books

“Masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas”?

I can usually accept Lucius T. Shepard’s opinions, because I think they’re often considered and well thought out, but I don’t think there’s any possibility that I could ever agree with him on anything. From his pretty negative take on Watchmen:

Despite the insistence made by some that pop culture be taken seriously as high art, =Watchmen= remains a superhero comic (if it were something else, it would not serve its author’s purpose), and as such its vision of history and its take on human relationships are adolescent and simplistic, and its profundities are merely quasi-profound; its themes, variously interpreted as everything from political satire to the death of the hero, are essentially a juvenile nihilism embroidered with masked musclemen and their melon-breasted mamas. It seems the work of an precocious sophomore whose reading of philosophy ended with Nietzsche and whose literary obsessions (Jack Kirby, Raymond Chandler, and so on) have produced an absurdly pretentious style of noir, a style that has since proliferated and that I’ve come to call the It’s-Always-Raining-Where-I’m-Drinking (high) school of creativity, usually defined by rundown urban settings rife with graffiti and rainy streets awash with obsessed loners and women in tight and/or revealing clothing. Labeling it one of the great novels of our era doesn’t change the fact that you could probably make a list of a hundred better novels written by authors whose surnames start with the letter Z. It’s a seminal work in the comic book field, a genre-expanding work, but the genre it expands, superhero comics, targets a demographic composed mainly of adolescents and adults clinging to their adolescence (I make no implicit judgment here—I’m clinging like all get-out to mine), a vast percentage of whom are prevented by an R rating from seeing the movie.

Which is just so arrogantly dismissive that it pisses me off. It doesn’t matter if you think Watchmen was a great or terrible movie; Shepard is saying that it can’t be great, because it’s based on a comic, and those things — as anybody with two brain cells to rub together could tell you — are by their nature shallow and immature.

It’s not that Shepard levels these charges against Zach Snyder’s movie, or against Alan Moore’s book. Nobody says that he, or anybody else, has to like either of them, or that they should escape all criticism. It’s that he comes in with all sorts of assumptions and prejudices and applies them across the board.

I’m reminded again why, although I can accept Shepard’s opinions, I tend to avoid reading them. And why, although I don’t always agree with her opinions, I think Abigail Nussbaum was completely right about the man.

Hurm.

Everything you’ve heard about Watchmen, the movie, is right.

Everything you’ve heard about Watchmen, the movie, is wrong.

Honestly, I think you should just see it and make up your own mind. I finally had a chance to see it for myself this afternoon, and I quite enjoyed it. Maybe I had less invested in it than some comic book fans; the original book absolutely deserves its reputation — it’s arguably Alan Moore’s finest work — but it’s been years since I first read it, and it’s not a book I return to time and again. I discovered Watchmen in college, when I started getting serious about reading comics again, but it’s less a personal touchstone for me than, say, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or the late-’80s X-Men books (from the last time I’d been serious about reading comics).

Reaction to the film has certainly been mixed — to the point where you almost wonder if everyone’s seeing the same movie.

Roger Ebert calls it “charged from within by its power as a fable,” while A.O. Scott found it “grim and grisly” and “interminable.” Certainly there’s room for differences of opinion, but Watchmen seems to have critics and fans split pretty evenly down the middle.

I avoided most online discussion of the movie all weekend — easy to do with only a couple hours of an iffy hotel internet connection every night — but now that I’m digging through some of it, I think my sensibilities lie most with Tasha Robinson, in her comparison of the movie and original graphic novel:

And so forth and so on. There are a bunch more little changes I could harp on, but frankly, in spite of all this—mostly attributable to the film coming from a different emotional place and a different creator, one who really loves the slow motion and the shock moment—I enjoyed the hell out of the film both times, simply because Snyder’s visual aesthetic is so close to the book: He really wants those characters onscreen just as they appear in the book, whether that means Rorschach’s shifting face or Dr. Manhattan’s eerie blue glow. And he wants it all to be as exciting and vivid and intense as possible; I can’t blame him for that, nor be too cross that his bar for intensity is higher than mine. And frankly, while many of these changes lost me little moments I was looking forward to, apart from the superheroing-up of the cast, they mostly strike me as cosmetic, the cost of a huge-budget action film. After decades of being positive Watchmen would never make it to the screen—or that it’d be completely rewritten, as a Terry Gilliam dark comedy or a 9/11 commentary film or who knows what else—I was delighted to get something this accurate to the broad storyline, and this reverential to Moore’s work. (Even if Moore himself doesn’t think so.)

So the movie is not the book, and it probably is the lesser of the two when all is said and done, but I think they’re both perfectly valid, perfectly entertaining ways of telling the same story.

And you know, even if the movie was — as Gerry Canavan and others have suggested — a creative failure, I’d still have great respect for director Zach Synder for making this kind of failure. For having a distinct creative vision (or at least a vision borrowed from Dave Gibbons) and for swinging for the fences. I don’t agree with everything Patton Oswalt says here, but I do agree with him on that.

I will say this, though: My Chemical Romance are no Bob Dylan.

Some book links

  • So by “video book,” HarperCollins really means “quick, sort of detailed interview about the book.” And for only $9.99! [via]
  • A high school English teacher wants to stop teaching Huck Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Of Mice and Men because Barack Obama is now President. [via]

    He makes a reasonable argument, but he’s still full of crap. You don’t stop teaching a book because it’s hard; you don’t stop teaching history because it was painful; you don’t move forward into a better tomorrow by forgetting what was wrong about yesterday. Teach the damn context. I know it’s a cliché that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but it’s true. An English teacher ought to know better.

  • The Miami-Dade School Board decided to ban a book because they felt it was inaccurate. This sets a very dangerous precedent. [via]
  • Some interesting thoughts on the future of e-publishing. In my (albeit limited) experience, publishing as a whole is still scared and confused by eBooks just as much as consumers, because it’s such a new, and as yet still largely only potential, audience. And while they’re significantly cheaper to produce, you also can’t charge as much for them — or won’t be able to for long. There’s still this feeling in the upper levels of the industry that book publishing is a good way to make millions of dollars. It’s really not, and I think that’s where a lot of the industry’s recent troubles stem from, it’s hard to shake those visions of dollar-signs from your eyes.
  • Then again, maybe this kind of print-on-demand is the real future of publishing and bookselling.
  • There’s been a lot of talk recently about the new Amazon Kindle’s text-to-speech feature, specifically how it might infringe on an author’s audio rights.Small Beer Press, for one, Wasn’t too happy about it:

    But the difference is that the Kindle is specifically a reading device, so customers can buy the ebook—and get it read to them, which is a different product and right, an audiobook—whereas a computer is a multifunction device. We’re happy that computers have text-to-speech capabilities for visually impaired readers but this seems to be directly impinging on an author’s rights. Hmm.

    However, a number of authors are not themselves all that concerned. John Scalzi writes:

    Since I’m not committed to busting down doors and shooting people when they read a book to their kids, worrying about a mon[o]tone computer voice bleating out the words to a text on a kindle is not something I’m going to stay up nights thinking about either.

    And Neil Gaiman adds:

    When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one’s going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors’ societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what’s good about them with it.

    Although he does note in a follow-up that his agent’s “concern that text to speech violates audio book rights is natural and sensible.”

    I think only time will tell. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry that the new Kindle feature might violate some contracted rights, or even that it might negatively impact audiobook sales. That’s maybe more a fear for future Kindle versions, if the text-to-voice ever isn’t a robotic monotone — although I think even the most sophisticated computer is going to have some trouble picking up inflection from just a printed page.

Zombifried

First, some links. It’s amazing how these things will accumulate, isn’t it?

On Saturday, I watched the original Dawn of the Dead. I’d rented it once before, years back, but for some reason never actually watched it. I’m very familiar with, but have never actually watched any of George Romero’s zombie movies before this.

It’s a really interesting movie — although, as Romero himself acknowledges on the DVD commentary, not a particularly frightening one. There’s more dark humor and social commentary than there are real scares. That’s not to detract from the film; those are precisely the things that have made it such an enduring classic, and arguably the quintessential film of the genre.

I definitely intend to watch Romero’s other zombie films. Although purists may be dismayed to learn that I’m also interested in seeing the 2004 Dawn remake.