The Blind Watchmenmaker

The internet will look up and scream, "Write us an article!"


And I'll whisper, "Come on, guys, I've got a headache and I've had a rough week. Oh fine, I'll write the damn article. Damn internet."

Does this make me crazy? Probably.

Keeper's Journal, February 10, 2012.


The Tubes are full of nerds, and the nerds are full of rage.


Nerd rage.


DC announced a whole slew of prequels, prequels to WATCHMEN, the Sacred Cow of Comics. Alan Moore denounced it. Dave Gibbons stayed out of it. Might be the only sane man here. Might be a coward. Might be losing the thread of this article. Hrm.


Problem is, there's not a lot more to say about WATCHMEN. DC is trying, but like a dumb blogger aping Rorschach's prose style, final product bound to come off as a cheep imitation.


It all comes back to theme.


See, the power of WATCHMEN was a deconstruction. Its power came from its theme and how it used the warped, twisted psyches of its characters to strip away the assumptions of the Superhero Comic. It laid the dark truths inherent in the genre bare. But in the process, it mined the whole of its promise. Entire premise based on deconstructing the characters individually in a compressed space. Result is a series of portraits that seem complete in and of themselves. So, the theme and characters have nowhere to go. It's a thematic planned obsolescence not seen in the ongoing stories told about nancyboys like that Superman or half-rate losers like Spiderman (Possibly homosexual? Hrm).


So where do you go when all avenues explored with character and theme?


You start tearing down the previous work.


Good Fanfiction is a model for this. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality good example. Responds to the work by telling a new story while analyzing the nature of the old one, in this case by picking apart the nature of Wizard society. Hell, it's what Watchmen did to comics in the first place.


My suggestion? Simple. To make the Prequels good respond to the original work. Don't just write prequels, write responses. One good way: where Moore and Gibbons made everything grim and gritty, find way to reintroduce hope. Of course, limited by the nature of the chronology, but wouldn't it be cool to see prequels used to deconstruct some of the original's qualities? KINGDOM COME good model for this: it's a comic that pushes back against the grim darkness of the 1990s and ends up finding hope and beauty in superheros again.


Another suggestion: patch the holes in the original. What's the biggest hole?


Rorschach.


People keep making the mistake of thinking he's awesome. This is a failure of both the reader and of Moore and Gibbons. Sooner we acknowledge that--and the fact that WATCHMEN isn't an unassailable work of staggering genius--sooner we can start picking apart why a murderous, psychopathic, ultraconservative, heterosexist, misogynistic monster appeals so much to comic fans. I would love to hold in my hands a comic that expresses just what a warped, inhuman individual Walter Kovaks is. Would be a creative masterstroke, and hugely important to the culture of fandom as a whole.


Weird thing is, this isn't going to happen. Doubt it will, anyway. And, indirectly, it's because of the fans--fans like me who are criticizing the venture.


Not to say the fans are wrong. No, I don't think it's crazy to feel like DC is pulling something sleazy here, and I know crazy. I know all about crazy. I think most fans sense what I wrote about above, even if they're not consciously aware of it. See, people know how stories work. We're wired to get stories. So we know when a story is over, even if we don't know consciously that we're experiencing it that way.


Problem is, that gets translated into Sacred Cow phenomenon. Fans interpret the completion of the story as the PERFECTION of the story. They look at the self contained nature and conclude that nothing more can be said. So, the conclusion is that WATCHMEN is untouchable when really it's just very cohesive in its scope. It's a misunderstanding similar to FILM CRIT HULK's concept of tangible details.


The unfortunate result of that conclusion is that you can't start picking WATCHMEN apart without nerd rage flooding the streets like an ocean of blood. Hrm. All the whores and liberals and politicians look up and scream, "WHERE IS THE SQUIDGINA?! WE WANT TENTACLE MONSTERS!!" and your movie spawns flamewars that ignite whole message boards in holy cleansing fire. Talked about this before in another article.


So what would happen if DC tried to publish a prequel that deconstructed the original work?


Mayhem.


Really, think about people who love Rorschach. They're wrong about loving him and admiring him. But what would happen if DC published a prequel making that clear? Again, mayhem. The reaction would run something like:


"DC is totally ruining WATCHMEN! They don't understand it at all! They made Rorschach suck!"


Misses the point, of course. Hypothetical!DC only exposing what's present, but unclear, in original text, but the fanbois won't see it that way.


So let me predict what will happen. DC has hired fans of WATCHMEN that will treat the material with respect, but ultimately won't take the themes anywhere new, because A. the company is probably aware of what the fans would do if they tried to put out something as revolutionary as the original work and B. the writers and artists are, themselves, fans and, I suspect, probably feel an obligation to the original comic. It's the Sacred Cow. You don't mess with the Sacred Cow, or Rorschach breaks your fingers.


All this totally ignores the ethics of DC's contract with Moore, of course. Not sure what I think about that. But I think it shows that creatively BEFORE WATCHMEN is a non-starter. And people can sense it, even if they can't articulate why. Deep down in their bones they know that it's just too lofty a goal.


And besides, writing like Rorschach is enough to drive anyone nuts. Wouldn't wish this shit on anyone. Going to go watch MY LITTLE PONY or something. Hrm.

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The comments section is afraid of me. I've seen its true face. If you like what you've read, share it--Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you whores and liberals are using to surf the blogoblag these days.

In a double blind test, how many people could tell the difference between Rorschach's journals and Frank Miller's tirades? Research this later. Hrm.

Hips Don't Lie: Body Language and Character

Let's talk about body language.

No, wait, this is more fun if we talk about something else, first. So let's talk about The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

For those of you unfamiliar with the film, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is a Spaghetti Western: an Italian cowboy movie that was later dubbed back into English. It is also a profoundly deconstructive work, analyzing the traditional set up of the Western film and introducing a number of ambiguities and grim truths. But none of this would matter if it wasn't for the craft and construction of the film.

Take a look at this scene from the climax of the film. It shouldn't give too much away, so don't worry about spoilers. The set up for this is that the trio of characters (two of which--Blondie, played by Clint Eastwood, and Tuco, played by Eli Wallach--appear in this scene) are looking for a stash of gold in a cemetery. The others know the name of the cemetery, but only Eastwood's character knows the name of the grave where the gold is buried. Recently in the film, however, Wallach and Eastwood have traded information, and now Wallach is after the gold himself.

Got it?

Let's watch:



A lot of things make this little clip extraordinary. The most obvious driving force of the scene is Ennio Morricone's score, which rises in intensity throughout the scene, building to a fever pitch before coming to a sudden halt when Wallach's character finally sees the grave. What's more, the camera work enhances the rising sense of panic by steadily panning faster and faster, until the world is simply a blur. The message here is clear: Tuco's very practical problem of locating one grave among hundreds becomes a way of understanding the awe-inspiring death toll of the Civil War. It is awful in the fullest sense of the word.

But there's one other aspect of this that might be easily overlooked: Tuco's body language throughout this scene. Sure, we get closeups of his face to see his emotions, and that's important, but those wide scenes do more than introduce the viewer to the vastness of the cemetery and, by extension, the devastation of the war. They also allow us a full view of Tuco's body language as he begins his search.

I want you to rewatch that scene, but this time turn off the sound. Ignore the score and let Wallach's acting do the talking.

Done?

Did you notice how he progresses in his movements from an easy (albeit somewhat skulking) confidence to a steadily rising panic? Look at the way he walks as he enters the graveyard. He seems to be at ease--he has gotten the information he wanted, and now he's going to get the gold. As he moves forward, even though his back is turned to us, we can see that he becomes hesitant, picking through the graves in a way that suggests his growing concern. By the time he begins running, he is already beginning to feel overwhelmed and panicked by the task before him.

Of course, these shots are interspersed with closeups that show us his emotions more directly. However, I would argue that these shots augment, rather than supplant, the distant shots. They would not work so well if Wallach wasn't able to convey his character's emotions at a distance through his posture and movements. Hell, look at that last shot of him running compared to the ones before: by the end of the search, he's plowing through the graveyard at a feverish pace, and his head is now darting from side to side, desperately seeking the grave. Even something as simple as that head movement enhances our understanding of the character's predicament, even if we aren't aware of it consciously.

What we can learn from this is that body language greatly enhances characterization. Facial expressions carry things a long way, but even at a distance we can read what a person is feeling by paying attention to how their body moves.

And this is why so much fan art fails utterly in its goals.

...And now my coat is covered in your drink. You really need to stop choking on your beverage each time I suddenly swerve full speed into a totally new argument. Maybe I should stop swerving into new arguments while you're drinking? NONSENSE!

Look, here, let me explain with a link. Check out this little image roundup (it's not even really an article) of female versions of male superheroes. There are a lot of problems with the roundup, I'm not denying that. Everything from the assumptions demonstrated in the language ("...if these superheros were all women, not only would they kick a** [sic] but also look very sexy doing it!" Right, because men can't be sexy, and the primary reason to make a character female is to raise the sex appeal) to the boneheaded ignorance (come on, even I know that She-Hulk is an actual character in her own right. Dumba**es). But most of the individual images are failures in their own right, for quite different reasons.

Take this image of The Riddler, for example:

Riddle me this: what the fuck is wrong with people?

Now, what do you know about Female!Riddler from this image?

1. She has a nice butt
2. She has good taste in canes
3. ???

That's... about it, honestly. The picture is all about the sexualization of the character. That's really all that matters for this image. The weird thing is, it ultimately defeats the purpose of the sexualization because it totally overwhelms any sense of the character. This is no longer The Riddler. It's a person in a Riddler suit.

Contrast this with the genderswapped version of The Joker:

She seems like a cheerful person

What a contrast. We know what kind of character Female!Joker is from the pose--the manic laughter, the way she stares at the viewer, the casual hold she has on the gun... I particularly love the contrast between that gun and the cute Batman doll. It actually suggests that Female!Joker has a somewhat different relationship to Batman and to the world--the joke-themed malevolence is still there, but there's something subtly different about her, something almost childish, and more related to Harley Quinn* than to her male counterpart.

*When she isn't being designed by the makers of the recent Arkham games or the DC reboot. I can only assume that those designers are simply giant cocks with hands. That is my only explanation for the staggering, objectifying stupidity of those costumes.

My prizes for most successful and most egregious go, respectively, to the redesign of Indy:

That whip just took on a whole new--actually, scratch that, I'm sure there's plenty of fanfics that have already made fine use of Indy's iconic accessory. Nevermind.

which is sexualized but in a way that actually corresponds well to the sexualization of the original character and manages to convey, through the sexy pose, a sense of Indy's swaggering confidence...

...And to the redesign of Dr Manhattan:

Mmmm, the impossibility of free will in a mechanistic universe gets me soooo hooot.

which manages to totally miss the entire point of the character's nudity in the original work (he doesn't care about clothes because he has basically ceased to be human) in favor of LULZ NEKKIDZ. My protip of the day is that if a fan work misses the nuance and purpose of a character's design, that "fan" is actually probably just someone trying to tap into the rest of the fanbase for fame or profit. They are the worst, most utterly disgusting type of artist.

Anyway, my vitriol aside, what I hope this highlights is the fact that an understanding of body language is essential for anyone who wants to tell a story visually. What's more, it's essential to understanding the relationship between art and social justice. You can argue for equality all you want--it ultimately won't matter a smidge as long as the unconscious truth of a character design is actively working against you.

This is the reason why, as this excellent Border House article explains, the following image is... well... let's say that its heart is in the right place, but its still ultimately kinda dumb:

Seriously, what's going on with her feet?!

Based on what we've gone over, can you see why there's some problems with the image? It's all in the body posture, folks. Beyond costuming, style, music, or even facial expression, body posture is an incredibly powerful force.

Our job as artists and critics is to be aware of its power and to use it effectively. And not like... well... this:

This is beyond stupid. This is in Insane Clown Posse or Rick Perry territory now.

As always, feel free to leave comments, complaints, or, best of all, your own interpretations, or e-mail me at keeperofmanynames@gmail.com . And, if you like what you've read here, share it on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Reddit, Equestria Daily, Xanga, Netscape, or whatever else you crazy kids are using to surf the blogoblag these days.

The Dark Lord Potter--Using Critical Analysis As A Creator

I've rattled on a few times before about what interpretation of a work is, and why it's a useful tool for an audience. But what I want to play around with today is the idea that interpretation can be useful to creators of art as well.

To show how this works, I'm going to take a look at some of the things going on in Harry Potter VII: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 2 (Dobby's Revenge)). Oh, and I'll be taking a brief look at Watchmen, both the film and the comic. I've tried to write this so that ANYONE can make sense of my argument, not just people intimitely familiar with both works. So, don't stay away if you haven't seen either movie. But be forwarned--there will be many spoilers here. I'll be revealing some major events. If I wanted to black out the spoilers in this column, the whole site would quickly turn into a Sisters of Mercy concert.

We'll save the goth invasion for when my sister does a guest post.

HPVII-2 does a few interesting thing with the characters. In particular, it plays up the ambiguity of action and motivation, to the point where it's hard to tell sometimes if there are any completely good characters or, to a lesser extent, if there are any completely evil ones.

Besides, of course, Voldemort, who is still an evil sod.

Take, for example, the infiltration of the wizarding bank Gringotts, where Harry uses an Unforgivable Curse--specifically, a mind control curse--on an innocent goblin. Yes, our beemish, noble hero used one of the four curses that the books refer to not as "Kinda Bad", not "Rather Unfortunate, But Alright, Maybe Just This Once" but as "Unforgivable." Hm. This is a bit of a divergence from Harry's earlier habit of shouting disarming charms at every obstacle. What's more, he gets there by bluffing another goblin into trusting him despite him having exactly zero plans for honoring his end of the bargain. Oh, and the goblin that he mind controls? Torched by a dragon. Hm. This is a far cry from Harry's tendency to save absolutely everyone earlier on in the series, and it also shows that his willingness to bend the rules has transformed, under pressure, almost into ruthlessness.

Now, this is something that happened in the books. It wasn't invented whole cloth for this movie. And yet... I can't help but feel, and you may lob that glass at my head if you disagree, but I can't help but feel that this wasn't ever candidly addressed in the book the way it was in the movie. There's something a little sickening about that goblin standing there, dazed, about to meet a grizzly end. It's a moment that can be glossed over much more easily in the text. In the movie, we can't avoid seeing the casualties of this war, and the compromising of Harry's principles.

Rather grim, no?

It is this sort of scene (there are others) that more completely sets up the final confrontation. We see, in the King's Cross scene, what Harry's great enemy Voldemort has become. Just for an instant, just for a few seconds, we see the huddled, gasping wound that is Voldemort's soul. This, and Harry's earlier willingess to use his power in destructive or unethical ways in order to win, sets up their last battle. Consider the visuals as they hurl themselves around the castle, locked in a death grip. In the midst of Voldemort's shadow, the two combatants twist and seem to almost merge together, becoming one writhing, howling being. The visuals are too obvious, and too distinct, to be anything other than deliberate. The creators of this film are telling us something. But what?

Well, in the book it was fairly obvious what Rowling wanted us to take away from the final battle. Harry, by sacrificing himself, had saved all his friends. Here, we are meant to see Harry as a messianic archetype--in other words, as a Jesus figure. But the creators want us to see him as something less pure, less noble.

They want us to see him as the next Dark Lord.

This makes the scene where Harry breaks the staggeringly powerful Elder Wand far more powerful. Here, Harry willingly turns away from power, having seen both his own willingness to use it, and the vision of what power could turn him into. What makes this interesting is that here the scene has far more meaning than it did in the original text. In the original text it was odd that Harry should throw away the Elder Wand, because he had been set up by Rowling as a noble Jesus figure. Why would he give away that power? He's one of the good guys! But in the movie... he isn't. He's not so unambiguously noble there, so the scene sends a more powerful, albeit unstated, message.

The same thing occurs, less successfuly, in Watchmen. In the original comic book, if you aren't familiar with it, New York is destroyed by a giant psychic tentacle monster (affectionately dubbed "The Squidgina" by fans). The thing is, the giant tentacle monster hasn't come from outer space. No, it's been created by a mortal man, as a massive hoax: he plans to stop an almost certain nuclear war between the US and Russia by convincing the world that an alien invasion is imminent.

In the movie, however, he creates a weapon that imitates the power of the godlike character Dr Manhattan... and, again, blows up New York. This change is not arbitrary. It means that humanity bands together against the threat of a functionally deistic power. They band together under the threat of the Wrath of God. It puts an interesting new dimension on the ending that wasn't present in the original, but it builds off of ideas introduced in the original work.

What? The point?

Ooooh, yes yes yes. The point. Right.

The point of all this is that both movies gained strength from the fact that the creators critically interpreted the texts that the movies were based on. In the case of HPVII-2, they took the ambiguity of the hero's actions, played the ambiguity up, and ultimately drew a new message out of the text--that it is preferable to give up power than to be consumed by it. In Watchmen, the analysis of Manhattan's godlike power and ambiguous morals was emphasized and turned into a contemplation of how humans behave when a godlike, wrathful being watches over them. Maybe. I could be totally off my rocker, and I have some doubts that Watchmen, in particular, was deliberately framed that way--it is, after all, Zack Snyder we're talking about here.

But even if I'm wrong, and all of this was just chance, I think it shows that this sort of analysis CAN be useful. It can allow us to look at a work that we're creating, and to say, "Now, some of what this character is doing implies x, y, z. What if I play that up? What if I change this scene to better fit in with those ideas? How will the reader interpret this?" And so on. Most writers probably already do that, to some extent, but it's a process that's worth doing a bit more consciously. This sort of thing allows us to bridge the gap between art that is pretty but has no real message, and art that has a message but thwacks us over the head with it. It lets us start to see a middle path, where we can raise interesting questions through subtle cues and themes. And, of course, it allows us to pick them out in other works and learn from them.

So, criticism isn't just for critics. And it's not just for the consumers of art. It's for the producers as well. Because choosing to critically analyze a work lets us create more nuanced and, ultimately, more meaningful stories.