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The Manic Maniac: R.I.P. Watchmen?
Watchmen's reality is killing the fantasy. By Joe Crosby
August 07, 2008
Dr. Manhattan is electrifying in WATCHMEN(2008).
© Warner Bros.
Not arguably, one of the two most buzz-worthy events coming out of Comic-Con this year was the footage of Watchmen (the other being the latest Terminator installment). At this point, we've all seen at least one Watchmen trailer, and it's hard not to get excited. In addition to the trailer, the kindly marketing gurus behind the Alan Moore adaptation have been uploading "production journals" to a dedicated web location at Yahoo! Movies, where fans can view three-minute making-of videos depicting a man afire, the construction of the ship Archimedes, among others, and soon to be more. Since May, new clips have arrived somewhat sporadically. But as of August 6—possibly due to the response from Comic-Con—the studio will be releasing production journals every sixth of every month until the film opens March 6, 2009.
It's a basic marketing campaign, but it's a fairly smart one. Reacting to a snowball-roll of anticipation over two years, they're offering instant gratification to an audience who needs it. In doing so, they are killing the magic of the movie.
The audience they're kneeling before, arms extended, is us, all of us—not just Watchmen fans, but every person who wakes in the morning and drifts off to sleep at night, knowing their coffee timer is set. We've been somewhat recklessly cultivating our instantly gratified society for years. Fast food comes to mind, certainly. But in the world of art, it's a more frightening concept. Film, books, comic books—these are many things, but they are all one thing: escape. They unleash worlds upon us where up is down, right is wrong, black is white and pigs fly. Fanciful dreams become fantastical reality. And part of the escapism comes from the anticipation, the imagination, the surprise and the interpretation, almost in that order. It's as much you—the escaper, the dreamer—constructing the world in your mind as it is the artist creating it for you. That's part of what's so jarring about Watchmen production journals. We know what a cheeseburger tastes like, but we don't know where out minds can take us. They're stealing some of the imagination, the surprise. They're doing most of the creation for us through exposition.
This has been done for years. Most obviously, it has come in the form movie trailers. Later, if you were lucky enough to have cable television, you might have seen a 15-minute "production journal" segment for an upcoming release in between Friday night HBO matinees. And now, online, we scamper to collect as much official and unofficial film footage as our RAM will allow. We can barely sit still without being, well, gratified. And long before a film is ever released. Watchmen production journals are doing this for us. They're strategically and incrementally offering us film footage, not just trailers, but actual explanations of how they made their story. They're showing us how this fantasy is becoming a reality, rather than letting us blindly immerse ourselves in it, live it. We didn't ask them to, and we didn't have to. Our nature demands it. We think we're being rewarded, when we're actually being deprived.
A friend recently brought up a college discussion about Dante's Inferno, and why the concept of Satan was so unsettling and intense. As the reader descended deeper through the rings of hell, he took in brief pieces about Satan, hints and stories, but there was nothing direct. As a result, the imagination ran unfettered, wondering what he would look like or say or do, and that's when he was the most frightening. That's what made him exciting. Anything Dante might have tried to expose hitherto could never compare with the reader's anticipation and imagination. Letting us think was the genius of Dante.
Because of the business of art and movies and our sensory-hungry condition, few artists get away with this anymore. J.J. Abrams does, which is, in part, what makes his Lost so mystifying. Cloverfield, with its airtight production policy, reaped similar rewards. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, in reality, had very little straightforward marketing, instead word-of-mouth phenomena spun hypotheticals and legends of Heath Ledger's Joker. George Lucas has been traditionally tight-lipped, but you could argue he's a generation gone now. There are precious few others. And certainly not Watchmen director Zack Snyder. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't. The studio wouldn't allow it. We would barely allow it.
It's part of the reason Watchmen scribe Alan Moore despises the concept of the adaptation. When Entertainment Weekly asked if he ever wondered what Snyder was doing with the film, he said, "I would rather not know." And not for imagination's sake. He hates the business of it that removes the art. So much so, that when Terry Gilliam attempted an adaptation 20 years ago, he asked Moore how he, if given the chance, would transform the graphic novel into a film. "If anyone asked me, I would have said, 'I wouldn't,'" Moore replied. Gilliam abandoned the project.
To be sure, the Watchmen Yahoo! page is little more than a business partnership thinly veiled as "something for the fans," in a form that just so happens to be palatable to our whims. And it will probably be successful, which means other films will follow.
Because of this, Watchmen’s alternate reality suddenly won’t be so alternate. We won’t be able to measure the impact this time, but the otherwise exact same film won’t be as good as it could have been. Because of marketing. Because of us.
Production journals, director's commentary, alternate cuts—the exposition, the transparency that is slowly killing the escape—it will all ultimately wear thin, but not before it has chipped away at our imaginations until there's nothing to escape from because there's no longer something to escape to. Ars gatia artis … art for art's sake scarcely exists anymore. And one day, the art will no longer be the form. The real art will be the anticipation, when some rogue creator abandons publicity and marketing and business, and let's our minds construct new horizons in experiences far removed from our own.
Combo number 2, please.
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