O Lord, why do you tantalize us with these impossible questions, which set our minds aflame in futile attempts at reason-driven answers?
Of course, I’m talking about how to do a Watchmen movie.
Plok is only the latest blogger to declare Watchmen unfilmable, or (more particularly) to state that any adaptation of the work destroys at least one layer of its meaning. Even apart from trying to stuff everything into a 2-3 hour movie, he argues that
[t]o do Watchmen, you’d have to switch focus a lot, imply progression and regression at the same time a lot, not rely on the mere progress of subjective time created by the frame-to-frame unreeling of film, but create a mood of time in the mind of the viewer that is quite different from the one you pick up quite automatically from the flow of a regular movie.
Now, as we all know from Scott McCloud, comics are particularly good at manipulating time. When movies try to do it, though, it tends to look “arty,” not to mention obvious, because we are used to 24 frames per second and we can tell (as in those old Babe Ruth highlight films) when things are out of sync with real life. Watchmen wants to mess with our perceptions without us noticing the messing.
Remember issue #9, with Laurie and Jon on Mars, where the perfume bottle falls slowly throughout the whole issue, spilling as it goes, and finally crashing upon the horrific revelation of Laurie’s secret history? Picture that issue, filmed “straight,” unspooling over, say, 10 minutes of screen time. In my mind it plays like bad David Lynch, but any director would have to handle that stuff extremely delicately, or risk being laughed out of the theater. The whole book is like that, and to a certain extent, that’s the point: everything fits together so delicately that any upset throws it all off.
Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t have some hare-brained hypothesis to test, and it comes from another “unfilmable” adaptation:
Although a PHC movie could easily have just dramatized Guy Noir or Lake Wobegon stories, that approach would have slighted the music, commercials, and other radio staples the show exploits so skillfully. Instead, the movie fictionalizes the show itself, stepping outside it to use it as a metaphor for the inevitabilities of life and death. The show is there every week until one week, suddenly, it isn’t — but the last show demands no more and no less enthusiasm than any other. The performers don’t act differently on stage, and nobody tells the radio audience the show’s about to end, leaving us moviegoers to supply our own pathos. The movie therefore doesn’t try to substitute for the original, but works to make the audience appreciate the original. All things end, the movie says, so enjoy them while they are here. I know I listened to the radio show a little more attentively this past weekend.
Anyway, maybe a similar approach would work for Watchmen. Set the movie in the world of the book, but just outside the events of the book. Maybe focus instead on a pair of filmmakers looking to make a documentary on the Comedian, and intersperse the “real” events with the documentarians’ investigations. For example, open the movie as issue #1 opens, with the camera pulling back from the bloody happy-face, and have that segue into the documentarians looking at storyboards for a possible opening sequence. Under the Hood, Rorschach’s psychological profile, the Veidt interview, and the other supplemental material could be parts of the filmmakers’ research; and one of them could be reading the pirate comic, or playing with the action figures. The filmmakers wouldn’t necessarily figure out what happened — although the movie could take place after the book ends, with one of them having found Rorschach’s diary — so there could be some disconnect with what the filmmakers know and what “really happened,” which the movie could point up.
It’s tacked on, sure, but it might still allow the audience to appreciate the original book’s complexity and self-referential nature. No film could really reproduce the cumulative effect of issue #9′s slowly tumbling perfume bottle, so a director would have to find some other way of conveying the book’s clockwork. If nothing else, those hypothetical documentarians could get just as frustrated as we fans have been. Watchmen has become so influential, twenty years later, that it no longer works just as a “realistic” take on superheroes. The trick now is in evoking the larger themes of time and fate.
(By the way, I keep saying “movie,” when I’m really thinking “miniseries.” All this stuff is definitely too much for 2-3 hours.)
Still, the more I think about this Rosencrantz & Guildenstern idea, the dumber it sounds. To adapt Watchmen it almost seems like the difficulty of a good adaptation must be acknowledged metatextually, and that sounds like the Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation – which, as it happens, I haven’t seen. (At least this post has some recursivity to it!) However, the Prairie Home Companion movie made me realize how powerful the evocation of a work can be, as opposed to the mere translation of said work.
Or, wait — what if Watchmen were animated…?
June 15th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
Yeah, I’ve long been convinced that the only way Watchmen could be filmed is as a 12-episode animated series, with one issue adapted per episode. And even then, the text material at the back of each issue would be very difficult to adapt.
June 15th, 2006 at 1:48 pm
I am much of your way of thinking (and I agree that ‘Adaptation’ is a good comparison). A ‘Watchmen’ movie would have to appear to blend different types of media – newsreels, film, video, maybe even animation, like in ‘Kill Bill Vol. 1′. A straight narrative wouldn’t work. Plus, some material would have to be cut, just because of time, and maybe some story elements would need to be changed; after all, a great movie has different ingredients than a great comic book does. But I think it could be done.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
There you have it, Tom, let’s get Robert Altman to direct Watchmen. Failing that, we get BBC to make a limited series of it…paired with that Doctor Who fellow. Failing that, you just make a documentary about Alan Moore and why he feels a Watchmen film would fail. I still love reading an interview with Sean Connery around the era of the Indiana Jones film. Somehow a discussion of a falling out between him and Gilliam came up. He derisively mentioned: “I hear he’s working on some comic book film now” (referring to Watchmen). Of course, years later, Connery himself would be appearing in League.
June 17th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
I’ve stated elsewhere that I could see only one way to successfully film WATCHMEN – as 12 separate animated mini-films, as faithful to the source material as possible (y’know, SIN CITY faithful), screened together, a la HEIMAT. This is a variation on how I’d produce a movie of Joyce’s unfilmable ULYSSES (sod Strick’s version) – by getting a different movie-maker to shoot each of the 18 chapters, to replicate the author’s stylistic switches, only with each sharing the same cast.
June 18th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
[...] Kevin and Michael May took a look at this fall’s Dark Horse releases in our regular Forward Thinking feature; be on the lookout for Marvel and DC’s next week. Speaking of our regular features, our resident Grumpy Old Fan talked about how to make a Watchmen film, Shane looks for Marvel blogs and Michael tells us why he loves monsters. [...]
June 18th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
It’ll never work, unless it were done by someone of very high caliber as a director, with a good budget.
And it would require at least an hour per issue of screen time, to do it “right”. I can’t see this ever happening unless it was something like an HBO miniseries.
June 20th, 2006 at 12:52 am
I’d get Sam Raimi to direct it and have lots of big action scenes loosely tied together by subpar dialogue and acting. I’d also make Veidt have a dark side schizo personality twin called Nero who would do all the bad stuff so we could still sympathize with Veidt. Also Rorschach is a little too harsh so I would tone that down a little. Also the Comedian needs to make wisecracks and I’d put nipples on his armor just like Batman’s. Jupiter needs bigger boobs and blonde hair. I’d leave out all the research stuff, who enjoys reading–Hell, it’s a movie. I would throw in a Rorschach mobile with changing patterns on it too and big car chase with the Owlmobile. Yes, yes watchmen is indeed filmable. It just needs the old Hollywood fix applied to it.
June 20th, 2006 at 2:12 am
I think the idea advanced here is worth considering – make Watchmen, just not the same story as the book.
Consider Akira, where the movie is essentially an expanded and reworked version of the first two books with a new ending. It works as what it is on a totally different level to the comic and tells a different story. It stands alongside the original, not beneath it.
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