Speaker 1: Oh no, Wandre, looks like the Reds are pallouting the
Speaker 1: city lake we do. We call the Watchman, Strong together,
Speaker 1: united forever. They're the best of friends.
Speaker 2: But when troubles them out, you would best watch out
Speaker 2: for the Watchman. And he loves to Russia expends to
Speaker 2: the animalssage. Yeah, when he's not clowning around, he beat
Speaker 2: up some thugs say no to drugs being bed by Tan.
Speaker 2: But it troubles about, you would best watch out for
Speaker 2: the Watchman. It's brittany bitch and said Iraq.
Speaker 3: Everywhere like I supposed to be the franchise player.
Speaker 1: And we in here talking about practice.
Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, we got them.
Speaker 1: Our next door neighbors are foreign countries.
Speaker 2: I call upon all nations to do everything they can
Speaker 2: to stop these terrors killing me.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Now watch this drive, Hey everybody, and welcome to Remember Shuffle.
Speaker 1: My name is Ben, with me as always my co
Speaker 1: host Tornano. I heard a joke.
Speaker 3: Once man goes to the doctor, says he's depressed. Doctor says,
Speaker 3: treatment is simple. Listener, remember Shuffle. That should pick you up.
Speaker 3: Man burst into tears, says but doctor.
Speaker 1: I'm Ben. Yes, if you couldn't have guessed from Tornado's impression.
Speaker 1: Today we are discussing the two thousand and nine Zack
Speaker 1: Snyder adaptation of Watchmen, and to do so, we are
Speaker 1: joined by Discourse stew of Marvelous or the Death of Cinema.
Speaker 2: Neither first time, long time. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I listen
Speaker 1: to your episode on Watchman in preparation, and I think
Speaker 1: we're gonna relign on a lot of what makes this
Speaker 1: film mediocre and forgettable. To be generous, i'd.
Speaker 2: Say mediocre, yes, not totally forgettable, but that is in
Speaker 2: part I think because of the benefit of the source
Speaker 2: material is drawing off of Yes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've been listening to your show for the past
Speaker 4: year or so ever since we started getting into marvel topics.
Speaker 4: I had found myself not as well versed as you guys,
Speaker 4: and I always found that your criticism and our criticism
Speaker 4: were very much aligned, and so I thought it'd be
Speaker 4: a good match, and we'll be going on your show
Speaker 4: to talk about a two thousands topic shortly.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, in a couple two or three weeks.
Speaker 4: So go subscribe to Marvelous and hopefully you'll hear us
Speaker 4: talk about BlackBerry in the coming months.
Speaker 2: I'm super looking forward to that one.
Speaker 1: It's great. We're both big fans of that film. So
Speaker 1: why talk about Watchman if you're tuning in hoping for
Speaker 1: another episode from our ongoing series on the Great Recession?
Speaker 1: We apologize, but in a similar way to how we
Speaker 1: took small breaks during the Iraq War series to talk
Speaker 1: about Ironman or Robin Williams or V for Vendetta. Appropriately,
Speaker 1: we're also taking a quick side quest to talk about
Speaker 1: the two thousands reception of the work of Alan Moore. Again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, comeing your break. I've been in Ethiopia for three weeks.
Speaker 4: I haven't been able to get to more Recession stuff.
Speaker 4: But let's do this nice, fun intlude on I would
Speaker 4: say the two thousands superhero work, which is maybe the
Speaker 4: highest brow superhero movie that came out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we wanted to give you something for your biweekly
Speaker 1: release rather than Leava Hanging. And the main reason to
Speaker 1: discuss Watchman is that the graphic novel fucking rocks. If
Speaker 1: you've ever heard anything about it, you know the fans
Speaker 1: will say it's one of the only graphic novels that
Speaker 1: Time put in its list of one hundred best novels
Speaker 1: since nineteen twenty something, as printed on every single paperback
Speaker 1: copy of Watchmen. And I think the movie itself is
Speaker 1: fascinating in that it is reverent. It is Zack Snyder
Speaker 1: treating the source material like scripture, even down to individual
Speaker 1: shots being framed for frame comic panels, and yet through
Speaker 1: what are relatively minor and modest tweaks, he manages to
Speaker 1: completely undermine the source material and not get it at all.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Zack Snyder.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I honestly think that this movie is under discussed.
Speaker 4: I tried to look up Watchmen podcasts out there, and
Speaker 4: like ninety five percent of content surrounds the TV show,
Speaker 4: which we will not be discussing today. Maybe we'll get
Speaker 4: to on the Patreon hopefully, but marvelous and discourse Stu,
Speaker 4: you guys have done an episode on Watchmen. But I
Speaker 4: think that people are not really sure what to make
Speaker 4: of this movie. You know, it's both good and bad
Speaker 4: in many ways, and so it's tough to sort of
Speaker 4: pin down. But that's why we're hoping to talk about
Speaker 4: it at length today.
Speaker 2: Part do I think makes it interesting, like Ben said,
Speaker 2: is it's like if i'd gotten to make a Watchman
Speaker 2: movie at like age fifteen, it probably would have come
Speaker 2: out kind of like this, Like like, I think it's
Speaker 2: Snyder making the version of Watchman as he understood it
Speaker 2: when he read it as a teenager, but without the
Speaker 2: more nuanced understanding you'd get from it if you go
Speaker 2: back and read it as an adult a little more critically.
Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely, Tredia says, simultaneously both good and bad. It
Speaker 1: is simultaneously both attempting to be highbrow, grasping at the
Speaker 1: high brow deconstruction of the superhero, and simultaneously very pubescent, lowbrow.
Speaker 1: These guys are fucking awesome, yeah, as we will see.
Speaker 1: So to begin, we're going to start by just doing
Speaker 1: a little character analysis because it's an assemble cast movie
Speaker 1: and it has really memorable characters that stick out in
Speaker 1: your mind. And then we'll do a quick plot summary
Speaker 1: if you haven't read it or haven't seen the film
Speaker 1: in a while. And then, as always, we'll talk about style,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about deviations from the source material, and then
Speaker 1: we'll talk about our themes and big ideas. So let's
Speaker 1: begin with everyone's favorite rorshak Or. I don't know if
Speaker 1: he's everyone's favorite, but he's clearly Zack Snyder's favorite. If
Speaker 1: I'm going to grasp for adjectives for Rorshack. He is
Speaker 1: anti social and misanthropic, right despite his crusade for some
Speaker 1: sense of justice. You get the sense from his journal
Speaker 1: entries that he hates humanity. You may remember some of
Speaker 1: the quotes from his journals that are often quoted or
Speaker 1: clipped form means, you know, the city's dying of rabies
Speaker 1: is the best I can do to wipe random flex
Speaker 1: of foam from its lips. He's reactionary. He's frequently calling
Speaker 1: women horrors. He hates people with liberal sensibilities. I reread
Speaker 1: Watchman in preparation for this episode, and there's a scene
Speaker 1: where they're going through drops that I believe Rorschach has
Speaker 1: left at the New Frontiersman in the crank folder, and
Speaker 1: one of them says, this one is addressed to the
Speaker 1: je United States of America. Not a comrade. And he
Speaker 1: is this filthy, anti social guy who walks around with
Speaker 1: a sign that says the end is nigh when he's
Speaker 1: not crime fighting. He is not Captain America. He is
Speaker 1: not Bruce Wayne. I have to make this abundantly clear.
Speaker 1: And he, like many of the characters, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: this is a thing that we're going to keep coming
Speaker 1: back to. He represents one of the possible logical end
Speaker 1: points of being a vigilante, to take law or justice
Speaker 1: into your own individualistic hands as opposed to something that's
Speaker 1: collectively administered by society and by institutions that are set
Speaker 1: up for society. It turns you into someone who actually
Speaker 1: hates humanity, who thinks they are superior to does that
Speaker 1: simple choice of saying that only I can do this
Speaker 1: puts yourself at a higher level than everyone else.
Speaker 2: Rorshak is in part modeled on a couple of Steve
Speaker 2: Ditko characters, the co creator Spider Man, mister A and
Speaker 2: the Question, who are both at least in Ditko's hands
Speaker 2: tools to articulate his literal randy and objectivism.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, yeah, And I found this take on Reddit,
Speaker 1: of all places, so take it with a grain of salt.
Speaker 1: But this person says that each of these heroes is
Speaker 1: meant to represent a different ethical school, and Rorshak is deontology.
Speaker 1: It's from a Greek word meaning obligation, so there's an
Speaker 1: absolute moral obligation to do what is right regardless of
Speaker 1: outcomes or consequences. There is a strong moral code, and
Speaker 1: I think you can definitely read the character that way.
Speaker 1: But I find it so fascinating that I think there's
Speaker 1: another reading of this character you could do where he
Speaker 1: is motivated by a kind of primal violent id. I mean,
Speaker 1: what is his mask. It's the block test to check
Speaker 1: your subconscious Like, is it really all a code or
Speaker 1: is it just living out violent power fantasies.
Speaker 2: His mask represents. It's like he has a constant moral binary.
Speaker 2: There's him and what's right, there's everybody else, But how
Speaker 2: that binary is constructed is always shifting. He has a
Speaker 2: code against compromising his binary, but how that binary is
Speaker 2: constructed as amorphous to the needs of a psyche at
Speaker 2: the moment.
Speaker 5: That's a great reading and can you tell me? Admittedly
Speaker 5: I'm sort of the Rolf Wigan on this episode here,
Speaker 5: having asked what does the Warshack tests have to do
Speaker 5: with his identity as a superhero? Like Peter Parker is
Speaker 5: a spider Man because he was bitten by a spider.
Speaker 5: Batman is the Batman because he got scared by bats
Speaker 5: and now he wants to turn that fear onto others.
Speaker 5: What does the Warshack test have to do with his
Speaker 5: own personal sort of story or crime findings. I was
Speaker 5: never able to piece that together.
Speaker 2: That's what it is. There's no person under there. There's
Speaker 2: this drive, this sense of never wanting to compromise, this
Speaker 2: sort of absolutism in his personality. But it's not built
Speaker 2: around a core of anything, just this amorphous collection of
Speaker 2: memes he inherited from his absent abusive father that disappeared
Speaker 2: early in his life, which is what his reactionary politics
Speaker 2: are built around, which is just a bunch of notions
Speaker 2: that don't really add up to a coherent worldview. There's
Speaker 2: just him and something to fight.
Speaker 4: So he's sort of intentionally hypocritical or like, not ideologically congruous,
Speaker 4: you think.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's intentional, but it's reflective of
Speaker 2: the lack of anything there. He is kind of like
Speaker 2: one of those guys that gets on Internet and yells
Speaker 2: and screams about all these different things because they hate themselves.
Speaker 2: You know, they're just blackpilled nihilists. But it doesn't add
Speaker 2: up to anything really coherent other than there's me and
Speaker 2: whatever I think is my stuff in the moment, and
Speaker 2: then the everything else. I'm against the degeneracy.
Speaker 5: I see.
Speaker 1: I mean he calls the mask his face at several
Speaker 1: points to this extent that there is no human underneath,
Speaker 1: there is only this I see.
Speaker 4: I've heard people say that, oh, well, the black and
Speaker 4: white shapes represent his black and white view of the
Speaker 4: world or whatever. But I'm like, well, that just describes
Speaker 4: the color. It doesn't really describe the essence of what
Speaker 4: a Rorshackt test is, which is to turn your projections
Speaker 4: into reality. And so it seems like there isn't like
Speaker 4: a great explanation maybe for why he specifically is tied
Speaker 4: to this rorshach test.
Speaker 2: It's because the black and white is a projection. His
Speaker 2: morality's always black and white, but what's in the black
Speaker 2: and what's in the white is always changing moment to moment.
Speaker 1: Mmm.
Speaker 5: I see.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to character number two to discuss. And
Speaker 1: this is kind of order of appearance in the comics.
Speaker 1: As I was reading Osmandias or Adrian Vite the smartest
Speaker 1: man in the world, and he is the cynical sellout
Speaker 1: very much works within the system. He's one of the
Speaker 1: first capes to go work with the government. In the backstory,
Speaker 1: this is the guy that Rorschak says of him rather
Speaker 1: despairingly when comparing him to the comedian. The comedian never
Speaker 1: let anyone retire him, never cash in on his reputation,
Speaker 1: never set up a company selling posters and diet books
Speaker 1: and toy soldiers based on himself, never became a prostitute.
Speaker 1: It's so great, quoting Rorschak, he has a very strong
Speaker 1: point of view in improv terms.
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, he seems to be the most on
Speaker 4: the nose criticism of superhero consumerism and like marketing, almost
Speaker 4: like Russell Brand, being like.
Speaker 5: You see, he sold himself. He understands that he is
Speaker 5: a product to be sold.
Speaker 1: He is eventually revealed to be the architect, mastermind, villain
Speaker 1: of our sprawling conspiracy that drives the plot of the story.
Speaker 1: And he's contemptuous of humanity because he thinks that he's
Speaker 1: just that much better than them, mostly in the intellectual sphere.
Speaker 1: He's got a god complex, hence the name. If you remember,
Speaker 1: the poem is about the god king whose statue is
Speaker 1: in the desert and the traveler comes on.
Speaker 4: Did Osi Mandius finish that poem? He based his superhero
Speaker 4: name off of it. I feel like maybe he didn't
Speaker 4: get to the end of it.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's so smart. He got four lines and he
Speaker 2: was like, oh, I see where this is going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is a poem, but a guy who rocks.
Speaker 1: Not a poem, but like the meaninglessness of the works
Speaker 1: of man on a large enough cosmic scale. But yes,
Speaker 1: he's got this God complex. And if we return to
Speaker 1: this view where all these guys represent different philosophical schools,
Speaker 1: Ozymandias is the easiest to place. He represents a kind
Speaker 1: of utilitarianism, do the thing that will do the most
Speaker 1: good for the most number of people, even if the
Speaker 1: decision that you need to make to get there might
Speaker 1: not in itself be ethical. Oh yeah, our next character,
Speaker 1: honestly maybe my favorite. I think I've grown out of
Speaker 1: Rorschak being my favorite. It's Doctor Manhattan aka doctor John Osterman.
Speaker 1: Speaking of God complexes, this guy is quite literally basically
Speaker 1: a god.
Speaker 5: You see, at the time I was misquoted, I never
Speaker 5: said the Superman exists and he is American.
Speaker 1: What I said was God exists and he's American. He's
Speaker 1: the big blue guy. He's called the walking h Bomb
Speaker 1: by a couple of characters to describe his powers. Is
Speaker 1: he can do anything. He can turn any matter into
Speaker 1: any other matter. He can teleport, he can make usself big,
Speaker 1: he can make usself small. He perceives time simultaneously. The
Speaker 1: work does some really fun stuff with predestination and free
Speaker 1: will with him and He's the comics take on what
Speaker 1: happens when someone gets Superman level powers, and the answer
Speaker 1: is that once you become that powerful, you become aloof
Speaker 1: and disinterested. I'm starting to notice a pattern. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: far all of our characters basically hate humanity in some way,
Speaker 1: shape or form. He doesn't hate it, he just doesn't care.
Speaker 1: He can't bring himself to care. A live body and
Speaker 1: dead body contain the same number of particles, he says, structurally,
Speaker 1: there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts.
Speaker 1: Why should I be concerned? More like Captain existentialism? Am
Speaker 1: I right?
Speaker 2: How familiar are you, guys with Alan Moore's work in general?
Speaker 1: I've read this, I've read v for Vendetta. I think
Speaker 1: that might be it. I never read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Speaker 1: I think I read from Hell back in the day
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 2: There's a recurring theme in his work and in his worldview,
Speaker 2: which is this idea of sort of like favor read
Speaker 2: Slaughterhouse five, of all of time existing at once in
Speaker 2: a kind of like four dy crystal structure, where everything's
Speaker 2: happening at once and has already happened and is happening.
Speaker 2: And Doctor Manhattan is in part just a vehicle to
Speaker 2: explore that idea with his sort of experiencing all of
Speaker 2: time simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Yes, you've almost certainly seen the famous meme of him
Speaker 1: sitting on Mars, used to poke fun at the fact
Speaker 1: that nothing ever changes in our world. You know, it's
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four, the president is a baby boomer. It's
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. The president is a baby boomer.
Speaker 1: Is twenty sixteen, the president is a baby boomer, and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth. He drops some just banger lines.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite all time lines is I'm tired
Speaker 1: of earth these people. I'm tired of being caught in
Speaker 1: the tangle of their lives. I'm going to use that
Speaker 1: next time I need to get out of plans I
Speaker 1: don't want to go to. I'm sorry, gag, I just
Speaker 1: I'm tired of being involved in the tangle of your lives.
Speaker 2: That's part of what makes him so interesting is to
Speaker 2: explore that sense of distance. I think even as a
Speaker 2: kid when I first read the book, I kind of
Speaker 2: related to it because I'm a god naturally, but because
Speaker 2: I was one of those kids I just had like
Speaker 2: a slightly different perspective and way of thinking from a
Speaker 2: lot of my peers, and so I sort of related
Speaker 2: to that sense of alienation.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think he's supposed to be like an
Speaker 4: analog for Superman, right, and the sense of Superman is
Speaker 4: like a god. And then to what extent can he
Speaker 4: empathize with a regular person enough to have the same
Speaker 4: perspective as them, Like Peter Parker has a good sense
Speaker 4: of what's right and wrong because he is a regular
Speaker 4: guy and like lived his life as a regular guy.
Speaker 4: But it's like, once you're a god, you could see
Speaker 4: how you might start to have problems with determining what's
Speaker 4: right and wrong if you are a perspective of the
Speaker 4: universe has made the earth like a tiny speck of dust, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: imagine you had like an ant farm, and like you
Speaker 4: kind of cared about these ants, and then you're helping
Speaker 4: them with when one ant is getting mugged by another
Speaker 4: aunt but then you have an ant farm for like
Speaker 4: eight years, and you're familiar with the rest of the world,
Speaker 4: you can kind of start to see that these ants
Speaker 4: their problems. You don't really have the same perspective.
Speaker 1: That they do.
Speaker 4: He's played by Billy Krutdup a stute Remember Shuffle listeners
Speaker 4: will remember him from Each Prey Love. He's Julia Roberts's
Speaker 4: ex husband who wants to go to grad school and
Speaker 4: so she gets a divorce. Much like Doctor Manhattan running
Speaker 4: from the relationship by going to Mars, he was running
Speaker 4: from the relationship to go to grad school in that movie.
Speaker 1: This is to remember Shuffle co host did not remember that.
Speaker 4: But you remember his song He writes on the guitar.
Speaker 1: I do It's all coming back to me now, okay.
Speaker 1: Our next character is the second Silk specter, Laurie Polish
Speaker 1: last name. I won't try and mangle Juice pet chick.
Speaker 1: Here's a fun twist. Instead of hating all of humanity,
Speaker 1: she just hates her mother and her partner. The first
Speaker 1: character we're introduced to in the book, who is a
Speaker 1: second generation Cape. There's a rich backstory to the Watchman.
Speaker 1: Her mom was the first Silk specter, and a lot
Speaker 1: of her plot wine has to do with nostalgia, living
Speaker 1: in the past. She's bitter against the comedian or attempting
Speaker 1: to sexually assault her mother, against her mother for making
Speaker 1: her a superhero, against John for his aloofness and disinterestedness,
Speaker 1: and especially in the movie. She is kind of the
Speaker 1: flattest character in the work, but she's also given the
Speaker 1: least to do in the story. She's kind of like
Speaker 1: a plot device in that her birth, as we will
Speaker 1: eventually see, is the miraculous thing that is so chaotic
Speaker 1: and random that led to someone so beautiful that doctor
Speaker 1: Manhattan can see the value in life again towards the
Speaker 1: climax of the thing. Yeah, not a lot to do
Speaker 1: in this film.
Speaker 2: I think she's maybe one of the weakest cast. Maelan
Speaker 2: Akerman really looks the part. With a character that has
Speaker 2: less screen time and dialogue to clarify their character, you
Speaker 2: kind of need someone who can use the performance to
Speaker 2: find more there, and she doesn't unfortunately.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Second last character to discuss is the second night Owl,
Speaker 1: Daniel Dreiberg. He's kind of like this universe's kid Gloves Batman,
Speaker 1: even down to the animal themes and vehicles and gadgets.
Speaker 1: He's the Adam West Batman. Rorshock is the well shit,
Speaker 1: I mean Zack snyderbad I guess, and that he kills people.
Speaker 1: He's an intellectual nerd. He went to Harvard to study ornithology, history,
Speaker 1: and mythology. He just decided to double down on birds
Speaker 1: as a major hence the unified theme of all this stuff.
Speaker 1: He's TMU Batman birdman, if you will. And he's driven
Speaker 1: by nostalgia, one of these key themes of the text. Right.
Speaker 1: He's his flabby middle aged man with nothing to do.
Speaker 1: He's bored. He needs the thrill of adventurism, even if
Speaker 1: it's bad for himself and society. He's living in the past.
Speaker 1: And if he has any kind of moral ethical system
Speaker 1: is a kind of basic pragmatism. Do what will be
Speaker 1: most effective in a particular moment for problem solving. Mostly,
Speaker 1: and that Reddit user that I crib that take from
Speaker 1: was named gumby pants. Shout out gumby pants. Yeah.
Speaker 4: You point out here that he comes around to Ozzi
Speaker 4: Mandios's side in the end He's like, well, I guess,
Speaker 4: I mean, if you already did.
Speaker 1: It, yeah, then we can't have all these people die
Speaker 1: for nothing. And finally, the last character is the comedian
Speaker 1: Edward Blake. He's the superhero whose murder is the instigating
Speaker 1: event of the entire work. His philosophical school is, of course, nihilism.
Speaker 1: He's witnessed the worst of humanity, especially in Vietnam. He's
Speaker 1: done war crimes. He's seen humanity at his absolute worse
Speaker 1: and has decided that that is our innate, unchangeable nature,
Speaker 1: which turns him into this violent, wanta be cop psychopath
Speaker 1: who just thinks that it's all a joke. It's all
Speaker 1: a big joke.
Speaker 2: He's a black built.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he decides to go with the state, right, He's like, well,
Speaker 4: I guess I'll just work for you and I'll be
Speaker 4: your instrument. We see him killing protesters in this movie.
Speaker 4: He's very much on the side of institutional power.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's the fucking tip of the spear of the
Speaker 1: US Empire. They say he's knocking over Marxist republics in
Speaker 1: Latin America.
Speaker 2: In the movie, at least to make it explicit that
Speaker 2: he killed JFK.
Speaker 1: Yeah, only gestured two in the comic, but we see
Speaker 1: him on the Grassy Knoll and yeah, I mean I'm
Speaker 1: sure somewhere deep in the lore he kills Salvador Allende
Speaker 1: and Chile, right, yeah, some of our faves. I think significantly.
Speaker 1: He's a crime fighter who doesn't believe in crime fighting.
Speaker 1: There's a great scene where they flash back to the
Speaker 1: sixties where he basically says to everybody, they're these big
Speaker 1: structural problems. Do you think busting Moloch matters? Do you
Speaker 1: think that solves anything? It doesn't matter because inside thirty
Speaker 1: years the nukes are going to be flying like may bugs.
Speaker 1: So he just leans into that nihilistic violence.
Speaker 4: Played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan of The Walking Dead, and yeah,
Speaker 4: I think, honestly, probably my favorite character in this movie
Speaker 4: very well characterized. He's the oldest member of the Watchmen,
Speaker 4: and so he transcends both the Bronze age comic iteration
Speaker 4: of the heroes the Minutemen, and our modern day heroes too.
Speaker 4: A lot of times you're wondering, like, why do they
Speaker 4: even let this guy in the club? I guess he's
Speaker 4: not technically a villain, so you're like, we gotta let
Speaker 4: him in.
Speaker 1: So those are your characters. We will kind of blitz
Speaker 1: through the plot. I did take down some beat by
Speaker 1: beats in my notes, but we can just kind of
Speaker 1: condense it as we go along. Watchman opens with the
Speaker 1: murder of the comedian. We're in this kind of dystopian
Speaker 1: retro future nineteen eighties. You said this on your episode.
Speaker 1: It's way more retrofuturistic in the comic. Yeah, it's kind
Speaker 1: of gestured towards in the film. It's never really fleshed
Speaker 1: out enough. But you know, there are blimps, there are airships,
Speaker 1: so that's how you know you're a retro futuristic world.
Speaker 1: The world is on the brink of nuclear war, super
Speaker 1: high cold war tensions. That's kind of the setting that
Speaker 1: we enter. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think that what they say is that because the
Speaker 4: United States has all of these superheroes that eventually start
Speaker 4: to do the bidding of the United States, it leads
Speaker 4: the Soviet Union to be more desperate and erratic in
Speaker 4: their decision making, which explains why the nuclear tensions are
Speaker 4: closer to disaster in their world than in our own.
Speaker 2: I mean, Doctor Manhattan wins Vietnam in a week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so sick. We see Rorshak, who's our initial point
Speaker 1: of view character. He's investigating the murder. He's going around Town,
Speaker 1: warning everyone to introduce us to all of our other
Speaker 1: characters one at a time because he believes that someone
Speaker 1: is killing Capes. We go through the comedian's funeral, and
Speaker 1: then we have all these different interstitial flashbacks of the backstory.
Speaker 1: So we see that scene I mentioned when I describe
Speaker 1: the comedian. We see the nineteen sixties. They're trying to
Speaker 1: make the crime busters, as they're called in the comic,
Speaker 1: but stupid Zack Snyder has to call them the watchmen.
Speaker 1: We have to work in the movie title for the swine.
Speaker 2: I would bet that was a studio note. That seems
Speaker 2: like an exec note to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah. True. We see the halting attempts to make the
Speaker 1: crime busters happen. We get the Great Vietnam War flashbacks
Speaker 1: of Doctor Manhattan winning the thing as one hundred foot
Speaker 1: tall giant blue guy, and we see Blake shoot the
Speaker 1: Vietnamese woman who's pregnant with his child, and Doctor Manhattan
Speaker 1: stands back and lets it happen. Just as one little
Speaker 1: scene does so much to characterize these two guys. The
Speaker 1: aloofness of Doctor Manhattan, which is commented upon by the comedian,
Speaker 1: and the nihilistic violence of the comedian himself, we get
Speaker 1: another flashback to the recent pass of the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: when the cops went on strike. Right, we live in
Speaker 1: a world where as capes do more and more, people
Speaker 1: start to get more and more frustrated with them. We
Speaker 1: see the iconic graffiti who watches the Watchmen? And we
Speaker 1: see these big riots before the gun passes a law,
Speaker 1: the Keen Act, banning superheroes, which brings us up to
Speaker 1: the present, all told through flashbacks at the comedian's funeral,
Speaker 1: I gotta take one quick classics tangent who watches the
Speaker 1: Watchman comes from Latin poetry. It comes from the Latin
Speaker 1: poetry of Juvenile, And when I was young, I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is such a deep line about power. Right, It's
Speaker 1: about institutional power in the police, and now we have
Speaker 1: these guards, but who watches them? It's about authority, It's
Speaker 1: about the panopticon. The actual context is about a cheating wife,
Speaker 1: where Juvenile says, you may hire a watchman to keep
Speaker 1: your wife faithful, but who's gonna watch the watchmen? Those
Speaker 1: watchmen are fucking your girl?
Speaker 2: My friend who cockch the coxsmen?
Speaker 1: Exactly? So we go through this sprawling conspiracy Rorschach is
Speaker 1: eventually framed and is thrown in prison. Doctor Manhattan is
Speaker 1: essentially exiled from Earth by having the Lion fake news
Speaker 1: media yell at him about having in every single one
Speaker 1: of his loved ones cancer. This is another kind of
Speaker 1: chess move that we need to do for the plot
Speaker 1: to get Doctor Manhattan, the most powerful guy on Earth,
Speaker 1: off of Earth. He's on Mars now. He's tired of
Speaker 1: living in the tangle of our lives. There's one scene
Speaker 1: that I want to talk about a little bit more
Speaker 1: at length, which is the attempted shooting of Ozamandias. Right,
Speaker 1: we don't know that Ozamandyas is the big bad yet,
Speaker 1: and there's an attempted assassination on him where he's talking
Speaker 1: to these titans of industry, including Lee Ayacoca, a real
Speaker 1: guy who worked for Chrysler, helped save Chrysler by inventing
Speaker 1: the minivan if I recall correctly, and he was still
Speaker 1: alive when Watchman came out and Zack Snyder shot him
Speaker 1: in the fucking face on screen. Not in the comics, really, No.
Speaker 2: That scene feels like a very pointed war on terror
Speaker 2: peak oil thing where they're all like free energy. That's socialism.
Speaker 2: You can't do that. We need our gas guzzling SUVs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you pointed out let's see where we see
Speaker 1: the twin towers in the background as well, Right, yeah.
Speaker 2: Before we find out Viight is staging Mega nine to
Speaker 2: eleven as an inside job.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: So at this point, Rorschak's in prison, he's getting psychoanalyzed.
Speaker 1: He's still saying things like your fat, rich liberal sensibilities
Speaker 1: to his shrink. Great scenes of Rorschak in prison just
Speaker 1: for like stupid Rorschak, badassory, shouting things like I'm not
Speaker 1: locked in here with you, You're locked in here with me, Passik.
Speaker 1: We check back in with night Al and the Silk
Speaker 1: Spector once again, very true to the comics. She's gone
Speaker 1: to live with Dan once John is gone, and they
Speaker 1: start this nostalgic flirtation in his basement in the owl cave.
Speaker 1: She's poking through all the gears. They start talking about
Speaker 1: the good old days. They attempt to hook up on
Speaker 1: the couch with the news in the background, but poor Dan,
Speaker 1: he can't get it up. So what do they do.
Speaker 1: They go out on patrol at three in the morning.
Speaker 1: This is where we get Silk Spector in her latex costume,
Speaker 1: walking in slow mode. They go, they say, some people
Speaker 1: from a burning building, and now they can have sex
Speaker 1: in a long much longer than in the comic sex
Speaker 1: scene set to the ultimate sex song, the original lettered
Speaker 1: coed Hallelujah.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, if that doesn't get it up, what will?
Speaker 1: Yeah, We're going to talk about adaptation a second, But
Speaker 1: this adaptation is so faithful to the comic. I would
Speaker 1: guess that eighty to ninety percent of the dialogue is verbatim,
Speaker 1: unchanged with the change in medium. They go to rescue
Speaker 1: Rorschak because they're starting to think he was onto something
Speaker 1: and they need Rorschak to unravel the whole mystery. They
Speaker 1: go to the prison. There's a bunch more violence, highly aestheticized,
Speaker 1: very badass, very cool looking. These guys are in it
Speaker 1: for the adrenaline and the hedonistic violence more than any
Speaker 1: sense of justice, but they still look fucking cool while
Speaker 1: they're doing it. They get Rorschak out of jail and
Speaker 1: Doctor Manhattan poofs Lori off to Mars to go have
Speaker 1: a commonsation. This is where doctor Manhattan points out that
Speaker 1: Mars is far more interesting to him than Earth, and
Speaker 1: they really cut a lot of the fun geological content.
Speaker 1: She says, like, what about the high highs and the
Speaker 1: low lows of being a human? He says, well, what
Speaker 1: about Olympus mons, and you get a nice little Martian
Speaker 1: geology lesson is on a large enough timeline, geological change
Speaker 1: can be just as interesting as a human life. In
Speaker 1: these Mars scenes, she finally breaks through the Doctor Manhattan
Speaker 1: once she has her like psychoanalytical breakthrough that the comedian
Speaker 1: who attempted to rape her mother had consensual sex with
Speaker 1: her later, this man whom she had every reason to hate,
Speaker 1: producing loriie. This was the randomness that led to something
Speaker 1: so beautiful that can make Doctor Manhattan start to care
Speaker 1: about Earth again. Rorschak and night Owil try to find
Speaker 1: Adrian Vite, mostly looking for him to help them. He's gone.
Speaker 1: They break into his office, They break into his computer,
Speaker 1: and they uncover the entire conc spira se.
Speaker 2: Which wouldn't have happened if Bit had the sense to
Speaker 2: put like an exclamation mark or an AT symbol in
Speaker 2: his password.
Speaker 1: Yes, his password is Ramsey's the second the original Egyptian
Speaker 1: name for Ozamandias, and like two factor authentication, wouldn't have
Speaker 1: changed anything. He gets away with it. In the end,
Speaker 1: he would have gotten away with it with even greater
Speaker 1: ease had he had two factor of authentication on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and describe Ozamandias's plot in this movie that he
Speaker 4: pulled off here.
Speaker 1: Yes, so our figures go to Antarctica to confront him.
Speaker 1: They get to his Antarctic base and he reveals the
Speaker 1: entire plot. This is the most significant change that Zach
Speaker 1: Sneyder makes in the comic. Ozamandias is going to teleport
Speaker 1: in a genetically engineered telepathic alien into the middle of
Speaker 1: New York City, which will release a giant shock wave,
Speaker 1: killing millions. And it's not just New York. It's New York,
Speaker 1: it is Moscow, is Beijing, is Hong Kong, it's every
Speaker 1: major world power, and it looks like aliens at ten,
Speaker 1: so that all of humanity will put down their nuclear weapons,
Speaker 1: abandon the worst angels of our nature, and unify against
Speaker 1: the common enemy. Zack Snyder thought that the alien would
Speaker 1: look fucking stupid on screen, I assume, And so instead
Speaker 1: they basically frame Doctor Manhattan and they make it look
Speaker 1: like Doctor Manhattan with his blue psychic power energy whatever
Speaker 1: destroyed all of these cities in the world, framing him
Speaker 1: so that humanity can unite against him and nuclear war.
Speaker 2: I think that choice is not what I like, but
Speaker 2: I think it's one of those like screenwriting economy moves,
Speaker 2: because they're just like, how do we fit in this
Speaker 2: whole sea plot where all the world's greatest artists and
Speaker 2: psychics and special effects guys were brought together to invent
Speaker 2: an alien invasion and then killed.
Speaker 4: Mm hmm, that's what happens in the comics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, really yeah, as Amandyas has to tie up all
Speaker 1: the loose ends.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, I thought he just like teleported a giant
Speaker 4: squid or something and said it was an alien.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's what all the world's greatest artists come
Speaker 2: up with, because the idea is when they drop, they
Speaker 2: trick like psychic shockwaves, like give the whole planet nightmares, gotcha?
Speaker 1: And so our heroes confront as Amandias and basically the
Speaker 1: big drop is that he's going to kill a millions
Speaker 1: to save billions, And he says, I'm not a comic
Speaker 1: book villain. Do you think I'd explain my master planned
Speaker 1: to you if there was any possibility you could affect
Speaker 1: the outcome? I triggered it thirty five minutes ago.
Speaker 4: I love that line, this sort of tongue in cheek
Speaker 4: reference to the fact that villains always do this where
Speaker 4: they explain the plot hm, right before it's undermined.
Speaker 1: Yeah, very meta, very fun. There's a more fighting. He
Speaker 1: tries to vaporize Doctor Manhattan. It doesn't work. Still, Inspector
Speaker 1: shoots him again, beat for beat from the comic, he
Speaker 1: catches the bullet. This is meant to be this huge
Speaker 1: reveal in the comics because nobody in the comics has
Speaker 1: actual powers. More on this in a moment. But Adrianvite
Speaker 1: in this climacting moment is able to like move fast
Speaker 1: enough to catch a bullet. You're meant to be like hmm.
Speaker 1: And so the conclusion of the film is that everyone
Speaker 1: except Rorshak agrees to let Ozamandias get away with it.
Speaker 1: They all agree that to reveal the truth would have
Speaker 1: humanity fighting each other again on the brink of nuclear
Speaker 1: war again, and all those people would have died for nothing.
Speaker 1: And Rorshack walks out into Antarctica, knowing full well that
Speaker 1: he's going to get killed because he has now become
Speaker 1: a loose end, you know, he refuses to compromise. He
Speaker 1: does even say never compromise, not even in the face
Speaker 1: of armageddon. That's always been the difference between us Daniel,
Speaker 1: That's what he says to night Owl, and Doctor Manhattan
Speaker 1: just fucking vaporizes him into a red splotch on the
Speaker 1: snow that looks like a Rorshack mask. Appropriately, that is
Speaker 1: the kind of anti climax of Watchmen. Doctor Manhattan is
Speaker 1: going to leave the galaxy to create some life of
Speaker 1: his own now that he sees its value. Night Owl
Speaker 1: does get to lay a beat down on Osamandias just
Speaker 1: to get out some feelings, which is something that's added.
Speaker 1: But he and so expect are going to live halfily
Speaker 1: hour after and we go out to my Chemical Romance's
Speaker 1: cover of Desolation Row. But what a twist. And I
Speaker 1: love this because it's so fucking bleak. Everyone has compromised
Speaker 1: their morals. But the final shot is Rorschak's journal that
Speaker 1: has the entire truth is about to be published by
Speaker 1: the tabloid Rag the New Frontiersman. He had the dead
Speaker 1: drop in the event that he doesn't come back, So
Speaker 1: you're left with this ambiguous ending as to what happens after.
Speaker 1: Who knows, Maybe they all ignore rorschak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it becomes qan on. Just about thirty percent of
Speaker 2: the population believes it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he is very cuan on coded Oh yeah, oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he would have been kicking in the doors of
Speaker 2: that Comet Ping Pong.
Speaker 1: Dead dog in the Comet Ping Pong pizza. Sweet.
Speaker 4: Well, we've done the work of describing the plots. Let's
Speaker 4: do a little discussion of the style of this movie.
Speaker 4: I think that dack Snyder not his first work. We've
Speaker 4: discussed on the pod. You know, we've also discussed three
Speaker 4: hundred and Donna the Dead. He's approaching like Wes Anderson
Speaker 4: levels of au tourism. I think he's got such a
Speaker 4: specific look he's going for. And he often does cover
Speaker 4: graphic novels too, so he's got a style that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. A lot of slow motion, a lot of over
Speaker 1: the top violence, a lot of really gray color ballads. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think this movie looks I don't if it looks
Speaker 2: like how I'd want a Watchman movie to look. I
Speaker 2: think it looks pretty good. It doesn't have the what
Speaker 2: Nicole my co host, called the wet concrete look of
Speaker 2: Man of Steel, or that kind of piss yellow look
Speaker 2: of three hundred that I don't love, but I think
Speaker 2: he just is often a mismatch for the material he chooses.
Speaker 4: I think on your pod you said that he almost
Speaker 4: has like a perfect recall for what a fifteen year
Speaker 4: old boy will think is cool, you know, like he
Speaker 4: has a bead on that for sure.
Speaker 2: And that is the wrong way to adapt Watchmen. Then
Speaker 2: earlier you described a cool fight scene, cool costume. Most
Speaker 2: of that stuff isn't cool in the comic. No, like
Speaker 2: Silkspector's cost is not latex in the comic. As far
Speaker 2: as I can tell, the action scenes are very pared down.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot to them, and they're presented fairly
Speaker 2: prosaically or as in this movie, even though it's ordinary
Speaker 2: humans that are just fit and good at fighting, every
Speaker 2: punch is like a woosh and a big slam, and
Speaker 2: he plays everything up very epic when it should be
Speaker 2: more sardonic and kind of undercut, I think for this story.
Speaker 1: Yes, precisely. There's this great YouTube video essay on this
Speaker 1: film called Watchman Doesn't Get Watchmen, and it brings up
Speaker 1: that quote from Terry Gilliam about how this is unadaptable
Speaker 1: and part of what makes it unadaptable is that the
Speaker 1: work is so fucking bleak and it is fundamentally an
Speaker 1: anti superhero work. These people are psychologically damaged, they are pathetic,
Speaker 1: they are just like us. They are flawed, profoundly and
Speaker 1: deeply flawed in almost every way. But Zack Snyder, because
Speaker 1: of those changes that you are alluding to, he basically
Speaker 1: gives them superpowers like no, there's no like radioactive spiders
Speaker 1: or whatever the fuck. But when the sixty something year
Speaker 1: old comedian is fighting off his attacker something where in
Speaker 1: the comic he just gets his ass handed to him
Speaker 1: and gets his ass thrown out a window. We see
Speaker 1: the comedian throwing knives. We see him punch through a wall.
Speaker 1: We see night Owl break a mugger in the alley's
Speaker 1: arm and the bomb pops out of his skin like
Speaker 1: they are elevated. And even if it's not in, the
Speaker 1: story is done through the visuals and through the action,
Speaker 1: and it completely undermines a story that's meant to be
Speaker 1: anti superhero.
Speaker 2: I agree with your assessment of the movie and where
Speaker 2: it falls or the material, I would disagree that Watchman
Speaker 2: is anti superhero per se.
Speaker 1: Okay, I think.
Speaker 2: Alan Moore has an uneasy relationship with superhero stuff, particular,
Speaker 2: it's modern cultural dominance and what that kind of says
Speaker 2: about where we're at is this, But he also loves
Speaker 2: that stuff, like he started writing it for a reason.
Speaker 2: He loves pulp adventurer, he loves superhero stories. I think
Speaker 2: the takeaway from Watchmen. Part of it is just him seeing, Okay, well,
Speaker 2: what would happen if I transplanted these ideas into this setting.
Speaker 2: But I think the takeaway from it a lot like
Speaker 2: the takeaway like a lot of the industry and fans
Speaker 2: of comics had after it came out, was all superhero
Speaker 2: storyes should I'll be like this, they should be realistic
Speaker 2: and grady. When the whole point of Watchman is if
Speaker 2: you take superheroes outside their King Arthur fairytale world they
Speaker 2: exist in, they cease to be heroic. And that's why
Speaker 2: you shouldn't do it. Oh yeah, yeah, that's why every
Speaker 2: superhero shouldn't be Watchmen. Because he's also responding to a
Speaker 2: trend that was already kind of setting in in the
Speaker 2: mid eighties where they're like, you know, doing the death
Speaker 2: and the family story in Batman and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe anti superhero lacks nuance, but I think he's
Speaker 1: definitely saying what you're saying. If you take superheroes and
Speaker 1: put them in a realistic world, they make that world worse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: superheroes in our world are a net negative on society. Yeah, emphatically.
Speaker 4: The point you're making about Zack Snyder not understanding the
Speaker 4: source material is that it's meant to be critical of
Speaker 4: superheroes and their nature, and yet because he's such a
Speaker 4: fan of them, Like Zack Snyder is such a fan
Speaker 4: of them, he can't help but embellish the story whenever
Speaker 4: he can to make them look cool, right, Yeah, whether
Speaker 4: it's that mugging scene right with owl Man, like finding
Speaker 4: a way to make Owlman and the soil respector like
Speaker 4: as cool as possible.
Speaker 1: His name is night Owl, please with some respect on
Speaker 1: his name. He is the second night Owl.
Speaker 4: And I was shocked when you told me that in
Speaker 4: the comics they don't actually have powers. That's a complete
Speaker 4: deviation from the movie. Like, as somebody who had only
Speaker 4: seen the movie, I was like, they're kind of lazy
Speaker 4: with Zuperbauers, Like they all have super speed and super
Speaker 4: strength and are really tough.
Speaker 1: Right, I had to be like No, none of them are,
Speaker 1: except for maybe Ozamandias and Doctor Manhattan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they're just guys. They're just guys in costumes.
Speaker 4: Which is kind of way better. But like that's a
Speaker 4: perfect example of like Zack Snyder, he can't help himself.
Speaker 4: He's like, well, what if I gave them just a
Speaker 4: little bit of super strength, you know, for cinematic reasons
Speaker 4: to make the fight scenes even more freaking epic. That's
Speaker 4: the sense I get when you tell me that he's
Speaker 4: made a major change like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he just sincerely believes in the superhero so much.
Speaker 2: When night Owl and still expect her get back into
Speaker 2: the costumes, like, yeah, they're settling up and they're riding again.
Speaker 2: Whereas the comic it's more kind of sad these people
Speaker 2: can't move on with their lives and find something else
Speaker 2: to fill the void.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and even like the change that I kind of like,
Speaker 1: or I don't even know if I like it, but
Speaker 1: the change I mentioned where after night Owl has compromised,
Speaker 1: he's able to lay a beat down on Ozamandas in
Speaker 1: the comic and in the movie, we see that ozamandyas
Speaker 1: just handles night Owl with ease and rorschak at the
Speaker 1: same time, they are not comparable. But we can't have
Speaker 1: this morally gray compromised ending for a Zack Snyder. We
Speaker 1: just can't, as much as he wants to. So he
Speaker 1: has to have the good guy hero at least get
Speaker 1: some of his anger out and lay the smack down
Speaker 1: on ozamandas it's like emotionally satisfying for the character, I suppose,
Speaker 1: but it does kind of undercut that bleak ending that
Speaker 1: our moral light has compromised.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's just too much of a sentimental idealist.
Speaker 1: And like, yeah, I love how you mentioned the costumes too.
Speaker 1: I was thinking in the comic the snow owl suit
Speaker 1: when they're driving across Antarctica on like hoverboards, they look ridiculous. Again, Like,
Speaker 1: all of the costumes are updated for this film, even
Speaker 1: the Minute Men costumes. Like we see their costumes in
Speaker 1: the forties and the sixties and the eighties, and all
Speaker 1: of them, in some way, shape or form look cool
Speaker 1: or sexy. The first Silk Specter, she's painted on the
Speaker 1: side of the plane that dropped the nuclear bomb. She's
Speaker 1: a fucking pin up girl, right. The Mini Men costume
Speaker 1: in the comic look fucking absurd. Because they're meant to
Speaker 1: recall the nineteen forties tights in underwears cereals, you know,
Speaker 1: but even down to the costume, they just have to
Speaker 1: look cool, and by making them look cool, it totally detracts, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what the text is trying to do.
Speaker 4: That is funny that Alan Moore, Like, you look at
Speaker 4: who's interpreting his works, and it's like Zack Snyder, the
Speaker 4: Wachowski's taken up by a wide array of ideologies, you know,
Speaker 4: and he himself, like Alan Moore is like an anarchist, right, He's.
Speaker 2: A left anarchist. Yeah, out of a long tradition of
Speaker 2: UK speculative fiction left anarchist writers like Michael Moorcock and
Speaker 2: Norman Spinrad I think is from the UK.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And when we talked about Viva Vendetta, we talked
Speaker 4: about how they took his criticism, his sort of ideology
Speaker 4: in the graphic novel and turned it into this de
Speaker 4: liiberal fantasy. The message of the graphic novel was completely
Speaker 4: ruined by the movie. So it's good to see that
Speaker 4: happen again, but in a different direction from Zack Snyder.
Speaker 1: It's good to see Alan Moore's works misunderstood and ruined
Speaker 1: in a different way. There's a take. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: I truly do think the work is kind of unadaptable. Right.
Speaker 1: There's a quote by Alan Moore that gets thrown around,
Speaker 1: which is the only point in transferring something to a
Speaker 1: medium for which it was not intended is you make
Speaker 1: more money, usually at the expense of the integrity in
Speaker 1: the work in question.
Speaker 4: Mister Moore, will you sign my DVD of Watchmen Babies?
Speaker 1: Which of the babies is your favorite? You see what
Speaker 1: those bloody corporations do. I take your ordeas and I
Speaker 1: suck them, suck them long leitches until they've gotten every
Speaker 1: last drop of the marrow from your bones. Watchman is
Speaker 1: a comic about comics, even down to having a comic
Speaker 1: within a comic in the form of The Black Freighter. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mercifully did not watch the Super Ultimate Cut, so
Speaker 1: I did not see the adaptation of The Black Freighter.
Speaker 2: I skipped through them to save a little time. Lucky
Speaker 2: you can I talk about something on that note that's
Speaker 2: just sort of interesting, please. I talked before about Alan
Speaker 2: Moore's hold obsession with this idea of time and how
Speaker 2: it's laid out right, and the comic book reflects that
Speaker 2: because when you read a comic book, you kind of
Speaker 2: skim back and forth across the images to build a
Speaker 2: context versus a movie, which is one image at a
Speaker 2: time in linear order. One of the issues the chapters
Speaker 2: is named fearful Symmetry, after the William Blake poem, and
Speaker 2: if you look at it closely, the whole chapter is
Speaker 2: visually symmetrical. The first page resembles the last page terms
Speaker 2: of panel layout and staging and everything into the middle.
Speaker 2: So it's the storytelling is built into the form. The
Speaker 2: themes are built into the medium in a way that
Speaker 2: a film literally can't adapt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he does so many clever things, little things
Speaker 1: like doctor Manhattan's speech bubbles are always blue, right, His
Speaker 1: speech bubbles are different from everyone else's. When Rorschak is
Speaker 1: in his like more Madden state, his speech bubbles are
Speaker 1: jagged as he speaks in that staccata way. But in
Speaker 1: the flashbacks before he starts killing people, he has regular
Speaker 1: speech bubbles. The attention to detail of the medium is
Speaker 1: so intense, and it's just something that you cannot do
Speaker 1: in the visual medium of a film.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can't sit and scrutinize a single frame for
Speaker 2: a minute, like you can with the comment.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you were talking about that on your podcast, about
Speaker 4: how like when you're dealing with a story that involves
Speaker 4: multiple time periods and like overlapping temporal lines, the ability
Speaker 4: to spend as much time as you personally want on
Speaker 4: a comic frame and consider what's happening changes completely in
Speaker 4: a movie where it's like it's going to move on
Speaker 4: with or without you GIF you're confused, that's on you.
Speaker 2: Like you get one twenty fourth of a second.
Speaker 4: Just before we move on. I have one more point
Speaker 4: about style, just about Zack Snyder's use of music. I
Speaker 4: always find very good. You know, when we watched Donna
Speaker 4: the Dead, I thought that that Johnny cash drop was
Speaker 4: excellent in the opening credits, and he does something very
Speaker 4: similar here with the Bob Dylan song The Times they
Speaker 4: are changing, right, which is admittedly on the nose, but
Speaker 4: them moving through forty years of history, going through all
Speaker 4: of these plot points, I thought was was very good.
Speaker 4: I genuinely enjoy his credit music sequences. We've talked a
Speaker 4: lot about how The two Thousands feels very much like
Speaker 4: an attempt at doing boomer nostalgia. It's them looking back
Speaker 4: at the last forty years. We talked about this in
Speaker 4: our two thousand and four election episode in the number
Speaker 4: of reboots that came out Catch me if you can,
Speaker 4: we talked about this extensively. But yeah, every music drop
Speaker 4: here is the complete boomer collection of greatest hits. You know,
Speaker 4: all along the Watchtower, the times they are changing.
Speaker 1: Sound of silence at the burl, the sound of Silence.
Speaker 2: That one made me laugh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, those opening credits are incredible. I remember
Speaker 1: sitting in the theater in two thousand and nine watching that,
Speaker 1: having already read the comic, thinking like, boy, am I
Speaker 1: in for a treat, and then being subsequently so fucking bored.
Speaker 1: It has references to the source material, but it also
Speaker 1: adds to the source material in like a fun way,
Speaker 1: like the famous victory in Japan. Kiss between the Sailor
Speaker 1: is like a lesbian kiss with the lesbian member of
Speaker 1: the Minute Men. Silhouette silouette, Yes they have the first silk.
Speaker 1: Spector's pregnancy with the Minute Men is framed like the
Speaker 1: Last Supper. For reasons. I think it's really Zack Snyder
Speaker 1: being like, yeah, I know paintings, here's a painting, you know,
Speaker 1: But also she is kind of the christ like figure
Speaker 1: who's going to bring God back to the world in
Speaker 1: the form of Doctor Manhattan. It's all of your favorite
Speaker 1: moments from your high school twentieth century history class, but
Speaker 1: with the superheroes you remember from the comic book homework
Speaker 1: you did before watching this film. The jfk assassination with
Speaker 1: the comedian, It's the bombing of Hiroshima in Nagasaki with Silkspector,
Speaker 1: It's the pin Up Girl. It's all of these nice
Speaker 1: little moments where you get to point at the screen
Speaker 1: and say, I know what's going on here, but it
Speaker 1: is more than a Marvel Easter Egg because you need
Speaker 1: to do a little bit more work yourself. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: all we got for the adaptation. How he took a
Speaker 1: work about heroes that were pathetic and contemptible and turned
Speaker 1: them into cool, sexy badasses. Okay, so let's talk themes
Speaker 1: and big ideas, and I think the number one theme.
Speaker 1: If there's a thing that Watchman is about, it's the
Speaker 1: deconstruction of the superhero. Superheroes in a world that recalls
Speaker 1: our own would be bad, and they would be flawed,
Speaker 1: empathetic and traumatized and have contempt for humanity and forgive
Speaker 1: me a second classic side tangent. But ancient authors kind
Speaker 1: of did this. It's not exactly what Alan Moore was doing,
Speaker 1: but you know that there's a billion and a half
Speaker 1: versions of basically every myth, right, so you can take Hercules.
Speaker 1: Most of the Hercules stories are these fun, loving adventure stories.
Speaker 1: He has the twelve Labors, he's got to kill the monsters,
Speaker 1: he got to bring him back. Hercules is like a
Speaker 1: hero out of time. He's the club generally, so he's
Speaker 1: kind of like a caveman. He's dumb compared to the
Speaker 1: other he heroes. He can't really go into a town
Speaker 1: without sacking it with his boorishness and his drunkenness and
Speaker 1: his gluttonous appetite. He's a hard drinking kind of Snorlax
Speaker 1: meets the Tasmanian devil in a lot of these myths.
Speaker 1: But you put him in the hands of Euripides the tragedian,
Speaker 1: and he's in the center of this tragedy that's about
Speaker 1: madness Vinely sent against him, where he murders his entire
Speaker 1: family in a family annihilation. So it can get dark, right,
Speaker 1: what do you do with the guy who's that powerful
Speaker 1: who goes mad. Well he fucking kills his family and
Speaker 1: feels real bad about it after the fact. And it's
Speaker 1: not a perfect one to one comparison in terms of
Speaker 1: like deconstructing broader tropes. Alan Moore isn't talking about one guy.
Speaker 1: He's talking about types, archetypes even. Yeah, but Euripides is
Speaker 1: extractolating from the character and coming up with conclusions of, like,
Speaker 1: what would this figure look like in different scenarios.
Speaker 2: That's what Watchman is on that, just as in a
Speaker 2: sad I have a question, what did Chris Benwa do
Speaker 2: you to piss off Harra?
Speaker 1: And yeah, Watchman says like to put on a caper
Speaker 1: costume and take justice into your own hands is inherently
Speaker 1: and necessarily to put yourself above humanity in one way,
Speaker 1: shape or form, like I said when I introduced all
Speaker 1: the characters, right, and this is also what the infinitely
Speaker 1: superior Watchman TV series does. I haven't finished, sit no spoilers,
Speaker 1: I'm only five episodes in, but in its world we
Speaker 1: see the cops need to start putting on masks. Right.
Speaker 1: It is also a form of masked justice and the
Speaker 1: show is so fuck impression. It came out in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: it's talking about the dangers of masked up law enforcement.
Speaker 1: What a time.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think if you're going to come away
Speaker 4: with anything from this movie or from the graphic novel,
Speaker 4: this was the most profound thing it had to say,
Speaker 4: This sense that if somebody is going to be vigilante
Speaker 4: with superpowers, it's so clear to us when Spider Man
Speaker 4: stops a mugging, what should be done in that situation, right, Like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: the mugger is in the wrong, the woman with the
Speaker 4: purse is in the right, and we need to stop
Speaker 4: this from happening. But like, as you move up in crimes,
Speaker 4: and especially if you're trying to solve structural issues, right
Speaker 4: and not just you know, have paylliad of solutions to symptoms,
Speaker 4: but like treat real issues, there are way more opinions
Speaker 4: on how to solve things based on personal ideology and
Speaker 4: personal feelings. And it really complicates what should happen when
Speaker 4: we give someone and this kind of authority. Right, And
Speaker 4: you know, if you listen to our episode on Iron Man,
Speaker 4: we talked about this a lot. Right, Great Tony Stark
Speaker 4: can now beat any military on Earth and can like
Speaker 4: unilaterally decide to show up in a conflict and wipe
Speaker 4: out one side, right, And how problematic that is because
Speaker 4: what we've seen in the past is that we're not
Speaker 4: always sure what side should be helped.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: What happens when Tony Stark shows up in a rock?
Speaker 4: Does he help the Shiahs, does he help the Sunnies?
Speaker 4: He can't solve all of the intractable social problems and
Speaker 4: political problems through sheer might, right, And what I thought
Speaker 4: this movie really did so well was say, Okay, let's
Speaker 4: say you don't have someone with perfect morality like Peter
Speaker 4: Parker or like Superman, and you have someone who has
Speaker 4: like pretty good morality, right, what should they do in
Speaker 4: a given situation where it's not as cut and dry
Speaker 4: as a mugging? You might say, Okay, the closest thing
Speaker 4: we have in our society to like a judge, someone
Speaker 4: who's able to do judgment is the state? Right, so great,
Speaker 4: so the superhero will just go along with whatever the
Speaker 4: state wants. But like Alan Moore, as someone who I
Speaker 4: don't think believes in the state at all, rightly points out, okay, well,
Speaker 4: now the CIA has the power of a superhero, what
Speaker 4: does that actually mean?
Speaker 1: It means that there's one hundred mi line massacres a day,
Speaker 1: but now it's done by a one hundred foot blue guy.
Speaker 4: Yes, exactly, so he's helping the FBI spy on MLK.
Speaker 4: On this pod, we talked about how the CIA is
Speaker 4: the one who gave South Africa Nelson Mandela's position. Right,
Speaker 4: who gets to decide what is right and wrong?
Speaker 1: Who watches the Watchman if you will? Exactly?
Speaker 4: The state is the closest thing we have to some
Speaker 4: kind of generally agreed upon morality, judger right or thing
Speaker 4: to administer justice right exactly, and we know that they're
Speaker 4: very often wrong, incorrect, administering it unjustly. And so what
Speaker 4: do we end up with? Just like a supercharged state power?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 4: And I thought that that was a very interesting idea
Speaker 4: that I hadn't seen us in a superhero movie before,
Speaker 4: and like a sense of thoughtfulness that you don't get
Speaker 4: from Spider Man or a Iron Man movie. Right, what
Speaker 4: does all of this increased capability really result in?
Speaker 1: America wins Vietnam?
Speaker 4: Yeah, America wins Vietnam precisely.
Speaker 1: And that's the comedians say, could you imagine if we
Speaker 1: lost that would have done to this country.
Speaker 4: So many of those winks towards you know, what actually
Speaker 4: happened in the real.
Speaker 1: World, where they're like, eh, eh.
Speaker 4: You know, you know what happens that you're a smart guy.
Speaker 4: You know that we actually lost Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Ah, some people will still try and dispute that.
Speaker 4: Right, true red format they have McDonald's. Now, that was
Speaker 4: kind of the takeaway that I got from this, very
Speaker 4: in line with the criticism that we had of Iron Man,
Speaker 4: which is okay, great, Now, how do we decide that
Speaker 4: this increased capability can decide what's right and wrong? And
Speaker 4: as the comedian points out, you're not really solving anything
Speaker 4: with these sort of micro administrations of justice, right, You
Speaker 4: can't really get to any structural issues this way by
Speaker 4: punching them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's interesting in the book and the film how none
Speaker 2: of the hero characters have a like well defined political ideology.
Speaker 2: I mean, some of them are kind of generally more
Speaker 2: conservative or seem a little more liberal or what have
Speaker 2: you in a vague sense, but none of them are
Speaker 2: operating with like a clear organized vision of how the
Speaker 2: world should be beyond a general sense of right and
Speaker 2: wrong or a nihilistic sense of just enjoying the exercise
Speaker 2: of power. None of them are like socialists or definite
Speaker 2: liberals or what have you. Right, they kind of just
Speaker 2: follow the status quo, like Doctor Manhattan kind of just
Speaker 2: does what the government tells them to do without worrying
Speaker 2: too much seemingly about it. Or he seems to have
Speaker 2: a sort of fatalistic lack of agency. Given that Alan
Speaker 2: Moore has a definite political point of view, I found
Speaker 2: that interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and as we're saying, we live in this alternate
Speaker 1: world where Nixon is in his third term, fourth term,
Speaker 1: fifth fifth, Yeah, it's the eighties. Nixon is in his
Speaker 1: fifth term. And I forget if this line is in
Speaker 1: the comics or not, or if it's just in the film.
Speaker 1: But the two night Owls are talking over a beer,
Speaker 1: and the older night Al says like, oh, that damn Nixon.
Speaker 1: He took you guys off the street. You deserved a
Speaker 1: shot to be capes like we did. He says that
Speaker 1: bastard Nixon. I did vote for him four times, And
Speaker 1: the younger night Owl says, well, it was him or
Speaker 1: the communists, right, So even our good liberal quote unquote
Speaker 1: non roar Shackian hero is still a Nixon Night. The
Speaker 1: next thing we want to discuss just talking a little
Speaker 1: bit about satire. Right, it's related to this idea that
Speaker 1: superheroes would be awful in our world. There's also this
Speaker 1: sense that superheroes in this context are kind of childish
Speaker 1: and dumb and stupid. Right, The Mini Men costumes I
Speaker 1: already mentioned look particularly silly or over the top. You
Speaker 1: get the sense that these people they can't help but
Speaker 1: do this kind of adolescent childish dressing up in costumes
Speaker 1: and punching things, and they just can't grow out of it. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I found the movie to be very pestiche in general,
Speaker 4: in the way that all of the superheroes that we
Speaker 4: see you can kind of squint your eyes and be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: that's Superman, or like that's Batman or that's Captain America. Right,
Speaker 4: they're all kind of individual satires, like you said, like
Speaker 4: a t MoU version of most of the popular heroes
Speaker 4: you're familiar with. And then often they're like just straight
Speaker 4: up parodying American culture in this alternate world where it's
Speaker 4: like they're doing the Apocalypse Now scene with the Right
Speaker 4: of the Valkyries, yeah, or like Doctor Strangelove parody with
Speaker 4: the world leaders and their office with like Henry Kissinger.
Speaker 4: I mean, one of the major themes I think is
Speaker 4: pastichean parody of our own world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's almost like a noir investigating the murder
Speaker 1: of the instigating event is definitely science fiction, and that
Speaker 1: we go to fucking Mars and a base into Antarctica,
Speaker 1: and then we also got a little bit of war
Speaker 1: movie parody, a little bit of this like Doctor Strangelove vibe.
Speaker 1: Definitely a lot of composite parts.
Speaker 2: Some of that is Snyder, I think, with like the
Speaker 2: Apocalypse Now stuff, but a lot of that is more
Speaker 2: in his broad repertoire of pulp fiction cuts, because I
Speaker 2: mean you can look at night Owl and there's like
Speaker 2: a Batman analogy there, but he's also sort of like
Speaker 2: guys like Blue Beetle, a lot of these sort of
Speaker 2: Golden age characters that fell out of use. I think
Speaker 2: Watchman started early early on as an attempt to write
Speaker 2: a book for all of these characters that DCY had
Speaker 2: acquired from another company that went defunct.
Speaker 4: I read that as well. Basically they brought it to
Speaker 4: Alan Moore and they were like, hey, we kind of
Speaker 4: have the rights to these obscure characters, can you do
Speaker 4: something with them?
Speaker 2: And then yeah, it evolved into being a standalone thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think when they saw how dark the story was,
Speaker 4: they were like, well, maybe we don't involve the Blue
Speaker 4: Beetle necessarily, like someone who might sort of remind people
Speaker 4: of something like this.
Speaker 1: Someone who for legal purposes is different. Yeah.
Speaker 4: In terms of the pastiche, I did find that it
Speaker 4: is for humorous effect. Often the way that night Owl
Speaker 4: is portrayed to kind of be like the Joel Schumacher
Speaker 4: batman or the Adam West batman, you know with the
Speaker 4: nipple cutouts in the suit, or like the nineteen forties guy.
Speaker 4: Doesn't he die because he got his cape stuck in
Speaker 4: like a revolving door. Yeah, every now and then he
Speaker 4: is able to portray them, I'm sure, as Alan Moore mean,
Speaker 4: which is to be like silly and undermined by their
Speaker 4: own ridiculousness.
Speaker 1: Another big theme that I think undergo is the text
Speaker 1: is trauma, memory, nostalgia. All these things are kind of interrelated,
Speaker 1: but all of our characters are in some way, shape
Speaker 1: or form deeply traumatized. Right Rorshak No father, mother's a
Speaker 1: sex worker, abusive Laurie abusive mother forced into doing this thing.
Speaker 1: The least traumatized is Dan. I suppose he inherited banking
Speaker 1: money and went to Harvard to study birds. But I
Speaker 1: think it does this thing that we've mentioned before on
Speaker 1: the pod where Jordana you compared Mouse to like some
Speaker 1: superhero films, It was V for Vendetta. Oh yeah, that
Speaker 1: was it. Apropos Mouse is about how trauma does not
Speaker 1: make you stronger and better and whatever. It just changes
Speaker 1: you irreparably.
Speaker 4: And you have to live with it. Yes, And then
Speaker 4: V for Vendetta's point was like trauma and pain whatever,
Speaker 4: it doesn't kill you, makes you stronger.
Speaker 1: At least in the film. But all of our characters
Speaker 1: basically are trying to wrestle with this trauma that they
Speaker 1: have by doing superhero dumb right. There is all these
Speaker 1: characters are, in some way, shape or form flawed and
Speaker 1: broken and weird. There are no normies who become capes.
Speaker 1: Their coping mechanism is vigilantism, right.
Speaker 4: I think that the point seemed to be the thing
Speaker 4: that would make you want to put your life at
Speaker 4: risk and fight crime extra judicially, might also preclude you
Speaker 4: from having normal good opinions. On what your will should
Speaker 4: be upon the world. Right, you are by definition not
Speaker 4: normal and therefore might have a hard time like determining
Speaker 4: what is right and wrong.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know how Rorshak pays for the rent
Speaker 1: walking around with an end asn't high sign. I don't
Speaker 1: know what the business is like on that. And I
Speaker 1: think it's even sadder when you see some of our
Speaker 1: characters after their cape days, we see through flashbacks that
Speaker 1: the Minute Men kind of fucking sucked right, very dysfunctional.
Speaker 1: We don't see a lot of the Minute Men's dubs.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen forties, we see the attempted sexual assault.
Speaker 1: We see hooded Justice is gestured to as like a
Speaker 1: closeted gay man. In nineteen forties America, we see the
Speaker 1: murder of Silhouette. But when we meet the older Silk Specter,
Speaker 1: she pines for those good old days. She's flattered that
Speaker 1: she's the subject of the Tijuana Bible, a pornographic comic.
Speaker 1: She says, you know, the grimy bits of your life
Speaker 1: get a little bit brighter as the world gets darker.
Speaker 1: Everyone is just so steeped in this nostalgia for this
Speaker 1: world that is no longer there, and wasn't even that
Speaker 1: great to.
Speaker 4: Begin with a frequent theme on our show, like when
Speaker 4: we talked about Blockbuster, and we're like, we have such
Speaker 4: nostalgia for this thing that kind of wasn't that great,
Speaker 4: but it's just gotten so much worse since then that
Speaker 4: it seems great in comparison.
Speaker 2: M I find now at a certain point in my life,
Speaker 2: I get this doalgic frisian from things I didn't even
Speaker 2: like when I was young, Like songs I fucking hated
Speaker 2: when I was twelve come on the radio and I'm like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, And I mean part of it is just
Speaker 2: remembering being young in general.
Speaker 1: Right. I was recently at the Washington Nationals Hot Dog Day,
Speaker 1: where lots of Glizzy themed puns and memes and costumes
Speaker 1: and shirts, and they played the song who Let the
Speaker 1: Dogs Out by the Baha Men many, many, many times.
Speaker 1: That was a song that I thought was so stupid
Speaker 1: when I was a child, and now I look back
Speaker 1: on it fondly in the context of five dollars Glizzy
Speaker 1: Day at the Washington Nationals ball Bar. Okay, the last
Speaker 1: kind of two interrelated themes that I want to talk about.
Speaker 1: One is apocalyptic anxiety, which is fucking huge in this work.
Speaker 1: You know what is the iconic Washman logo. It's a
Speaker 1: smiley face with the blood drop indicating the doomsay clock.
Speaker 1: We are five minutes to midnight, right. It drives the
Speaker 1: plot of the work. We are about to end it all.
Speaker 1: This is the you're in the back alley that our
Speaker 1: Watchman hero need to solve. That's their ethical quandary. How
Speaker 1: do we keep us from killing each other? And how
Speaker 1: does that apocalyptic anxiety manifest? Or the comedian it's in
Speaker 1: the meaninglessness of life Rosamandies is solving it through his
Speaker 1: fucked up own doomsday plot. YadA, YadA, YadA. The thing
Speaker 1: I think about this theme is that it hit in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties. When it came out, people were still
Speaker 1: talking about conflict with the Russians and nuclear war. But
Speaker 1: this does not hit like it used to. And in
Speaker 1: my research for this episode, I learned the doomsday clock
Speaker 1: is still a thing. Yep. The International Association of Atomic
Speaker 1: Scientists or whatever still run the clock, and they have
Speaker 1: included climate change is one of the things that moves
Speaker 1: the doomsday clock up. And let me tell you, friends,
Speaker 1: were at less than two minutes to midnight it is.
Speaker 1: It's actually worse the doomsday clock than it was when
Speaker 1: Watchman came out.
Speaker 2: Really cue the Iron Maiden.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm, yup.
Speaker 2: I could talk for a minute, because I want to
Speaker 2: touch on both this and nostalgia as a theme, because
Speaker 2: they're kind of intertwined.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Please.
Speaker 2: The book spends a bit of time with Fite and
Speaker 2: his sort of psychoanalyzing the social salt by watching twenty
Speaker 2: TVs at once from his throne, and he talks in
Speaker 2: it about nostalgia being a thing that becomes popular when
Speaker 2: times themselves are kind of grim, right, people think about
Speaker 2: things were so good in the past, where did we
Speaker 2: go wrong? And it's significant that we've just kind of
Speaker 2: been there and been sitting with those same apocalyptic anxieties
Speaker 2: since the eighties, since the onset of neoliberal economics, since
Speaker 2: since we had this sort of underinvestment in stagnation and
Speaker 2: growth where things don't change. Even all these new technologies,
Speaker 2: they don't get deployed in a really transformational ways because
Speaker 2: that would be too demanding. So we're just like everything's
Speaker 2: sounded like the same but worse. And I think the
Speaker 2: apocalyptic anxieties go hand in hand with that, because when
Speaker 2: we can't feel the world getting better or dream of
Speaker 2: a better world, we imagine a world that is destroyed
Speaker 2: or sort of reborn through destruction. Like this movie has
Speaker 2: kind of a mini apocalypse that promises a possible better world.
Speaker 2: Have either of you seen Acura? Yes, yes, I just
Speaker 2: rewatched that for the show yesterday, and it came out
Speaker 2: around the same time the last issues of like eighty
Speaker 2: seven eighty eight of Watchmen would have been being published,
Speaker 2: I remember, right, And it is very much like, kind
Speaker 2: of similar in a lot of ways, and it has
Speaker 2: this same sense of this degenerated world that is hurtling
Speaker 2: towards some kind of self destruction that the population it
Speaker 2: seems to kind of crave because they know things have
Speaker 2: to be different somehow, and destruction can bring change maybe
Speaker 2: in the in the imagine area.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's very thoughtful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this idea that if all you can imagine for
Speaker 4: the future is the end of it, the apocalyptic end,
Speaker 4: or the worsening of conditions, the only natural place that
Speaker 4: you can go psychologically is to like obsess on the past,
Speaker 4: you know. And so tying these two themes together of
Speaker 4: like nostalgia and apocalypse.
Speaker 1: I always found it so weird that after the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union collapse, we stopped obsessing about nuclear war so much,
Speaker 1: where it's like, well, well, you know, the adversary has
Speaker 1: been defeated, the bad guys of the nuclear weapons are gone,
Speaker 1: but we still have all the nuclear weapons, right.
Speaker 4: Like, I don't know, man, were you not listening to
Speaker 4: George Bush and his two thousand and three State of
Speaker 4: the Union when he heated to look out for nuclear
Speaker 4: nu jahadeen?
Speaker 1: You know what?
Speaker 2: One guy was worried about nuclear weapons in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 2: one hed aol Koji.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't need more things to worry about, but
Speaker 1: just be aware, listener, the nukes are still out there.
Speaker 1: Fallout can still happen. The last thing to mention, and
Speaker 1: it's related to everything we've been talking about nostalgia, apocalyptic anxiety,
Speaker 1: and we kind of already talked about this. But just
Speaker 1: like the deconstruction of American history, this book does such
Speaker 1: an excellent job at the world building. Zack Snyder does
Speaker 1: a good enough job with his montage to open it
Speaker 1: with his flashbacks. They're so grounded in the text, so
Speaker 1: much boomer winking, and yeah, just this view that the
Speaker 1: twentieth century didn't go the way that it should have,
Speaker 1: either in their world or as we understand in ours
Speaker 1: nineteen seven, these riots that are happening. Night Owl two says,
Speaker 1: the country's disintegrating. What happened to America? What happened to
Speaker 1: the American Dream? This is a line in both the
Speaker 1: book and film, and the comedian, wearing his BDSM mask
Speaker 1: outfit in the comic a shoulder pad with the Captain
Speaker 1: America star and holding a shotgun says, it came true.
Speaker 1: You're looking at it. Now, come on, let's really put
Speaker 1: these jokers through some changes, right. This is the American
Speaker 1: dream of the late twentieth century. It is the meeting
Speaker 1: out of violence. It is doing unto others what you want. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's start to wrap up here.
Speaker 4: I just wanted to mention quickly that I read the
Speaker 4: comic Red Sun the Superman comic in this last week,
Speaker 4: and I thought that they were very similar, which was
Speaker 4: interesting because I mean that also comes out in the
Speaker 4: two thousands and is retrospectively looking at the past, and
Speaker 4: the plot of that is that Superman lands on a
Speaker 4: farm in Ukraine instead of Smallville, and he becomes the
Speaker 4: leader of the USSR after Stalin dies, which he figures
Speaker 4: this is the position in which he can do the
Speaker 4: most good, right from the top of the country, That's
Speaker 4: where he can do the most good. And so then
Speaker 4: the issue becomes now that Superman is responsible for the state,
Speaker 4: he has to do things like state repression of free
Speaker 4: speech right very much in line with The Watchman, which
Speaker 4: is like what happens when a superhero is in line
Speaker 4: with the state and is forced to meet out justice
Speaker 4: based on their own personal ideology. But some interesting parallels
Speaker 4: in that story was that the US crumbles because they
Speaker 4: can't keep up with the USSR because the Superman is
Speaker 4: part of their state. And yet the main ideas are
Speaker 4: that like, if you enhance the capability of the state
Speaker 4: through superpowers, then you are sort of inherently relying on
Speaker 4: personal ideology, which is extremely problematic.
Speaker 1: It's the best Superman story. The best Superman stories, because
Speaker 1: he's so powerful, are not about him punching guys. It's
Speaker 1: about him wrestling with ethical questions, which is how much
Speaker 1: should I help these people and how much should they
Speaker 1: help themselves.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I also just wanted to mention that I had
Speaker 4: never seen this before watching it for the pod The
Speaker 4: Watchman and I had a date and I was like, Oh,
Speaker 4: I have to watch this movie for the pod. Do
Speaker 4: you want to watch it with me? And she was
Speaker 4: like sure, And so I put on the Zack Snyder
Speaker 4: Director's cut of The Watchman, which I got to say, uh,
Speaker 4: not a great date movie.
Speaker 1: It's uh, I gotta ask your Dana. Was it the
Speaker 1: director's cut or was it the ultimate cut?
Speaker 4: It was the whatever, the longest one was, That's what
Speaker 4: it was. And like four hours into it, she was like, well,
Speaker 4: what's the point of all of these pirate ship scenes?
Speaker 1: And I was like, I don't know. Came out looking
Speaker 1: dumb on your date night movie. It's like I can't
Speaker 1: interpret this. I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: I've like had to apologize so many. I was like,
Speaker 4: there's still two hours left. I'm so sorry, But yeah,
Speaker 4: I didn't love the Ultimate super cut or whatever it's called.
Speaker 1: Going into Watchman blind is fucking crazy. Someone I saw
Speaker 1: this with in two thousand and nine was there and like,
Speaker 1: it is a weird film if you haven't read the text. Well,
Speaker 1: I remember watching it with like a very normy, nice guy.
Speaker 1: He's a doctor. Now he was like, we're in Antarctica, now,
Speaker 1: like we're on Mars, like, what what is happening?
Speaker 4: I will say I had a very similar experience where like,
Speaker 4: the first time I watched it, I was like, what.
Speaker 1: The fuck is this?
Speaker 4: This is fucking stupid, And then like after I finished it,
Speaker 4: I'm like, let me run it back, and I like
Speaker 4: watched the first hour and then already knowing what they
Speaker 4: were doing, like who the comedian was, why he was murdered.
Speaker 4: I gotta say I enjoyed it far more having already
Speaker 4: known what was going on, but that first time was rough.
Speaker 1: This is why it's like not a great adaptation is
Speaker 1: that it is only for people who have already read
Speaker 1: it because of Zack Snyder's reverence. I think it's a
Speaker 1: very unapproachable film if you have not read it already. Hi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I read it well before the movie came out.
Speaker 2: I never thought about that. It's also sort of interesting
Speaker 2: that this movie even got made, because it's one of
Speaker 2: those things where it's clearly like the source material developed
Speaker 2: all of this cultural prestige without anybody realized it didn't
Speaker 2: necessarily translate to like a one hundred and fifty million
Speaker 2: dollar budget movie audience.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the movie lost money, Like I'm sure that they've
Speaker 4: eventually recouped it on Blu Ray Ultimate Cut sales or something,
Speaker 4: but your theatrical release it lost money. But you can
Speaker 4: see how it would have been made considering like the
Speaker 4: main thesis of your podcast is that, like all of
Speaker 4: our movie making resources in the last twenty years have
Speaker 4: been pointed at making superhero IP content, and so it's
Speaker 4: an easy sell to be like, hey, here's this massively
Speaker 4: popular graphic novel featuring superheroes. Can I have one hundred
Speaker 4: and eighty million dollars to make this?
Speaker 2: It is, but only from the movie producer brain. Logically,
Speaker 2: you don't actually sit down and read it and go,
Speaker 2: oh Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, no, no, not important.
Speaker 2: Like leave Astoria, gentleman, is just as is even weirder
Speaker 2: because that was a less popular comic that is much
Speaker 2: weirder in dealing with more esoteric material. Have either of
Speaker 2: you read Leary Story?
Speaker 1: Gentlemen, I've seen the film, but I have not read
Speaker 1: the comic.
Speaker 2: So in the comic, among many men any other things,
Speaker 2: the film is not much of an adaptation. One of
Speaker 2: the things that happens in the comic is Spoiler's mister
Speaker 2: Hyde as in Jekyl and rapes the Invisible Man to death.
Speaker 1: Hey Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, very very weird choice for adaptation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like, okay, this is I'm not gonna be
Speaker 1: a fucking nerd continuity or guy. But one of the
Speaker 1: video essays I watched on YouTube pointed out deep into
Speaker 1: the film, like we're at pass the two hour twenty
Speaker 1: minute mark, at the climax in Antarctica, Ozumandias tries to
Speaker 1: vaporize Doctor Manhattan with the same industrial accident that led
Speaker 1: to doctor John Austerman becoming Doctor Manhattan. And he comes back.
Speaker 1: He's giant. He smashes his blue hand through the glass
Speaker 1: ceiling and he says, reassembling myself was the first thing
Speaker 1: I learned how to do. It couldn't stop John Osterman.
Speaker 1: Do you think it will stop me? That is the
Speaker 1: first time in the film that the name John Osterman
Speaker 1: has been dropped. It It is maybe not in some
Speaker 1: of the extra cuts, but in the theatrical cut they
Speaker 1: never say John Ousterman's name. Oh. It's just like one
Speaker 1: of these little things where like that line had to
Speaker 1: be there because it was verbatim from the comics, but
Speaker 1: because you're cutting words. If you went in Truly Blind,
Speaker 1: you could be like, who the fuck is John Austen.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can use context clues to figure out
Speaker 1: that's probably him. But like just little things that go
Speaker 1: completely unexplained, like Ozamandiez's genetically engineered Lynx Boubastis is just
Speaker 1: there without comic that's explained in the comics. The fact
Speaker 1: that the existence of Doctor Manhattan creating new materials is
Speaker 1: why we live in this retrofuturist nineteen eighties. Also something
Speaker 1: that's like not really underlined and explained. Again, makes total
Speaker 1: sense if you've come in having done your homework for
Speaker 1: this movie. But yeah, I don't think a movie that
Speaker 1: requires homework is going to be the most commercially successful.
Speaker 2: Even like the pirate comic thing, I mean, whine. If
Speaker 2: you read the comic within a comic closely, you see
Speaker 2: the thematic parallels with the main story, But it's also
Speaker 2: like part of the world building where superheroes existed in
Speaker 2: real life. So supero comics kind of fizzled out and
Speaker 2: pirate comics became the hot thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll add one last miscellaneous thing because I think
Speaker 1: we need to say. We talked about Zack Snyder's homophobia.
Speaker 1: When we talked about three hundred about how he kind
Speaker 1: of alided any gay stuff from ancient Greece. This movie
Speaker 1: kept every single instance of homophobia from the comics. That
Speaker 1: includes Silhouette getting murdered with the graffitied caption lesbian whores.
Speaker 1: During the Keen Riots, a rioter calls the comedian the
Speaker 1: homophobic f slur Rorschach in his journal says, possible homosexual.
Speaker 1: They have to investigate, right, all the homophobia that was
Speaker 1: there in the comics, you know what's getting in there.
Speaker 1: Zack Snyder was saying, Well, that's just how it is,
Speaker 1: That's just how the text is. But there is a
Speaker 1: subplot involving some lesbian lovers in the comic, and one
Speaker 1: of whom wants to put up a gay rights poster,
Speaker 1: And there's this moment where the two lovers are having
Speaker 1: a little bit of spat right before the world ends,
Speaker 1: and like humanity comes in to help them like reconcile
Speaker 1: and like tear them apart from one another so that
Speaker 1: they don't engage in an act of violence right before
Speaker 1: everything goes down. Any positive gay stuff somehow ended up
Speaker 1: on the cutting room floor, but all the homophobia stated
Speaker 1: I've calmed down on the side.
Speaker 2: I don't think Zack Snyder is I mean, I think
Speaker 2: his politics are probably like sort of weird. I think
Speaker 2: he's sort of like a libertarian liberal, but I don't
Speaker 2: think he's like culturally right wing. I think three hundred
Speaker 2: probably has more to do with the source material and
Speaker 2: with this movie. I think that was just probably one
Speaker 2: of those things that was cut for time for streamlining
Speaker 2: the very large story. I think like the inclusion of Silan,
Speaker 2: even though it's just kind of in those like flashback
Speaker 2: scenes very briefly, the fact that they went out the
Speaker 2: way to include Silhouette, even if it also means including
Speaker 2: her homophobic murder, felt to me more like a statement
Speaker 2: on the side of gay rights. Like I think he's
Speaker 2: a you should be able to do whatever you want
Speaker 2: type guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I could be wrong. He could be lying about his
Speaker 2: politics in the couple times he's brought it up, but
Speaker 2: that's kind of the re I have on him. I
Speaker 2: think the Zach Schnyder super right wing guys. I think
Speaker 2: it's a common misread because his movies are often not
Speaker 2: that great and their stylization is so hyperbolic and kind
Speaker 2: of meat headed. I think people tend to read him
Speaker 2: sort of uncharitably.
Speaker 4: He probably just has like a fifteen year old's ideology. Yes,
Speaker 4: socially liberal, physically conservative. Wait, you don't physically conservative fifteen
Speaker 4: year olds. I think that's just like the fifteen year
Speaker 4: old view of the world. I think maybe why he
Speaker 4: gets to read his right wing is because he made
Speaker 4: three hundred. Yeah, but that's almost certainly more a result
Speaker 4: of Frank Miller.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're right, he does make the VJ Day
Speaker 1: kiss a lesbian kiss, like he has some I suppose,
Speaker 1: like attempts at inclusion there as well. So maybe he's
Speaker 1: been slightly unfairly maligned.
Speaker 2: He's a self identified feminist. Oh interesting, I think probably
Speaker 2: in kind of like a in some ways meat headed way.
Speaker 2: But like, are you familiar with Sucker Punch?
Speaker 1: No, but you mentioned it on your Watchman episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I haven't seen it long time. It's a very
Speaker 2: strange movie. I don't think it's successful, Like I don't
Speaker 2: think most of his movie is successful. I'm not like
Speaker 2: a fan by just I feel a little bad because
Speaker 2: I think he's been badly misread because so many Snydercut
Speaker 2: guys are also kind of chuds. But that was a
Speaker 2: movie he wrote with his wife that was like, at
Speaker 2: least attempting to be like a feminist deconstruction movie. Okay,
Speaker 2: I I don't know if he succeeds, but that's what
Speaker 2: I was trying to do.
Speaker 1: It sounds like Bill Maher honestly. Yeah, right down to
Speaker 1: the Islamophobia in three hundred right.
Speaker 4: But just one more miscellaneous thought. I did like that
Speaker 4: the Minute Men being in the forties and The Watchmen
Speaker 4: being in the seventies. I did like the parallels on
Speaker 4: the comic industry at large, with like what is it
Speaker 4: the Silver and Golden Age of comics sort of overlapping
Speaker 4: with that area a little bit of meta commentary on
Speaker 4: the nature of superheroes in our own culture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, now wrap up with some closing thoughts. As
Speaker 1: a film, I think it came out at this weird
Speaker 1: time where it's post Iron Man, it's post Dark Knight,
Speaker 1: right at the beginning of the cap inning that was
Speaker 1: about to happen. But like we've said a bunch of times,
Speaker 1: the greenlit this work without having read it. It's pretty
Speaker 1: unapproachable and unadaptable work. That is weird, especially if you
Speaker 1: haven't read the source material. It's slavishly, reverently faithful to
Speaker 1: try and please the fans, but it's also different enough
Speaker 1: from the source material because of the changes that we
Speaker 1: already talked about making them cool and making them sexy,
Speaker 1: making them badass, that the die hard fans aren't going
Speaker 1: to totally like it, truly just leasing no one. I
Speaker 1: think the problem is they tried to make a sincere
Speaker 1: Superhero film, trying to cash in on trends based off
Speaker 1: of work that was highly satirical of the genre and
Speaker 1: doing something a bit heaviier with both the genre and
Speaker 1: the medium. I don't know if that is an exercise
Speaker 1: that you can execute, but boy howdy did they try.
Speaker 2: It is a very well intentioned adaptation at least. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's not coming from a place of contempt for the
Speaker 2: source material.
Speaker 1: No. I think even in the framing that I just
Speaker 1: said that makes it sound like nothing but a shameless
Speaker 1: cash grab, and it's definitely more than that because they try.
Speaker 1: I mean, they got my chemical romance to do that
Speaker 1: Dylan Comfort, and I'm embarrassed to say that it is
Speaker 1: still in my rotation. I think it goes really hard,
Speaker 1: but I'm a shameless MCR fan.
Speaker 4: I think an interesting question might be, let's take sort
Speaker 4: of what are considered to be the better two thousand
Speaker 4: superhero movies and take like spider Man, X Men, iron Man,
Speaker 4: Watchman in the Dark Knight, and say, like, what's your
Speaker 4: ranking of those five? Like, where does this fit into
Speaker 4: the list of the best superhero movies of the two thousands.
Speaker 2: I'd say maybe spider Man two at the top in
Speaker 2: terms of I think being closest to understanding the subject
Speaker 2: matter on its own terms. The Dark Knight I have
Speaker 2: ambivalent feelings about, but overall, I think it works as
Speaker 2: a movie in its own right. Overall, obviously the Joker
Speaker 2: performance alone is enough to make it. I think the
Speaker 2: X Men movies don't really hold up. Watchmen is is
Speaker 2: kind of in the middle somewhere. There's things about it.
Speaker 2: I like, there's a lot that I think doesn't work.
Speaker 2: Iron Man one of the better MCU move on that curve, But.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have I mean, I might need to put
Speaker 1: it in the top five conversation, which is crazy because
Speaker 1: I don't love it that much as a movie. But
Speaker 1: I reread the graphic novel before I rewatched it, and
Speaker 1: there were some scenes that I liked seeing put on screen.
Speaker 1: I liked seeing the Rorshak arrest scene when he shoots
Speaker 1: the guy with a grappling gun, just like he does
Speaker 1: in the comics. I liked the scenes of Rorshak in jail.
Speaker 1: I found myself wanting certain scenes to be longer, which
Speaker 1: is fucking crazy given how long this film is. But
Speaker 1: in the graphic novel the conversations between Rorshak and his
Speaker 1: psychiatrists are so good. We're like, just interacting with Rorshak
Speaker 1: starts to have these deleterious effects on the psychiatrist's life.
Speaker 1: It hurts his marriage and whatnot, just being in close
Speaker 1: proximity with that. Like, I wish that could have been
Speaker 1: more fleshed out. Seeing the attempt at adapting the Unadaptable, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I enjoyed that. But like I've also seen a lot
Speaker 1: of people point out that even though it's so slavishly faithful,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of fluff that you can cut from
Speaker 1: this thing, just like long transitions out of scenes and
Speaker 1: like you have to play the full thirty seconds of
Speaker 1: ninety nine loop Balloons or whatever, and like you actually don't,
Speaker 1: Zack Snyder, you can shave minutes off this film just
Speaker 1: in the transitions.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I mean as somebody who watched the four
Speaker 4: hour version on a date. I concur with that.
Speaker 1: Conclusion, But yeah, I don't want the actual film to
Speaker 1: be shorter. I just want it to be longer in
Speaker 1: different ways.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I agree with Stu that it's sort
Speaker 4: of in the middle. Probably Spider Man in the Dark
Speaker 4: Night are better. And of course this movie benefits for
Speaker 4: being explicitly for adults rather than like being for adults
Speaker 4: and children.
Speaker 1: Big R rating. Maybe f Bomb's gore sex blue dicks. Oh,
Speaker 1: we didn't even mention all the blue dogs. It's been mentioned.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 4: That's the one thing people seem to remember about this movie.
Speaker 4: But yeah, I think that, like, well, how I will
Speaker 4: generally rate it is like if it gives you some
Speaker 4: new understanding of the world and like leaves you with
Speaker 4: a piece of psychological jewelry that you can carry with you.
Speaker 4: That's the mark of a good movie to me. And
Speaker 4: I do find that the ethical question that this movie
Speaker 4: asks you, which comes from Alan Moore entirely, is something
Speaker 4: that kind of puts it above almost any other superhero
Speaker 4: movie in which you watch Iron Man and you're unchanged,
Speaker 4: you know, you watch X Men, and unless you really
Speaker 4: haven't thought about it at all. I thought about gay
Speaker 4: rights at all. Your money, you're mostly unchanged. And so
Speaker 4: that's one advantage this movie has, is it you know what,
Speaker 4: it's a movie that makes you think, I mean.
Speaker 1: The classic remember shuffle test? Are you happy this piece
Speaker 1: of media exists? And I think I have to say yes.
Speaker 4: That's the thing is like, if we're going to funnel
Speaker 4: all of our movie making resources at making superhero movies
Speaker 4: and recognizable IP, then there is like a cost to
Speaker 4: every movie that gets made, right, which is that like
Speaker 4: we're not making other things. And so if we're gonna
Speaker 4: send like two hundred million dollars at this movie and
Speaker 4: not six indie movies or something, we have to ask
Speaker 4: if we're happy this exists. I think that this is
Speaker 4: thoughtful enough that I am happy it exists.
Speaker 2: It's interesting as a largely unsuccessful adaptation in terms of
Speaker 2: why it doesn't succeed, in how the comparison can allow
Speaker 2: you to analyze and appreciate the original work.
Speaker 1: And if you want to talk about a real Watchman
Speaker 1: cash grab listener, I am embarrassed to say that in
Speaker 1: the late two thousands and early twenty tens, I had
Speaker 1: a big comic book reading phase, and that's nothing to
Speaker 1: be ashamed of. You gotta understand, it hadn't become our
Speaker 1: entire culture yet. I read a lot of graphic novels.
Speaker 1: I read a lot of comics, and in the early
Speaker 1: twenty tens, they made a Watchmen prequel series called Before Watchmen,
Speaker 1: and I wrote comic reviews for a comic book shop
Speaker 1: in Montreal. It was paid in comics. It was a
Speaker 1: bad deal. So I own every single issue of Before Watchmen.
Speaker 1: Now a stud fans may point out, what is there
Speaker 1: to prequelize? Isn't the book so filled with flashbacks and
Speaker 1: backstory that there really are no gaps to fill in?
Speaker 1: That's correct, But if you ever wanted a couple issues
Speaker 1: on what Dollar Bill was up to, they made them.
Speaker 1: They are eminently forgettable. I remember reviewing the Silk Spector
Speaker 1: one and it was like, you think there was Boomer
Speaker 1: nostalgia in the Watchmen, Oh my god, just wait until
Speaker 1: you read the thoroughly forgettable Before Watchmen comic prequels that
Speaker 1: came out in the early twenty tenths.
Speaker 2: What about what was it Doomsday clock?
Speaker 1: That sounds right?
Speaker 2: It was the sequel that managed to crossover with the
Speaker 2: actual sort of mainstream DC universe or something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Good Watchman adaptation is of course to the
Speaker 1: HBO one, which we may or may not cover on
Speaker 1: our Patreon, which is a flawless segue to wrap it
Speaker 1: up the show. So, Stu, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: coming on.
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you for having me. This is fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're so happy to have Stu on. We have
Speaker 4: been listening to his show for a bit and they
Speaker 4: came on very last minute. We put this together in
Speaker 4: the eleventh hour of the doomsday clock of our show.
Speaker 4: And if you listener, remember shuffle and you're always asking
Speaker 4: us questions like, Hey, why don't you do an episode
Speaker 4: on the Hulk or why don't you do an episode
Speaker 4: on Spider Man? I got good news for you. If
Speaker 4: you head on over to Marvelous or the Death of Cinema,
Speaker 4: which will provide a link for in the description, you
Speaker 4: can check out their episodes on these movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, plug your show. Plug your show to our listeners.
Speaker 2: Marvelousdeath dot com, Patreon dot com, backslash Marvelous Death. If
Speaker 2: you like what you hear and want to hear more
Speaker 2: and send us little money. That's me my best friend,
Speaker 2: Nicole and Cole Netscape. You may or may not remember
Speaker 2: from Twitter.
Speaker 1: Is there any particular episodes that you really love and
Speaker 1: are proud of or think are a good entry to
Speaker 1: the show.
Speaker 2: I would say, just scroll through in whichever movie you're like, Oh,
Speaker 2: I kind of want to they have to say about that.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's better than anything I like, I'm
Speaker 2: so bad at imagining someone who's not me as the listener.
Speaker 2: If you do get on the Patreon though, or want
Speaker 2: to check that out, I would recommend our episode on
Speaker 2: the Very Weird Paulin Trevarro tweet indie drama thriller Book
Speaker 2: of Henry. Okay, one of the most fun ones we
Speaker 2: ever did.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah, tell us a little bit about your show. I
Speaker 4: tell the listener about your show.
Speaker 2: Marsa Dee's. The Cinema in terms of our mainline episodes,
Speaker 2: is a more or less chronological with diversions look through
Speaker 2: the landscape of major Hollywood franchise film releases, kind of
Speaker 2: since Ironman, where everything became about cinematic universes and not
Speaker 2: just like, oh, we could have a series of films
Speaker 2: and maybe some merch or whatever, but like everything's a
Speaker 2: multimedia super franchise and just kind of picking apart how
Speaker 2: it's always been a very commercial industry, but how the
Speaker 2: last fifteen to twenty years or more, it's really accelerated
Speaker 2: into kind of hyper commercialism. There's a space for a
Speaker 2: degree of if not like already ardiness, craftsmanship, a certain
Speaker 2: level of quality you could expect from the sets, just
Speaker 2: the basic script writing that has just been eroded by
Speaker 2: an increasingly assembly line process of production for major films.
Speaker 4: And you guys have a love I think for the
Speaker 4: source material too. Writ Like we did an X Men
Speaker 4: episode a month ago, and a few people write fully
Speaker 4: complained that we didn't know a lot about the comics,
Speaker 4: you know, And so if that is your complaint, I
Speaker 4: would say that you guys generally have a pretty good
Speaker 4: breadth of the source material depending. Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 4: one of the reasons we brought Cole on because they,
Speaker 4: I mean, I know a little bit of comics.
Speaker 2: Cole really knows comics. And it's not about comic book
Speaker 2: movies per se, but that's been the dominant source of
Speaker 2: raw material for franchise films, so their expertise has been
Speaker 2: really helpful. But yeah, the idea is kind of that
Speaker 2: like it's as much as a lot of comics can
Speaker 2: be very dumb in juvenile, there's also a lot of
Speaker 2: imagination and interesting ideas in them, and the best ones
Speaker 2: do reach the level of literature and quality of any
Speaker 2: other medium, and these adaptations tend to strip out what's
Speaker 2: most interesting about them, even ones that might not be like, oh,
Speaker 2: they're not Watchmen, They're not like literature, but they have
Speaker 2: that raw imagination or weirdness that you get from like
Speaker 2: a pulp sci fi novel, from just like a weird
Speaker 2: guy or weird artists sitting down with their ideas, and
Speaker 2: all of that gets sanded away when they turn it
Speaker 2: into Doctor Strange seven.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you so much Stu for coming on the
Speaker 4: show this week and talking about Alan Moore. We've revisited
Speaker 4: him many times now unintentionally. His work just seems to
Speaker 4: keep popping up in the two thousands.
Speaker 1: And shameless plug for this show. Please like, subscribe, risk
Speaker 1: to comment, do all that Remember Shuffle engagement, And we
Speaker 1: also have a Patreon you can get a little bit
Speaker 1: more Watchman content there.
Speaker 2: Yes, get on the Remember Shuffle Patreon. You guys do
Speaker 2: a great show. I've been listening for years it's a
Speaker 2: tremendous pleasure to have been on. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: That's so kind, Thank you, thank you for coming. All right,
Speaker 1: have a good one. Caut out au revoir