Demos: In A Million Pieces

The title is a bit of a double entendre. In A Million Pieces is a record by the Draft, which I heartily endorse, but the name still might ring a different bell. A Million Little Pieces is a book that lots of people read, only to find out the author lied, fabricated or distorted much of his own life in the book. In a piece about reading and literacy, it's fun to echo a book that many people have read and been excited about only to be disappointed.

Plus, there's been a post...three out of the last five days. Can we keep it going?

In 2003 the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) put out a list of 100 of England's favorite books, based on a poll of their viewers. Now, in 2009, it is getting reborn as a Facebook meme.

The Facebook-spread meme heading states that the BBC believes people will read only six out of the 100 books. A quick Google search yields nothing from the BBC's perspective, so this heading sounds fictitious. (I think I saw this float around Livejournal once back in the earlier part of this decade. What's old is new again.) But that's not the real issue. The real issue in my mind is that this seems to be interpreted by otherwise intelligent people as a sign that we are living in illiterate times.

They might be right, but not for the reasons they think.

One, they're just going along with something they saw on the internet, but more importantly, that list isn't the arbiter of who or what is literate. (There are reading comprehension problems because until recently United States schools were not promised a lot of money—especially those that did not teach white kids.)
The list wasn't meant to be definitive, but even if it was trying to be, it never could be. There is always going to be something important left out. The list is written from one perspective, which privileges one form of expression over another.

White people writing in a traditional manner are overly represented and graphic novels are non-existent. But what's important to me is the reactions.
Many of the responses on Facebook I see appear to be a variation of the following: "I haven't read enough of these" or "based on the fact that more people haven't read these books, we live in illiterate times and that's depressing" and "I've read this many!"

That second response infuriates me. First, it's narcissistic and self-centered. It privileges the social class that has the time and energy to read these books by assuming that the list is definitive and applicable for everyone, everywhere else. They decide what is on that list. Mastery of it constitutes literacy. They ignore other forms of the written word, whether in newspapers, ads or printed on the internet.

What makes someone literate is how deeply they can read into the material, not how far they've gotten on some viral reading list, using the BBC’s coattails as a shield. Reading half or none of these books at age 22 (or 88) doesn't make you literate. It just shows you different ways to use language. Put me in a Staten Island high school and (if I’m lucky) I might recognize half of what's being said or expressed. The language of “Pride and Prejudice” isn't going to help me there. For that matter, neither will “Dune” by Frank Herbert.

Language is about expressing yourself with the written word regardless of what form you choose. All of the BBC’s books will help you, but what will help you more is knowing what to use and where and how to make connections between people and ideas that would otherwise remain distant from each other, lessons which doesn’t have to come from that list.

That experience and that knowledge doesn’t have to come from books. Illiteracy isn’t when people aren’t reading classics. Illiteracy is when people aren’t reading at all.

About That Watchmen Movie...

I enjoyed the Watchmen movie. I had a lot of fun watching it as well. That's it. I feel that's all I can say with certainty.

Everything else is my opinion and interpretation.

But, let's talk about it. This will have spoilers throughout it, but I don't mean them to break anyone's non-knowledge of the movie for the purposes of being a douchebag.

Wait, what? Zach actually posted? Do you know how long I've been bugging him about this? And....he's wrong. It's been eleven months since he posted something native to Eleven Names. But shhhhhh. That's between you and me.

It's good to have him back.

The movie he missed last night was Watchmen. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it as a movie. I enjoyed it as a distillation of the graphic novel, I think. Make no mistake, this movie is worth your money, I believe. I personally paid $7.50 for it, though that may roughly double depending on where you live.

The change at the end...in retrospect doesn't feel so bad. Oh, don't worry. All the people that were supposed to die still did. (Rorschach is still dead by the credits, even if Jon (Dr. Manhattan) did him the final grace of having his blood explode and land on the snow as his symbol.) The difference (in the non-alien ending and New York not becoming Tentacle Town, as a friend of Eleven Names put it) is from where the destruction comes, which I guess, is a point of contention.

I'm not sure how to interpret that change. Am I supposed to see the lack of non-human lifeform as something anathema to the book's message? That the threat posed to earth by Ozymandias' machinations was not one that could be pointed to a terrestrial source? That the threat was Othered, uniting all of humanity, regardless of race, belief, sexuality and country against it? If so, then you'll be content.

For that matter, what is the message of the book? One friend of Eleven Names said that the movie sold out the book by portraying the characters as too likeable. It made them heroes at the end when they weren't supposed to be, which sold out the movie, he believes. I don't want to straw-man his argument.

(I think he reads this, so I'll respond to this here, and so to him, I say: if I neglected an important point of your argument, let me know and I'll edit this accordingly!)

He said the point of the movie was that the protagonists weren't heroes and to portray them as such, to airbrush their unenviable traits, (Silk Spectre II wasn't whiny enough, Rorsarch wasn't obviously insane enough, etc.) was to sell out the message of the book, which was these people aren't heroes. He believes that the movie made Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II into heroes because they went along with the lie and are going back to small-time superheroics.

I believe he's wrong. I haven't read Watchmen carefully yet. It's a huge book. I've read it two or three times, but not carefully, so I can't tell if Silk Spectre II should have been more whiny, but I'm fairly sure the book had many meanings, and many messages to bring to the reader. When we spoke, he seemed adamant to say the story was about heroes. What should be, what they are, etc. I'm not sure it's right to say the book was about one thing, above a bunch of other ones. Was it about how close humanity was/is to nuclear annihilation and what it would take to make humans back off that ledge of holocaust?

Is the film about our collective hubris to let large world powers steadily decline into a place where they feel nuclear attacks are the only option and what would save us or is it just about heroes?

I think it's about all of that and more I can't wrap my head around or understand because I haven't read it carefully. Saying the movie has a singular meaning above all the other ones is something I think I can reasonably I disagree with.

There was one part that didn't sit quite right to me, above a lot of others that didn't as well.

It's not a spoiler if you've read the book, but in the end, Jon, (Dr. Manhattan, a.k.a. Tiny God, LLC), sees Silk Spectre II and Dan (Nite Owl II) naked, obviously having finished sex, asleep. He smiles, in what I take to be content and joy, then walks up to Ozymandias, who has a very "human to God" conversation, in which Jon says he doesn't know what's going to happen, but he knows that it's going to continue and it's not over. He then says he's going to create some life somewhere else.

In the movie, he kisses Silk Spectre II once more before he goes off to create life and he doesn't say that to Ozymandias, he says it to Silk Spectre II before the kiss. And I'm not sure how to interpret that change. Am I supposed to be angry because Jon, in the book, was supposed to finally have accepted his godhood and detachment from the mortal coil and it is shown through the smile and not interrupting the budding romance between Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II to say goodbye or anything, and in the movie he goes for a final kiss to the woman whom he tried to love, possibly ruining that interpretation of events?

I was already in Mr. Snyder's corner and so it shouldn't be surprising that I interpret Watchmen to be very faithful to the book, to its possible detriment as a movie with enough fanboy moments to reassure me that Mr. Snyder is dead serious about paying respect with little bits of love weaved into every scene.

Perhaps the movie is too long for Joe Popcorn, as the Onion's A.V. Club mused, but for me it was a little short. An HBO miniseries sounds like a good idea, but Watchmen is simply too expensive to pull off as anything but a huge Hollywood blockbuster, according to the director. The action scenes are exciting and in a moment of sheer generic masculine excitement, fucking awesome! For some people, that might ruin the movie, but I don't think I could stand a movie that was all exposition and dialogue without something easier to digest to break it up.

Even using the phrase easier to digest sets off warning bells in some people and they're right to be concerned. Watchmen is not something that's easy to digest as a whole, but there are individual portions that go down easier than others, and when viewed from that perspective, those slow-motion action sequences make more sense in the context of the movie.

The Watchmen movie still has to be a movie, and I'm not going to lie, without those action scenes, I would have been looking at my pocketwatch a lot more, which is not something you want to happen in a movie. Different artists make some changes to original material for their interpretations. The example that works best in my mind is Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt, originally written by Nine Inch Nails.

If you're a fan of the book, your own prejudices, reasonably cultivated, I believe, are going to inform your opinion more than any review or perspective I can give you, so I'll say this:

I view the point of the Watchmen, the book, to be to leave the reader with more questions than answers by a long shot. Some of those questions are centered around heroes. Other questions are centered around other considerations. I feel that the movie left me with more questions than answers about the nature of heroes, who they are, the extent of an all-encompassing personal moral compass and how close the world is to its own demise by people who won't compromise their position, regardless of whether they're in a beat-up raincoat, the Presidency or the Kremlin. From my perspective, Zack Snyder and everyone involved with the adaption succeeded.

I enjoy the movie and I recommend it to you, whether you've read the book or not.







Oh, and I almost forgot: Rorschach is bad ass.