"Watchmen" Credits Sequence

Despite the best efforts of two decades' worth of talented filmmakers and screenwriters, the plot of the "Watchmen" film adaptation does not seem to indicate any cohesive attempt to corral the episodic narrative of the epoch-defining comic book series into one single movie-length through line. Lots of people call "Watchmen" a graphic novel, but in its original form, it was a series of 12 issues, published over the course of one year. The bliss - the reason why lots of people who should know still call it The Greatest - is that every "episode" feels complete in itself - even when issues end at cliffhangers, some essential finale has been reached. Alan Moore weaves a story spell, so that each issue feels like a tiny circle concentric within the larger narrative cycle; an aesthetic matched by Dave Gibbons' brilliant artwork, which establishes a tiny series of recurring motifs in every issue and larger motifs (happy faces, clocks, ink blots, lovers) that carry over throughout.

"Watchmen" is often described as a mystery - Who Killed the Comedian? - but truthfully, that plot is practically forgotten, or at least set far in the background, after the first couple issues, and although the series is tightly plotted, there's the sense, starting with issue 3 and hitting stride with issue 4, that Moore is doing what he does best - riffing on a concept, like a jazz pianist inflecting an old Beethoven with a modern sensibility, or a rapper moved to rhyme over an old Clash bassline. Issue 4 and issue 6 are pristinely-focused explorations of individual characters - first Dr. Manhattan, then Rorschach - and in their own divergent way, both issues play like "Citizen Kane" fully translated into comic book form.

Both issues have zilch to do with any plot and everything to do with Moore's fascination with digging beneath the surface. If Hemingway saw great literature as the 1/8 of the iceberg that peeks over the surface, it's Moore's lifelong quest to excavate the missing 7/8 - or, more often, to create that missing 7/8, to uncover ideas and notions no one, not even the creators, thought existed. Each of these issues only make sense as individual episodes - Rorschach's story is actually told from the perspective of his psychiatrist, first introduced in issue 6, who only appears once more in the series. Yet both of these issues are dramatically important to understanding "Watchmen."

Zack Snyder understands - really and truly gets and grasps- "Watchmen," probably more than most people, certainly more than anyone could have expected. The fact that he transposes these episodes into the movie is admirable; but the fact that they still function purely as episodes is a disappointment. Dr. Manhattan's Mars reverie plays beautifully onscreen - a fine, if redacted, adaptation of Watchmen #4, with Billy Crudup's haunting, mournful, monotone narration, and the images moving only a little bit more than they did on the page (Zack Snyder loves his slow motion, but in "Watchmen" and "300" it feels less like a tic than a genuine style - he wants you to explore his slow-motion shots from every angle, to freeze time until what you're seeing looks transcendent and silly both at once.) But the sequence is so fascinating, so propulsive, that it sticks out painfully from everything around it - it feels more like a tangent than an essential link in a chain.

Dr. Manhattan's absence after his flashback didn't seem so lengthy in the comics - the issues that followed were about different things. His ensuing absence from the film, though, makes the middle section feel imbalanced. The same is true, in fact, of The Comedian - Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays Eddie Blake so memorably, so perfectly, and so constantly in the first half hour that casual moviegoers would be forgiven if they thought he was the main character in the film... and yet, but for another flashback or two, the Comedian never appears again.

This may just be an indication that "Watchmen" was always meant to be a TV miniseries more than a movie, but Snyder gets so much right that could only be cinematic - Dr. Manhattan's floating city on Mars, and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's epic airborne sex (hot like something out of an old Sharon Stone movie, that scene also gives both characters depth sorely lacking in the rest of the film), and, most of all, the opening credits sequence. I don't think I've enjoyed anything in a movie as much as I enjoyed the credits sequence - certainly, it's the first time since the ending sequence for "There Will Be Blood" that an American film has so completely captured that feeling of exquisite madness.

Set to Bob Dylan's greatest and most hilariously ambiguous anthem - Times are changing? Jesus Fuck, they've NEVER done THAT before! - the sequence cuts through five decades of bizarro-world history, dramatizing certain segments that Moore had just imagined (a cape caught in revolving doors, a man dressed like a moth being packed into a car by men dressed all in white, JFK shot by someone who's definitely not Lee Harvey Oswald), suggesting that a world with superheroes would be alot like the world without superheroes. Andy Warhol illustrated Nite Owl and Silk Spectre instead of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, but the thesis of his art - the glorification and denigration of glorious denigrated modernity - was no different. There's so much going on in every single shot of the sequence - in my favorite, you see the streets of New York celebrating the end of World War II, and one heroine, Silhouette, takes a nurse in her arms and kisses her, while a sailer looks on, mighty confused.

Every shot in the sequence is like that - fantastically over-aestheticized (like the whole movie), but also hilariously darkly funny (like only parts of the movie.) It brings you into a big joke (it makes me sad when, twice in the first half hour, one character will say, with all the subtlety of Moses on Mount Sinai, "It's all a big joke.") This credits sequence is, really, one of the few places that "Watchmen" FEELS like a movie, and not just a dress-up re-enactment of scenes from a comic book.

I'm tempted to say that Zack Snyder should have done more of this sort of thing. The changes he made to the Evil Plot of the movie are fascinating - less about the plot itself than a few key details of its intentions - and it actually unifies the endgame much more coherently than the Evil Plot of the comic book. Then again, the addition of massive levels of ultraviolence is occasionally quite silly, and even kind of a crutch - Snyder might film violence more fetishistically than any other commercial filmmaker, so it's strange that his action sequences are so boring. Supposedly, another hour of film awaits us with the DVD. I'm hopeful that hour rescues lots of tiny bits, but I imagine that "Watchmen" the movie will remain as it is - a wandering movie, tonally-perfect but narratively invertebrate, a fascinating curio filled with errant musings and glorious colors and great acting and miserable acting. Put it next to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and ponder what wondrous mediocrities the major studios, in the salad days of the mid '00s, were suddenly willing to bankroll.

My Bookshelf

From Left to Right:

Original Screenplay for an Amazing Movie.The Screenplay is one of the most amazing things I have ever read - so good that the writer had originally planned to extend it into a novel, though part of the fun of reading it is how expertly they play with the normal lame screenplay form to create a bizarro hybrid - but it has never been officially released to the public. I had an opportunity to get a copy once. I got three. This is one of them.

Moby-Dick: A Pop-up Book. Awesomely ornate kid version of one of my favorite books (although it's more accurate to say that it's a favorite experience - I was bouncing from Belgrade to Switzerland to Amsterdam reading the real live text version, a long time ago.) Gift from a co-worker, who probably got it as random swag.

Walt and Skeezix. Compilation of an old, old, old-timey newspaper cartoon, with a beautiful foldout newspaper-style cover. Never once actually cracked this open after I found it somewhere, but still love having it. Whoever wrote the copy on the front and rear flaps deserves a medal.

FUCK this book. Joke-art high-concept book. Back in Fall 2007 I went to a social function hosted by the publisher, Chronicle. Witnessed a coworker demolish a pinata at the party. The publisher had a whole bunch of their books and calendars out for taking. I made the joke that all of my Christmas shopping was done, but actually I just took four books and three calendars and never did anything with them.

Popgun, volume 1. One day, an awesome dude from Image stopped by the office to drop off some comics for a coworker (same guy who passed "Moby Dick" onto me.) Graham and I got to talking to him, and he gave us this sick anthology of different stories from young and old comics people. Favorite story: a meditation on unicorns by one of my geek idols, Richard Starkings, the genius font designer behind ComicCraft.

Lit, No. 14, Spring '08. I have no idea what this is. Inside, there's a note inscribed to one of my coworkers. Did I steal this?

Super Picsou Geant. I found this in the bargain bin outside of Dog Eared Books (one of three bookstores on my block) and had to have it. It's a series of French Uncle Scrooge comics (Picsou means "miser" or "penny-pincher.") My mom tried to get me interested in French during my first trip to Europe by using a copy of this very same comic. I still can't read French, even after four years of it in high school.

Y: The Last Man, Volume 8: Paper Dolls. My brother got me this for Christmas. This was the most amazing graphic novel series I've read in forever. My mind is still reeling. Volume 8 a breezy read - there's a quick series about the gang going to Australia, followed by a few memorable standalone issues. A great breath of air inwards, awaiting the climactic events in Volume 9 and 10.

Chip Kidd. A book about cover designer Chip Kidd, another geek hero. A coworker stole this book for a few weeks once. I think I'll give it to him before I leave.

Notes On Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair. The Moby Dick coworker again. An advance reading copy - swag getting passed down the line. No idea how this is, but there's a blurb from Judi dench on the cover.

Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. An old book Graham and I found for our project. I don't think either of us ever cracked this one.

The Comics Journal, issue 289. That same coworker (Moby Dick and Notes on Directing) would always pass along issues of Comics Journal whenever it came in. I always want to like the Comics Journal, and they've had a few articles that totally blow my mind (including an issue-length roundtable on a biography of Charles Schultz.) But this is an insider's insider magazine, often very snooty, resolutely anti the more comic-booky (and popular) side of comic books. Sometimes that's a good thing. This issue features the best review I could find of "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier."

The Believer, issue 60. The most recent issue. Features an interview with Mary Gaitskill, a writer Graham said would be perfect for our project eons ago (we never contacted her, alas.)

The Believer, issue 52. I had a couple things in this issue. So did Geek Hero #3, Chuck Klosterman. For research on an article, I watched a lot of road movies. "Vanishing Point" was awesome, "Two-Lane Blacktop" was lame, and "Gerry" was pretty sweet on fast-forward.

An Empty Envelope. From a customer. To be continued.

Songs You Know By Heart: Jimmy Buffett's Greatest Hits. Won during a family game of White Elephant Gift Exchange, Christmas '08.

Wholphin, issue 6. Features one of my favorite documentaries ever, about a class in China learning about democracy. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories about elections. I was just reading the chapter in "The Path to Power" about Lyndon Johnson's first Congressional election. There's something about elections that reminds me of making a movie - you're acting like a better version of yourself, and pouring lots of money into selling yourself, and the whole thing is this massive production that has nothing and yet everything to do with real life. "Campaign" is a word that describes elections and wars. Maybe it could also be used to describe making a movie. Peter Jackson didn't direct "Lord of the Rings," he was the chief commander of the "Lord of the Rings" campaign. Steve Spielberg and George Lucas didn't "make" Indiana Jones 4, they led a years-long electoral campaign to make Indiana Jones 4 into a popular movie.

Maps and Legends. An advance copy.

The Player of Games. The second book in Iain M. Banks' Culture series. I purchased this several months ago, when I was briefly switching between Culture novels and novels by Walker Percy. The LBJ book totally torpedoed that schedule. Player of Games is a great book - it's all about an genius game player who gets sent to a distant galactic kingdom. Said kingdom is organized around a game, and the championships of that game form the majority of the book. Amazingly, this book manages to work, even though Banks never really reveals exactly how the game is played. That's pretty much the definition of a solid B+ story - a story which knows it's missing something.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. Picked this up at the Barnes and Noble down the peninsula one day with Candice. Walking through a bookstore with C is pretty much my favorite thing ever. We always find each other books. For her, we found a book that she hate-loved - "The Man of My Dreams," by Curtis Sittenfeld. I started reading this on break from LBJ. Will finish it someday. Tragically beautiful writing.

Channel-Surfing the Apocalypse. I was drawn in by a back-cover description that made this book sound like some weird mangle bit of DFW-steez criticism mixed with a memoir mixed with a novel. Found it in the Feminist Issues section of Dog Eared, at a time when I had read three post-apocalyptic male-centric stories in a row - "The Road," "Y: The Last Man," and something else I'm forgetting, and figured I desperately needed some female perspective. It was this or Virginia Woolf's "The Waves." Should've picked Woolf.

Hooked. Collection of Pauline Kael's reviews from the 80s. Got me through many long tough days. This woman wrote like she meant every word. Her prose undresses you.

The Price of Water in Finistere. I met the author of this book through my drudgery called a job. She ended up sending me a copy of her book (along with a letter inside that empty envelope.). A wondrous little read that provided a calming image of the seashore and of distant lands during many dead December days.

Kongesagaer. Graham got this book for our project. A collection of old Icelandic sagas, published centuries ago.

I Love You More Than You Know. My friend JD got me this book back in 2007, when I had just moved to San Francisco. Those were my salad days, indeed. Jonathan Ames writes hilariously and honestly about the most terrible things you never like to admit have happened to you.

Love is a Four Letter Word. Some kind of collection, gotten out of the Free Book bin, never opened.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find. A collection by Flannery O'Connor. Bought off of a friend's recommendation. The first story, the title story, is pretty much the most amazing short story I've ever read. There's something about Catholic Southern writers that fascinates me - Walker Percy is another one, hell, so's Anne Rice. It's like a double shot of decadence and glory and guilt and tradition and notions of eternal punishment and some missing reward.

The Art of Fiction. Picked this up randomly, I think in Washington, DC, but maybe somewhere else. It was definitely last fall, when for about a week I had enough time away from work to think about writing fiction again. The great experiment failed. I'm not sure I even want to write fiction anymore, or if I can, or ever could.

The Invention of Morel. I ordered this from the Science Fiction bookstore across the street: "Borderlands." It had been referenced on "Lost," but there was something in its wikipedia entry that made me want it especially - it may have been the fact that it was so short, or that Borges liked it. A strange little book which becomes, in its closing pages, when you get the joke, one of the most amazing reads of your life. It haunts me still.

Awful Homesick. A disgustingly awesome book of artwork. Graham gave this to me. I'm not sure if it was a loan or a gift. I really need to clear that up.

Shakespeare Wrote for Money. Collection of Nick Hornby essays from the Believer. I definitely thought this bookshelf had more personal reads than company swag. Boy was I wrong. This post gets an F plus.

A Wizard of Earthsea. I'd never read any Ursula K. Le Guin, and I was in the mood for fantasy that wasn't remotely contemporary - by which I mean, I didn't want something like the Culture series, which works fastidiously at creating a sense of verisimilitude and realism inside of insane surroundings; or something like "Y: the Last Man," which sets a plot out of HG Wells in the contemporary world with characters who are hyper-aware, Tarantino-style, of every other book and movie and comic that their own story seems to touch upon; or even the new "Battlestar Galactica," which works resolutely to correct all the ridiculous things with its progenitor. I wanted Fantasy that was just Fantasy, as if from the dawn of an age, when rules didn't need to be broken because they hadn't been set yet. This book is a real wonder - a tiny story, really, but filled with incredible depth, and it doubles as a travelogue of a world that's strange and abstract and filled with casual amazement. Also features the greatest Dragon standoff ever, and that's not even the climax, not even close.

The Customer is Always Wrong. The guy who taught me the ropes sent me this book from his new job, a compendium of retail horror stories. Hilarious stuff, and more comfort reading during the dark retail days.

War Without Death. Besides having the greatest title ever, this book had a plotline that seemed tasty - an examination of one year in the NFC east, focusing as much on the dealmaking and the boardroom as it does the games and the players. I never finished it, but I want to someday. Sports writing has become a new running fascination for me - I just read books about Sonny Liston, Dutch Soccer, and the Freedarko NBA book. I also just read the next book over.

Forty Million Dollar Slaves. A history of the African American athlete which makes a pretty daunting argument - that contemporary African American athletes, despite supposed notions of racial equality and ever expanding paychecks, are still essentially on the plantation, because they don't have any real executive power. The writer, William C. Rhoden, makes a number of salient points - there are almost no African American managers, only one black owner. He brings up the touchy but important subject that the new concept of a "Post-racist" society is inaccurate at best, dangerous at worst. I don't agree with all of Rhoden's points - at times, he sounds more than a little bit nostalgic for the days of the Civil Rights movement, and seems frustrated with contemporary athletes like Kobe Bryant because they don't hold up the banner the way that Muhammed Ali did. It's a bit like Jesse Jackson during the Presidential Campaign, threatening to cut off Obama's gents - one generation doesn't like the next generation, the oldest story in the book. Rhoden's race-centric analysis obscures, I think, the real point he is trying to make. By arguing that athletes don't have enough control over themselves - that their executive overlords use them as cheap labor and then dispose of them - his arguments have less in common with the teachings of the Civil Rights movement and more in common with the teachings of Karl Marx. Nothing wrong with being a Marxist, but by not owning up to that fact, Rhoden occasionally just appears angry that, in basketball, "Eastern European" is the new "African American." They took our jobs!

Orfina. Got this manga out of a free comic book bin brought over by our corporate siblings across the street. No idea what the hell this is.

I Hate You More Than Anyone. See Orfina.

The War That Time Forgot. A monochromatic DC showcase. WWII soldiers fight dinosaurs. Mostly fun to just open it up to a random page. Free Comic Book Bin.

Army@Love, volume 2. The Exterminators, volume 4. Countdown Presents: Lord Havok and the Extremists. Suicide Squad: From the Ashes. All from the Free Comic Book Bin.

JLA Presents: Aztek: The Ultimate Man. A curio from the Golden Age of Grant Morrison at DC. A riff on superheroes and superherodom that also wants to be a mythic superhero story. A mysterious loner with a magic helmet comes to a city called Vanity, on some kind of quest to save the world. The art is no fun, but that may be the point - in a cool background plot that never has time to come forward before the series' cancellation, you learn that the city of Vanity was specifically designed to make people inside of it feel strange and just a little bit... off. (I think this is also true of San Francisco.)

Found, issue 6. The editor in chief was in the office for a few days and passed around some copies.

Awesome.

"Lost" Last Night

I've been critical of "Lost" this season, but last night's episode was a series best - right up there with "Walkabout" and "Flashes Before Your Eyes" for pure breadth and depth of feelings (despair, excitement, shock, awe) squeezed into one hour with commercials. At the end of last season, nothing seemed more obvious than the need to get the Oceanic Six back to the island. Am I the only one who, last night, thought that that was maybe the worst idea ever? How did Jack, who is supposed to be a hero, end up sitting on a plane with dozens of innocent people, praying for a crash? How did his whole purpose change so radically, from getting his friends off the island to getting them back on the island? How did he allow John Locke to so completely take the place of his father - for that matter, how did he convince himself that he needed another father, at all? None of his fellow island escapees can even stand to look at him anymore - except maybe Sun, who's putting her trust in the same bad people. It fell to a random passerby to offer him any kind of comfort. "Sorry about your friend," said Kind-Eyed Passenger #1, and Jack could just stutter a response, perhaps realizing that the Kindness of Strangers is all he has left in the world.

Maybe we'll find out that that guy is one of Ben's people. Maybe not. The actor's name is, suggestively, Saïd Taghmaoui. He is roughly more Middle Eastern than the fictional Sayid (who is played by an Indian, though both actors were born in a different Western European Globalized Metropolis.) Taghmaoui practically hasn't aged a day since his supporting role in "Three Kings," where he played an Iraqi torturer (Lindelof/Cuse must've geekgasmed) who taunted Mark Wahlberg about American hypocrisy. His scenes added gravitas to a film that could've been a Mel Brooks comedy, and "Three Kings" remains the only film besides maybe "Salvador" to portray history effectively as a violent hilarious tragic farce (shudder over "1941," and pray for "Inglourious Basterds.")

Taghmaoui, born of parents from Morocco, has spent the last decade playing variations on Islamic terrorism. On "The West Wing," he was the Ambassador from Qumar, a Middle Eastern Ruritania which was Aaron Sorkin's post-9/11 personification of American anxieties regarding the Islamic world (see Robert Baer's description of Syriana). He played a Symbolic Historical Arab in "O, Jerusalem," unseen in America, which appears to have been the "Gone with the Wind" for the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict. (His character's name in that film was Saïd.) He was in Showtime's miniseries "Splinter Cell." He was in "Vantage Point," a movielength distillation of a season of "24," in which Taghmaoui's character leads a terrorist group which plots and subplots so extensively that they actually manage to execute the President of the Unites States and then, later, kidnap him, which is the terrorist version of having your cake and eating it, too. He was an arms dealer in "Traitor." Lest we miss the point, he was on HBO recently as Barzan Ibrahim, half brother of Saddam Hussein and leader of the Republican Guard.

This list is a travesty of topical typecasting, considering that Taghmaoui has a hard-soft concrete burn in his eyes that make him look like Montgomery Clift or like Jean-Paul Belmondo, another French actor. I'm tempted to say that his casting on "Lost" is almost a conscious mea culpa by the writers - I have at least one Iraqi friend who never quite got over the fact that Sayid, probably the most famous Iraqi character in American TV history, was played by an Indian (more dispiriting, I think, was the fact that so few Americans could even notice the difference.)

Yet even more interesting is that the character Taghmaoui was playing was actually the only character sitting in first class who didn't think that the plane was going to crash. "Lost" has always traded, very subtly, in post-9/11 themes and visual reference points - plane wreckage and torture, sure, but also the weird clash of tribalist primitivism and high-tech modernism which makes all Westerners freak their shit, like nomads on camels holding machine guns, or old dirty nukes controlled by people who live in tents.

Last night, we saw a few conspirators board a plane and sit in First Class, all of them pretending not to know each other, all suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, most of them onboard because some power that may as well be divine had informed them that the plane would be their last journey ever, that it would take them to a much better place than this. "Stop asking why it's so ridiculous, and start asking if it's going to work!" Mrs. Hawking screamed. And Christ Alive if Jack didn't buy that totally utterly, learning maybe the wrong lesson from the old Sunday School tale of Doubting Thomas, (you have to admire Thomas just a little bit for holding on to a basic belief in reality, at least until Christ presented his zombie scars.)

All of Jack's guilty looks around the airport lobby at the other people boarding the plane - did anyone else think of the terrorists in "United 93," briefly considering the people around them as real living breathing entities and not just as extras on the outskirts of one's own divine journey? How guilty did everyone look - Hurley purchased several dozen tickets, and still looked uncomfortable (here's someone who seeks nothing in life but personal connection - not even money matters to him - and who feels most comfortable in a padded room talking to ghosts.) The Lost creators have always been admirably multicultural, even if the primary narrative thrust of the series centers on three fatherless white men, but the reverse racial profiling last night was a thing to behold: the Terrorist Guy was the kindly bystander, and our heroes, our gang, couldn't wait for the plane to crash.