Kids like comics. It’s 10pm on a school night and you’re 12-years-old. Older kids knock on the door and ask if you want to go out to the park. “Course you can’t,” says mum. “It’s a school night”. There are rules, there are restrictions. You run to your room and pick up a comic. Spiderman swoops through the night, flying between skyscrapers in a city 3,000 miles and countless dreams away. You fly with him.
“With great power comes great responsibility” – the most daunting and exciting rule you’ve ever known.
Adults like comics. You’ve grown up and you haven’t. Mum’s authority was a precursor to society’s. There are new rules, there are new restrictions. You have a mortgage, you have a partner, you have kids. You go to the movies to see Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s take on Alan Moore’s graphic novel, a book which permanently corrupted the childishly fundamental principles of good and evil – the bedrocks of the superhero genre.
The ruthlessness of even the Watchmen’s kindest characters shocks you. The film’s reality isn’t so far from our own (albeit based on an alternative history where the Soviet Union still exists and is on the edge of nuclear war with the US), but the casual way in which justice is dispensed by ‘heroes’ like Rorschach, a lone wolf viligante laying graphically violent punishment on New York’s corrupt and the pitiful, is appalling… and fascinating.
“Not even in the face of Armageddon, no compromise,” says Rorschach. All other rules are out. He lives by an absolute.
In the post-Bush era it should be easy to see why adults are again switching on to darker comic book movies like Watchmen.
After eight years of the Bush administration, Spiderman’s motto rings hollow – we’ve seen just how irresponsible the powerful can be. We need our heroes certainly (“President Obama gave the world renewed hope, and on that day billions of people truly looked to Washington DC as ‘a shining city upon a hill’,” said Gordon Brown on Thursday) but we also need to them to be fallible, vulnerable and, ultimately, human. Then we can love them, even as they fall.
Zack Snyder stuck faithfully to Moore’s comic, so the Watchmen movie fulfills this desire.
These are heroes that fuck, maim and slaughter. Who (like the Batman of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight) shoulder that presidential weight of duty, of being forced to sacrifice the few to benefit the many. Who live in an America wobbling on the brink of nuclear war and daily face the genuine threat of worldwide destruction.
Bones pop out of broken arms, young children are abducted and sex is marred by impotence. And we wince, frown and smirk through the ironic truth that this fantasy world – no less glamorised than that of Ironman, Jumper or The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, mind you – is in many ways as real as our own.
In Watchmen freedom belongs to the sociopathic. And we buy into it. We’ll go in our millions to watch heroes like The Comedian, an amalgamation of Dirty Harry, Rambo and Johnny Cash, murder a woman pregnant with his child. It’s a form of escapism both disturbing and thoroughly, depressingly adult.
With films like Watchmen we grow up and realise the excitement in the dark fantasies close to reality. We don’t even need to pretend to fly anymore.
