Favorite Films - Watchmen (2009)

Zach Snyder’s Watchmen, released in 2009, is my favorite comic book movie, and no one is more suprised about that than I. The reasons why I ought to dislike it are myriad. It’s a Zach Snyder movie, for one, and I find none of his other films even remotely compelling. His use of hyper-stylized CGI is grating in pretty much all of his films, and this one is no exception. It has this chemical, synthetic overlay that I have to actively work to forget about because it keeps inserting itself into the movie as if it is a character itself. It is distracting and annoying. For two, It’s based on a graphic novel that I never read, so I have no emotional connection to the material at all. Before I saw it, I wasn’t even aware of the the Alan Moore-penned graphic novel. That’s in contrast to the X-Men and Spider-Man, which were pretty much the only two titles I followed when I read comic books. The X-movies all suck, and Spider-Man, much like Batman, has never gotten the treament he deserves on the big screen. In the case of Spider-Man, that I read the comics and know the character is probably precisely why no Spider-Man film has passed muster. (For what it’s worth, I think the original Raimi Spider-Man gets the closest, but it isn’t nearly close enough. Also, I might as well be clear that I absolutely despise the Disney Spider-Man films with Tom Holland because the character represented in those films doesn’t resemble any Spider-Man that I recognize.)

Nevertheless, periodically I find myself drawn to rewatch Watchmen, and I can’t say that about any other comic book movie, and I find that the film holds up pretty well, and I would argue that it is unique not even among comic book movies, but among movies in general, because it presents a thematic nihilism that few films will touch. This is a godless world, a world in which the very notion of a god in the traditional sense, the omni-present, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc., god is supplanted by the existence of Doctor Manhattan, a god that actually makes sense because it doesn’t contradict itself, and by that I mean that Doctor Manhattan has the omnipotence, but nothing else. The film makes this clear, that he is neither benevolent nor can he be everywhere at once. Doctor Manhattan can reorder matter at will, see time as a whole piece, teleport to anywhere in the universe in an instant, and so forth. It isn’t explicated, but one can assume that the loss of the traditional religions makes the world go a bit insane: The cold war never ends, and in that perpetual state of emergency, Richard M. Nixon installs himself as an FDR multi-term president. Crime is rampant and hopelessness is the order of the day. The doomsday clock is ticking.

Okay, so right away, the premise of the movie doesn’t make any damned sense at all unless the audience does some heavy lifting, and I would think most people aren’t going to do it. Doctor Manhattan could end the cold war, but he doesn’t. He could turn all of the Russian nukes into candy bars, but he doesn’t. I think we are supposed to understand that Doctor Manhattan is having something of an identity crisis. When he first emerges onto the world stage, he does the bidding of the federal government. He explodes the opposition in the Vietnam War so that in this timeline the U.S. wins that war, and I think we are supposed to understand that this causes Manhattan a lot of guilt, a lot of disgust with himself, and so he decides that he’s not going to intervene in the affairs of human anymore. This is exacerbated by the fact he is so powerful; his god-like powers have separated him from his humanity, and from humanity itself, so that now he sees people as termites beneath him, and we are supposed to take from his struggle that he isn’t saving the world from itself because he thinks “the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon”. Basically, it is an existential crisis. What is Manhattan’s role in the context of human society? Nuclear war is on the horizon, and Manhattan, who again could absolutely turn all those nukes into cotton candy, removes himself to a barren Mars. If humanity is intent on destroying itself, so be it.

Dealing with this pervasive nihilism, we have a few archetypes that personify various approaches to dealing with it. Nothing matters, human life is pointless, so now what?

The Comedian laughs at the absurdity. Life is a joke, a theme that comes up over and over again in the movie. In an insane world, all a sane man can do is laugh. Fuck you universe, says the comedian, I laugh in your face.

Except the universe doesn’t care.

Rorschach takes a hard-line stoical approach, that it is meant to be endured with quietude. He forms his own personal black-and-white moral code and he answers to no one. When it is his time to die, he takes off his mask and faces it, like a true stoic.

The universe doesn’t care.

Night Owl is the compromiser who doesn’t seem to be philosophical in any particular direction. He doesn’t think about it much, but instead focuses on his job to fight the bad guys and help people where he can.

The universe doesn’t care.

Silk Spectre just turns inward to her femaleness, which I think is a master stroke if I’m being honest, because females just don’t have these existential issues, overall, I’ve found. Females are closer to their biology, their animal natures, as the ones to actually birth the babies. Females have the luxury of circumscribing their entire world within those boundaries. When my first daughter was born, I was thrown into an existential crisis, and it was real, and it was difficult to work through. Took me at least a year. My wife at the time had no such problem at all.

The universe doesn’t care.

Ozymandias makes the point that Night Owls heroics have done nothing, that they are mere drops compared to an ocean. He recognizes that Doctor Manhattan cannot be relied upon to save humanity from itself, and so he uses his intelligence and his vast resources to engineer a solution without Manhattan, and he succeeds. He succeeds in turning Doctor Manhattan from God into the Devil, and humanity forgets its previous conflicts and unites against Manhattan as a common enemy. Ozymandias’ is the pragmatic approach. You have to break some eggs to make an omelette.

The universe still doesn’t care.

All of this is sophomoric, and I think necessarily so given that Moore is writing to an audience that reads comic books. I mean, the film isn’t able to do much with these various defenses against nihilism, but it does give us food for thought, and that is far more than anything done by other comic book films, and so, what I’m left with in Watchmen is a deeply flawed film, but nevertheless a faithful adaption of the source material created by Alan Moore that could even serve as an entry point to these kinds of deeper philosophical themes.

The universe doesn’t care. Human life adds up to nothing. Your childish omni omni omni god doesn’t exist. Now what?