Picture Poetry

or: How Smart Is Zack Snyder?

A) really dumb?

We’ve approached each character individually regarding the design of their costume. In most cases, we have remained very close to the graphic novel. Although in some cases, we’ve made adjustments. I think Nite Owl and Silk Spectre have probably been changed the most from the original designs. We felt these changes were necessary because we live in a comic-book cinema world where costumes have been fetishized to a huge degree. The costumes, as they’re drawn, might not be accessible to many of today’s audiences. I also felt that audiences might not appreciate the naiveté of the original costumes. So, there has been some effort to give them a slightly more… I would say modern look — and not modern in the sense of 2007, but modern in terms of the superhero aesthetic. It was also important to me that they appealed to my own taste as a moviegoer.

NIPPLES!

or B) kind of clever?

Lastly and possibly most important, I wanted to be sure that they comment directly on many of today’s modern masked vigilantes — who shall remain nameless…

NIPPLES!

I think that for me, it’s about adapting that great work into a movie, but it’s also certainly about making a film that does hopefully to the cinematic superhero genre, what the book did to the comic book world. It’s my hope and my intent to shine a light on the current state of superhero movies and what they mean to pop culture, and what they mean to people who enjoy them, and comic book fans.

SPIKES! DONGS!

As in most contemporary superhero movies, the costumes are grotesque fetish objects — more or less suits of sex armor — which combine a ten-year-old boy’s ideas about both sex and industrial design, then turn everything up to 11. Do they make me want to vomit? Yes. Is it the appropriate look for a film adaptation of Watchmen — which is fundamentally be an act of deconstruction and cultural commentary?

…Maybe?

This gets at a bigger question: how can anyone possibly make a film of Watchmen when the entirety of geek pop culture has been killing itself trying to be Watchmen for twenty years? Comics, television, and movies have been relentlessly pursuing the decadent, cartoonish (and frankly idiotic) “realism” that [they thought] they found in late-80s comics (Watchmen, Dark Knight, Miracleman) ever since. Some segments of superhero comics are still stuck in the 90s, but quite a lot of them have finally shoved off and found a new aesthetic to play in.

Unfortunately, just as comics are starting to finish digesting 1986 and escape from the era of X-treme,* the rest of the world is playing catch-up. Frank Miller and Zack Snyder have brought the world of pop culture back into Miller’s brain circa 1995, and if you liked it the first time, you’ll LOVE it now that your co-workers can quote Sin City at you!

*[of course, the most interesting recent work in comics was never influenced by 1986 to begin with.]

I think Snyder is a really smart guy who knows what he’s doing. I think a lot of viewers will pick up on the metatextual nature of Watchmen (both film and comic). But I worry that, like Fight Club before it, the Watchmen phenomenon (and it will be a phenomenon) will simultaneously celebrate that which it criticizes, and a lot of dudes are going to come out of the theater totally pumped about what they just saw, brah. A mass-market version of comic fans’ response to Watchmen the comic.

And we’ll be in for a whole ‘nother plague of copycats. Except this outbreak won’t be limited to the world of superhero comics. You thought Pointy Batman was bad? Wait till we get Chain-Smoking Wife-Beating Indiana Jones and Lion-O’s Stress-Induced Erectile Dysfunction.

EDIT: How appropriate that these should come out the same week as Michael Chabon’s essay about the impossibility of reproducing a hand-drawn costume in the real world.

“I am appalled by the idea of the innocence of the original Peter Pan story being sullied by a seedy work like this.”

Take a look at this two-part interview with Alan Moore (Alan’s interviews are always worth reading) about the new book Lost Girls by him and his wife Melinda Gebbie.

Yes, we are making quite a passionate plea for the freedom of the sexual passion in LOST GIRLS, but we’re also quite passionate about art nouveau and old painters and writers that we like, and beauty. The thing is that all of this is destroyed by war. The art treasures of Europe, and Britain and Europe’s youngest and prettiest and sexiest men and women were just turned to hamburger in their millions in the First World War. Don’t even get me started…

~ ~ ~

AM: One of the main things that we wanted to do with LOST GIRLS — one of the reasons why we wanted to do erotica or pornography or call it what you will that was art — is because there is a very big difference between the effect of genuine art and the effect of pornography, as it stands. When we see a work of genuine art, it makes us feel less alone. We see something captured in that sculpture or that piece of music or that painting or that book — it expresses something that, up until then, only we had perceived. We see something like an echo — something that confirms to us that, yes, our way of seeing things is not wrong. There are other people who have seen things that way, too, and they’ve just expressed it better than we could.

KA: I think one of the great tragedies of the human condition is that you can’t truly share another’s experience. We can describe and communicate our feelings and perceptions, but no one can experience anyone else’s in the first person.

AM: You can’t get inside somebody else’s skin. We’re all quite lonely. If art has a real function, then surely part of it must be as a way of communicating mind-to-mind, often in ways that language alone can’t manage. A piece of music can say things that words couldn’t. A genuine piece of art — we hear it or we see it — it makes us feel less alone. Now, that is the exact opposite of a work of pornography. A work of pornography generally leads to isolation, selfish lust, and unbearable loneliness. Once the object of the pornography has been achieved, then you can writhe in the sordid and degraded kind of loneliness of your abject existence. That’s not the kind of feeling that I prefer to associate with sex. And yet, I think an awful lot of the millions of people who make use of pornography across the world must be regularly plunged into that very unpleasant kind of selfish space. There’s no need for that. If pornography could be an aesthetic experience, an intellectual experience, and still be sexy, then it could be an incredibly useful tool that could heal a lot of people in areas where they have problems that they don’t even know how to talk about or define. If pornography was used correctly, it could give a kind of forum for discussing sexual ideas. There isn’t a forum of that nature in existence at the moment. The only place where sex gets discussed is in these teenage problem page columns where it’s generally discussed with an absolute antiseptic lack of sexiness, so that it all sounds very medical — as if it probably involves tubes and clamps (which I suppose it may, depending on your habits). This is such a big issue. If you ask anyone that’s culturally in the know what are the big themes, they’ll say, ‘Oh, well, sex and death.’ I don’t see a lot of evidence for that. I mean, death, certainly — we seem to be completely obsessed with it. If the big themes in art are sex and death, I’d say that sex is woefully underrepresented. It struck me and Melinda that this is a territory that everybody was ignoring, which are always the territories I like best. When I first involved myself with comics, it was a territory that serious artists and writers seemed to be avoiding, which is always a really good reason to go and check something out. You might find that it’s relatively undeveloped, untouched, and can be shaped with sufficient talent and ability into something that’s viable.