This article, which concerned Nikki Webster and her new single Devilicious, has been removed. It may reappear in some form or other in the future.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Fiction: Tragedy at the Snow
Before I moved back to the city and met your mother, I lived for a while in a town out west, past where the towns sit next to each other on the train line like stalls at a carnival, out where, if it were a movie, the townspeople would hear the trains passing through from their kitchens and just shake their heads. I won’t say the name of the place. I knew a girl there.
I rented a basement room from an older man who lived alone and kept dachshunds, one young, one old, and the dogs never got used to me in the whole five months I lived there. I’d come around to the front door each Friday to pay the man his rent in cash, and they’d bark at me. My landlord never apologised for the way that his two dogs barked, but I always did, always said sorry, which even at the time didn’t make sense if I thought about it, but then neither did being in this town in the first place, or parting with the small amount of money I had to be angry so far from earshot. I think sometimes your reasons are your reasons, what works isn’t the same as what makes sense. Thinking through the whys of doing some things, and what the alternatives might be, almost always takes more time than you’d like.
I won’t make it a mystery why I was there. Your grandmother had died suddenly and without dignity, and your grandfather, who I didn’t care to understand, had married again quickly to a woman I didn’t care to know. I had enough saved to go overseas for a few weeks or go somewhere else nearby for who knew how long. A lot of my friends would have opted for the romance of the former, but my life was quite small at the time, and the latter seemed a bigger gesture. I think it’s important to note the circumstances behind the choice, though, because they meant I knew all along that my life in this town was only going to be temporary, only could be, and I always had it in my head I’d go home eventually. Maybe not to my father and his wife, no, but to the city, yes. Once I had everything worked out and wasn’t so angry any more. I never had a job while I lived in that town, and I’d taken every penny I had with me in cash, which was also a gesture of some kind, and I counted the money almost every day, which meant almost every day I was reminded that this couldn’t last forever. That the vision I had for how it would all pan out would eventually have to become more vivid, cross that line between vision and plan. I think when I met this girl that, as much as anything, it was a good excuse for putting that off. But I allowed myself, and her, to believe it was a much larger deal, with fewer hard edges.
I met her at the supermarket, which would be trite in a big city like this, sure, but in a town where the supermarket is the only public place anyone really has an excuse to go to, it felt like a blessing. And it didn’t take any lines or tricks or even courage like it would in a city either. No hanging out in the health food aisle, no purchasing impressive condiments. She just came up to me and said, Hello, and I said, Hello, and that was that. We’d met. She was originally from near there, a town near this town. She had black hair and fingertips stained brown with nicotine and she was two years older than me.
She was living by herself in this house, if you could call it that. It was a couple of blocks from the supermarket. She had an uncle who lived somewhere nearby, who owned this house, and at different times she told me different versions of what exactly the arrangement was. It didn’t seem important to me what the arrangement was, or even if there was one, but I suspected all along that her uncle might have known even less about it than I did. I didn’t want to talk about why I was there, at least not very specifically. Being around a girl, well. My reasons were of the sort that sound stupid if said straight out. Righteousness is, as you’ll learn, a fragile thing. Snippets, though, just dark little moments where I’d cloud up and reveal what my mother’s eyes looked like before they closed or what the sky had looked like the days after or how I’d felt when I went shopping for a tie for the service stood in for the kind of depth young men lack, even when bad things have happened to them. So I was happy for her lies. They let me be mysterious.
The first time I went there, to her house, I thought that I was going to go straight through the floorboards. There were rusted nails sticking out everywhere, holes in almost every wall. There was one working tap, in what she called the kitchen, which ran cold water clouded with rust. The ceiling in the entire front half of the building had collapsed. She had all her possessions in garbage bags.
And only one room in the house had any carpet and any warmth, and that was her bedroom, so that’s where we sat and talked. And what happened was what happens when people sit in bedrooms and talk. I was quite handsome when I was young.
What’s better than winning gold in the paralympics? she would ask.
What’s better?
Arms and legs.
Once, filling in time, I bought her a purse at the St Vincent de Paul’s in town, an old purple vinyl thing, and she quietly put the small amount of money she had inside it and then carried it in her hand whenever we left the house.
We spent a lot of time together.
When I’d come around I’d buy cheese and bread and cheap ham that tasted like sweat, and we would eat a dinner together, or a lunch, and that seemed very civilised in the absence of a hotplate. The days I wasn’t there she would just eat bread toasted jokingly with a cigarette lighter, or sometimes nothing at all. I would arrive to find the house empty of food and she would shrug off my questions and suggest we just go get something now. And that didn’t annoy me in the beginning. It made me want to be there even more, as much as I could, to make sure she was okay.
When I’d stay over I would sleep on my side, behind her, naked, my arm around her waist or slung over her small hip, and I’d think, This is how men lie with women. And in the beginning I would ignore the fact that she always smelled and tasted of cigarettes and woke up coughing and hacking and always got into bed with feet blackened from the filth on the floor. She didn’t own any make-up, and I genuinely believed she didn’t need to. Her skin was perfect, her eyes were dark, her yellow smile perfectly shaped.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’d say, and hand him some cash. And he would simply take it and say, Thankyou. All well?
And I’d say, Yes, I’m sorry.
I was being honest when I told her, the girl that is, that it was for his sake I didn’t want us to go around to my room, because he was really quite unbelievably old.
And so whenever we spent time together, it was at her house, which was a shadeless twenty-minute walk from mine. We never had anywhere to go except the supermarket. We’d walk there and browse the cereal aisle. We never spoke out in public, only at home, and we never held hands if there were people around. I don’t know why. We never discussed it. It was just a rule we had.
I think that could have been the only way it started to feel like we were married.
One morning in March I picked up the newspaper from the recycling bin, where my landlord had put it. On the front page was the word Tragedy, and then, smaller, the words At the snow, and beneath that a picture of a young man’s face. I recognised him. I’d gone to school with him as a kid. He’d stayed at my house. I remembered being stirred from sleep one night by my mother shuffling around, putting new sheets on his mattress, as he stood watching with a look on his face which, to this day, I don’t know the word for.
In the picture he was wearing ski goggles on his forehead and he had stubble on his chin and a smile on his face, and I thought he looked older than I would have expected. Older than me. The article said he’d been killed in an avalanche and that his sister had been there and seen the whole thing and dug around in eight feet of snow, calling his name for hours and hours until they finally found her, exhausted, and that he had just graduated from university and taken up employment at a sports management company.
That night, when the girl climbed into bed with me, she had cold hands and she placed one of them between my thighs and for some reason I felt very angry.
Can you wash your feet, I said.
She got up and left and I could hear the tap running in the kitchen, the pipes shuddering somewhere under the floor, and then the noise stopped. But she didn’t come back. I heard the clicking of her cigarette lighter out in the front room. I heard it again a few minutes later.
I must have been asleep when she finally came to bed.
Sometimes, in the afternoons, I would walk to her place to find her sitting on the crumbling paved area out front, her eyes red and a cigarette in her hand and her thighs sticking out pale from a pair of shorts, ants crawling across her lap. Just watching the road as if waiting for something to arrive. Which could only mean me. She would say nothing was wrong and that she was just enjoying the sun.
Or I would get there and hear banging noises from the street and come inside to find her shifting a pile of broken tiles from one side of the front room to the other and she’d say she’d just been trying to get the place in order, which could almost have been funny had it only happened once.
It was autumn now. The gutters in the streets were filling up with leaves. Every now and again the sun was disappearing behind clouds long enough for you to notice the breeze.
I was counting my money more regularly. There was less and less of it.
We were on our way back from the supermarket the day her uncle finally turned up. He was waiting out front, leaning against a beat up old station wagon, smoking. He was gaunt and wore a beard and had a blue teardrop tattooed here, under his left eye. He began smiling when he saw us, but I could tell from the way her steps slowed next to mine that I shouldn’t smile back.
Fancy seeing you here, he said. Mind if I come in?
Your house, she said.
Yeah, he said. My house.
She led him inside. I followed a few steps behind.
We moved silently through the house and, without any kind of negotiation, towards the bedroom. Maybe in her fear she was trying to be hospitable. Maybe she wanted him to see the pitiful amount of space she was taking up, see the ragged carpet and the mattress without sheets and the windowsill she kept her toothbrush on.
We stood a moment. Me by the door, her out in open space, him between us, flexing his wrists.
You know, he said, I might fix this place up.
She didn’t say anything.
Get some tenants in, he said. Wouldn’t take much. Splash of paint. Bit of carpet. Bit of Ratsak. Move all the rubbish out. I always like this house when I visit. I always think, I should put some money in it. Make something of it, you know?
She still said nothing. Stared at him.
Then he punched her. He didn’t slap her. He punched her. The way you could never imagine doing to a girl. Closed fist. No clapping noise to suggest it might sound worse than it looked, but a brief, factual thud as his knuckles connected with her face, and a louder one as she stumbled back against the wall.
Don’t, I said, regretting it instantly, before he’d even turned to me, which he did very slowly, taking his time. In almost a whisper I said, Stop.
He moved towards me and I glanced across at her and she was holding her hand to her face, looking stunned.
He stood over me and I tried to hide the way my weight was shifting onto my back foot, which was ridiculous because my palms were already up, facing him, fingers splayed.
He breathed and I looked into his eyes.
You’re a fucken kid, he said.
We all stood silently for a moment and thought about that. Then he looked back and forth between us, then around at the room, up at the ceiling, down at her garbage bags.
Look at how you’re living, he said. Look at this fucken place. Then, to me, he said, I’d tell her to get out again, but she never listens, this one. Stupid little cunt, aren’t you? Bitch? Tell you what, he said. Stay. It’s yours. Be winter soon. It’ll be a palace. You can fucken freeze.
He cast his eyes around the room again and they settled on the purse I’d bought her, which was sitting on the floor by the window. He walked over and picked it up and opened it and counted its contents and then looked up at us. Then he walked slowly towards the door, taking the purse with him. He didn’t shut the front door after him. We heard the car start.
It must have been a few minutes after he was gone that I stopped staring at her and asked if she was okay.
Days later I finally turned up and we talked a while, like normal, like nothing had happened, and then we kissed each other and she took off her clothes, and I saw that she was cut to ribbons down there, half her hair missing. I asked her what in God’s name had happened.
I was trying to make myself nice for you, she said.
I wanted to cry, wanted to feel like wanting to cry, but nothing came out. In the bathroom, afterwards, I considered bashing my fist against an exposed beam in the wall, but thought better of it. The beam was splintery. I wasn’t about to hurt myself. It took me a week to figure it out for sure, but that was the moment, the moment I saw her slashed to pieces with a cheap razor blade, that I began deciding it was over and time for me to leave.
She was such a nice girl, so ruined.
And over the course of that week, the only full week since meeting her that I didn’t see her, I convinced myself to hate her for being such a ridiculous mess of a human being, for being such a fool as to care for someone who was only passing through.
When I told her I was going, she asked, Where to? I didn’t answer. Then she asked, Why? And I said, Because I’m going to be bigger than this. Which is an astounding and very cruel thing to say to anyone, and is never true, and is a brand of cruelty of which, unfortunately, not only the young and stupid are capable. We don’t outgrow people. We get sick of who we were when we decided to fall in love with them in the first place.
That same afternoon, as I arrived back to my boarding room, I went and knocked on my landlord’s door and told him I was going to leave the next day, but I’d give him a week’s rent in lieu. It was the first time he said more than three words to me since the first time we’d met.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, he said. Not many people come through here wanting to rent, not that you’d want in your home, at least. I don’t know how I’ll make up the money.
Half-joking, awkwardly, I suggested he breed dachshunds, since he liked them so much, but he shook his head and said to me, We’re bachelors, us three.
You seem happy enough, I told him.
He said, We keep ourselves to ourselves. We don’t hurt anybody and nobody hurts us.
In that moment, at once hating and feeling sorry for myself, it seemed like a very sensible way to live, and my landlord with his two loudmouth dogs seemed less like a lonely old man than a wise one.
A year later I met your mother. Not in a supermarket or anywhere so necessary. We met through mutual friends at a dinner. She wore dresses and had a few pieces of jewelry and her hair was combed straight always and her father shook my hand when I met him and when she kissed me she made a noise that, at the time, I found very appealing. For these reasons I quickly willed myself to forget all about my landlord and the town I lived in and the girl I knew there, because your mother was a good match for me, someone I never meant to be bigger than and so wouldn’t need to leave, and it wouldn’t have done to talk about those things with her. That kind of stuff isn’t very charming. And I suppose I wanted to have you, and I knew going in that some things would have to be left out.
I rented a basement room from an older man who lived alone and kept dachshunds, one young, one old, and the dogs never got used to me in the whole five months I lived there. I’d come around to the front door each Friday to pay the man his rent in cash, and they’d bark at me. My landlord never apologised for the way that his two dogs barked, but I always did, always said sorry, which even at the time didn’t make sense if I thought about it, but then neither did being in this town in the first place, or parting with the small amount of money I had to be angry so far from earshot. I think sometimes your reasons are your reasons, what works isn’t the same as what makes sense. Thinking through the whys of doing some things, and what the alternatives might be, almost always takes more time than you’d like.
I won’t make it a mystery why I was there. Your grandmother had died suddenly and without dignity, and your grandfather, who I didn’t care to understand, had married again quickly to a woman I didn’t care to know. I had enough saved to go overseas for a few weeks or go somewhere else nearby for who knew how long. A lot of my friends would have opted for the romance of the former, but my life was quite small at the time, and the latter seemed a bigger gesture. I think it’s important to note the circumstances behind the choice, though, because they meant I knew all along that my life in this town was only going to be temporary, only could be, and I always had it in my head I’d go home eventually. Maybe not to my father and his wife, no, but to the city, yes. Once I had everything worked out and wasn’t so angry any more. I never had a job while I lived in that town, and I’d taken every penny I had with me in cash, which was also a gesture of some kind, and I counted the money almost every day, which meant almost every day I was reminded that this couldn’t last forever. That the vision I had for how it would all pan out would eventually have to become more vivid, cross that line between vision and plan. I think when I met this girl that, as much as anything, it was a good excuse for putting that off. But I allowed myself, and her, to believe it was a much larger deal, with fewer hard edges.
•
I met her at the supermarket, which would be trite in a big city like this, sure, but in a town where the supermarket is the only public place anyone really has an excuse to go to, it felt like a blessing. And it didn’t take any lines or tricks or even courage like it would in a city either. No hanging out in the health food aisle, no purchasing impressive condiments. She just came up to me and said, Hello, and I said, Hello, and that was that. We’d met. She was originally from near there, a town near this town. She had black hair and fingertips stained brown with nicotine and she was two years older than me.
She was living by herself in this house, if you could call it that. It was a couple of blocks from the supermarket. She had an uncle who lived somewhere nearby, who owned this house, and at different times she told me different versions of what exactly the arrangement was. It didn’t seem important to me what the arrangement was, or even if there was one, but I suspected all along that her uncle might have known even less about it than I did. I didn’t want to talk about why I was there, at least not very specifically. Being around a girl, well. My reasons were of the sort that sound stupid if said straight out. Righteousness is, as you’ll learn, a fragile thing. Snippets, though, just dark little moments where I’d cloud up and reveal what my mother’s eyes looked like before they closed or what the sky had looked like the days after or how I’d felt when I went shopping for a tie for the service stood in for the kind of depth young men lack, even when bad things have happened to them. So I was happy for her lies. They let me be mysterious.
•
The first time I went there, to her house, I thought that I was going to go straight through the floorboards. There were rusted nails sticking out everywhere, holes in almost every wall. There was one working tap, in what she called the kitchen, which ran cold water clouded with rust. The ceiling in the entire front half of the building had collapsed. She had all her possessions in garbage bags.
And only one room in the house had any carpet and any warmth, and that was her bedroom, so that’s where we sat and talked. And what happened was what happens when people sit in bedrooms and talk. I was quite handsome when I was young.
•
She had jokes she told.What’s better than winning gold in the paralympics? she would ask.
What’s better?
Arms and legs.
•
I had things that I did.
Whenever I kissed her hello I would cradle her face in my right hand, which I would warm up in my pocket before I arrived. If she had an eyelash on her cheek I would carefully wipe it off with my fingertip and tell her to make a wish, but she would never tell me what the wish was. She was one of the only people I ever met who could do that without the unspoken being obvious.
Whenever I kissed her hello I would cradle her face in my right hand, which I would warm up in my pocket before I arrived. If she had an eyelash on her cheek I would carefully wipe it off with my fingertip and tell her to make a wish, but she would never tell me what the wish was. She was one of the only people I ever met who could do that without the unspoken being obvious.
Once, filling in time, I bought her a purse at the St Vincent de Paul’s in town, an old purple vinyl thing, and she quietly put the small amount of money she had inside it and then carried it in her hand whenever we left the house.
•
We spent a lot of time together.
When I’d come around I’d buy cheese and bread and cheap ham that tasted like sweat, and we would eat a dinner together, or a lunch, and that seemed very civilised in the absence of a hotplate. The days I wasn’t there she would just eat bread toasted jokingly with a cigarette lighter, or sometimes nothing at all. I would arrive to find the house empty of food and she would shrug off my questions and suggest we just go get something now. And that didn’t annoy me in the beginning. It made me want to be there even more, as much as I could, to make sure she was okay.
When I’d stay over I would sleep on my side, behind her, naked, my arm around her waist or slung over her small hip, and I’d think, This is how men lie with women. And in the beginning I would ignore the fact that she always smelled and tasted of cigarettes and woke up coughing and hacking and always got into bed with feet blackened from the filth on the floor. She didn’t own any make-up, and I genuinely believed she didn’t need to. Her skin was perfect, her eyes were dark, her yellow smile perfectly shaped.
•
My landlord never asked me about the nights I didn’t come home, which ended up being frequent. I paid my rent on time, every Friday, dogs barking their arses off, me apologising for causing such a ruckus. These weekly, senseless apologies came to be the first of my outlets, I suspect now, for a general sense I had, that I have still, that I owe an apology to someone, I don’t know who, for something, I don’t know what.I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’d say, and hand him some cash. And he would simply take it and say, Thankyou. All well?
And I’d say, Yes, I’m sorry.
I was being honest when I told her, the girl that is, that it was for his sake I didn’t want us to go around to my room, because he was really quite unbelievably old.
And so whenever we spent time together, it was at her house, which was a shadeless twenty-minute walk from mine. We never had anywhere to go except the supermarket. We’d walk there and browse the cereal aisle. We never spoke out in public, only at home, and we never held hands if there were people around. I don’t know why. We never discussed it. It was just a rule we had.
I think that could have been the only way it started to feel like we were married.
•
One morning in March I picked up the newspaper from the recycling bin, where my landlord had put it. On the front page was the word Tragedy, and then, smaller, the words At the snow, and beneath that a picture of a young man’s face. I recognised him. I’d gone to school with him as a kid. He’d stayed at my house. I remembered being stirred from sleep one night by my mother shuffling around, putting new sheets on his mattress, as he stood watching with a look on his face which, to this day, I don’t know the word for.
In the picture he was wearing ski goggles on his forehead and he had stubble on his chin and a smile on his face, and I thought he looked older than I would have expected. Older than me. The article said he’d been killed in an avalanche and that his sister had been there and seen the whole thing and dug around in eight feet of snow, calling his name for hours and hours until they finally found her, exhausted, and that he had just graduated from university and taken up employment at a sports management company.
•
That night, when the girl climbed into bed with me, she had cold hands and she placed one of them between my thighs and for some reason I felt very angry.
Can you wash your feet, I said.
She got up and left and I could hear the tap running in the kitchen, the pipes shuddering somewhere under the floor, and then the noise stopped. But she didn’t come back. I heard the clicking of her cigarette lighter out in the front room. I heard it again a few minutes later.
I must have been asleep when she finally came to bed.
•
Sometimes, in the afternoons, I would walk to her place to find her sitting on the crumbling paved area out front, her eyes red and a cigarette in her hand and her thighs sticking out pale from a pair of shorts, ants crawling across her lap. Just watching the road as if waiting for something to arrive. Which could only mean me. She would say nothing was wrong and that she was just enjoying the sun.
Or I would get there and hear banging noises from the street and come inside to find her shifting a pile of broken tiles from one side of the front room to the other and she’d say she’d just been trying to get the place in order, which could almost have been funny had it only happened once.
•
It was autumn now. The gutters in the streets were filling up with leaves. Every now and again the sun was disappearing behind clouds long enough for you to notice the breeze.
I was counting my money more regularly. There was less and less of it.
•
We were on our way back from the supermarket the day her uncle finally turned up. He was waiting out front, leaning against a beat up old station wagon, smoking. He was gaunt and wore a beard and had a blue teardrop tattooed here, under his left eye. He began smiling when he saw us, but I could tell from the way her steps slowed next to mine that I shouldn’t smile back.
Fancy seeing you here, he said. Mind if I come in?
Your house, she said.
Yeah, he said. My house.
She led him inside. I followed a few steps behind.
We moved silently through the house and, without any kind of negotiation, towards the bedroom. Maybe in her fear she was trying to be hospitable. Maybe she wanted him to see the pitiful amount of space she was taking up, see the ragged carpet and the mattress without sheets and the windowsill she kept her toothbrush on.
We stood a moment. Me by the door, her out in open space, him between us, flexing his wrists.
You know, he said, I might fix this place up.
She didn’t say anything.
Get some tenants in, he said. Wouldn’t take much. Splash of paint. Bit of carpet. Bit of Ratsak. Move all the rubbish out. I always like this house when I visit. I always think, I should put some money in it. Make something of it, you know?
She still said nothing. Stared at him.
Then he punched her. He didn’t slap her. He punched her. The way you could never imagine doing to a girl. Closed fist. No clapping noise to suggest it might sound worse than it looked, but a brief, factual thud as his knuckles connected with her face, and a louder one as she stumbled back against the wall.
Don’t, I said, regretting it instantly, before he’d even turned to me, which he did very slowly, taking his time. In almost a whisper I said, Stop.
He moved towards me and I glanced across at her and she was holding her hand to her face, looking stunned.
He stood over me and I tried to hide the way my weight was shifting onto my back foot, which was ridiculous because my palms were already up, facing him, fingers splayed.
He breathed and I looked into his eyes.
You’re a fucken kid, he said.
We all stood silently for a moment and thought about that. Then he looked back and forth between us, then around at the room, up at the ceiling, down at her garbage bags.
Look at how you’re living, he said. Look at this fucken place. Then, to me, he said, I’d tell her to get out again, but she never listens, this one. Stupid little cunt, aren’t you? Bitch? Tell you what, he said. Stay. It’s yours. Be winter soon. It’ll be a palace. You can fucken freeze.
He cast his eyes around the room again and they settled on the purse I’d bought her, which was sitting on the floor by the window. He walked over and picked it up and opened it and counted its contents and then looked up at us. Then he walked slowly towards the door, taking the purse with him. He didn’t shut the front door after him. We heard the car start.
It must have been a few minutes after he was gone that I stopped staring at her and asked if she was okay.
•
Days later I finally turned up and we talked a while, like normal, like nothing had happened, and then we kissed each other and she took off her clothes, and I saw that she was cut to ribbons down there, half her hair missing. I asked her what in God’s name had happened.
I was trying to make myself nice for you, she said.
I wanted to cry, wanted to feel like wanting to cry, but nothing came out. In the bathroom, afterwards, I considered bashing my fist against an exposed beam in the wall, but thought better of it. The beam was splintery. I wasn’t about to hurt myself. It took me a week to figure it out for sure, but that was the moment, the moment I saw her slashed to pieces with a cheap razor blade, that I began deciding it was over and time for me to leave.
She was such a nice girl, so ruined.
And over the course of that week, the only full week since meeting her that I didn’t see her, I convinced myself to hate her for being such a ridiculous mess of a human being, for being such a fool as to care for someone who was only passing through.
When I told her I was going, she asked, Where to? I didn’t answer. Then she asked, Why? And I said, Because I’m going to be bigger than this. Which is an astounding and very cruel thing to say to anyone, and is never true, and is a brand of cruelty of which, unfortunately, not only the young and stupid are capable. We don’t outgrow people. We get sick of who we were when we decided to fall in love with them in the first place.
•
That same afternoon, as I arrived back to my boarding room, I went and knocked on my landlord’s door and told him I was going to leave the next day, but I’d give him a week’s rent in lieu. It was the first time he said more than three words to me since the first time we’d met.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, he said. Not many people come through here wanting to rent, not that you’d want in your home, at least. I don’t know how I’ll make up the money.
Half-joking, awkwardly, I suggested he breed dachshunds, since he liked them so much, but he shook his head and said to me, We’re bachelors, us three.
You seem happy enough, I told him.
He said, We keep ourselves to ourselves. We don’t hurt anybody and nobody hurts us.
In that moment, at once hating and feeling sorry for myself, it seemed like a very sensible way to live, and my landlord with his two loudmouth dogs seemed less like a lonely old man than a wise one.
•
A year later I met your mother. Not in a supermarket or anywhere so necessary. We met through mutual friends at a dinner. She wore dresses and had a few pieces of jewelry and her hair was combed straight always and her father shook my hand when I met him and when she kissed me she made a noise that, at the time, I found very appealing. For these reasons I quickly willed myself to forget all about my landlord and the town I lived in and the girl I knew there, because your mother was a good match for me, someone I never meant to be bigger than and so wouldn’t need to leave, and it wouldn’t have done to talk about those things with her. That kind of stuff isn’t very charming. And I suppose I wanted to have you, and I knew going in that some things would have to be left out.
Watchmen (2009) MA15+
When it was originally published in 1987, the graphic novel Watchmen, by writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, was hailed as possessing a sense of psychological realism without precedent in the form, and lauded for its incisive portrayal of the effects of the Cold War on the American understanding of heroism. Among its many distinctions, it was the only comic book honoured with a place on TIME Magazine’s list of the All-Time 100 Best Novels. While it’s unlikely to achieve comparable honours, the film adaptation of Watchmen, the latest effort from director Zack Snyder (300), makes a deadly-earnest attempt on the meaty themes and self-reflexivity of its inspiration. If only the film could be judged by its good intentions.
When The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Grey’s Anatomy) is beaten to a pulp and thrown from his high-rise apartment window, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, Semi Pro) sets out to discover the assassin’s identity. Whether he does it out of self-concern or superhero solidarity is never really clear but, figuring they’ll share his alarm, he appeals for help to his erstwhile colleagues: a gang of misanthropic and dysfunctional vigilantes including the irradiated Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous), his long-suffering girlfriend, Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman, The Heartbreak Kid), the mild-mannered Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson, Angels in America) and the preening genius, Ozymandias (Matthew Goode, Match Point). They’re all too concerned with their various personal problems to commit to Rorschach’s whodunit (at least until very late in the game), but his arrival sparks a series of digressions and flashbacks through which we learn these characters’ troubled backgrounds, and watch them confront their uncertain future.
These trials of the superheart couldn’t come at a worse time. While President Nixon was, in the Watchmen universe, able to secure a third term by winning the Vietnam War, his luck in negotiating brinkmanship with the Russians has been less favourable. The so-called “doomsday clock”—whose function as a moderator of public sentiment seems roughly as efficacious as Fox News in the War on Terror—has just been set to “five minutes to midnight”, meaning nuclear trigger fingers on both side of the Pacific are getting extremely itchy.
As you can sense coming from about twenty minutes in, the paths to The Comedian’s murderer and the foiling of the impending holocaust will converge fortuitously in the end. The ethical double bind in which this lands our heroes is somewhat harder to see coming.
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While the likes of The Dark Knight and Sin City have done much to reinvigorate the comic book/superhero genre, both in terms of the canvas size and emotional terrain available, none has taken us as far into the heart of darkness as Watchmen. It renders the familiar push-pull of its heroes’ public responsibilities versus their guy/girl-next-door domestic tribulations with an unusually careful hand, and develops in its characters the kind of complex emotional problems and self-awareness at which Hancock’s attempts were so cringe-worthy. The Watchmen are concerned about their media profiles. They are variously sell-outs and stoics. They act heroically as much out of a need to feel alive and needed as any higher moral imperative, and they know it. They are confounded by their Sisyphean duties in a world perpetually at war. They are beholden to the good opinion of a reliably unappreciative citizenry, whom they never truly meet. They are faced with evils they elect not to act upon, and they are forced to wonder why.
Which sounds great. But where the Batman films work and Watchmen, despite the great earnestness with which it pursues this stuff, does not is in the pleasure of watching. In Batman, we are willing to brave the darkness because, somewhere, there'll be light. Perhaps because of the intensity of its thematic ambitions, Watchmen ends up taking itself far too seriously. In its relentless examination of superheroic ennui, it often loses sight of the fact that brooding is not the same thing as being thoughtful; that nostalgia is not the same thing as reflection. The result is that what is intended as sprawling and epic becomes meandering and ponderous; what is designed to be complex ends up opaque; and the handful of riffs intended to be fun are, by the time we get to them, simply too few. Darkened throughout by the shadow of Armageddon, the dank, crumbling world of Watchmen becomes too joyless to like and reveals its characters as too damaged to redeem it.
Given which, it’s ironic that where the film further lets itself down is in its seeming disinclination to treat its context as seriously as its characters. Latent in the third act are perhaps the timeliest questions Watchmen might have asked: Does the need for heroes disappear when politicians assume their mantle? Does individual heroism become obsolete when most people’s problems are inherently political, their solutions likely macroeconomic? And, perhaps most importantly, should we presume that God, if he exists (which he does here, in the form of Dr Manhattan), cares enough about the world to prevent its destruction, let alone take sides? It was on this ground that Watchmen might have staked its claim to greatness, or at least justified its wearyingly anhedonic tone. Sadly, it’s ground the filmmakers seem bashful to tread. Instead they content themselves with glib broadsides (television referred to a “super weapon”—zang!) and music hall prosthetic gags (Nixon’s nose has grown in step with his tenure—kapow!). In this sense, the ending is also hackle-raising: test-audience-approved denouement meets undergrad Nietzsche. This structural bow-ribbon doesn’t just feel at odds with the rest of the film, it does nothing whatsoever to address the character dilemmas with which the bulk of the story is concerned. The net result is a similar brand of pyrrhic moral victory as ended 300. However much the swelling soundtrack endeavours to make it seem otherwise, the characters are in fact left with far bigger problems than they had going in.
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Will fans of Snyder’s trademark balletic violence and slow-motion gore have fun? Some. Whether or not the belabouring of this aesthetic makes him—as has been so incessantly billed—a visionary is another question. The claim seems a little grandiose given his short list of credits, the two best-known of which have been adaptations of successful graphic novels, much of the “visionary" legwork having already been done by someone else.
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