Even Watchmen Get the Blues

So how about that big blue penis? According to a few of my children’s friends, the Watchmen movie gives new meaning to the phrase “weekend gross”.

At issue is the character of Jon Osterman, a physicist who, after a radioactive mishap, becomes a glowing omniscient demigod named Dr. Manhattan, who performs most of his business buck naked. As a result, many moviegoers have found themselves considering a fundamental philosophical question: Is a cinematic penis still obscene if it’s translucent and blue?

Dr. Ted Baehr, media critic at the Christian Film and Television Commission, has, perhaps not surprisingly, come out as anti-blue penis. On the site movieguide.org, Baehr says that the film deserves an X or an NC-17 rating, not the R that it received. “The motion picture industry keeps changing its standards,” he says. “No wonder the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system confuses parents.” And why should the rating be changed? Because, “throughout most of the whole picture, one male character walks around completely naked, with his private parts waving in the breeze.”

True enough, except that the parts in question don’t actually belong to Billy Cruddup, the actor playing the good doctor. Apparently the blue meanie was generated by a team of computer graphics engineers. This raises an even more complex issue for parents to wrestle with: Is a translucent glowing blue penis still obscene if it’s not real?

Opinion, as one might imagine, is split. There was a fission of enthusiasm in the nerd world last October when news of the CGI-penis became official. “Three cheers for atomic blue penises!” began an article over at comicbookmovie.come. Conservative cultural critic Debbie Schlussel, meanwhile, wrote in her blog, “If you see it yourself, you’re also probably a moron and a vapid, indecent human being.” She has a whole host of complaints, but chief among them is Dr. Manhattan’s “swinging computer generated penis frequently in your face on-screen.”
Clearly there hasn’t been this much excitement about a penis in film since Bart Simpson bared all in 2007’s Simpsons Movie.

According to the MPAA, an R-rated movie “contains some adult material,” and may “include adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense or persistent violence, sexually oriented nudity, drug abuse or other elements so that parents are counseled to take this rating very seriously.” An NC-17, meanwhile, “simply signals that the content is appropriate only for an adult audience. An NC-17 rating, meanwhile, can be based on violence, sex, aberrational behavior, drug abuse or any other element that most parents would consider too strong and therefore off-limits for viewing by their children.” The MPAA does note, however, that the rating “does not mean ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic.’”

By my reading, the key concept separating the two ratings is the concept of “aberrational.” By that measure, a giant translucent demigod’s penis may be many things, but one thing it is not is an aberration, at least not on Mars.

Before taking my children—ages 15 and 12—to the Watchmen last weekend, the only R-rated movie they’d ever seen was Slumdog Millionaire. We had a good talk in the car about the violence in Slumdog, both the physical kind done to the protagonists as well as the spiritual kind caused by the jaw-dropping poverty of Mumbai. My boys were moved, and entertained by Slumdog, not least because it gave them occasion to think about their own relationship as brothers, and exactly what sorts of risks and sacrifices they’d be willing to make for one another.

They’d been looking forward to Watchmen for a long time, and had read Alan Moore’s original novel a year or two ago. That novel is every bit as violent as the film, and yes, includes Dr. Manhattan’s penis. I warned them that the film was rumored to be, a-hem, “loyal” to the book in this regard, but this didn’t dampen their enthusiasm. (This was something of a surprise, coming from two young men who on one occasion refused to go to the Guggenheim several years ago because “there might be paintings of naked people.” Score: DC Comics 1, Picasso 0.)
After the film, my boys admitted that a lot of the images in Watchmen had been a little much for them. But it wasn’t Dr. Manhattan that made them uneasy—it was the scenes of heads being whacked with meat cleavers, guys arms being bisected with circular saws; and, oh yes, the obliteration of most of Manhattan by some sort of thermonuclear device. My older son, who claims to be a pacifist, found that deeply disturbing, “even if it is based on a cartoon.”
As for Dr. Manhattan? My sons said, “Well, he’s slowly becoming less and less human, so clothes have just become kind of strange for him. You can sympathize with that.” And the blue penis that has caused all the trouble? “Normally, it would bother me, but with Dr. Manhattan, you know, it just seems kind of natural.”

There was also some surprise—I have to put this delicately—that the Doctor’s unit itself was of a size somewhat less than cosmic. After all, this is a guy who can change the pigmentation of his skin, teleport himself to Mars, and see the future. Is Watchmen really trying to tell us that size doesn’t matter? One of my boys wondered whether in days to come we might see one of those “Natural Male Enhancement” commercials on television, except that instead of “Whistling Bob” we’ll see a very satisfied looking Dr. Manhattan.

They also liked the sound track of the film, which features lots of Bob Dylan. The use of “The Times They Are a Changin’” as background to the opening montage struck all of us as particularly moving.

Whether the times actually are changing, and we’re now about to enter a new era of translucent penises in movies remains to be seen. In the meantime, I’m hoping that any Watchmen sequel might consider, in addition to Dylan, adding the music of Miles Davis to the soundtrack. Starting with “Kind of Blue.”

The Day the Gazungas Died: True Story of Boylan, Buddy Holly, Don McLean, and Rick Russo

A true story about a party at Don McLean's house this fall. I was there with a bunch of other Maine writers; Don and his wife were hosting a benefit for the Maine Writers & Publishers' Alliance. I made smalltalk with our host and he was generous and pleasant in every way. At the end of the evening, I went inside (it was a garden party) to use the bathroom, and en route snooped around the incredibly beautiful house. (The McLeans live on top of a mountain near Camden, Maine, one of the most jaw-droppingly gorgeous places I have ever been.) Anyhow, there in the living room, among other cool objects d'art, was a bust of the songwriter himself.

Later, Deedie and I went out to dinner with our friend Rick Russo. I told him about what I'd seen in the parlor, and started giving Rick a hard time about how he ought to have a statue of himself in his house. "Maybe not today, Russo," I said, "But one of these days, you're going to turn to yourself and say, 'Man, I just GOTTA get a BUST!"

Without missing a beat, Russo just smiled and said, "Well, Boylan. You did."

Anyhow: R.I.P, Buddy Holly, whose plane crashed 50 years ago today.

That'll be the day.

Tim Kreider, Funniest Man Alive, presents "All Yours": Bush to Obama

Artist's Statement by Timothy Kreider

(The reduced image at left hardly does Tim's work justice; and you surely should click here to see the piece in all its glory.)

If all goes according to plan like it never does, this will be my last overtly political cartoon.

I just got back from Inauguration last night. That crowd you saw on TV, filling the Mall from the Capitol to the Washington Monument? That was me! Through her unparalleled interpersonal and bartending skills my friend Melissa scored tickets to the inauguration for our whole group of friends. We left our HQ in Maclean, Virginia (thanks, Kristie and T.L., for your extravagant hospitality) at 5:15 A.M. to get the Metro into the District, and it was a good thing we did--we later ran into people who’d gotten into D.C. at 5 AM and still didn’t get into the inauguration. We spent several hours trapped in a vast, immobile crowd, waiting to get into the designated gate for purple tickets. At one point we saw Jesse Jackson and his entourage up ahead of us, trying to make their way through the crowd, on foot and just as fucked as the rest of us. I remembered then how he’d been overheard saying he was going to “cut [Obama’s] balls off” during the campaign, and I thought, Well, that’s what you get for talking shit about Obama—the same color ticket as Tim Kreider. (I read later that Jackson never got into the inauguration at all. Neither did Mariah Carey.)

Later an ambulance needed to get through the intersection, and the crowd, already packed as densely as a New York subway at rush hour, was pressed even more tightly against the barricades that hemmed us in. This was the only point at which we felt there might be even the slightest possibility of being maybe a little bit crushed to death. It was then that Melissa, who was raised to believe that there is always a way to sneak around the rules and avoid getting screwed along with the rubes, struck out away from the crowd and led us all to another approach to the gate, one where the crowd, though just as dense, was indeed shuffling slowly, intermittently forward. Despite the interminable wait, the frustrating absence of any communication or direction from anyone in charge, the agoraphobic closeness and toe-numbing cold, the people in D.C. that day were (a little halfhearted and desultory chanting aside) not ill-tempered or impatient but calm and friendly and humorous, joined together in a spirit of commiseration and fellow-feeling. I heard later that even with a crowd of almost two million people—the largest assembly in the history of Washington, D.C.—there was not one arrest. Melissa gave our extra ticket to a guy hawking Presidential T-shirts.

We did finally get into the Inaugural area, where every monument was coated and dripping with people. [Photos of the event, courtesy of Sarah Glidden, are posted on our photos page.] The trees were full of people, too, at whom the cops would periodically yell to get down. And the tree people would sullenly clamber down only to be replaced by more climbers five minutes later. I was reminded of Zacchæus, the short tax collector who climbed a sycamore to see Jesus preach. Never in my lifetime have I seen so many people strain with such intensity and passion to see a single man. (And when have you ever seen sportswear emblazoned with the name and face of a U.S. President?) It was a racially mixed, polyglot crowd, like a New York City street scene, strikingly unlike the homogenous mob of cruel-faced, desiccated coots in cowboy boots and their powdered, mink-enshrouded wives I saw at Bush’s first inaugural. Older black women were weeping openly, their faces embarrassingly beautiful to see; happy Asian couples were taking photos of themselves against the background of the crowd. All our trials were worth it to me to know that one of the millions of boos George Bush heard when his name was announced was my own. The most air-stillingly beautiful moment of the day was Aretha Franklin’s “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” When she sang the line, “Land where our fathers died” a voice behind me shouted, “Yes, they did!” in churchly call-and response. Melissa and Sarah were weeping. I kept laughing for happiness. Obama’s speech was the only one we could hear well, so clear and resonant was his voice. I uttered a feeble “h’raay” when he mentioned “non-believers” (despite the incorrect nomenclature—we prefer to be called “The Damned”). It was a gesture of inclusion as unexpected and as moving, in its way, as his speaking the word “gay” in his acceptance speech. In the pause after an especially welcome or inspiring line, because of the sheer expanse of the crowd and the slow travel time of sound, you could hear the roar of cheers and applause rolling in oceanic waves two miles down the mall, like thunder or the sea.

After the inauguration I retreated to a mobbed and raucous Irish bar catty-wampus from Union Station where Van Halen was playing real loud and I scarfed down a plate of chicken wings and drank Jack Daniels out of a plastic cup for the first time in many years. It was there that I watched George W. Bush leave Washington, D.C. in disgrace. When he ascended the stairway to his plane the whole bar erupted with jeers and hurrahs. Everyone waved Good riddance, fuckboy, and raised their beers in ferocious toast. I gave the finger to the screen.

That night my friends and I retired to my Undisclosed Location on the Chesapeake Bay, well north of D.C. I built a fire in the woodstove and we all drank wine and made baked brie and salad and mushroom risotto. Late that night I put an episode of The Shadow on the turntable and we all passed out within minutes. The next morning, after breakfast, we all went for a walk on the beach, where we saw a couple of bald eagles flapping over the frozen cove. I played the Star-Spangled Banner on my pump organ before we left the cabin and headed back up 95 to New York City and home.

This morning I overcame my post-election indifference to politics, which borders on an active antipathy, and forced myself to read the Times, figuring that after eight years of relentlessly ghastly and depressing affronts to human decency I owed myself a little good news. I almost couldn’t take it. Already President Obama has signed executive orders closing down Guantanamo and the CIA’s secret prisons and overturning Bush’s efforts to block access to government records. Dennis Blair, Obama’s appointee for national director of intelligence, called for oversight and transparency in intelligence and said that counterterrorism must be consistent with American law and the Geneva conventions. He actually used the phrase “speak truth to power.” It is such a profound and pathetic relief just to hear anyone in the government say anything sane or reasonable or obviously true. Can it all really be this easy? As my cartoon illustrates, I know that the Bush administration has left the country a shambles, and it’s not just a matter of repair but of rebuilding, from the ground up, and it’ll take a long time. But it means so much just to know that the people in charge are smart and responsible and in touch with reality, listening to their soldiers and their spies and their scientists instead of plugging their ears and praying, that they respect the law and believe in democracy. It feels like the Dark Tower toppling, the statue of the Emperor pulled down, the snow melting and rumors of Aslan returned.

Most amazing of all, in a way, was the simple photo of President Obama sitting at the desk in the Oval Office. I looked at it for a long time.

You can see all of Tim's many perverse and wonderful cartoons, and/or make a donation to The Pain comics by clicking here.

MAN OF THE HOUR for January 4, 2009: BUSTER KEATON

Jenny Boylan's MAN OF THE HOUR for January 4, 2009 is Buster Keaton, American actor and director, a.k.a. "The Great Stone Face."

Born October 4, 1895, his career lasted into the early 1960s, with a cameo in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."

But his greatest films are the early silents of the 1920s, including The General and Sherlock, Jr.

At the grimmest turns of my life, I have found Keaton's films an irrepressible source of joy. There's a lot to love about Keaton, but for me the greatest gem is that prune face of his, calm on the surface, but with the tenderest emotions flickering just beneath. He does more with a single gesture than most actors do with a page and a half of dialouge.

Here's the opening of Sherlock, Jr., which includes an amazing scene involving a dollar bill found in the trash.


There's lots of Keaton stuff on the web, the coolest of which might be Juha Takkinen's list of Keatonia.

BUSTER KEATON, Old Stone Face, is the MAN OF THE HOUR!