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Subj: Cool! Although I hope you're not sharing *all* of your entertainment tastes with them... Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 at 11:41:57 pm EDT (Viewed 369 times) | Reply Subj: My PARENTS saw Watchmen. Posted: Mon Mar 16, 2009 at 08:56:24 pm EDT (Viewed 490 times) | ||||||
Quote: Well, technically, so did I, but that's not really the point.After all, I'm already indoctrinated. Let me back up just enough to give you a proper context. I'm in my early 30s, and my folks are right on the edge of their late 50s and early 60s. This means that, for roughly the past dozen years, they've been putting up with my bullshit about how superhero comic books can be culturally significant and legitimate works of art and blah blah blah, and their attitude has generally been one of quiet, patient, but sometimes weary, indulgence. In short, they look at my love of the potential inherent in superhero comic books the same way that you or I might look at the guy who's obsessed with collecting model train sets ... he's not really harming anybody, and it's not like his hobby is unpleasant or anything, but it's simply Not Your Thing, no matter how much the guy might try to evangelize the joys of constructing an entire scale landscape for his toy train tracks. This is compounded by the fact that my folks are the sort of people who see a clear dividing line between Entertainment and Art, and while they're not nearly such snobs that they'd turn down decent Entertainment (they quite enjoyed both The Incredibles and The Dark Knight), they'll still always see mere Entertainment as ... lesser than full-fledged Art. To them, the book is always better than the movie, the movie is always better than the TV version, an author cannot be considered "classic" until he's dead, and comic books are certainly not "real" books, so even when I've recommended critically acclaimed comic books to them in the past, including the works of Alan Moore, I've been met politely humoring rebuffs ("We're glad that you like them"). V For Vendetta cracked that wall a bit. They wound up watching the film version on DVR, without me even recommending it to them, presumably because they'd seen complimentary reviews of it from The Right Critics. They were surprised and impressed when they learned that it was based on a comic book, and they actually engaged me in a brief bit of conservation about it (rather than the other way around, which is how it usually works), but it didn't lead to much more than that. When Watchmen came out, though, I saw my opportunity. I reminded my folks that the guy who wrote the comic book that the Watchmen movie was based on was the same guy who wrote the comic book that the V For Vendetta movie was based on. I passed on some of the more glowing reviews that the comic book had received from The Right Critics. And I pointed out that it had made the TIME list of "Top 100 Novels." To my mom, the English teacher, the fact that a mere comic book had been ranked by literary critics among the likes of "real" books was stunning. But I sensed that might not be enough, so I made my finishing strike. I offered to pay for their movie tickets, so that all of us, plus a friend of the family who had gotten involved in our online discussion about it, could go see it together. This family friend, by the way, is in her 70s, and like my mom, has an extreme aversion to violence. In a very real sense, I was relying on Zack Snyder (yes, the man who managed to make the movie version of 300 even less subtle than the Frank Miller comic book that it was based on) to sell the artistic legitimacy of ALL superhero comic books to my parents, a pair of upper-middle-class liberal intellectual Baby Boomers with a mild distaste for modern popular culture, inspired in no small part by their pronounced chauvinism toward their own culture. And holy shit, what do you know. The kid came through in the clutch. I can't begrudge any fellow fans of the comic book who don't care for the movie, either because of the inherent compromises required to translate a 12-issue comic book into a two-and-a-half-hour movie, or else because they don't care for the stylings of Snyder in particular. On the one hand, I don't think anyone can doubt Snyder's genuine love for, and devotion to, the source material, but on the other, there were indeed moments when it seemed as though he didn't entirely understand the source material, and was simply recreating onscreen what he saw on the page like an illiterate copying the words of a book, or perhaps he simply loved it too non-ironically, since Moore himself was offering such an ironic commentary upon superhero comic books. And yet, in spite of my own quibbles with some of Snyder's choices, I found myself loving the fuck out of this film. And guess who else loved it, too. No, they didn't care for the dead dogs, the brutal superhero fights or the prison bloodshed. And no, they weren't terribly impressed by the acting, either (with the exception of Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley, both of whom they thought were very good, and Billy Crudup, who my mom liked because "he reminded me of HAL from 2001." Believe it or not, she didn't even notice his big blue penis). All that aside, though, my folks could not stop talking about how "amazing" the characterizations and world-building and politics and philosophy and ... hell, even the zeitgeist were. Yes, I grew up during the '80s, but my folks lived through it as adults, and they were taken back by how much it felt like the '80s to them. "There was just so much ... detail," my mom said. "I never knew a superhero comic book could be like that." And there it is. Much like Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore is one of those writers who, even when his work is being bastardized by Hollywood, still manages to be smarter than 90 percent of the storytellers out there. Oh, and the family friend who joined us? The woman in her 70s, who doesn't like onscreen violence? She bought a trade paperback copy of Watchmen online, for her and my folks to share, so that they can take turns reading it. I've already traded an entire series of e-mails with her about the comic book, and all the little details that Moore and Gibbons managed to hide within it. "WOW!" my mom said, when I opened the book to the pages with Walter Kovacs and Malcolm Long. "They're, like, TWINS of how they were in the movie." This movie is being marketed to the wrong people. We have the potential to turn an entire generation into nerds. But even if we don't, nerd culture has finally won out. | |||||||
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