Movie Review: Watchmen - Page 3

But the sources of Rorschach’s nihilism — crime-ridden streets and moral depravity — are not what people live to in today’s word where New York is comparatively crime-free and Girls Gone Wild is a cultural institution. Today, the more pressing depravity in New York is among the urban developers who claim they are doing good for the neighborhoods they are kicking poor people out of. Thee also include the hypocritical crooks like Madoff, Spitzer, and, at the highest level, Bush and Cheney. The audience is the same as those who laugh at the cries of the stimulus bill as “turning America socialist” (a reference that also elicits laughs in the Watchmen movie) and who have no idea why Bill Ayers would matter to anyone.

The larger issue with the coverage of 300 has now come to fruition in Watchmen: while the culture wars from 1964-2004 saw American society as a battle between the far left and the far right, the main conflict in American society today is not ideological, but generational — between those who lived and felt the culture wars and those who didn’t.

The biggest complaint about the movie, even (or perhaps especially) among its supporters, was its use of music. The score featured every clichéd '60s rock song you can think of, from “The Time They Are-A-Changin’’” to “Sound of Silence” to “All Along the Watchtower.” Snyder is too slick a filmmaker to be blind to the ineffectiveness of his use of soundtrack. My best explanation is that Snyder was intentionally introducing a disjointed element into the film to point out, however crudely, the larger significances of the era of Watchmen, and, more importantly, the younger generation’s cultural consumption of the era of Watchmen. If in the end the soundtrack hurt the film, it ended up depicting Snyder as a more astute auteur and cultural commentator than even I had previously given him credit for.

In the press leading up to the Watchmen movie, Snyder has depicted himself as an utterly devoted fanboy, obsessively detailed in his rendering of Alan Moore’s vision, down to the brand of coffee. But though Snyder, 43, lived through the 1980s, his overgrown 15-year-old boyish tendencies have incidentally given him more significance with millenials than few people over the age of 30 can properly understand. Moore’s denouncement of the film is not so much a rebuke of Snyder as a reflection that the vantage point of Moore, one of the most deeply cynical cultural figures of the 1980s, cannot be reconciled with the fact that Snyder is presenting an era that drove people to paranoia to people who see that paranoia as comical.

Article Author: Ethan Stanislawski

Ethan Stanislawski is a freelance journalist/critic and new media specialist. He is a regular reviewer and staff writer at Prefix Magazine, and also contributes regularly to Blogcritics Magazine. His interests include theater, film, and pop music …

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