This is both awesome and unawesome at the same time.
It is awesome because Jack White is singlehandedly rescuing rock 'n roll from it's sad Top 40/Nickelback-style fate. Most of his (I use the term loosely) albums are fantastic, and even when they aren't, they're interesting at the very least. You can check out the fawning review of the latest Raconteur's album I wrote a while back if you can't fathom my love for the man.
It is un-awesome because it means that we will undoubtedly have to wait for another album from The White Stripes and The Raconteurs to drop. Sigh.
But as long as Mr. White keeps a-rockin', I'll come a-knockin'.
Greetings, dear reader. As you see, Disappear Here went on a bit of sabbatical following the new year. But here we are, in March, no less, and it's time we get back to the work at hand -- whining about any and everything in popular culture.
A caveat: I enjoy mindless, stupid entertainment such as Bad Boys II or Pearl Harbor, etc., etc. In much the same way that I enjoyed those films, so too did I enjoy WATCHMEN.
Which is to say, as a mindless, stupid, overly-long piece of cinematic entertainment.
So how did an amazing graphic novel that changed the tone of comics forever after become such an (entertaining) mess?
The fans.
Often hailed as unfilmable, WATCHMEN has been in development since its publication. But it’s epic, sprawling story has been impossible to wrangle into a manageable narrative, giving the project the air of “always a bridesmaid, never the bride.” But director Zack Snyder -- he of the execrable 300 -- decided that a literal adaptation of WATCHMEN best suited the project. His decision was hailed by fanboys all across the internet (who, incidentally, all love the film). But it is this adaptation that WATCHMEN fails so completely.
This is not a review, but rather thoughts I’ve been having about the movie. My “review,” is that the film looks beautiful, is exceptionally silly, but is entertaining in a pure “sweet-baby-jesus” kind of way.
WATCHMEN fails because Mr. Snyder failed to adapt the story of the graphic novel. Instead, he, and the millions of fanboys across Internetlandia, decided that literally adapting the graphic novel to the screen (with minor changes to suit the modern era, and the expected length of films) was to be preferred over a real adaptation of the film.
Come with me for a moment.
If you had read the novel Jurassic Park, without seeing the film, you would have expected a very different beast than what Steven Spielberg shot for your pleasure. Characters are cut or altered; the main relationship between the adult leads is merely hinted at in the film, whereas it is explicit and central in the book; action scenes are cut; characters who live in the book die in the film; characters who die in the book live in the film. And so forth. Yet it cannot be argued that Jurassic Park struck a chord. Yet, being adapted (by the original novelist, Mr. Michael Crichton, and hit-maker David Koepp, no less) for the screen, as opposed to being literal, saved the story. The gist of Jurassic Park the book was transferred to the screen, even while many changes were made to the narrative and characters. The spirit of the book lived on in celluloid.
Another classic: To Kill a Mockingbird. The film is considered by many I know to be “perfect.” And yet the film and the novel differ in many ways. Details from the book are absent from the film, with whole passages excised to fit the narrative into a two hour film. Yet, once again, To Kill a Mockingbird is a perfect adaptation because it captures the spirit of the book. It tells the story of the novel, without becoming bogged down in the nitty gritty. Hell is in the details, I have heard.
This is precisely where WATCHMEN suffers. Rather than adapt the story of psychologically damaged superheroes, incapable of staving off the impending (and possibly necessary) holocaust, it becomes a spectacle of showing off insider cred and spectacle. Action scenes are added -- just because, without thought to how it affects the characters. Secondary characters and scenes are kept to show how “faithful” to the novel the production was. Important scenes were cut because they didn’t “drive the main narrative.”
Snyder didn’t adapt the story. He adapted the graphic novel. Literally.
And in this way he missed out on making a movie that really said something, that was really about something.
One of the main “awesome points” for the fans is that the film takes place in the alternate-universe 1985, when the graphic novel took place. But this allows them to forget that the book was portraying what was, at the time, a contemporary alternate universe. In the film, we got an alternate past. It removes the viewer from the film. The 80’s sucked, but they didn’t suck in the same way that now does.
And sticking the film in the original time of the novel allows Snyder to punish the audience with a terrible Richard Nixon. As if Richard Nixon being president and abusing the power he has with superheroes is the point -- the point being that the United States Government, corrupt regardless of who the President happens to be -- would always use Dr. Manhattan in the same way. That conflict would always arise when one nation has a literal superman and the rest do not. That Dr. Manhattan is as much a metaphor as he is a character.
Not only that, but the time period allows Snyder to assault the viewer with music from the times -- and with the exception of the opening montage set to Dylan, it is distracting and annoying.
Because ultimately the focus is on the graphic novel rather than the characters or the story. Characters having sex in a hovercraft, accidentally hitting the flamethrower button during orgasm? An amusing comment, in the graphic novel, on the inanity of comic books; on the immature treatment of sexuality; the silliness of the moment. In the book, so loud, so boisterous, so in your face, it’s an American Pie moment -- “Look, they’re cumming, so it’s funny that the craft shoots out flames! GET IT?!”
Yes, Mr. Snyder. I get it.
A friend of mine commented that they loved the film so much due to it’s conflicting, false portrayal of “good.” What is “good” in the WATCHMEN world, when it causes to much bad to so many? This is an idea that is gone into in great depth in the graphic novel, but the movie rushes through so much that these ideas aren’t fully developed. The story is about the impotence (sometimes literally) of supermen to change the world by fighting crime at its source. It’s also about how silly it is to expect anything from such a method, anyway. And so much of that is missing from the film.
Instead, Snyder decided to focus on action and literalness. Arms are broken. People exploded. But the quiet moments from the story are all missing -- instead of more time with Laurie and her own conflict over her very existence, we get arms being rotor-sawed off in prison. And so forth.
But subtlety is not Mr. Snyder’s trade. WATCHMEN disappointed me because there is -- literally -- so much to mine from the graphic novel. To truly make the movie about something that wasn’t the graphic novel.
I’d like to go into how he also doesn’t know how to direct actors -- how any sort of subtle, emotional moment in the film is ruined by clunky acting by good actors, but I am running long, and I’d like to wrap it up.
I wish WATCHMEN had lived up to the graphic novel instead of being the graphic novel. I wish Snyder had decided to tell the story, as opposed to the graphic novel. I wish he had taken the time to direct his actors. Or think about what a world would be like now with masked heroes who only ever made things worse.
Instead, he treated WATCHMEN like a loving, inept boyfriend -- worshipping at your feet, without taking the time to ask her about your feelings. WATCHMEN is the most shallow kind of adaptation.
Literal. And dumb.
Over and out.
-RoboNixon
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the film. Please comment below.
Check it out. But I also wanted to take the time to look at one particular thing he says:
The point is, I have listened for years, to complaints from true comic book fans, that "not enough movies take the source material seriously." "Too many movies puss out," or "They change great stories, just to be commercial." Well, I f***ing dare you to say any one of those things about this movie.
The thing he's leaving out is the question of why you would adapt something if you aren't going to tell it in a particular way -- why would you adapt something so literally? Why not just have people read the comic?
And for the record, I'm not saying they should have or could have drastically changed the story of the graphic novel for cinema. I'm saying that by paying so much attention to the FANS -- but a small segment of the film-going community -- they limited their perspective on the story, and instead of telling something that meant something to them through the story, they merely told the graphic novel.
Just like the best song covers bring something new to the table, so too are the best adaptations. Film is a similar, but different medium than ink and words, and in keeping so close to the fanboys insistence, on the fanboys' vision, they blinded themselves to the possibilities.
Two young men from New Zealand are playing acoustic guitars and rapping in front of a live audience. This is supposed to be funny in itself, and indeed, the audience is appreciative. The joke isn't particularly new or original, and the two men, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, exhibit no ambition to transcend the simple, ancient gag of nerdy white guys rapping: "Yes, sometimes my lyrics are sexist / But you lovely bitches and hos should know I'm trying to correct this." "Other rappers dis me / Say my rhymes are sissy / Why? Why? What? Why? / Be more constructive with your feedback!" "Ain't no party like my nana's tea party!" But the audience laughs; the audience loves it. Encouraged, the two men begin to improvise, instigating a playful call-and-response with the audience. "When I go ooh, all the ladies go ahh!" The audience complies, and so on. Finally McKenzie instructs, "When I go ooh, all the ladies go, Ooh, Flight of the Conchords, you're so big!" Lazily, he strums a few chords. "Ooh!"
And all at once a primal squeal erupts from the audience, a roar of pure, concentrated female human lust. It is an earth-shaking, magnificent sound, one that is rarely heard outside of Beatles concerts in the early '60s, or midnight book-release parties for new installments of Twilight. It is the scream of collective female sexuality unbound, and it says: "OOOOOH, FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS, YOU'RE SO BIG!!!!!!"
McKenzie and Clement sit onstage, frozen, out of character, apparently genuinely astonished. There is an awkward silence.
"Wow, thank you," mumbles McKenzie.
Clement scratches the back of his head shyly. "Thank you, ladies," he says. "You didn't have to say that."
And the audience collapses in nervous, embarrassed giggles. What have they just revealed about themselves? What just happened?
What just happened? To an outside observer, the question is mystifying. Even to fans of Flight of the Conchords, such a level of adoration might seem out of proportion. After all, it is an unspoken secret among their fans that Flight of the Conchords are really not very good. Their humor is always gentle and inoffensive, but falls squarely in the tedious Eddie Izzard genre of quotable British-Commonwealth whimsy, whose appeal is perilously inextricable from its foreign accent. As parodists, they are excruciating at least as often as they are on the money. As comedians, they are mediocre at worst; as musicians, they are mediocre at best. McKenzie's voice is reedy and weak; Clement's is frequently off key. Perhaps this is part of the joke, but if so, the joke is rather feeble. This is cast into especially sharp relief during the rare moments on their TV show when McKenzie and Clement do manage to hit that magical sweet spot of tunefulness and hilarity, usually with the help of a talented director (like Michel Gondry); and even then, half the pleasure is visual.
There is, however, another unspoken secret among Flight of the Conchords fans, and it is peculiar that it has gone unspoken for so long. Most of the fans -- the really devoted ones, the diehard fanatics who run the fansites and write the slash fiction and shriek "You're so big!" on command -- are women.
Why should this be? On the surface, the answer is obvious. Just look at Bret and Jemaine: they are so cute.
In 2007, Salon.com selected them for their list of Sexiest Living Men, reasoning: "A guy with a guitar is hot. A guy with an accent is hot. And a guy who can make us laugh is really, really hot. What, then, could be better than a man who embodies all of the above? Two men who do." Fair enough -- but the question remains: why do they make us laugh? And why is it so hot when they do?
This is why: there is a sexual undercurrent to the comedy of Flight of the Conchords. It is largely unremarked upon, and passes unnoticed by critics and male fans and, possibly, by McKenzie and Clement themselves. Like a dog whistle, it is perceptible only to women, and in response -- without understanding quite why, only sensing it on an instinctual level -- they go wild.
For McKenzie and Clement are the most sexually objectified men on television, outside of gay porn. So much of their comedy depends on their sexual passivity, on one or both of them taking the female sexual role, submissive to sexually dominant women. Over the course of two seasons of Flight of the Conchords, Bret McClegnie and Jemaine Clemaine (as their characters on the show are named) have been pressured into sex, coerced into sex, forced into sex, tricked into sex, and drugged into sex. They have been violated, degraded, and humiliated by the women who fuck them. In every episode, they are sexually harassed by a predatory female stalker named Mel. They have been sexually taken advantage of, and then made to feel ashamed for it. They have been tied up; they have been forced to wear uncomfortable, sexually provocative outfits. They have even been driven into prostitution. There is no female sexual indignity, short of an unwanted pregnancy, to which Bret and Jemaine have not been subjected.
There is no other show on television so focused on the bodies of its male characters. It took a while for this pattern to develop on the show, but as it did, the fanbase swelled. The feminization of Bret and Jemaine really took hold in the sixth episode, "Bowie," which centers on Bret and Jemaine's "body image issues" -- a gendered phrase if there ever was one -- and Bret's perceived struggle with bulimia. Bret attempts to regain his confidence by exposing his body in public, but finds that this only makes his self-esteem worse. The simplicity of the gender role reversal is brilliant: the plot wouldn't be a joke at all if Bret and Jemaine were women.
The sexual objectification began a bit later, in the eighth episode, "Girlfriends" -- perhaps the show's best episode ever. In "Girlfriends," Bret dates a sexually aggressive woman named Lisa, whose advances make Bret uncomfortable. An entire gender-studies thesis could be written about the gender switch that is the central joke of this episode. When Bret confides to his friends, they suggest that he's "asking for it" by "showing too much skin." Bret attempts to cover up, but Lisa persists. She forces herself into his apartment and wakes him up in the middle of the night, coercing him into sex using familiar male guilt tactics: "Come on. Just give me a little sugar. You've been kissing me all night, Bret. It's been driving me crazy. You have to give me just a little something something. It's kind of an unspoken rule." She finally coerces him into sex with a sob story about being deployed to Iraq the next day. Bret capitulates, and the sex is violent and one-sided, ending with Lisa fast asleep on top of Bret. Feeling dirty and violated, Bret retreats to the shower with his clothes on, like a confused schoolgirl -- and the next day, he is humiliated to learn that Lisa has tricked him. She isn't going to Iraq, and having used him, she has no interest in seeing him again. Bret protests, in one of the show's greatest lines ever, "But you said you loved me! You had sex on me!" The episode ends in a perfect tableau of gender-switched slut-shaming when Bret finds himself pursued by a gang of rapacious women, who sleazily ask, "Are you Bret? We hear you like to have a good time."
Bret and Jemaine suffer date rape once again in the tenth episode, "New Fans," wherein a predatory groupie coerces them into dropping "acids" and then gets them to have a threesome with her. They are reluctant, but too polite to say no. The episode ends with the revelation that a webcam has been installed in Bret and Jemaine's shared bedroom, and that their female stalker, Mel, watches them every night.
All this role reversal is funny, of course, in the same way that nerdy white guys rapping is funny. But unexpectedly, it also happens to be sexy, perhaps uniquely so for women. If men want to see beautiful women's bodies sexually objectified, they need only look to the entirety of Western culture. But what about women? The conventional pop-science wisdom is that women are less visual than men in their sexual arousal, but it's difficult to argue this convincingly when women have so little to be visual about. Even gay porn is not meant for their eyes. What do they have? Now they have Flight of the Conchords.
The aesthetic of "The New Cup" is noticeably different from that of, say, "Girlfriends." This time around, Bret and Jemaine seem to be sexually aware of their own bodies, vamping for the camera like the scantily clad girls who writhe in MTV videos. The episode's other song, "Sugalumps," was criticized by some fans for being too similar to the Season One song "She's So Hot (Boom)." But watching them side-by-side reveals a profound difference in Bret and Jemaine's physicality. In the Season One song, their movements are simply goofy -- they flail around asexually like young boys:
But by Season Two, Bret and Jemaine appear to have developed an awareness of how their female fanbase sees them. When Bret spreads his legs he is not entirely kidding, and Jemaine, especially, has perfected his veneer of passive fuckability: staring vacantly into the camera, slack-jawed, caressing himself, bucking his hips and throwing his head back in a "take me" position, he is a perfect caricature of receptive female hotness.
This season, Bret and Jemaine have been advertising their bodies to women in a manner that might really be unprecedented. Male comedians jokingly put their bodies on display all the time, but who, besides McKenzie and Clement, has ever dared to take that extra step and pose sincerely, for the sexual gratification of their fans, just as female celebrities do? It cannot be a coincidence that within the first seven episodes alone Bret and Jemaine have pole-danced, whored themselves, dressed up for kinky sex with a fetishistic woman; they've been tied up, painted in a nude portrait, and mistaken multiple times for lovers -- that eternal female fantasy. The music video for last week's song, "Demon Woman," really went over the top: with Bret and Jemaine thrusting their pelvises in all-black-letter getups, and Jemaine, in one glorious moment, going shirtless altogether, there can be no doubt remaining that they are playing to their audience.
Flight of the Conchords is scheduled to end in two weeks, supposedly for good, leaving a hole in the fantasy lives of women. The odds are that the last few episodes will be largely underwhelming, as most of them tend to be, and many people will wonder at the massive outcry when the show disappears. What, they'll wonder, are these fans going to miss?
This is what we're going to miss: porn. Porn that only we recognize as porn -- porn that's just for us, porn that we have spent our whole lives searching for, but never found until Flight of the Conchords. We'll miss knowing that at least one show out there recognizes us as sexual beings with our own sexual desires, and simply gratifies them, without objectifying us in the process. This is why we love Bret and Jemaine.
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