Twenty years ago, Terry Gilliam, founder member of Monty Python (designer of that famous foot) and director of such cinematic fantasies as Brazil, Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, sat down to lunch with Alan Moore, a writer of comic books, and as celebrated in his own field as Gilliam was in his. They had agreed to talk about Watchmen, Moore’s eccentrically brilliant, 400-page graphic novel. How, Gilliam asked, would one go about transposing such a book on to film? “Well actually”, said Moore, “I wouldn’t.” Gilliam took the advice but others in Hollywood, scenting a potential hit, were less easily dissuaded. The project spent years in larval form, existing only as draft scripts and airily speculative cast lists while a conga line of directors was rumoured, one by one, first to be weeks away from production then to have washed their hands of it entirely. Only now, two decades after Moore deterred Gilliam from the attempt, has a film finally arrived, borne upon a tide of hyperbole and merchandizing opportunities, which Moore, resolutely unimpressed, has disowned without having seen. His name does not appear on the credits.
Watchmen was not Moore’s first success. Born in Northampton in 1953, he came to prominence in the early 1980s, first by the stories (notably, “V for Vendetta”, his weird, anarchistic update of Nineteen Eighty-four) that he contributed to a variety of British magazines, then by his graduation to work for comic-book companies in America, heartland of the superhero, where he gained a reputation for the revivification of old characters and the creation of resonant new ones. In 1985, given free rein by his publishers, he announced that his next undertaking would be something different, longer, more ambitious and (rare in comic-book terms) finite.
Originally published as twelve individual supplements and collected into a single volume almost immediately thereafter, Watchmen is an alternative history of 1980s America, mapping a society in which Nixon is still in power, the Vietnam war ended in victory for the United States, and superheroes are real. Although these “heroes” at first strike a reader with even the most passing acquaintance with the tropes of the genre as familiar types (the public-spirited genius with a hideout in the Antarctic; the street vigilante with a penchant for hard-boiled narration; the wealthy technophile with the apparatus of his secret identity hidden in his basement), they are swiftly revealed as human beings at their frailest – callous, violent, paranoid, sociopathic and sexually dysfunctional. The story begins with the murder of one of their number and, as some of the survivors investigate the crime, we are witness to a world which becomes murkier and more complex with each fresh discovery.
The style chosen by Moore and his illustrator, Dave Gibbons, a former surveyor, is one of calm and painstaking realism. Gibbons’s drawings are clear and recognizable and each page is laid out in a regular grid pattern (typically comprising nine panels but expanding to one at the start of the final instalment) with everything outside of them coloured white. The effect is that of a draughtsman attempting to impose order on chaotic life.
Their world is built from details. Each chapter is accompanied by a piece of prose, an artefact from this imaginary universe – segments of memoir, journalism or correspondence – which bolster the main narrative and contain further struts of story. It may be useful to consider the construction of the novel as being analogous to that of a watch (a central metaphor, punningly referred to in a title which alludes also to Juvenal), filled as it is with tiny constituent parts which, while individually unremarkable, together form a mechanism of considerable ingenuity. This precise and careful approach to material which might otherwise read as melodrama makes suspension of disbelief not only possible but desirable.
Yet to interpret the book merely as a disassembling of the subtexts of the superheroic myth by putting it in an approximation of the real world would be to underestimate Moore’s ambition. Watchmen is a parable about power and its acidic effect on moral purpose. In an ending which flirts with the absurd, the author suggests that one of the most insidious and unforgivable abuses by the powerful is their willingness to hijack and exploit the creative act.
Given that Watchmen feels like the last word on the genre, it is appropriate that much of Moore’s work since the 1980s has taken place beyond the milieu of crime-busting musclemen. He has written a prose novel, Voice of the Fire, the first chapter of which is narrated by a Neolithic man in a vocabulary of around 400 words; devised The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), an exuberant celebration of fin-de-siècle fantasy fiction which relishes the dropping of Allan Quatermain, the Invisible Man and H. G. Wells’s Martians into the same adventure; and published From Hell, a fictive post-mortem on the Jack the Ripper case which uses the murders as a prism through which to view Victorian society.
He has also gone three bruising rounds with Hollywood. From Hell (2001), though an enjoyable thriller featuring Johnny Depp as a psychic cockney, bore almost no relation to its progenitor save for the names of some of its characters. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), which starred a bewildered Sean Connery, vacuum-pumped away the wit of its putative model, and V for Vendetta (2005), with an uneasily accented Natalie Portman in the lead, appeared to take place in a peculiarly transatlantic version of the United Kingdom, in which the national dish is “eggy in a basket”. Moore has come to believe that “adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances” and has apparently insisted that the royalties from any future big-screen projects go only to his collaborators.
One cannot imagine that the film of Watchmen will change his mind. Directed by Zack Snyder, it is a well-intentioned homage which fails to replicate what is most interesting about the book. The essential structure of the story is recognizable (though the mad excess of its ending has, disappointingly, been muted) and many visual moments have been transferred faithfully from the page. What is missing is narrative detail. One’s admiration for the original increases as tiny pieces of the mechanism, apparently superfluous, are revealed by their absence to have been crucial. If this picture were a watch, it would be a replica: the restoration of the main features is exemplary, but the machine does not keep time.
Snyder’s choices are familiar ones – slow-motion fist fights, cheesily lit love scenes, shifts in chronology signalled by the soundtrack’s appropriation of well-known contemporary music – and if a cinematic equivalent exists of the book’s measured realism then the director has not found it. “They’re shaping me into something gaudy”, complains a superhero when his abilities are press-ganged into the service of American foreign policy, and it is difficult not to conclude that Snyder has worked a comparable transmutation on his source material.
Yet even audiences familiar with the original will come to find, once certain allowances have been made, certain expectations recalibrated, that there is much here to enjoy – not least in the performances, which include Patrick Wilson’s likeably rumpled Dan Dreiberg, Billy Crudup’s eerily aloof Dr Manhattan and Jackie Earle Haley’s curiously endearing Rorschach, whose gruff intonation when he retreats behind his mask plays like a parody of Christian Bale’s sandpaper-voiced Batman. Furthermore, there are moments – a superhero being accused on a television chat show of giving cancer to his lover; a scuzzy vigilante eating cold beans from a tin in the kitchen of an old friend; the memories of a man’s life shuffled out of order at entrancing speed – where the sheer strangeness of Moore’s visions is ideally conveyed, his talent for interlacing the outlandish with the everyday, the exhilarating giddiness of his imagination.
That the film contains only echoes of his achievement was to be expected (though it is tempting to imagine what Gilliam might have made of it had that lunch gone differently) but it is surely to be hoped that such glimpses will lead new readers to what inspired them. Moore remains prolific – we are promised another instalment of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a second prose novel and a treatise on magic – and, while his ire towards Hollywood is understandable, it is hard to imagine that the movies will gravely tarnish the originals. Long after the film of Watchmen has slipped unnoticed into the late-night television schedules, the mechanisms of Moore’s graphic stories – the acme of their medium – will go on keeping their immaculate time.
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