This is gonna be my first sort of more “informal,” end-of-month newsletter that I’ll try and do from time to time. Not all the time, though, since I’m exploring a lot of different avenues with this newsletter and don’t want to force myself into any sort of strict routine. Sometimes, like last month, I’ll have the bandwidth for two lengthy, researched articles. Sometimes I won’t. Maybe next month I’ll end things with a list of recommendations! Maybe I’ll do two lists next month and no essays at all!! I’m trying to keep things eclectic here and I’m still very much experimenting. Anyway, I’ve been writing this particular piece for the past few weeks under the presumption that it would be a big hybrid personal and researched essay, but my thoughts are too scattered to render it one truly cohesive or refined thing. There isn’t any real thesis to this. But I don’t think I could go very much longer without saying a few things about Watchmen.
Basically, something not so chill happened the night I saw Watchmen for the first time. This was back in March, following a week of largely mediocre festival films and patience running thin on film quality. That night, I packed a bowl and inhaled so deeply I scorched my lungs — understand, this was not my intention. It addled my brain well into the following day, but in the moment I could feel my body anticipating its next panic attack. All the telltale signs began to manifest: my heart rate quickened and pounded in my chest, my head felt so heavy, like it was going to tumble off my neck and roll into the hall; I pulled at my skin and paced around my room. The movie I’d put on with the intent of having a nice evening to myself now idled in the background, Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” suddenly the background music to my breakdown.
I know better, at this point, than to overdo it with weed when I’m alone. After an amiable relationship with the drug for nearly a decade, a couple bad experiences doing edibles has made me prone to overthinking myself into extreme paranoia no matter the intake, incarnation, or strain. Last year, I spent nearly every night of lockdown and well into the summer pleasantly stoned, watching movies, until a pretty bad panic attack from a potent edible led me to being vulnerable to anxiety when I do the drug by myself. This is all somewhat beside the point, but under the increasingly calming effects of my weighted blanket the night I watched Watchmen, I soon became captivated by the images on my screen. You see, it’s necessary to explain just how high I was this night, because that thing began to happen that happens when being ungodly high marries perfectly with a film in a wholly symbiotic if unexpected way. “billy crudup........is dr. manhattan,” I tweeted incredulously out from under the haze of my intoxication at 10:32 pm. “this is amazing,” soon followed after that.
In 2009, back before Zack Snyder became America’s sweetheart, his nearly three-hour long theatrical adaptation of Alan Moore’s beloved comic series was apparently seen as something of a mixed bag. The story of the Watchmen surrounds a group of costumed, human vigilantes first called the Minutemen, then eventually dubbed the Watchmen during the Vietnam War era. The Watchmen are made up of Silk Spectre II/Laurie Jupiter (Malin Åkerman), Ozymandias/Adrien Veidt (Matthew Goode), the unorthodox Rorschach/Walter Kovacs (Jackie Earle Haley), Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), and former Minuteman the Comedian/Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). They are led by the god-like Doctor Manhattan, formerly known as Dr. Jon Osterman, a scientist who received superhuman abilities following an Intrinsic Field Generator accident, and who is used by the U.S. government like a weapon to win the Vietnam War.
The narrative jumps back and forth between the decades of the 1960s and 80s, between the Watchmen and the original Minutemen, the latter of whom consisted of the original Silk Spectre — Laurie Jupiter’s mom Sally (Cara Gugino), the Comedian, the original Nite Owl — Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie), and others who are either deceased or went insane. In 1977, anti-vigilante sentiment became too common and the Keene Act was passed by third-term president Richard Nixon, which rendered costumed vigilantism illegal. Most of those involved went into hiding, while others, like the Comedian, became government agents. Then, in 1985 (the film’s present day), the Comedian is murdered in his own home, and Rorschach becomes convinced it was something more sinister than the simple home invasion that it’s deemed to be by police.
Historically I’m not one for superhero films, nor Zack Snyder’s oeuvre. But the recent fascination I held with the Snyder Cut saga, the earnestness of Snyder’s journey to seeing that vision finally come to fruition (despite the well-documented, ravenous pleading from his fanbase) and realizing just how hot Zack Snyder is made me want to explore his past work. I had loathed both Man of Steel and Batman v. Superman. On two separate occasions in the past I had tried to watch Sucker Punch and lost interest less than an hour in (I’ve rectified this recently by finally sitting through the whole thing; not good!). I do enjoy the occasional Marvel or DC film and have certainly never been opposed to seeing one stoned, but I wouldn’t call myself a fan of any of it. In fact, I’m actively disposed to denouncing superhero franchise films. I’ve never read Alan Moore’s series and I’m not sure when I will (I have too many unread books in my bookshelf as it is). Watchman did pique my interest at the time of its release because I was fourteen and My Chemical Romance had covered a song for the film — Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” — my walls back then adorned with frontman Gerard Way’s face. Yet despite the fact that I spent my teenage years frequenting the theater in my hometown that let underage kids into R-rated films, my friends and I somehow never made it to this one. I do remember pirating it a few years later — maybe in high school or college — on my laptop and watching the first few minutes, then abandoning it for reasons I can no longer recall.
Though the bombastic adaptation was, by all accounts, as faithful of a cinematic retelling as could be gleaned in under four hours (save for an extensive alteration to the ending), it still drew a motley assortment of reactions from audiences and critics alike. Critics who were fans of the graphic novel were left disappointed, critics who weren’t were left confused by the overbearing melodrama. Meanwhile, audience devotees of the comic have taken issue both with the film’s overly simplistic and surface-level approach to the thematically dense source material, and how too painstakingly Snyder adhered to directly recreating comic panels for the film. Alan Moore himself is notorious for being staunchly adverse to film adaptations of his work. Nevertheless, the film maintains a fairly favorable 65% critics score and 71% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I guess I’m noting all of this to give some perspective on how the world seems to view this film, since I’d remained largely ignorant to the response to it until only very recently. The extent to which I knew of what people thought of Watchmen was just that it was “mixed,” but I’d seen occasional comments from people on Twitter over the past few years indicating that it was, in actuality, an underrated gem. When I expressed my newfound love of the film to a friend and comic book fan recently, he was surprised, recalling from memory that other comic book fans had hated it.
Very few films elicit intense emotional responses from me anymore, admittedly. It’s something I think about a lot that bothers me. I’m a very emotional person, I love films readily; I give out 4.5 and 5/5 star ratings on Letterboxd with ease. The weirdest things make me cry now that I’m older, and I find enormous joy or sorrow in the most innocuous moments. But the potency with which I experience the majority of new-to-me films has become diluted the older I’ve gotten too, the more movies I’ve seen, and it takes an extremely specific kind of film to make me feel like — for lack of a better term — it reaches into my soul. It’s very hard to describe this sensation accurately, but I can still feel it in my mind’s eye; it’s as if my whole mind and body is slowly given over to the film as I watch it, and afterwards I feel, I don’t know… changed? I know this sounds so cloying, but I experienced this with nearly every movie I watched as a teenager persisting into college, when I sought out canon classics and masterpieces for the very first time. Back then, there was that awe of bearing witness to a piece of art at an age when your still-forming and impressionable brain is hinged entirely on gratuitous emotions, when you feel everything so deeply and wholly, and why you were convinced at 13 that the guy who was your first kiss will be the one you’ll end up marrying. Perhaps I just watch too many films now, I don’t know. Probably?
In the past few years, I think the only films to make me feel that way again, like a teenager in awe, have been Under the Silver Lake, Eyes Wide Shut, Uncut Gems, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Inland Empire, and now, somehow, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen. Again, it’s not that I don’t love tons of new-to-me films or am not affected by them, but it’s become a few and far between phenomenon to feel like something profound within me has shifted after watching one. So I’ve jokingly started to call it “The Watchmen Effect;” a term I’m occasionally using — mostly to myself — to describe when a film affects me quite deeply these days. It’s funny to me to use a generally-perceived-as-middling film, let alone a superhero film, to denote films that I feel are emotional masterpieces, and the fact that it happens so infrequently as to warranting such a special title at all. It ties into my whole thing of loving underloved crap, embracing this naturally contradictory side of myself that enjoys championing the low or at least lower-brow as a fun bit and simultaneously in total earnest.
The first time I watched Watchmen I was left utterly dumbfounded. This can of course be partly attributed the rich source material the film owes credit to — Alan Moore’s anti-superhero superhero story on the true cost of a “greater good” and the inherently conflicted morality of caped crusaders. And I also think a lot of my inexplicable love for this film can be chalked up to my mental state that first time I watched it. Despite the emotional strife it can cause me now, weed has often made me experience films in that intense, all-encompassing way I experienced them as a teenager. And even though I watched the film a second time sober that same weekend, the intensely poignant and overwhelming first viewing could not be wiped clean from my mind. It was just so refreshing to see a cynical, violent superhero film with gore, sex, obscenities, and total earnestness. There are no smarmy quips to downplay emotional beats, there are laughably obvious needle drops (“Sound of Silence” plays over the Comedian’s funeral); there is an infamous, inane sex scene set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah" that had nonetheless unironically enraptured me. The characters are engaging if not always likeable, the three-hour runtime is never bogged down; there are genuinely upsetting scenes, like the Comedian and Dr. Manhattan’s tenure in Vietnam, and one in which it is “revealed” that Dr. Manhattan’s superhuman body gave people close to him cancer. The clear love and passion Zack Snyder has for the source material is palpable. This isn’t some assembly-line franchise film helmed by an idiosyncratic indie director who’s had their creativity neutered in favor of family-friendly palatability. It feels like Zack Snyder was in total control, that he made the film he wanted to make; like he loves it, and wants us to love it too.
As I’m writing, I’m realizing the film is earnest in such a teenager way. Like a horny, brooding 15-year-old who doesn’t know what to do their feelings so they spill out and overflow in unbecoming ways. There are moments of truly exquisite filmmaking, like Dr. Manhattan’s origin sequence which, in my initially inebriated state, made me burst out laughing when I realized that a line from the graphic novel that I had only ever known as a Twitter meme was actually in the film too. But I think part of Watchmen’s charm for me is how mawkish it is — how it embraces such extravagant melodrama in a way that much of its modern ilk will not dare dip their toes into. It’s something that one would think would remain naturally imbued in a subject as absurd as superheroes. Snyder’s first two DCEU films are bogged down by the same joyless self-seriousness as Todd Phillips’ Joker. The sincerity of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy films scratches the surface, but they still possess that glossy, boardroom-approved sheen. The Harley Quinn movie is fun, but feels safe and restrained like any of them do. Most of these films exist somewhere in the middle; funny enough, interesting enough, exciting enough. Never awful. Utterly adequate.
No, Watchmen is a fantastic mess. A superfluous and beautiful work of unfettered id that could only have been made back when extended universes were still in their infancy. It’s why Snyder’s fleshed-out, overlong Justice League was eviscerated in favor of Joss Whedon’s two-hour, quip-friendly abomination, and the core of which — in all its four-hour-long, often unbearable glory — possesses that same convoluted wholeheartedness of Watchmen. The much-criticized sex scene between Nite Owl II and Laurie Jupiter, despite it’s hokey song choice and baffling placement in the film nevertheless depicts actual, lustful hunger. Characters in the film are horny; even utterly deplorable because of it. Dr. Manhattan spends a good portion of the movie hanging dong, and at one point tries to have an orgy with Laurie (they’re in a relationship) with multiple clones of himself. There are cringe-inducing line reads, and scenes that drag on longer than they need to. Characters in the film are annoying, horrifying, human. This film was made by humans, it feels like it was made by humans, and it’s better than the majority of modern superhero films because of it. Snyder’s penchant for excess doesn’t always hit: Man of Steel is a slog, BvS is more of one (notwithstanding the over-three-hour-long director’s cut); I can’t say I enjoyed the Snyder Cut much at all. But his 215-minute ultimate cut of Watchmen is allegedly considered better than the nearly three-hour theatrical one. Some people may call Zack Snyder self-indulgent, but I would take self-indulgence over safety any day.
I didn’t really intend for this to become a diatribe against superhero films, so I’ll cut it off here. This was just my way of trying to explain why Watchmen worked for me and affected me so much because I’ve been trying to make sense of it all myself. It felt uncanny to me for a while, but maybe not so much anymore. I guess, ultimately, it comes down to the film itself, and how stoned I was when I watched it, and the fact that it truly aligns with most of the stuff I’ve loved so strongly in the past. It felt weird at first because I don’t tend to love superhero films, but Watchmen isn’t just a superhero film. It’s an unhinged, glorious display of excessive self-gratification, which is an overly redundant way of saying that it’s messy and, whatever, you all know that meme; “I love mess.” But even more than that, I love mess that has a soul. I love a movie that swings for the fences and ends up in the stratosphere. Watchmen is a symphony of ambition and absurdity. I don’t know what more I could ask of a film for it to be completely and totally my shit.
As Dr. Manhattan’s origin sequence unfolds, he reflects on his time spent as a government-sanctioned killing machine in Vietnam: “They are shaping me into something gaudy, something lethal,” he soberly narrates in a voiceover. I like this line a lot for various reasons. Sometimes, it reminds me of what ten years down the line modern superhero films would become. But, as deadly to the film industry as they currently are, superhero films aren’t actually gaudy at all — and that’s part of the problem with them. They’re slick, sufficient, sexless, consumable content. Sorry, I said I would stop shitting on superhero films; that’s what I spent my last essay doing. I guess completely unrelated to the context of the quote itself, I just love the word “gaudy.” I would say gaudiness has a lot to do with what I love about Watchmen. It’s a gaudy, overzealous blockbuster film that I don’t think would ever have been made today if the Snyder Cut saga is any indication of that.
It also upsets me to think how infrequently I experience this “Watchmen Effect” these days, and when it happens I feel compelled to hold onto such films for dear life, to shout about them insufferably on Twitter, to sustain this feeling that has been rendered so fleeting to me for as long as I can. And it’s as if Watchmen is the angsty, adolescent artistic incarnation of the very sensation that I’ve named after it. It’s like watching these rare feelings manifested on screen, contained in a brief window of time, but where I know I could experience them again and again. And sometimes, as much as I miss it, I think maybe it’s not really a bad thing to have such precious feelings be so precious at all. I do feel like I’m running out of steam here, and I can’t really think of a good way to wrap this all up in fulfilling way that presents my final thoughts as something cohesive, or like I really learned anything. I did warn you all about this at the start of my essay anyway. No culpability if you’re left unsatisfied. But I do hope that, regardless, maybe you found some meaning in all of this mess. The same way that I found meaning in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.*
This was great and make me want to watch this movie, which I've stubbornly avoided. "Mess that has a soul" is a rich, unappreciated genre and it reminds me of Southland Tales. That movie is tremendously flawed, but I can't help but appreciate its commitment to itself.