Blush: The Birth Of An Addiction

By 1915, filmmaking as an existing thing and the concept we know it as was barely twenty years old. Sound in film would not be introduced for another twelve years. The medium was in its infancy and molten, clay to be shaped. Along comes a man named D.W Griffith, who proceeds to make a film that would basically invent the very underpinnings of what all traditional cinema would come to do. Whether or not they were techniques just awaiting to be discovered and Griffith happened to think of them first is debatable, but whatever the case, it was his film that first utilized such techniques as moving the camera, rapid cuts (and editing in general), and perhaps most importantly, the cavalry scene, the scene of a mass of people riding to the rescue that would be stolen and adapted by hundreds of films in his wake over the decades. It was in many ways the first feature length film and the first 'blockbuster', decades before Jaws really defined that concept. You could definitely say it was the first true 'movie'. So why am I bringing this up when I should be talking about comics? Well, you can watch the now public-domain film here if you wish, but really, one image of this film says all I would really need to say.

Yes, that is the Ku Klux Klan, riding to the rescue and killing men in blackface (and being presented as the heroes for it). The film Griffith created with all these now-basic filmmaking techniques that he originated was Birth Of A Nation, a film whose message is as disgusting as its techniques were groundbreaking, and even moreso. When a film is considered racist in 1905, you know you've created a real winner of a story. Say what you will about Citizen Kane, but at least you can watch it these days without cringing through the whole experience. The vileness of the tale, however, does not take away from the reality of the framework created to present it. It is the unfortunate fact that not every created thing gets to come into existence with good intentions, and if you ever want that driven home with a bullet, do some research into how many medical advances came out of studying the records of experiments performed on the victims of the Holocaust and Imperial Japan.

Therein lies the issue of this article: groundbreaking works with a truly unfortunate pedigree (intentional or not) and most of the time, an unfortunate legacy in turn (The KKK was more or less dead before Nation's release; its defining-to-film nature helped revive the group). Hence, Watchmen.

Watchmen is Art. It is a Good Comic.

It is not for everyone, and it falls into the traditional trap of 'reality is innately ugly' that a lot of art falls into, but much like the techniques invented to present the tale of Nation, one can assess the one without innately dismissing it because of the unfortunate aspects of the other. Watchmen might be the most defining superhero comic ever created.

It also more or less ruined the medium, at least in terms of the widespread, accessible to the greater public sense. There are plenty of people who could point out the many other stories comics have been used to tell, before or since, but to the average person, comic books are superheroes, and to the loudest, most 'dedicated' fans, that's all comic books are too.

A side note on fans, if I may. One that doesn't just apply to the comic book medium.

A lot of fans aren't.

If you've ever been friends with a drug addict (which we'll use as a basic example), you probably know how hard it is, and what likely ended it if you did end the friendship. An addict (too often sadly) isn't the person you originally befriended. The addiction had climbed into the person's skin and taken over, and it will do anything to ensure it is fed. Friendship, trust, basic human decency, all of that falls away when the demon is squatting and scratching at your brain. To be friends with an addict is to be friends with a roulette wheel, where your actions if they crap out (go go inappropriately mixed gambling allegories!) tend to be the more basic and simple; anger, rejection, and the severing of the relationship. It's difficult to overcome the basic negative emotions that come from being betrayed by a friend in some way due to their demons (theft of property being the most common one), let alone know when things have reacted a point where the negative emotions are the proper reaction. It becomes even worse if the addict, who tends to not have the most stable viewpoints in the first place, comes to see you as an obstacle to sate their addiction. Understanding such feelings and where they spring from doesn't make it any less ugly or unpleasant (if not worse) to experience.

(Side Note: I am aware there are many reasons people become addicts. I'm generalizing.)

Devoted fans of things tend to be in two camps. One are hobbyists, and one are addicts. Hobbyists are pretty much exactly what it says on the tin; they collect, they may even obsess, but their fandom does not enter into who they are as a person, at least primarily. Perhaps most importantly, they have a better grasp of what's important and what's not; they may hate to part with or lose something, they may even regret it, but they'll accept it.

Fandom addicts, as you might have guessed, are not so lucky. Like any classic addict, what they want is a fix, and just like a drug addict, they will never get it. Addiction has many roots, but a large one in many drug addicts is the eternal chase of 'the first high', the pure sensation that the person felt when their body was first introduced to the drug. This sensation will never be felt again, as the body cannot replicate the feelings when it is first experiencing the results from an outside source for the first time, but that won't stop the addict from chasing it, and potentially sacrificing everything to the chase. Much like an addict can destroy their lives, relationships, and health for their fix of something that will kill them, one way or another, the addict lacking any perspective for what they're losing solely for an impossible gain, a fandom addict in a lot of ways doesn't care about what they supposedly like; they just want their fix. But you can only see the opening to Star Wars and feel what it made you experience, just like you can only take a drug for the first time once; fandom addicts want that same feeling again, and when they don't get it, things can get ugly. As a result, you often get a person who takes the object of their fandom very, very seriously, while paradoxically not understanding it very well, if at all. More on that later.

In any case, Watchmen. If you haven't read it, I would recommend it. You may not like it, but I still recommend it. The plot is simple; in a world with masked mystery men and a superhuman, a murder has been committed. The whys and fallout will reach back into the world's past and define its future, as well as provide examinations of the human condition, the abstract reasoning of countries, and show the very best, and the very worst, of human minds, morality, and thinking processes, and the myriad ways good people do bad things, bad people do good things, and people just do things without having any idea if they're good and bad. It can be read as very dark and bleak, but it can also be read as a examination of real life heroism, how it can go wrong, and how one can avoid it going wrong. In a lot of ways, Watchmen is not very different from this.

As cheesy and silly as these comics read now, when Stan Lee wrote them, he recreated and reinvigorated the superhero genre the same way Watchmen did; he added realism. The Fantastic Four weren't a group of shiny happy people effortlessly defeating ugly, deformed criminals (or more likely, Nazis or Japanese soldiers), they were a family that didn't get along, bickered and fought, and had a team member who was not only strong, but also ugly, and also SMART. To the simple superhero field, that was as groundbreaking as Nation's cavalry rescue ride. Spider-Man wasn't a noble adult, he was a selfish teenager whose use of his powers got the most important person in his life indirectly killed, a lesson that shocked him so bad that he devoted himself to heroism as a result. Superman never had to fight crime with a cold, and the Justice Society never had a hero who looked like a monster and couldn't turn it off, yet refused to abandon the cause of good no matter how much society ostracized him. For his flaws, Lee actually made these superhuman people human, and better characters for it.

Alan Moore, who wrote Watchmen, just took the next step. Unfortunately for the genre, it was the same kind of step Nation took, albeit not for the same reasons. Nation would recreate the underpinnings of a genre, while being attached to the most unfortunate content possible. Watchmen would do the same thing, with the exception that its content wasn't unfortunate because of its innate existence.

It was unfortunate because of how its innate existence would be perceived. In my last column, I talked about how the immature desperately seek to be seen as mature (and just prove their immaturity). In my next, I'll take that and the fandom of addiction, and show how Watchmen combined with the two to cast a dark shadow over virtually every comic book that would come out ever since.

Coda: The 'villain' of Birth Of A Nation would primarily be based on Thaddeus Stevens, a man who was decades if not centuries ahead of his time. Fortunately, later films would get better actors and better lines to represent him.

This has nothing to do with comics; I just think it's a great speech.