Gay Watchman

Last night I went to see Watchmen at the IMAX theater near Lincoln Center. I had never been to an IMAX film before and I knew nothing about the graphic novel that the film is based on. Quite actually I don’t know what a graphic novel is in the first place. When people say “graphic novel” I usually think of Edina and Patsy responding to Marshall’s proclamation that his project “is in a really exciting stage” and that a Japanese company has agreed to do it in animation form.

“A cahr-tooooon?!”

Which was my feeling last night, too. There were way too many people there taking another comic book movie way too seriously. In fact there were way too many people there, period.

The six o’clock showing that I attended was sold out but my friend had faithfully saved our seats an hour early and this was a good thing because it really was already super crowded by the time I arrived a half hour before start time. As the auditorium filled with people, so filled I with panic. They were all breathing my air. Our seats would have been in an optimum location in a regular theater, but here being midway between rows and columns only served to increase my panic. Trapped, I clutched my Freitag bag and imagined myself one of a mass of bodies, tumbling over each other in the mayhem that would ensure when the fire broke out.

Once I calmed down, the movie was pretty good. My main complaint was that, at 2 hours and 40 minutes, it was too long. There should have been an intermission. Also, though, there was the gay thing. The evil mastermind turns out to be this gay narcissistic megalomaniac, played by Matthew Goode. A super hero gone bad. Because there is no context given for his obsessive need to save humanity from itself, at all costs, other than a desire to be super fabulous and because his sexuality is not openly referenced, he was kind of a caricature.

The action in Watchmen, which culminates in the 80s, is full of symbolism and references to real life events and people. Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan, the War in Vietnam, and the Cold War all play major parts. But no where is the AIDS epidemic referenced so I guess what struck me later was that evil gay Watchman Adrian Veidt probably had much more productive things to do, or at least a real motive for his desire to save at all costs. That stuff all got left out. Lame.

~ by carlosville on March 10, 2009.