A Clockwork Red
Okay, let's take a break from politics for a moment and talk about something that really matters: The Watchmen.
The movie was fine, but had a lot of needless shock value. The sawing off of the convict's arms and the hacking of the pedophile's skull were not only gross-out over the top, but not in the book. In fact, the director pretty much stuck religiously to the book, scene for scene (which makes Zach Snyder slavishly imitative and not visionary) except when it came to scenes of violence and sex. Moore's realistically visionary work is blood-soaked, no doubt, but never stooped to shocking his audience for the mere sake of it. Even the startling recreating of JFK's death included more brain matter on the back of the limo than would actually fit into a man's brain.
Also, Moore's adventurers were purely human, They didn't leap nimbly to rain-soaked metal railings and they did not have devices that lifted them up to high-rise apartments and they could not fight like silver screen uber-professionals after years of retirement or after jumping to a street through a plate glass window. Also, Manhattan's mere existence brought about a huge leap in available 70s technology in the book, which was ignored by the director.
Some of this movie was in a word, awesome. But the ending was rushed and I felt that Snyder missed a lot of points. His over-reliance on sex and numbing violence is called pornography, and I simply find it distracting. While actors don't really need to act to groan in orgasmic ecstasy or scream while they're being chopped to ribbons, and most of the audience doesn't notice anyway, it's not art.
Onto a larger point, it's amazing to me that so many artists and regular joes alike have fought to define writhing, naked bodies and gut-churning violence as a basic American freedom. I'm sure if only one person held that view the rest of the world dismiss him as crazy and anti-social. And if you're tastes run to dark humor, then it's hilarious that the expression of raw brutality is more important these days than decent living. Eveyone's got rights, but fewer and fewer of us are talking about how to comport ourselves. Funny how these things work, eh?
But I guess I'm breaking my word here and talking about politics again.
One last string of repeated words from Wikipedia: "Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times wrote that the dark legacy of Watchmen, "one that Moore almost certainly never intended, whose DNA is encoded in the increasingly black inks and bleak storylines that have become the essential elements of the contemporary superhero comic book," is "a domain he has largely ceded to writers and artists who share his fascination with brutality but not his interest in its consequences, his eagerness to tear down old boundaries but not his drive to find new ones."
Which neatly describes my constant fussing over the self-restrained freedom to think versus the unrestrained freedom to act.
Read the book, The Watchmen. Oh, and have a great day!
