On Watchmen, and Violence

I saw Watchmen last night. Good, after a fashion. With certain qualifications.

I find it helps with these things not to expect too much. I expected little of Transformers, and thus enjoyed it greatly. I had read that Watchmen lacked fire and impetus and tension, and indeed it did (though the original comic had a sort of grim bloodlessness to it anyway - Moore is very cerebral); so I wasn't disappointed, and the movie is visually fantastic, so there were many parts I enjoyed a fair bit. Furthermore, the ending has been tweaked a little to make orders of magnitude more sense. (Consider the original comic, you who have read it. Consider how long it will be until someone dissects what they find in New York and figure out where its constituent parts come from. Consider what happens when they do DNA testing, and then clone the brain. The game will be up, the US will start looking for someone to blame, and the world will have new forms of weaponry. Messy.) (This is a strike against the comic insofar as its supposedly-intelligent villain/saviour is not being very smart; in the film, he's smart but arguably incredibly naive, because human nature won't change: the measure taken to produce peace will need repeating again, and again, and again...) (Cf. Evil Overlord List #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.)

Rorschach is brutal, and horrible, and also the best thing on the screen. (More in spite of than because of his brutality. The original comic did not have all those cracking and scrunching noises when he interrogates people, which made it a tad easier to like him.)

Dr. Manhattan seems somehow more vulnerable, more human, than I remember him being from Dave Gibbons' clinical, emotionless rendering of him. When reading the comic I had not taken note of his hunger for transcendence, that he desires to see a miracle, which makes sense - he's trapped in a clockwork world, unable to change anything, past or future (both of which he sees with far too much clarity). (Cf. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

[T]he materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will... the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them.

There's some of this in Dr. Manhattan; although he finds a partial answer in reverence for life, the imago Dei, and then waltzes off to another galaxy to become a Demiurge.)

The movie has one major downside, namely the gore and violence, which I did not like. Some of this was present in the comic, which was a shade more brutal and bloody than a story about people in spandex kicking each other strictly need to be. The movie decided this was not sufficient, and added more.

There were points where the violence was artistic and admirable - Dan and Laurie in the prison, for example, wading through escaped prisoners. This is proper to an action movie, which basically lives off the excitement of violent action, the exchange of blows and projectiles and explosive devices.

There were points where the violence, or rather the gore involved, was excessive. This is a subjective thing, how violent a movie should be, and how much of the results (in terms of mutilation, injury, etc.) should be shown. Rorschach burying a meat cleaver in someone's head, and a bullet going through Veidt's secretary's leg, seemed this way to me. Justifiable in terms of the story (just about), but gratuitous in that they did not need such explicit showing. Similarly, 300: severed body parts and lots of blood are the logical consequence of large numbers of people attacking each other with sharp objects, but it could easily have done with a little less. It is excessive; but my sense of it is that the movie is simply blasè about gore, and expects the viewer to be too.

Then there were points where the gore was not merely gratuitous, but seemed to be revelled in. The movie had little excuse for showing a man's broken arm spurting blood from the elbow; or showing bloody body parts hanging from the ceiling; or showing a man's bloody stumps after having his arms cut off. The difference is between the camera not bothering to avoid the bloody consequences of violence, and actively seeking out the gore - the camera seemed moved to snatch glimpes of injury and mutilation out of perverse titillation at the sight.

This bothers me. Wallowing in violence for the kinetic thrill of it is one thing: whether it goes too far or not, I understand it. Wallowing in gore and blood and body parts is outside of what I understand and sympathise with - it pertains more to a psychopath than a normal human being. It reminds me of Brian Cox' Hannibal Lecter (in Manhunter): normal-seeming, but his eyes light up, ever so slightly, when handed photos of the Red Dragon's victims to look at. The implication that even a small chunk of the viewing public shares this mentality is rather worrying.

(I formed these thoughts, or most of them, commenting on John Wright's livejournal entry on the movie. John Wright says "it is not as bad as some modern horror movies". I find myself really not wanting to know.)