Right now, the upcoming Watchmen film ought to be the least of my worries; but I’ve seriously considered not watching Zack Snyder’s apparently faithful adaptation of the seminal graphic novel. You see, a comic geek scorned is a force to be reckoned with.
The first comic book I remember falling in love with was an issue of Batman (a Man Bat story arc) sometime around 1993. Frequent trips to India allowed me to source comics from airport stalls. Ever read the now discontinued and forgotten Thunderbolt? I have. And I remember specific frames from the book. Perhaps it was an escape from my relatively drama free childhood or maybe it was a rite of passage every young boy went through; whatever it was, I never got over the medium.
Third year of college. Holed up in that room, Watchmen convinced me that the comic book was far more than just colourful frames with conversation bubbles. The Comic Book had become The Graphic Novel. Characters had become morally ambiguous all of a sudden, heroes had become fallible and lofty ideals seemed suspicious. The Superhero concept had been deconstructed. Alan Moore joined the ranks of Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Dave Gibbons that of Rembrandt and Picasso. (Oh yes, comic book nerds are known to make wild exaggerations.)
I’ve been reading the book again; taking in every frame, digesting every line and assimilating concepts, some of which still strain my primitive frontal lobe. The book is an assault on the senses like no other; a work that perhaps was best left untouched.
However, I am mildly curious to see how Snyder translates something this complicated. 300 wasn’t exactly a brilliant film. If he does pull it off, will audiences be able to sit through 3 hours of an uncaring superman, an impotent vigilante and a masked anti hero who goes by the name Rorschach?
All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him.
I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of “prejudice” or “ignorance”, but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.
When you demand “respect”, you are demanding we lie to you. I have too much real respect for you as a human being to engage in that charade.
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But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.
Read this beautifully articulated argument by Johann Hari in its entirety here.
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.
I remember reading Philip Roth’s Everyman a couple of years ago and then Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores more recently; both of which tell rather morbidly, the stories of old men who after living lives of regret and philandering are faced with their imminent mortality and unfulfilled desires. Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino draws strong parallels to these stories. Walt Kowalski, however, shuts his emotions in and redeems himself in the strangest and, for a film with so much profanity and tongue-in-cheek political incorrectness, most gut wrenching of ways.
Eastwood plays a tired and lonely version of Dirty Harry or even, Blondie, who finds himself as an antique from a bygone era in drastically different times. Like most scowling old people, Walt Kowalski is an irate old man who feels the world truly went under after the 60s. He invariably ends up helping a young Hmong immigrant find his bearings in a gang infested neighbourhood. Unlike the terrible Seven Pounds, Gran Torino lets us empathize with a character who learns how to finally let go of life. I do realize suicide is an ethically sketchy subject, but rarely has a film tackled it with such grace.
And that final scene where Tao drives off in the Grand Torino – such catharsis.
