ATTENTION
There will follow something of a muse on Watchmen: DO NOT READ IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS
Muse begins:
So, I just saw Gangs of New York recently and so that, a choice line from the movie and the siting of The Comedian’s gave with the twin towers backdrop got me to thinking. Don’t expect anything coherant or accurate.
America is a curious place, it’s really not like the UK. The fiction somehow reflects that. The pulp heroes they all came from the cities, from America which is built in cities squirming and squabbling and fighting over the scraps of history which they themselves are trying to create. Everywhere needs a barbarous mythology and America was creating it’s own whilst the rest of the world was struggling to get away from its own.
Something in the dreams of America are simplification and past and those of children, which are bloody and difficult to reconcile with adults.
Dressing up in costumes, thats a part of it, a longing for blody vengeance and perfection, that’s another. A desire to be remembered, a longing for a story when you can’t see you already have one.
I liked Watchmen. It was not the epic classic that the book was, it was simply a good film. But it was done well. The ending was changed, true, but it worked. Maybe there were some underlying meanings lost and maybe there were some gained as well… the whole ‘John as God’ thing I have problems with from the book never mind the film.
America has curious cities. It has dark places that are modern and old all at once. It has it’s barbarism all up in the cities whereas Europe locks those things away in elderly countryside.
Who’d be a costumed vigilante…certainly not me, I don’t have the legs for it.
Here endeth the ramble.