| Talkin' 'bout Watchmen |
[17 Mar 2009|12:11am] |
"There is something about the quality of comics that makes things possible that you couldn't do in any other medium," [Moore] says, with just a hint of the exasperated schoolteacher. "Things that we did in Watchmen on paper could be frankly horrible or sensationalist or unpleasant if you were to interpret them literally through the medium of cinema. When it's just lines on paper, the reader is in control of the experience—it's a tableau vivant. And that gives it the necessary distance. It's not the same when you're being dragged through it at 24 frames per second."
It might have been because the naysayers were right, and Watchmen doesn't work as anything but a comic book, and especially not as a movie, a medium that's in some ways the antithesis of the comic form. As anyone who's been to my blog or been stuck alone with me after I've had too many drinks knows, I'm a big believer in the work of Marshall McLuhan, who labeled movies a "hot" medium (figuratively speaking, they're of a high resolution—the film provides every last detail) and comics a "cool" one (they demand that you fill in sound and movement yourself, in your brain).
And if you talk to me about reading comics, I will invariably bring up what you create between the panels, or what Scott McCloud calls "blood in the gutter," which is all to say that Zack Snyder's Watchmen had, I thought, entirely too much blood and not enough inference.
While scanning some books, I listened to Pendant Productions' fan radio dramas, James Bond: To the End and Indiana Jones and the Well of Life. I didn't grow up listening to radio dramas, so it can't be nostalgic, but the experience definitely tickles something in the hindbrain (paging Dr. Jung?). While some of the acting is awkward (oh, God, the accents), and I could quibble with their characterizations, I'll definitely be checking out their DC series.
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