Next weekend, Watchmen opens in theaters nationwide, and in preparation, I've been re-reading the trade paperback of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons twelve-issue comic book series. Now, Watchmen premiered in 1988, a year or two after I stopped reading and collecting comic books (and I didn't start again until five years ago), so I never read it when it debuted, and I had never heard of it until I started reading comic books again about five years ago. Oh, but what I missed.
Watchmen--whose surface premise centers on the mystery surrounding the murder of an aged and amoral superhero (though the comics are about much, much more)--is routinely hailed as one of the best--if not the best--comic books ever produced, though it does have its share of detractors. While fans and critics may disagree on the book's greatness, what's usually agreed upon is the comic's seminal influence* on the entire comic book industry. In the comic, Moore (and Gibbons) look at superheroes from an objective, distanced standpoint, and they attempt to portray how superheroes might really function, over time, in the "real" world, and the results ain't pretty, as the creators don't objectify these costumed individuals. They look at them as complex individuals, with all the ticks and flaws inherant in even the best of us, and what they display is sad, heartbreaking, and tragic.
So far, in my re-reading, I've just finished the fourth issue, and the character that most fascinates me is Doctor Manhattan, the focus of the fourth issue (and part of the third). Jon Osterman is--in tried-and-true comic book form--an "ordinary" scientist who's transformed by a (formulaic, but that's the point) mishap into a superhuman being who can teleport, walk through walls, and re-arrange matter on a molecular level--meaning, basically, that he could transform physical reality into whatever he wanted it to be. As Moore and Gibbons present him, Osterman--before transformation--is a pretty straight board, not quite a milquetoast, but not possessing of a very strong or social personality, either. After his transformation, Osterman's personality doesn't actually seem to change very much, as he's very distanced and cerebral and analytic, all traits that Osterman held in the first place.
There's a subtle change. Osterman--as Manhattan--just doesn't seem completely human, as if he's lacking some small ingredient. He's like those computer-generated cartoons of people, like those found in the early days of Pixar movies, those that certainly look and behave like human beings, but they're just off enough to cause a general sense of unease. There's a disconnect there; something's amiss, as if just underneath the surface, there's a mysterious being or world or abyss waiting for us to come close enough to grab us and turn our nightmares into reality.
It's this type of surreal disconnect that I find running underneath the current of the Starlight Mints' "Inside of Me." It's a flawless pop song, with hooks a' plenty, but it's not too saccharine: the glossy production still brings the rock via Duane Eddy-like reverberating and shimmering distorted guitar, the "Werewolves of London" rolling piano, and through the drummer's steady back-beat, and the hooks are distributed well and given space to work their magic without overwheming the senses.
The song's nothing new, nothing revolutionary, and is very reminiscent of the art-pop work of Robyn Hitchcock and Crowded House and the Flaming Lips. The record sounds like it could have been made in the '90s, or the '80s, or the '70s (not before, though, as the background vocals and harmony style are too Jeff Lynne-like to have existed before ELO started in the mid '70s). That's not to say this record's completely derivative, 'cause it's not; in fact, I can't think of any glossy, uptempo, pop-rock songs that are quite like this one. What makes this record so unique?
"Inside of Me" possesses the damnedest quality of being happy, catchy, and utterly creepy. I think the creepy quality comes from the sum of several different factors: the reverberating guitar (and the production that, a couple of times, lets the guitar reverberate all by itself with no other sound surrounding it); the horror fun-house piano that cascades up and down the scale, a very Caligari-esque quality (not the piano's sound, though; just the constant chords going up and down); the indecipherable nature of the background vocals, sounding like some old ELO vocals being played backwards; the singer's sliding phrasing at the ends of the verses; and snatches of the cryptic lyrics ("Come inside and be my skin and bones," "We could fall on through," "The mess that breathes inside me"), which are almost assuredly about the speaker wanting a companion to "complete" him...but they don't come across that way.
The lyrics--at least the ones that I could decipher the first time I heard the song--seem to be issued by one who's ready to descend into some world that is not the one we know, some Lovecraftian universe that's out of colour and space and time, just as Doctor Manhattan is, essentially, out of colour and space and time. He basically lives inside his own quantum field that touches upon all moments upon his own timeline all at once. Manhattan--for all intents and purposes--is deja-vu...all over again (God love Yogi Berra). And what is deja vu but a glimpse into another world that is not currently our own, a sense of slipping into a place where we're not meant to be, a place where we don't belong, though we're there anyway, and we've always been there, a Twilight Zone, a nightmare of past lives, an undercurrent of unease and disconnect that is as timeless as it is haunting, much like Watchmen and much like this song.
*The critical and financial success of Moore's and Gibbons's deconstruction of the idealistic heroes of their (and our) youth sent out a hydrogen bomb-level flare over the comics industry, as the tropes and trappings in Watchmen were then used to usher in a new era of comic books, in which most comics turned grim and gritty, where joy and fun were looked at as ridiculous notions of an older, hackneyed age. Most of the subsequent comics using this cynical approach (and Moore's and Gibbons's comic wasn't cynical; it just appeared that way to many upon first read as many of the heroes therein are cynical) turned out to be dreary and drudgery without one whit of what really made Watchmen special: the multi-layered plot, the complexity of the characters' motives and emotions, the unflinching view of politics, and--especially--the duality of the heroic and tragic aspects of each of its major characters.
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