More about Watchmen, the comics-flavored film product

[womzilla]

Over at Howling Curmudgeons, the group comics blog to which I contribute far too infrequently, there has of course been some discussion of the film Watchmen (not the Saturday-morning cartoon). I said this:

I have spent so many years looking at the precise telling of Watchmen--the emblems, the sigils--that I'd forgotten how much I like the story. But every time Snyder missed an opportunity to layer on a sigil or an emblem, I felt it sharply. No triangular bloodflow on Moloch's face? Why not?

(Laurie isn't water in the film. That's just bad filmmaking.)

to which one of my fellow curmudgeons, who is intimately familiar with the source material, replied, "I don't understand that comment."

So, I elaborated:

The six major characters all have physical emblems. Laurie's is water--the snow globe, the perfume bottle, the pool in Karnak, tears, rain. That's all lost in the film, just not there at all.

(This is distinct from the characters' sigils--Adrian's triangle, Blake's smiley face, Jon's circle.)

...

Emblems: Adrian is knots, surprisingly. Jon is watches, unsurprisingly. The others don't come to mind as readily--I might never have worked them all out to my satisfaction. (Is Dan eyeglasses? Maybe.)

Other sigils: Laurie is a wavy line. Rorschach is a stain. Dan is, I believe, a crescent.

Back in 2000, I wrote that I thought that the "minute hand at 11:58" might be Blake's sigil, but I think it belongs to all of them, a loss of innocence and the awareness of death--the most important image of the book, of course, since each of the characters is an answer to the question, "How do human beings respond to the awareness of death?"

The sigils and emblems recur throughout the book, sometimes very blatantly, sometimes very subtly, to connect each part to each other part. Motifs, you might say.

Another commenter, "Scavenger", pointed out that Dan's emblem is probably eyeglasses, which seems right; another commenter, "Jeff R.", added that "Associating Veidt with knots gives him a strong connection to Hooded Justice", which pleased me a lot--one sign of a good theory is that it explains things one didn't think of when one first came up with the theory.

On reflection, I am coming to think that tears are, in fact, the Comedian's emblem, separate from Laurie's. Are reflections Rorschach's emblem? I think they have to be.

Anyway. My biggest single disappointment in the film is that most of this dropped out completely. Even when it would have taken no effort to include the emblems and the sigils, they are (mostly) aren't there. And that's just odd, and sad.

Comments

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I hadn't caught Adrian's pyramid showing up on Moloch's face--very nice. I'm pretty sure the triangular flow IS there in the film, but we don't see it at a good angle; Moloch's head flops back and to the left (JFK?) when Rorschach touches him, instead of giving us the full-face view Gibbons draws.

And it may be that Dan's emblem is glass in general. Not only does Laurie wipe the lenses of both his goggles and Archie's ports, but Dan sees her in the mirror on several occasions in "Fearful Symmetry" as well.

But I've always viewed Jon's hydrogen atom as one more version of the nuclear clock, the other main one being the bloodstained smiley face. The difference of course is that in Jon's version, the electron puts the time as absolute midnight. You could also argue that Dan's lenses (typically smeared with a symbolic clock-hand) and Laurie's tumbling perfume bottle (and snow globe) are reiterations of the clock as well. (The bottle does spin clockwise, I would note.)

[avram]

The flow down both sides of Moloch's nose is there, but we never get the full-on frontal view of his face that would make it triangular. I just saw the movie tonight, and was looking for it.

We do get the Pyramid Deliveries truck with the triangle on the roof going down the street during the overhead shot of Blake's murder site -- in the comic, that's the first incidence of Ozymandias's triangle.

Someone on Usenet had a theory that all of the main characters have some kind of (differing) relationship with glass. I noticed that the movie took away one of Dr Manhattan's glass references (Milton Glass, head of the Gila Flats facility, was dropped from the story) and added in a new one (Philip Glass soundtrack for Dr M's Martian soliloquy).