points out, you're not really solving anything with these sort of micro administrations of justice, right? You can't really get to any structural issues this way by punching them.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> It's interesting in the book and the film how none of the hero characters have a like well-defined political ideology. Mhm.
>> I mean, some of them are kind of generally more conservative or seem a little more liberal or what have you in a vague sense, but none of them are operating with like a clear organized vision of how the world should be beyond a general sense of right and wrong or a nihilistic sense of just enjoying the exercise of power.
>> None of them are like socialists or definite liberals or what have you, right? They kind of just follow the status quo. Like Dr. Manhattan kind of just does what the government tells him to do >> without worrying too much seemingly about it or he seems to have a sort of fatalistic lack of agency given that Alan Moore has a definite political point of view. I found that interesting.
>> Yeah. And it's worth saying we live in this alternate world where Nixon is in his third term, fourth term.
>> Fifth.
>> Fifth. Yeah. It's the '8s. Nixon is in his fifth term. And I forget if this line's in the comics or not or if it's just in the film, but the two night owls are talking over a beer. And the older night owl says like, "Oh, that damn Nixon. He took you guys off the street.
You deserved a shot to be capes like we did." And he says, "That bastard Nixon, I did vote for him four times." And the younger night owl says, "Well, it was him or the communist, right?" So even our good liberal quote unquote nonorshakian hero is still a Nixonite.
The next theme we want to discuss just talking a little bit about satire, right? It's related to this idea that superheroes would be awful in our world.
There's also this sense that superheroes in this context are kind of childish and dumb and stupid, right? The minute men costumes I already mentioned look particularly silly or over the top. You get the sense that these people, they can't help but do this kind of adolescent childish dressing up in costumes and punching things and they just can't grow out of it.
>> Yeah. I found the movie to be very pastiche in general in the way that all of the superheroes that we see, you can kind of squint your eyes and be like, "Oh yeah, that's Superman or like that's Batman or that's Captain America, right?
They're all kind of individual satires like you said, like a teu version of most of the popular heroes you're familiar with. And then often they're like just straight up parodying American culture in this alternate world where it's like they're doing the apocalypse now scene with the Ride of the Valkyries. Yeah.
>> Or like Doctor Strange Love parody with the world leaders in their office with like Henry Kissinger. I mean one of the major themes I think is Pastian parody of our own world.
>> Yeah. Cuz it's almost like a noir investigating the murder the instigating event is definitely science fiction and that we go to [ __ ] Mars and a base into Antarctica. And then we also got a little bit of war movie parody, a little bit of this like Doctor Strange love vibe. Definitely a lot of composite parts.
>> Some of that is Snyder, I think, with like the Apocalypse Now stuff.
>> Mhm.
>> But a lot of that is more in his broad repertoire of pulp fiction cuts cuz I mean you can look at Night Owl and there's like a Batman analogy there. But he's also sort of like guys like Blue Beetle, a lot of these sort of golden age characters that fell out of use. I I think Watchmen started early early on as an attempt to write a book for all of these characters that DC had acquired from another company that went defunct.
>> I read that as well. Basically, they brought it to Alan Moore and they were like, "Hey, we kind of have the rights to these obscure characters. Can you do something with them?"
>> And then, yeah, it evolved into being a standalone thing.
>> Yeah. I think when they saw how dark the story was, they were like, "Well, maybe we don't involve the Blue Beetle necessarily, but like someone who might sort of remind people of something like this, >> someone who for legal purposes is uh different."
>> Yeah. In terms of the pastiche, I did find that it is for humorous effect.
often the way that Night Owl is portrayed to kind of be like the Joel Schumacher Batman or the Adam West Batman, you know, with the nipple cutouts in the suit or like the 1940s guy. Doesn't he die cuz he got his cape stuck in like a revolving door.
>> Yeah. Mhm. Every now and then he is able to portray them, I'm sure, as Alan Moore meant, which is to be like silly and undermined by their own ridiculousness.
>> Mhm. Another big theme that I think undergurs the text is trauma, memory, nostalgia. All these things are kind of interrelated, but all of our characters are in some way, shape, or form deeply traumatized, right? Roshchack, no father, mother's a sex worker, abusive.
Lori, abusive mother, forced into doing this thing. The least traumatized is Dan. I suppose he inherited banking money and went to Harvard to study birds. But I think it does this thing that we've mentioned before on the pod where Torino, you compared mouse to like some superhero films.
>> It was V for Vendetta.
>> Oh, yeah, that was it. day appropo mouse is about how trauma does not make you stronger and better and whatever. It just changes you irreparably >> and you have to live with it.
>> Yes.
>> Then V for Vendetta's point was like trauma and pain whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
>> At least in the film. Uh but all of our characters basically are trying to wrestle with this trauma that they have by doing superhero dumb. Right? There is all these characters are in some way, shape or form flawed and broken and weird. There are no normies who become capes. Their coping mechanism is vigilantism.
>> Right? I think that the point seemed to be the thing that would make you want to put your life at risk and fight crime extrajudicially might also prelude you from having normal good opinions on what your will should be upon the world.
Right? You are by definition not normal and therefore might have a hard time like determining what is right and wrong. Yeah, >> I don't know how Rorchack pays for the rent walking around with an end is nigh sign. I don't know what the business is like on that. And I think it's even sadder when you see some of our characters after their cape days. We see through flashbacks that the Minutemen kind of [ __ ] sucked, right? Very dysfunctional. We don't see a lot of the Minutemen Men's dubs in the 1940s. We see the attempted sexual assault. We see hooded justice is gestured to as like a closeted gay man in 1940s America. We see the murder of Silhouette, but when we meet the older Silk Spectre, she pines for those good old days. She's flattered that she's the subject of the Tijana Bible, a pornographic comic. She says, you know, the grimy bits of your life get a little bit brighter as the world gets darker. Everyone is just so steeped in this nostalgia for this world that's no longer there and wasn't even that great to begin with.
>> A frequent theme on our show. Like when we talked about Blockbuster and we're like, we have such nostalgia for this thing that kind of wasn't that great, but it's just gotten so much worse since then that it seems great in comparison.
>> Mhm.
>> I find now at a certain point in my life, I get nostalgic from things I didn't even like when I was young. Mhm.
>> Like songs I [ __ ] hated when I was 12 come on the radio and I'm like, "Oh yeah." And I mean, part of it is just remembering being young in general, >> right? I was recently at the Washington Nationals Hot Dog Day where lots of Gizzy themed puns and memes and costumes and shirts and they played the song Who Let the Dogs Out by the Baja Meny, many many, many times.
>> That was a song that I thought was so stupid when I was a child. and now I look back on it fondly in the context of $5 gizzy day at the Washington Nationals ballpark. Okay, the last kind of two interrelated themes that I want to talk about. One is apocalyptic anxiety which is [ __ ] huge in this work. You know what is the iconic Washman logo? It's the smiley face with the blood drop indicating the doomsday clock. We are 5 minutes to midnight, right? It drives the plot of the work. We are about to end it all. This is the mugger in the back alley that our watchman hero need to solve. That's their ethical quandry.
How do we keep us from killing each other? And how does that apocalyptic anxiety manifest? Or the comedian is in the meaninglessness of life. Rosamandas is solving it through his [ __ ] up own doomsday plot. yada yada yada. The thing I think about this theme is that it hit in the 1980s when it came out. People were still talking about conflict with the Russians and nuclear war, but this does not hit like it used to. And in my research for this episode, I learned the doomsday clock is still a thing. Yep.
The International Association of Atomic Scientists or whatever still run the clock and they have included climate change as one of the things that moves the Doomsday Clock up. And let me tell you friends, we're at less than 2 minutes to midnight. It is uh it's actually worse the Doomsday Clock than it was when Watchmen came out.
>> Really?
>> Cue the Iron Maiden.
>> Mhm. Yep. If >> I could talk for a minute cuz I want to touch on both this and nostalgia as a theme because they're kind of intertwined.
>> Yeah, please. The book spends a bit of time with Bite and his sort of psychoanalyzing the social gestalt by watching 20 TVs at once uh from his throne.
>> Mhm.
>> And he talks in it about nostalgia being a thing that becomes popular when times themselves are kind of grim, right?
People think, oh, things were so good in the past. Where did we go wrong? And it's significant that we've just kind of been there and been sitting with those same apocalyptic anxieties since the 80s, since the onset of neoliberal economics, since since we had this sort of underinvestment and stagnation and growth where things don't change. Even all these new technologies, they don't get deployed in a really transformational ways cuz that would be too demanding. So we're just like everything's kind of like the same but worse. And I think the apocalyptic anxieties go handinhand with that because when we can't feel the world getting better or dream of a better world, we imagine a world that is destroyed or sort of reborn through destruction. Like this movie has kind of a mini apocalypse that promises a possible better world.
>> Have either of you seen Acura?
>> Yes.
>> Yes.
>> I just rewatched that for the show yesterday and it came out around the same time the last issues of you know like 878 of Watchmen would have been being published if I remember right. And it is very much like kind of similar in a lot of ways. And it has this same sense of this degenerated world that is h hurtling towards some kind of self-destruction that the population it seems to kind of crave cuz they know things have to be different somehow and destruction can bring change maybe in the in the imaginary.
>> Yeah, that's very thoughtful. Yeah. this idea that if all you can imagine for the future is the end of it, the apocalyptic end or the worsening of conditions, the only natural place that you can go psychologically is to like obsess on the past, you know, and so tying these two themes together of like nostalgia and apocalypse. I always found it so weird that after the Soviet Union collapsed, we stopped obsessing about nuclear war so much where it's like, well, you know, the adversary has been defeated. The bad guys with the nuclear weapons are gone, but we still have all the nuclear weapons, right? Like, I don't know. Man, were you not listening to George Bush in his 2003 State of the Union when he heeded to look out for nuclear mujahadines?
>> You know what? One guy was worried about nuclear weapons in 1998. One hide ojim.
>> Yeah, I don't need more things to worry about, but just be aware listener. The nukes are still out there. Fallout could still happen. The last thing to mention, and it's related to everything we've been talking about, nostalgia, apocalyptic, anxiety, and we kind of already talked about this, but just like the deconstruction of American history.
This book does such an excellent job at the world building. Zack Snider does a good enough job with his montage to open it, with his flashbacks that are so grounded in the text. so much boomer winking and yeah just this view that the 20th century didn't go the way that it should have either in their world or as we understand in ours 1970s riots that are happening night owl too says the country is disintegrating what happened to America what happened to the American dream this is a line in both the book and film and the comedian wearing his BDSM mask outfit in the comic a shoulder pad with the Captain America and holding a shotgun says it came true.
You're looking at it now. Come on. Let's really put these jokers through some changes. Right. This is the American dream of the late 20th century. It is the meeting out of violence. It is doing unto others what you want. Okay, so let's start to wrap up here. I just wanted to mention quickly that I read the comic Red Sun, the Superman comic in this last week and I thought that they were very similar which was interesting because I mean that also comes out in the 2000s and is retrospectively looking at the past and the plot of that is that Superman lands on a farm in Ukraine instead of Smallville and he becomes the leader of the USSR after Stalin dies which he figures this is the position in which he can do the most good right from the top of the country that's where he can do the most good and so then the issue becomes now that Superman is responsible for the state. He has to do things like state repression of free speech, right? Very much in line with the watchmen, which is like what happens when a superhero is in line with the state and is forced to meet out justice based on their like own personal ideology. But some interesting parallels in that story was that the US crumbles because they can't keep up with the USSR because Superman is part of their state.
And yeah, the main ideas are that like if you enhance the capability of the state through superpowers, then you are sort of inherently relying on personal ideology, which is extremely problematic.
>> It's the best Superman story. The best Superman stories, because he's so powerful, are not about him punching guys. It's about him wrestling with ethical questions, which is how much should I help these people and how much should they help themselves?
>> Yeah. I also just wanted to mention that I had never seen this before watching it for the pod, the watchmen, and I had a date and I was like, "Oh, I have to watch this movie for the pod. Do you want to watch it with me?" And she was like, "Sure." And so I put on the Zack Snider director's cut of The Watchmen, which I got to say, uh, not a great date movie. It's uh >> I got to ask Dana, was it the director's cut or was it the ultimate cut?
>> It was the what? Whatever the longest one was, that's what it was. And like 4 hours into it, she was like, "What?
What's the point of all of these pirate ship scenes?" And I was like, "I don't know."
I came out looking dumb on your date night movie. I was like, "I can't interpret this. I'm sorry." I've like had to apologize so many times. I'm like, I there's still two hours left.
I'm so sorry. But yeah, didn't love the ultimate super cut or whatever it's called. Going into Watchman Blind is [ __ ] crazy. Someone I saw this with in 2009 was there and like it is a weird film if you haven't read the text. But I remember watching it with like a very normie nice guy. He's a doctor now. He was like we're in Antarctica now? Like we're on Mars? Like what what is happening? I will say I had a very similar experience where like the first time I watched it I was like what the [ __ ] is this? This is [ __ ] stupid.
And then like after I finished it I'm like let me run it back. And I like watched the first hour and then already knowing what they were doing, like who the comedian was, why he was murdered. I got to say I enjoyed it far more having already known what was going on. But that first time was rough. This is why it's like not a great adaptation is that it is only for people who have already read it because of Zack Snider's reverence. I think it's a very unapproachable film if you have not read it already.
>> I Yeah, cuz I read it well before the movie came out. I never thought about that. It's also sort of interesting that this movie even got made because it's one of those things where it's clearly like the source material developed all of this cultural prestige >> without anybody realizing it didn't necessarily translate to like a $150 million budget movie audience. Yeah, the movie lost money. Like I'm sure that they've eventually recouped it on Blu-ray ultimate cut sales or something, but pure theatrical release it lost money. But you can see how it would have been made considering like the main thesis of your podcast is that like all of our movie making resources in the last 20 years have been pointed at making superhero IP content. And so it's an easy sell to be like, "Hey, here's this massively popular graphic novel featuring superheroes. Can I have $180 million to make this?"
>> It is, but only from the movie producer brain logic. You don't actually sit down and read it and go, "Oh, Jesus Christ."
>> No, no, no, no, no. not important.
>> Like Lee of Visary Gentleman is just as is even weirder cuz that was a less popular comic >> that is much weirder in dealing with more esoteric material. Have either of you read Leory Gentlemen?
>> I've seen the film but I have not read the comic.
>> So in the comic among many many other things the film is not much of an adaptation. One of the things that happens in the comic is spoilers Mr. Hyde as in Jackal and rapes the invisible man to death.
>> Holy [ __ ] >> Jesus Christ. Yeah. No. Very, very weird choice for adaptation.
>> Yeah. And like, okay, this is I'm not going to be a [ __ ] nerd continuity error guy, but one of the video essays I watch on YouTube pointed out deep into the film, like we're past the 2hour 20 minute mark at the climax in Antarctica, Ozamandas tries to vaporize Dr. Manhattan with the same industrial accident that led to Dr. John Austerman becoming Dr. Manhattan. And he comes back. He's giant. He smashes his blue hand through the glass ceiling and he says, "Reassembling myself was the first thing I learned how to do. It couldn't stop John Austerman. Do you think it will stop me?" That is the first time in the film that the name John Austerman has been dropped.
>> Is it?
>> It is. Maybe not in some of the extra cuts, >> but in the theatrical cut they never say John Austerman's name. Oh, it's just like one of these little things where like that line had to be there because it was verbatim from the comics, but because you're cutting words, if you went in truly blind, you could be like, "Who the [ __ ] is John Austin?" I mean, you can use context clues to figure out it's probably him. But like just little things that go completely unexplained like Ozamandas's genetically engineered Lynx Bubast is just there without comment. That's explained in the comics.
The fact that the existence of Dr. Manhattan creating new materials is why we live in this retrofuturist 1980s.
Also something that's like not really underlined and explained. Again, makes total sense if you come in having done your homework for this movie. But yeah, I don't think a movie that requires homework is going to be the most commercially successful. even like the pirate comic thing. I mean, one, if you read the comic within a comic closely, you see the thematic parallels with the main story, but it's also like part of the world building where superheroes existed in real life, so superhero comics kind of fizzled out >> and pirate comics became the hot thing.
>> Yeah. I'll add one last miscellaneous thing because I think we need to say it.
We talked about Zack Snider's homophobia when we talked about 300 about how he kind of elided any gay stuff from ancient Greece. This movie kept every single instance of homophobia from the comics. That includes Silhouette getting murdered with a graffitied caption lesbian [ __ ] During the Keen Riots, a rioter calls the comedian the homophobic F slur. Roarshack in his journal says possible homosexual. May have to investigate. Right. All the homophobia that was there in the comics, you know, is getting in there. Zack Snder would say, "Well, that's just how it is.
That's just how the text is." But there is a subplot involving some lesbian lovers in the comic, and one of whom wants to put up a gay rights poster. And there's this moment where the two lovers are having a little bit of spat right before the world ends, and like humanity comes in to help them like reconcile and like tear them apart from one another so that they don't engage in an act of violence right before everything goes down. any positive gay stuff somehow ended up on the cutting room floor, but all the homophobia stayed in.
>> I've come down on the side. I don't think Zack Snyder is I mean I think his politics are probably like sort of weird.
>> Mhm.
>> I think he's sort of like a libertarian liberal.
>> Mhm.
>> But I don't think he's like culturally rightwing. I think 300 probably has more to do with the source material. And with this movie, I think that was just probably one of those things that was cut for time for streamlining the very large story. I think like the inclusion of sil even though it's just kind of in those like flashback scenes very briefly. The fact that they went out of the way to include silhouette even if it also means including her homophobic murder felt to me more like a statement on the side of gay rights. Like I think he's a you should be able to do whatever you want type guy. Yeah, I could be wrong. He could be lying about his politics uh in the couple times he's brought it up, but that's kind of the read I have on him. I think the Zack Snider super right-wing guy is I think it's a common misread because his movies are often not that great and their stylization is so kind, you know, hyperbolic and kind of meattheaded. I think people tend to read him sort of uncharitably.
>> He probably just has like a 15-year-old's ideology.
>> Yes. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative.
>> Wait, you know, fiscally conservative 15year-olds.
>> I think that's just like the 15-year-old view of the world. I think maybe why he gets a read as rightwing is because he made 300. Yeah. But that's almost certainly more a result of Frank Miller.
>> Yeah.
>> And you're right, he does make the VJ day kiss a lesbian kiss. Like he has some I suppose like attempts at inclusion there as well. So maybe he's been slightly unfairly maligned.
>> He's a self-identified feminist.
>> Oh, interesting.
>> I think probably in kind of like a in some ways meat-headed way, but like are you familiar with Sucker Punch?
>> No, but you mentioned it on your Watchman episode. Yeah, I haven't seen it in a long time. It's a very strange movie. I don't think it's successful.
Like I don't think most of his movies successful. I'm not like a fan by just I feel a little bad because I think he's been badly misread because so many Snder cut guys are also kind of chuds. But that was a movie he wrote with his wife that was like at least attempting to be like a feminist deconstruction movie.
>> Okay.
>> Again, I don't know if he succeeds, but that's what he's trying to do. He sounds like Bill Maher, honestly.
>> Yeah. Right down to the Islamophobia in 300.
>> Right. But just one more miscellaneous thought. I did like that the Minutemen being in the 40s and the watchmen being in the 70s. I did like the parallels on the comic industry at large with like what is it the silver and golden age of comics sort of overlapping with that area a little bit of meta commentary on the nature of superheroes in our own culture.
>> Yeah. Okay. Now let's wrap up with some closing thoughts. As a film I think it came out at this weird time where it's post Iron Man is post Dark Knight. It's right at the beginning of the capening that was about to happen. But like we've said a bunch of times, they green lit this work without having read it. This pretty unapproachable and unadaptable work that is weird, especially if you haven't read the source material. It's slavishly, reverently faithful to try and please the fans, but it's also different enough from the source material because of the changes that we already talked about, making them cool, making them sexy, making them badass, that the diehard fans aren't going to totally like it. Truly just pleasing no one. I think the problem is they tried to make a sincere superhero film, trying to cash in on trends based off of work that was highly satirical of the genre and doing something a bit headier with both the genre and the medium. I don't know if that is an exercise that you can execute, but boy howdy did they try.
>> It is a very well-intentioned adaptation at least.
>> Yeah, >> it's not coming from a place of contempt for the source material. No, I think even in the framing I just said that makes it sound like nothing but a shameless cash grab and it's definitely more than that cuz they tried. I mean, they got My Chemical Romance to do that Dylan cover and I'm embarrassed to say that it is still in my rotation. I think it goes really hard, but I'm a shameless MCR fan. I think an interesting question might be let's take sort of what are considered to be the better 2000 superhero movies and take like Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight and say like what's your ranking of those five? Like where does this fit into the list of the best superhero movies of the 2000s?
>> I'd say maybe Spider-Man 2 at the top in terms of I think being closest to understanding the subject matter on its own terms.
>> Mhm. The Dark Knight I have ambivalent feelings about, but overall I think it works as a movie in its own right.
Overall, obviously the Joker performance alone is enough to make it. I think the X-Men movies don't really hold up.
Watchmen is is kind of in the middle somewhere. There's things about it I like. There's a lot I think doesn't work. Iron Man, one of the better MCU movies on that curve. But >> yeah, I mean, I might need to put it in the top five conversation, which is crazy cuz I don't love it that much as a movie, but I reread the graphic novel before I rewatched it. And there were some scenes that I liked seeing put on screen. I liked seeing the Roarshack arrest scene when he shoots the guy with a grappling gun just like he does in the comics. I liked the scenes of Rorchack in jail. I found myself wanting certain scenes to be longer, which is [ __ ] crazy given how long this film is. But in the graphic novel, the conversations between Rorchack and his psychiatrist are so good where like just interacting with Rorchack starts to have these deleterious effects on the psychiatrist's life. It like hurts his marriage and whatnot. Just being in close proximity with that. Like I wish that could have been more fleshed out.
seeing the attempt at adapting the unadaptable. Yeah, I enjoyed that. But like I've also seen a lot of people point out that even though it's so slavishly faithful, there's a lot of fluff that you can cut from this thing.
Just like long transitions out of scenes and like you have to play the full 30 seconds of 99 lof balloons or whatever.
And like you actually don't, Zack Snder, you can shave minutes off this film just in the transitions.
>> Oh yeah. I mean, as somebody who watched the 4-hour version on a date, uh, I concur with that conclusion, >> but yeah, I don't want the actual film to be shorter. I just want it to be longer in different ways.
>> Yeah, I think I agree with Stu that it's sort of in the middle. Probably Spider-Man and The Dark Knight are better. And of course, this movie benefits for being explicitly for adults rather than like being for adults and children.
>> Big R rating, baby. Fbombs, gore, sex, >> blue dicks. Oh, we didn't even mention all the blue dogs.
>> It's been mentioned. I don't know that we need to. That's the one thing people seem to remember about this movie. But yeah, I think that like well how I will generally rate it is like if it gives you some new understanding of the world and like leaves you with a piece of psychological jewelry that you can carry with you. That's the mark of a good movie to me. And I do find that the ethical question that this movie asks you, which comes from Alan Moore entirely, is something that kind of puts it above almost any other superhero movie in which you watch Iron Man and you're unchanged. You know, you watch X-Men and unless you really haven't thought about it at all, thought about gay rights at all, you're you're mostly unchanged. And so that's one advantage this movie has. Is it you know what?
It's a movie that makes you think.
>> Yeah. I mean, the the classic remember shuffle test. Are you happy this piece of media exists? And I think I have to say yes.
>> That's the thing. It's like if we're going to funnel all of our movie making resources at making superhero movies and recognizable IP, then there is like a cost to every movie that gets made, right? Which is that like we're not making other things. And so if we're going to send like $200 million at this movie and not six indie movies or something, we have to ask if we're happy this exists. And I think that this is thoughtful enough that I am happy it exists. It's interesting as a largely unsuccessful adaptation in terms of why it doesn't succeed and how the comparison can allow you to analyze and appreciate the original work. And if you want to talk about a real Watchman cash grab listener, I am embarrassed to say that in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I had a big comic book reading phase.
And that's nothing to be ashamed of. You got to understand, it hadn't become our entire culture yet. I read a lot of graphic novels. I read a lot of comics.
And in the early 2010s, they made a Watchmen prequel series called Before Watchmen. And I wrote comic reviews for a comic book shop in Montreal and was paid in comics. It was a bad deal. So, I own every single issue of Before Watchmen. Now, astute fans may point out, "What is there to prequalize? Isn't the book so filled with flashbacks and backstory that there really are no gaps to fill in?" That's correct. But if you ever wanted a couple issues on what dollar bill was up to, they made them. They are eminently forgettable. I remember reviewing the Silk Spectre one and it was like, you think there was boomer nostalgia in the Watchmen? Oh my god. Just wait until you read the thoroughly forgettable before Watchmen comic prequels that came out in the early 2010s.
>> What about uh what was it? Doomsday Clock.
>> That sounds right.
>> It was the sequel that managed to cross over with the actual sort of mainstream DC universe or something. Yeah, the good Watchmen adaptations, of course, are the HBO one, which we may or may not cover on our Patreon, which is a flawless segue to wrapping up the show. So, Stu, thank you so much for coming on.
>> Oh, thank you for having me. This was fun.
>> Yeah, we're so happy to have Stu on. We have been listening to his show for a bit and they came on very last minute.
We put this together in the 11th hour of the doomsday clock of our show. And if you listen to Remember Shuffle and you're always asking us questions like, "Hey, why don't you do an episode on the Hulk or why don't you do an episode on Spider-Man?" I got good news for you. If you head on over to Marvelous or The Death of Cinema, which we'll provide a link for in the description, you can check out their episodes on these movies.
>> Yeah. Plug your show. Plug your show to our listeners.
>> marvelous death.com, patreon.com/marvelous death. If you like what you hear and want to hear more and send us a little money, that's me, my best friend Nicole, and Cole Netscape, who you may or may not remember from Twitter.
>> Is there any particular episodes that you really love and are proud of or think are a good entry to the show?
>> I would say just scroll through and whichever movie you're like, "Oh, I kind of want to hear what they have to say about that." I feel like that's better than anything. I like I'm so bad at imagining someone who's not me as the listener. If you do get on the Patreon though or want to check that out, I would recommend our episode on the very weird Colin Travaro twe indie drama thriller Book of Henry.
>> Okay.
>> One of the most fun ones we ever did.
>> Cool. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your show or tell the listener about your show. Mars the death of cinema in terms of our mainline episodes is a more or less chronological with diversions look through the landscape of major Hollywood franchise film releases kind of since Iron Man where everything became about cinematic universes and not just like oh we can have a series of films and maybe some merch or whatever but like everything's a multimedia super franchise and just kind of picking apart how it's always been a very commercial industry but how the last 15 to 20 years or more. It's really accelerated into kind of hyper commercialism. There's a space for a degree of if not like arty artiness craftsmanship, a certain level of quality you could expect from the sets, just the basic script writing that has just been eroded by an increasingly assemblyline process of production for major films.
>> And you guys have a love, I think, for the source material too, right? Like we did an X-Men episode a month ago and a few people rightfully complained that we didn't know a lot about the comics, you know, and so if that is your complaint, I would say that you guys generally have a pretty pretty good breadth of the source material.
>> Depending. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the reasons we brought Cole on cuz they I mean I I know a little bit of comics.
Cole really knows comics and it's not about comic book movies per se, but that's been the dominant source of raw material for franchise films. So, their expertise has been really helpful. But yeah, the idea is kind of that like it's as much as a lot of comics can be very dumb and juvenile, there's also a lot of imagination and interesting ideas in them. And the best ones do reach the level of literature and quality of any other medium. And these adaptations tend to strip out what's most interesting about them. Even ones that might not be like, "Oh, they're not Watchmen. They're not like literature, but they have that raw imagination or weirdness that you get from like a pulp sci-fi novel, from just like a weird guy or weird artist sitting down with their ideas, and all of that gets sanded away when they turn it into Doctor Strange 7."
Yeah. Thank you so much, Stu, for coming on the show this week and talking about Alan Moore. We've revisited him many times now, unintentionally. His work just seems to keep popping up in the 2000s. And shameless plug for this show, please like, subscribe, write us a comment, do all that remember shuffle engagement. And we also have a Patreon.
You can get a little bit more Watchmen content there.
>> Yes, get on the Remember Shuffle Patreon. You guys do a great show. I've been listening for years. It's a tremendous pleasure to have been on.
Thank you so much.
>> That's so kind. Thank you. Thank you for coming. All right, have a good one. Chow chow. Oivvoir.
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