How to evaluate the movie The Watchman?

I remember talking about superheroes with my senior sister Zhou Zhou at dinner. A point she pointed out at that time was very enlightening to me. She believes that the dilemma faced by superheroes after The Dark Knight is that more and more realistic factors are integrated into the narrative context of superhero films.

In fact, it's not just a superhero film. In the later stage of the development of the so-called Hollywood genre films, the directors made a breakthrough attempt to integrate more and more non-genre elements into the original genre context. The concept of realism is too dangerous and vague, and I dare not use it casually. In fact, sometimes it is not necessarily realism that intrudes into the context of genre films. For example, the heterogeneous elements in Roger Rabbit and Shark Gangster are the elements of film noir and gangster films.

But intuitively, I think realism is the most destructive and subversive of those heterogeneous elements that are integrated into genre films. Of course, this needs to first explain how to identify the concept of realism. Patrick Fullai's view on this concept is enlightening. He thinks that realism has nothing to do with reality. Realism really emphasizes "sense of reality" or "real effect". Realism does not completely copy reality, but makes the recipients (readers and audiences) "think it is true".

Teacher Li Yiming has a similar view on this issue. In his view, movies are not a reduction of reality, but a reduction of experience. After watching a movie, we feel good, not because it completely simulates a reality in our life, but because it confirms some experiences in our inner feelings. All the stories in the film are not necessarily true, but our experience tells us that this is the case. Interestingly, Mr. Li Yiming called this "Hollywood Technocracy", while Mr. Fullai simply called it "realism". If we refer to some ideas of realism put forward by Yan 'an and Shanghai Left Wing, I believe we will agree with Fullai.

If we take the film The Watchman as the analysis object, we can clearly see the usage of the concept of realism in narrative films and how realism subverts typed narration.

Almost everyone who has watched this film will admit that it is an anti-heroism superhero film. I think Zack Snyder, the director of this film, must have seen Nolan's The Dark Knight and was inspired by it, because the ending of the film is almost a replica of the Dark Knight, which is not consistent with the original comic book. But I think the director has gone further than The Dark Knight, because the criminals are actually superheroes. An innocent superhero finally took the fall for another criminal superhero, and in order to realize the plan of crossing the sea, the innocent superhero finally stained his hands with evil blood, and he killed a person who didn't want to keep a secret.

Therefore, in Watcher, the madness of the superhero is undoubtedly exposed, and there is no need to use symbols such as clown and two-faced man as in The Dark Knight (Batman is essentially a clown and a two-faced man, and the three of them are actually a trinity). There is an animated story in The Watcher that has nothing to do with narrative on the surface, but actually exists as a metaphorical text (this is a story in a comic book that a child in the movie has been reading). In this story, a captain was killed by a black cargo ship on his way home from sailing, and all his crew were killed, except him. The captain knew that the sailing route of the black cargo ship would definitely pass through the town where he lived. He was worried that his town would also be attacked by the black cargo ship, so he went through all kinds of hardships and returned to his town. Under his nervous gaze, the town has been occupied by the evil of the black cargo ship, so he attacked and killed those bad people he imagined unscrupulously until he found out that his wife, who had always wanted to go back to the town to save, was actually killed by him. It turned out that the town was not attacked by a black cargo ship at all.

The core metaphor of this story is that the hero imagines a context (such as a city full of crimes, a corrupt judiciary, and a town occupied by a black cargo ship), in which his illegal lynching becomes legal.

In fact, movies are the best mechanism to create and support this kind of imagination. Only in movies can we enjoy the protagonist on the screen with a pleasant mood and kill those "bad guys" like chopping melons and vegetables without bearing any moral guilt. Because in the typological context deliberately created by movies, those bad guys become a pure object and a tool to create evil, and their huge number and easy elimination make them feel like little monsters in video games. Destroy them just to better promote the narrative of development. Indiana Jones series is a typical example of this type of context.

If it's more packaged, the defense for the lynching of superheroes is that they don't kill people. No matter Superman, Spider-Man or Batman, they all stick to this bottom line, catch the bad guys and hand them over to the police, thus ensuring the legality of their actions.

The genius of The Dark Knight is that it skillfully drives the second context crazy with the first context. There is no doubt that the clown is the embodiment of pure evil. He does evil for no reason, just to destroy the order (this order is both legal and moral, so that thieves and gangsters can't tolerate him). There is no doubt that if the clown appears in a story like First Blood or Indiana Jones, he must be the villain who has no connotation and is just a madman, and the solution of the protagonists is simply to destroy him. However, because he is in the context of the story of The Dark Knight, and a protagonist abides by the bottom line that superheroes can't kill, the connotation of subversive genre films possessed by his madness is highlighted. The existence of the clown itself is a question of the principle firmly adhered to in superhero movies, and even makes us suspect that Batman must abide by this principle because he is afraid to expose the fact that he is essentially the same kind as the clown. The principle that Batman sticks to, like his uniform and mask, protects him from being recognized by social order and regarded as a monster.

The Watchman, on the other hand, does not question one aspect of the typed narrative (such as the villain's extreme evil), but questions the context of the whole typed narrative. This kind of questioning is produced by directly mixing history, reality and the stories of superhero movies.

In the opening credits of The Watchers, the director combined the history of superheroes (that is, the Watchers League) with the whole history of the United States through editing, and the superheroes themselves participated in the construction of history (the comedian, one of the Watchers, assassinated Kennedy, and the comedian and dr. manhattan helped the United States win the Vietnam War). But it is in this process that the existence of superheroes becomes more and more ridiculous. We can't imagine how embarrassing and inappropriate it is for a superhero to be out of Hollywood's genre narrative and in the realistic and historical context. So at the beginning of the story, the superhero alliance has disappeared, replaced by Nixon's Keane Act. Superheroes must either submit to the government (fully integrated into the order) or dissolve, otherwise it is illegal.

In the story, the director also said through Rorschach, one of the watchmen, why are there so few superheroes with normal mind and body? Ironically, Rorschach who said this was himself the most extreme sociopath and mentally abnormal. In fact, the abnormal psychology of superheroes is the necessary condition for superheroes to exist in reality. Just like the captain in the animated story, it is precisely because they imagine the city as dark, corrupt, chaotic and full of eschatological crises that they can gain rationality for their lynching behavior.

Of course, some people can argue that the background of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union in this film justifies the cynicism of superheroes, and even defends the madness of Victor, one of the last superheroes (Victor is just the cleverest of all the watchers). But as the title says, in fact, the escalation of the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union is largely caused by the existence of dr. manhattan, one of the watchmen.

So in a realistic and historical context, we find that on the one hand, superheroes complain about the degeneration of society and the helplessness of having to do justice for heaven (instead of law), but on the other hand, we find that the social problems are either paranoia of superheroes or caused by superheroes themselves. They are like the captain in the cartoon, they are the executioners who destroy the peace of the town, and they thought they were saving the town from the clutches of the black cargo ship.

At the end of the story, we can really understand that the craziest comedian is the wisest. He said that the Watchman is actually a joke. However, the people in the joke can't see through the joke, and they still maintain their imaginary world seriously and painstakingly.