Movie Matters: The Watchman

I wasn't planning on doing a post on The Watchman but then Brian Garback sent me this in an email:

re: watchmen: it took a couple hours to develop all the dark and monstrous characters and in the end i found it hard to empathize with them. unlike batman and harvey dent, the few human emotions they showed were cheapened by their willingness to disregard one other and the rest of humanity, apathetically sleeping around and causing immense collateral damage with little selfless remorse.

Here is my response.

I think the film was first about the dehumanization that accompanies fighting evil. To truly root out evil one has to become the thing that he or she destroys. The film goes one step further to suggest that the only way to really conquer evil is to destroy mankind because mankind is fundamentally evil. This, then, begs the question, why would we want to root out evil if it is in fact essential, or at least part and parcel, to the human condition? Therefore, superheroes, or even average heroes, equipped with powers or the capacity for stepping outside of the human condition and live unaffected by evil are antithetical to human survival.

So what this story finally deals with, and this, I think, makes the graphic novel so important, is why do we need stories about superheroes? I think the answers lies somewhere in our collective idea that if only we could be faster, smarter, stronger, or all powerful we could make all of our problems go away, but when these theories are tested in our imagination, on the pages of comic books, or on the big screen, we are faced with the reality that the solutions to our problems, if there are any, must be found within ourselves.