Firefly the Great

I saw Watchmen Thursday night, and I have to say I am joining the chorus of people saying that it was a great film and an amazingly accurate adaptation of the graphic novel.

When I first saw it, I only had one objection, not related to the graphic novel or even the film per se, and that was, when the credits rolled, I went “Oh my god. Is this REALLY supposed to be ‘Desolation Row’?”

My Chemical Romance, you fail at Dylan.

I know, the film has three Dylan songs, which is AWESOME, and expecting fanboys to sit through”The Times They are a Changin’” is more than most directors would give us, but the three-minute rocked-up version of “Desolation Row” commits one of the great musical sins of the Firefly-Verse, which is that the music is over-produced given the theme.

(spoiler cut)

OK, that’s admittedly a sillier objection than ZOMG WHERE IS MAI GIANT SQUID, but I was a Dylan fangirl long before I picked up Watchmen, so deal with it.

Looking back at my graphic novel, I’m actually amazed at how accurate it was, particularly to a graphic novel considered by many to be “unfilmable” … and, in a way, I can see their point. The novel’s plot meanders and goes off in a million different directions at once, each of which reinforces the other in strange and subtle ways — the AV Club’s Book vs. Film feature points out how the pirate story connects with Ozymandias, for example:

The only bothersome thing is that the loss of the Black Freighter story affects the final scene with Ozymandius in the film—in the book, he recounts a dream that draws a parallel between himself and the protagonist of that story, which suddenly makes the story’s presence in the book make sense. For 400 pages, you’re meant to wonder what the hell pirates and a castaway spouting purple prose has to do with anything, and Ozy’s line at the end suddenly makes it all clear: It’s a metaphor for what he’s done, and what he has to live with as a result. I really missed that sense in the movie, and the feeling that came with it that Ozy really did regret what he’d done, and really did feel all the deaths he caused, and wasn’t just paying them a little emo lip service.

But there is a Black Freighter animated DVD in the works — and, of course, a director’s cut, which fanboys can only hope to be as polished as the long-form Lord of the Rings films. This is, of course, the major failing of the film, albeit a necessary one, given the form. Each character feels like a snapshot of himself: the essence of the character, admirably, but little else. Ozymandias is clearly a Nazi-style supervillain from the start; Rorschach is frightening (and Jackie Earle Haley puts in an excellent performance) but we always know he’s on the right side.

On the other hand, it’s amazing that the film works at all, particularly for people who haven’t read the graphic novel. Watchmen is like Shakespeare or Casablanca, it’s full of cliches (that it predates). It’s impossible to envision Heroes without Watchmen, same as countless other imitators that embrace the gritty realism and moral gray areas without fully appreciating them.

The theme that struck me most on my first reading is that it took all these characters, and seemed to say: OK, what if they were real? What then?

Rorschach, most interestingly, is based on a third-string superhero called The Question, a product of Steve Ditko’s Objectivist philosophizing. Unlike the shifting “whatever you see” reality of the inkblot, Rorschach is a man of strict morality that leaves no place for human emotion; as much the Moore version of John Galt as Nite Owl is an impotent, cut-rate Batman.

And yet, Rorschach is the driving force of Watchmen, the only person who cares to investigate the Comedian’s death; the one who stands resolute, even in the face of apocalypse, much like heroes of that other Zack Snyder film.

Of course, he’s also a madman.

Somehow, this got me thinking about Moby-Dick, which is about as difficult as getting me thinking about Bob Dylan, i.e. not particularly. The thing of Moby-Dick is that it has two main characters who compete for our attention: Ishmael and Ahab. Ishmael is the protagonist, it’s his book, it starts with “Call me Ishmael” and ends with “I alone am escaped to tell thee.”

Ask a man on the street for the story of Moby-Dick, though, and you’re not likely to hear of Ishmael and his whaling adventure, you’re likely to hear of an old man and his monomania, his vengeful search for a whale.

Melville, like Moore, was a genre author; his obituaries listed him as the author of Typee, which was a form of his own days most popular genre, the travel/adventure tale, complete with naked women and cannibalism. You could not go wrong with naked women and cannibalism in the 19th century, as long as it was firmly in the realm of Those Savages.

Moby-Dick took this genre story and made it into something more. He imbued its characters with Shakespearean attributes and embedded in them the elements of high tragedy. His characters were recognizable to students of Melville.

Ishmael was the Good Guy, but Ahab was right. Ishmael survives, as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre survive (though not to tell the tale) because they are truly people of basic good character…

But not because they understand.

On some level, understanding is madness.

Expecting justice in the world, expecting to strike beneath the mask, to see the little lower layer — only Ahab and Rorschach go there.

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