The series creator, Alan Moore , it is argued– and I just accept this valuation– its a master of the comic form. A craft that often remains just this, but with a touch like Moore’s becomes art. Of course, much can be said about the denigration of comics as an art form, just an one can point to the many great science fiction, mystery, and espionage writers that have been pigeonholed as genre fiction writers. Denigration of this other beast, the adaptation of comics to blockbuster films, however, may be too little.

I recently read a exposition on the act of adaptation by Salmun Rushdie, which lead me to think about Watchmen and comic-to-film adaptations in the first place. Of course, comic books are often adaptations of adaptations. This is sometimes the commercial reuse of intellectual property in the form of characters and stories; but there is also an mythological element in the reworking of superheroes and villains to square with contemporary issues. In the case of Moore’s watchmen, DC Comics made an acquisition from Charlatan Comics, a cast of characters. Moore was then hired to adapt these character’s for a DC series. He choose to take a group of status-quo super heroes and make them dysfunctional anti-heroes. As Grady Hendrix writes of the comic:

Watchmen made the point that superheroes, realistic or otherwise, were beside the point. Its costumed do-gooders are retired, impotent, or insane, and they generally do more harm than good [...]  This [is a] surprising development, the comic reframed itself: Watchmen isn’t about crimefighters coming out of retirement and taking up their rightful mantles, but about how they never should have existed in the first place. The nuclear war they’re trying to prevent is almost entirely their fault in the first place, and the arms race that preceded it was accelerated by their mere existence.

Last summer’s comic blockbuster, The Dark Knight, also considered whether a non-super hero should retire. The comic book release of The Dark Knight was released at the same time as Watchmen, and the two works are interesting companions. They shared critical acclaim in the mid-Eighties– both perceived as revolutionary in artistic process and narrative. Also, they both take place– one figuratively– in New York city.  The Gotham milieu says many more things about our current condition, about American fear and politics in an age of terrorism. And whereas the effete watchmen either become the literal tools of Richard Nixon or hang up their capes, its natural to feel, as many critics have argued, that Batman’s heroism against terrorism is apologetic for the policy’s of Dick Cheney and the Bush Department of Justice.*

The Dark Knight is an exception to movies derived from comics though– they generally stink. They stink for many reasons, but in part they stink because the format doesn’t allow for hero’s to be deconstructed, as is done in The Watchmen series and, too a smaller extent, in The Dark Knight. I expect the movie retelling of the story will try to, despite its grit and frame-by-frame loyalty to the original, recast the Watchmen as heroes (not that their story ends heroically).  In the case of Watchmen, its doesn’t really seem to matter that the original work is masterpiece. As Dana Steven’s sumarizes, “the book’s spirit—its paranoia, its dark humor, and above all its bleak anti-triumphalism—has been squelched in the transition to a big-budget action epic.”

* I felt that this question in Christopher Nolan’s Batman was more provocative than allegorical. Thinking of its portrayal of torture and also a scene where the police, to their demise, neglect a suffering man because of his association with the Joker. (The Joker has given the man an implant of explosives.)

Some related readings:

• In Defense of the Blue Penis
• Is Watchmen the Next Dark Night
• The Watchmen Rorschach Test

I have often found myself in the delicate situation of having to express my thoughts on books I haven’t read. Because I teach literature at university level, there is, in fact, no way to avoid commenting on books that I haven’t even opened. It’s true that this is also the case for the majority of my students, but if even one of them has read the text I’m discussing, there is a risk that at any moment my class will be disrupted and I will find myself humiliated.

Bayard does not exactly say one should lie about the books they’ve read, but he does offer that we can no many thing about books unread:

Between a book we’ve read closely and a book we’ve never even heard of, there is a whole range of gradations that deserve our attention. In the case of books we have supposedly read, we must consider just what is meant by reading, a term that can refer to a variety of practices. Conversely, many books that by all appearances we haven’t read exert an influence on us nevertheless, as their reputations spread through society. Reading is not a simple, seamless process; it has fault lines, deficiencies and approximations.

 Fittingly, Bayard has authored How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

While Crosby and Franzen both grew up in Saint Louis suburbs and coincidentally share a number of similar experiences, I think most people– or at the least urban, white, liberal, contemplaters– personally respond to Franzen writing. His most recent collection of essays, The Discomfort Zone, of which most of Crosby’s correlating experiences can be found, is not so much about events. The events in the book are mundane. It’s more about Franzen’s feelings of inadequacy, which would be an annoyingly self-absorbed topic (consider that Franzen seems to be handsome, respected, successful, intelligent, normal) if he wasn’t so eloquent in describing it all. So most of use share Crosby’s problem with Franzen or any other accomplished, talented person in our field: he feels inadequate same way she does, but he’s exceptionally better at it insofar as receives money and acclaim writing about it. And while Crosby finds passing validation from this, she also finds that her material is used up.

If we think of literature as a encyclopedia of society and human experience, the passages on disappointment, dissatisfaction, or any social state fill up quickly. But emotions and experiences are never fully defined, and so art is in finding how our influences and experiences change.