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

[docbrite.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the movie, but now I have to go read the damn comic again with all this in mind.

(Kidding about the "damn" part. It's always good to have an excuse and/or a new way to reread an old favorite, and I did just spend two days privately obsessing about King's use of dead-leaf images in The Shining.

[edited for typo]

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Geeze, it's just a sci-fi movie and a comic book.

You're talking as if such materials are created for adults and should be read with attention and respect. It's just grist for the Hollywood crap mill, sneered at even while being huckstered at top volume.

[avram]

I'm still not as convinced of this as you are.

Or rather, I'm not convinced that these "emblems" are tied to characters. The chapter in which Laurie argues with her old lover on Mars is full of water and water symbols, yes, but the one in which she takes up with a new lover is full of fire. This can be seen as symbolic of the nature of the relationships -- fire is excitement, water is continuity (in this case, the continuity between generations, as Laurie discovers who's really her father). Making love next to the swimming pool in Karnak would therefore symbolize the start of a committed, long-term relationship, and not just a fiery one-night stand.

The knotted rope might not be (ahem) tied to Veidt in particular; it might just be (like a noose) a symbol of vigilantism, of unlawful violence in the name of mock-justice. That would seem appropriate for the only three uses I've been able to find: Hooded Justice's costume, Adrian Veidt's story of the gordian knot, and the rope the sailor uses to climb up onto the Black Freighter. (And maybe Rorschach's repeated breaking-into Dan's home.)

[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).

[washa-way.livejournal.com]

I like the Milton/Philip Glass switch! Very cool.

Hmm. Is Adrian's glass the one he looks at himself in?

[avram]

Here's the old Usenet thread with the glass thing. The second message, by bsvitavsky, lays out the theory. I think he's straining to include Rorschach.

Now that I think about it, I think Moore may have included all the glass references deliberately, and excluded Roschach. Glass reflects, and an alternative identity can be thought of as a reflection, a different face seen in the mirror. Rorschach denies the existence of his other self, Walter Kovacs. He's all other-self, nobody to see in the mirror. Perhaps that's why he wears a reflection on his face, and why he bookends the symmetrical chapter.

All of the major Watchmen characters are in some kind of denial. Rorschach denies his own identity. Dr Manhattan denies being a god. Laurie denies her true father. Veidt denies the moral horror of his plan. Blake, like Veidt, denies the immorality of his actions. Dan... I'm not sure about Dan. Maybe he's in denial about his own sexuality.

[avram]

Further evidence for my fire-vs-water theory: In Chapter 3, page 9, panel 9, we see a close-up on their hands as Dan hands Laurie a cup of hot, steaming coffee. The composition is nearly identical to Chapter 4, page 5, panel 6, where we see a close-up on the "cold, perspiring" glass mug of beer the Janey Slater is handing to Jon Osterman.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of fog/steam imagery throughout the book; I haven't tried to tease out whether I think it has a consistent significance.

I don't see how the pairing you identify says anything about fire or settled vs. unsettled love--the beer is the start of Jon and Janey's relationship, and their relationship is uneasy and impermanent (aren't they all?).

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Why, then, does Rorschach take off the mask at the end?