The Watchmen has been called "controversial," but I argue that in comparison to Diane English's romantic comedy The Women, Alan Moore's vision of civilization and its post-human future is a little been-there-done-that. That's right: The Women is a more ambitious movie. How's that for controversial statements? Let me first say that although The Watchmen is limited as a book/movie of ideas, it's a fantastic character piece. In both the graphic novel and its pretty-fucking-satisfying-to-fans film version, it's poetry in limping motion. They're superhumans that are more like all-too-humans, pockmarked with flaws that get complicated, rather than covered, by their costumes. Reluctantly, often abusively, they take up their hero mantles like specters, able to save lives, but not their own beautifully wounded souls. Although it often comes off as deliberate, excessive, and deliberately excessive, it remains ruthlessly truthful, scathingly triumphant and just generally moving. And, inevitably, a patriarchal text, the few weak female roles eclipsed by dudes who hold all the big political and human naturey cards. Despite that, I raced to see it and it's presence in my life turned out to be exactly the inverse of The Women's which, in its pseudo-conceptual prohibition of any male specimen entering it's hallowed estrogenical frames, seemed to be vying for some kind of monolithic chick flick status. It's creative story is also the opposite of The Watchmen's: it's a boring play very loosely adapted into some painfully dull cinema.
Rewind a few months to my viewing of The Women to which I was, well, a little less eager. Let's just say that my girlfriend at the time somehow managed to unhandcuff me from the toilet and pull the stitches out of my eyelids. By the time the chlorophorm lifted I was in the theater flanked by popcorn and twizzlers (I was so mad, she knows I like glosettes), expecting a useless string of stuff happening that shows how kooky it is to be a lady. The movie turned out to be more than that. It wasn't the fact that it's actually based on a stageplay by Clare Boothe Luce written in 1936 that was "modernized" for the screen, which means, of course, incorporating some courageously bad pantomime of Sex and the City. It wasn't the "razor sharp!!" dialogue or "insight into life and love!!" that made me realize that this movie wasn't just an exploit. It was in the fleeting aerial shots, easily played off as transitional grace notes ("we're in a city, which means the story has a lot of momentum, right!"), that elevated the film's ambitions beyond just an exploit to mythology-in-the-making.
Despite its refusal of a visual male presence, the plot still orbits around their off-camera deeds, which pull the narrative around like dramatic dark matter - cheating, not appreciating their witty, soulful female companions and, occasionally, casting spells of true love that the ladies later poeticize to each other. The Women is not a movie. It is a cybernetic ova with galvanized cell(uloid) walls. It is a divining rod designed by Prada as a summer accessory, stabbing madly through the skyless urban lunacy for a vision of what it means to be a lady. Not just a lady, but one whose womanhood is constantly undergoing the Manhattan field test, the most unforgivingly commercialized scenario of the modern world. It was then that I realized that one of my favorite things about Manhattan is that it's one big vagina. Enter the aerial shots: they focus not on the phallic structural hallmarks of the city's masculine industrial legacy, but the presence of central park and its unruly crevacious presence within an architectural metastasis. Like the aftermath of a terrorist attack from Captain Planet. It is here that Manhattan is rendered vaginal, its spiritual interior being the park, the realm of the film's ingenue who runs its committee. It is here we are afforded a glimpse of the city's mythological heartbeat in which the sentinels of its last bastion of natural history are, crucially, the daughters of Eve.
But it's more than that, as the film then poses a contradiction: why are our women, charged as the guardians of our city's organic atrium, obsessed with the plasticity of shopping and vanity? Well, first submit to the fact central park is also artificial, existing by design and not necessity, maintained not by nature-lovers, but bored upper class socialites. Central Park, therefore, serves as a decent metaphor for postmodern femininity - potentially artificial but an essential earthly anchor to the concrete fever dream that is urban life. Two eras now stand side by side: the old male era of anabolic industry and the new female era of design, commerce and information. Information? Why yes, who after all pushes more knowledge than a gossip queen with a blackberry? The modern urban environment has, in general, acquired a predominantly female temperament: within their information orgy they lay out the tenets of desire, relationships, success, family, etc, all negotiated while they shop, eat and groom - habits the city has gone to great lengths to cater to. They are the gatekeepers and they know who you're fucking.
Fortunately the main characters of The Women are situated as, relatively speaking, "progressively" minded: scoffing at facelifts, rejecting the mass-distribution and/or the puerile hollowing of their fashion products. Though they'll still flip their shit over a handbag. Then again, what's nymphhood without a little frivolity? What's a tribe without fetishes? And what better, more primal, way to pay tribute to their tools of epistemelogical dominance than a lavish womb for their little darling blackberry familiars to rest?
So, yes, The Watchmen more directly addresses the "fate of humanity," but it's battleground is phallic, all nukes and cigars and guns and manufacturing moguls roosted on the scalps of high-rises. The Women proposes something far more revolutionary: a yannic future. Sadly, unlike The Watchmen (which for the most part kicked ass), it's just not a very good movie. The drama and humor resort to "rambunctiousness!" to keep the audience from slipping into a catatonic state of boredom, the character's relationships maintain a stultifying amount of simplicity, as does the rest of the film's (potential) subject matters, letting the layers flake off, leaving only cliches of "true love" to stand on. I think the director got scared. That one flash of our feminine fate and English retreated to the doctrines of classical romcoms for comfort. But why fear a future less masculine? Don't tell me you really are afraid of gentlemen becoming a remember-when. Apparently, if we squeeze out the dudes, women would have nothing to talk about anymore.
Post-script:
I think there's a connection between Manhattan the city and the somewhat androgynous (minus the omnipresent penis, I suppose) Dr. Manhattan character in The Watchmen. Maybe Manhattan, as a city, is a hermaphrodite. It's intergenderal, its two organs competing for the alpha role. Which one will prevail?
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