Watchmen and Genre Deconstruction
During a conversation about the book and movie versions of Watchmen last night with a couple of gentlemen from Conor’s old haunt, Federalist Paupers, the idea came up that Watchmen might be the first genre work to both completely be and completely destroy its source material (in this case the superhero comic). Later, we’d see the same attitude at play in films like Unforgiven, which was both a legitimately great Western and, at the same time, a devastating attack on the genre. Somewhat lesser, more overtly comic works of genre deconstruction came later: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, the underrated Last Action Hero, and Wes Craven’s Scream. The shared aim of all of these films was to obey the rules of their given genres while simultaneously using those rules to collapse the genre in on itself.
Before Watchmen, had anyone ever really done this before? Agatha Christie, perhaps, with her murder mysteries in which everyone is the killer, or the narrator is the killer? Still, it seems to me that with books like these, Christie, like Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns and his delightfully noirish early run on Daredevil, wasn’t trying to break down the genre, but rather trying to expand it by taking its formula to its logical conclusion. It seems like there might be some s.f. novel from the 70’s that works in a similar manner, but I can’t think of one off hand. Does that make Alan Moore the first to pull off this stunt — or even attempt the trick at all? I’m curious to see if anyone can recall anything in this vein prior to Watchmen.
I think a case could be made that Patrick McGoohan managed to pull that off with The Prisoner which, at least in its first 7 or 8 episodes, had many of the familiar plots of conventional secret agent shows and book. But it was also the first show to raise questions about who the enemy really is.
To a lesser extent, The Clash attempted to do the same with punk rock on London Calling. But I wouldn’t really count that because punk had only been around for a few years and London Calling didn’t exactly follow the ‘rules’ of the genre.
— Bubs · Mar 15, 12:50 PM · #
It would have helped The Watchmen movie if The American market had even heard of the comic, instead of lumping the movie out to the audience as they did. The Watchmen is inapplicable to The Americans and Moore should have placed his tale in Britain to begin with. The viral marketing posers on sites like YouTube trying to sell the movie to Americans is a laughing riot. The Americans can tell they’re not actual American fans. lol
— Les · Mar 15, 04:40 PM · #
There’s Robert Altman, of course – The Long Goodbye and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, specifically. But I guess you could argue to what extent they were “being” the genre they deconstructed.
— Line · Mar 15, 05:44 PM · #
“It seems like there might be some s.f. novel from the 70’s that works in a similar manner, but I can’t think of one off hand.”
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” started its radio broadcasts in 1978. It’s certainly more whimsical than a lot of the pieces you’ve mentioned and it breaks as many rules as it follows, but it seems to fit the formula of an excellent (if irreverent) genre book taking down its own genre.
— ly_yng · Mar 15, 07:41 PM · #
I’m not that familiar with genre fiction, but in the movies there are countless earlier examples of this. For example, Unforgiven is hardly the first or most comprehensive self-critiquing western; Eastwood was following the footsteps of Leone and Peckinpah, and stuff like Once Upon a Time in the West or The Wild Bunch precede Eastwood and Altman’s efforts. (Unforgiven isn’t even Eastwood’s first attempt at genre deconstruction; all of his previously directed westerns dabbled in this mode.) If you look at noir, Robert Aldrich’s 1955 Spillane adaptation Kiss Me Deadly is a perfect example of a work that completely is and completely destroys its own model, a formulation that would also describe the 50s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. The list goes on.
Obviously there’s a lot of ambiguity built in to the definitions of genre and of deconstruction; it isn’t hard to argue, as I would, that some of the “classical” examples of a genre, like the westerns of John Ford or Anthony Mann, are in fact more subversive and self-examining than the later blatantly deconstructive responses (like those of Peckinpah, Altman, Eastwood, etc). In any case Moore was certainly not the first person to go down this road while working on a mainstream production.
— ap · Mar 15, 08:00 PM · #
Peter,
I think your way off on this one, this has been going on as long as there have been Genres.
As others have pointed out there are numerous Noir movies from the 40s and 50s that do this. Anthony Mann’s westerns are pretty clear examples.
And arguably wouldn’t the most famous example be The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
— eric k · Mar 15, 08:17 PM · #
Others will know far more about this than me, but in addition to movies like The Wild Bunch, I’d like to throw in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” as another example. Steve Martin doing his thing, along with clips from old film noir movies as actual characters, would seem to me to have been an effort to simultaneuously honor and spoof the genre…
— Jeremiah · Mar 15, 09:29 PM · #
Tristram Shandy, maybe? (The genre being The Novel itself, which begs the question of when someone might attempt a film that is part of, and deconstructs, all of filmdom.)
— Chris Floyd · Mar 15, 09:39 PM · #
Couldn’t agree more about “Last Action Hero.” My favorite Arnold movie and a great satire on action movies. But few Americans “got it,” and so Arnold moved away from this kinds of satire. (Americans are REALLY bad at getting satire. Bad for a movie star’s bank account)
— Tom Regan · Mar 16, 01:08 AM · #
Don Quixote?
— Steve Sailer · Mar 16, 02:41 AM · #
Line – I think you might be right about Altman; McCabe and Mrs. Miller is fantastic.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen The Wild Bunch, so I could be wrong, but I’m not sure it fits into this category. Isn’t it more like Miller’s work — expanding the genre rather than undermining it?
Erik, you could well be right (and that’s why I asked!). My knowledge of older Westerns and noir films isn’t too sharp; I’ve seen Wild Bunch, a few Sergio Leone films, and that’s about it. Might have to check out some of your suggestions.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 16, 02:43 AM · #
When a movie starts out with Hamlet (as played by Arnold) mowing down Claudius with a submachine gun, and then blowing up the castle with explosives, it’s difficult to describe its satire as too subtle.
I think Americans “got it” just fine. The movie, after all, beats you around the head and shoulders with the ham-handed satire. The problem isn’t that Americans didn’t “get it”, the problem is that The Last Action Hero sucks. It’s not in any way “underrated”, it’s just shitty. “True Lies” is the much greater deconstruction of action movies, but I guess it’s an espionage action movie, not a crime action movie.
— Chet · Mar 16, 04:38 AM · #
While I haven’t seen Watchmen (and probably won’t) I think eric k. is dead-on: inasmuch as I understand you there’s absolutely nothing new about working strictly within the genre to explore the flaws of the genre. I’ts a weird post. Right away I think of Pynchon’s V and Barth’s Sot-Weed Factor and Chimera, there’s certainly Sanctuary and — ooh, what about even Antony and Cleopatra where Cleo forsees her own portrayal in a play? In movies this seems to be old hat: the Leone stuff mentioned above, or what about Man Bites Dog or even Raiders (and Phantom Menace may unintentionally pull the trick off too). And in music it’s so common as to be not worth even pulling examples although for some reason Sex Mob Plays Bond sticks out in my head; maybe the comic parts of the Diabelli Variations (and certainly Uri Caine’s Goldberg Variations, or much of John Zorn (Naked City)).
— Sanjay · Mar 16, 12:39 PM · #
I always thought Blazing Saddles was the earliest version of the Unforgiven/_Scream_ “be the thing you’re critizing.”
Unforgiven, Scream, and Watchmen criticized their genre, but ended up popularizing the exact thing they were criticizing. Blazing Saddles, on the other hand, has most of the emotional payoffs of a traditional Western, but also tore apart the genre so thoroughly that it took a decade or so to recover.
— J Mann · Mar 16, 04:35 PM · #
Sanjay — This is why I asked! I wasn’t at all certain that I was right about this. I’m not intimately familiar with all the works you name, but I don’t think I’d count Raiders in the same stable as Watchmen. Raiders, I’d say, is almost more like the new BSG — an update that seeks to make better use of the materials on display. Raiders was a celebration of those old genre tropes. Watchmen was an attack on them; it didn’t want to pave the way for more superhero comics — it wanted to end them.
— Peter Suderman · Mar 16, 07:03 PM · #
How about Americana, Don DeLillo’s first novel, and a playful shredding of the road novel?
— W. DeFord · Mar 16, 07:44 PM · #
Since you mentioned SF novels, The Forever War by Joe Halderman was the first example that came to my mind: a classic example of military SF that simultaneously critiques military sf.
I don’t think that parodies (Hitchhiker’s, Last Action Hero) belong in this category, since a parody doesn’t ask its audience to take it seriously. The devastating thing about Watchmen or The Forever War is that the genre is played straight, even while its pretensions are stripped bare.
— JS Bangs · Mar 16, 08:14 PM · #
Well, yeah, Peter, Raiders was a stretch.
Americana, yeah, hot damn. Although it gets close to parody: Mason and Dixon parodies the road novel too.
Agreed with Bangs, parody isn’t what Suderman’s talking about. Invoking, for example, Blazing Saddles seems very wrong to me [side note: there used to be a lunch place in downtown Boston called Blazing Salads. I think that’s hilarious.] because it hardly adheres to the Western tradition except when sending it up: the heroes are by no means typical of the genre. Right from the beginning for example, when you might see the Negroes singing spirituals as they work in the sun, you get … well, it ain’t a Western per se. And the end? Running around the lot? What the hell is that?
Look, I don’t like comics or even sci-fi much. Yeah, I’m a snob, suck it up, girls. And I’ll bite hard at the idea that Watchmen (which I’ve read) “wanted to end” superhero comics — Moore _ did lots of other comics and the people influenced by the book did too. Rather it did something Beethoven is also doing with the Diabellis: sneering a little at the weaknesses of the form while using them to point a way forward. This goes back as far as you want: think Michelangelo’s use of structural architectural elements just for visual effect. It’s what artists _do when they think they’re better than their predecessors, no?
— Sanjay · Mar 16, 08:57 PM · #
Sorry about the odd italics — I’d popped back to note that my second confirmation word was, oddly, “Moore.”
The more I think on it the more I think Phantom Menace is the Platonic ideal. It adheres exactly to the formula and suddenly, seeing it, you realize that the whole thing is dreck.
— Sanjay · Mar 16, 09:09 PM · #
I’ll let it go after this.
Scream is a parody that uses the genre tropes to give you genre emotional payoffs while simultaneously mocking the rest of the genre. IMHO, Blazing Saddles is that, but moreso. Clevon Little arrives in town and through a series of violent conflicts, reorganizes the social structure from corruption toward law, gives hope and new life to Gene Wilder, might make an honest woman out of Madeline Kahn (I can’t recall), and delivers justice to Harvey Korman.
Unforgiven and Watchmen, on the other hand, aren’t parodies – they don’t argue that their genres are fundamentally silly, just that they got it wrong.
— J Mann · Mar 16, 09:14 PM · #
How about Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey?
However, I think I have a problem with this wholeconcept. How do you delineate between movies that supposedly “attack” an genre with deconstruction and others that supposedly “honor” a genre with pastiche, like the aforementioned Raiders?
While I agree that Watchmen is anti-heroic in its themes, I don’t consider it an “attack on the genre”. I don’t think it would even be possible to make such an attack and also follow the genre rules, without making an intentionally bad movie — in which case Phantom Menace would be the only semi-viable candidate mentioned so far.
— Ethan C. · Mar 17, 03:31 AM · #
It’s not the earliest by any means, and it’s not necessarily art, but Alan Sokal’s Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity is a great alt example of collapsing a genre from within.
— JA · Mar 17, 03:45 AM · #
Hee, hee, JA, yeah, that wuz da bomb.
I find the repeated invocation of Unforgiven — from the original post to J Mann’s comment — completely bizarre; Unforgiven in no way discredits the Western genre, except for maybe a kind of Lone Ranger / early John Wayne thing which had long since been set against a different, darker Western vision, for example in the Man with no name movies referenced above. Anyone who thinks Unforgiven is “a devastating attack on the genre” is naively reading too much into Little Bill’s disillusioning of one journalist about dime-store Westerns, since after all Little Bill and Bill Munney themselves do embody a dark, primal and mythical West, and in fact said journalist just refocuses on them. If there’s an attack on the genre it had long since been made and in fact accepted as part of the Western canon (by which I mean not “the Western canon,” but “the Western canon,” if you dig) and Unforgiven follows smoothly in that tradition, starring in fact an actor who helped develop it. I mean, what’s a darker slap at the Western than Hard Plains Drifter — the hero opens that one by raping a woman in a barn, right? And there’s a direct line between the sort of “force-of-nature” violence of Bronson’s Harmonica Man and Eastwood’s Bill Munney, but the latter is decades after the former. Unforgiven is not a discrediting of the Western, it’s a sort of capsule summary and homage, a realization of the full vision of the Western which Eastwood had dabbled in for a long time, and the only sense in which it’s meant to close out the genre is that it’s probably the last Western Eastwood will do, which isn’t saying much since even then he was getting on, and the genre’s popularity was waning anyway. It’s the opposite of what Suderman was positing: not trying to discredit the genre so much as in fact breathing new life into it, saying, look, there’s still a lot in this vision we haven’t explored.
— Sanjay · Mar 17, 12:03 PM · #
I would argue that in Robert Heinlein’s Number of the Beast is not only a genre deconstruction, but the first and only time an author deconstructs HIMSELF…
— Alex Knapp · Mar 17, 05:35 PM · #
I agree with Sanjay, and as I said above, I think this point can be extended. Like Unforgiven, Watchmen is not really an “attack” on the superhero genre. If it was intended to point out structural flaws in the genre, its working within the conventions of the genre would have to lead to its internal failure. It would be “bad art”. But it’s not bad art. Therefore it actually proves the robustness and capability of the genre to offer something that revises and expands its subject matter.
Both Watchmen and Unforgiven revise their genres’ tropes in a more “gritty”, violent and nihilistic direction. But that’s not the only way such revision can operate, and I don’t think that even such a dark take necessarily represents an “attack” or a “deconstruction”.
— Ethan C. · Mar 18, 12:35 AM · #