mr_bad_example

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

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I saw Watchmen this afternoon. It was better than I was expecting—I think it was as good as it could possibly be, given the complexity of the source material.

I'm worried, though, about the influence it's going to have on future comics adaptations, it and The Dark Knight. See, around 1985-86, DC published the one-two punch of the Watchmen comic and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It kicked off what some people call the "Dark Age" of comics. Suddenly, everybody was competing to see who could put out the most DARKNGRITTY comics, each one more godawful than the last. They tried to emulate the style, and the concept of superheroes as damaged people, but they failed to capture the qualities that made Watchmen and DKR great. Every mainstream comic looked like this.

I'm afraid of the same thing that happened to superhero comics happening to superhero films. It's been an awesome couple of years for good, fun films that are simultaneously faithful to the comics and yet also deliver what Tom DeFalco called "hoo-hah." I'm thinking of the first two X-Men films, the first two Spider-Man films, Batman Begins, Iron Man, and hell, I even liked The Incredible Hulk. We don't need the filmic equivalent of Rob Liefeld coming in and wrecking the whole thing. (Some would argue that this has already happened, but that's just uncharitable.)

So if superhero movies could skip the whole "superheroes as sociopathic douchebags" era that the comics industry fell into after Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, I'd be a happy man. That's why I think they need to make a Nextwave film. Less of the derivative brooding anti-hero nonsense, more of THE EXPLODO, please.

If you start the interview by putting me on the defensive about having been out of work since October, then follow it with questions to the effect of,"Well, if you weren't doing automation at your last job, then what WERE you doing?," then you've got no business acting all surprised when I say I don't want to link to you on LinkedIn.

I broke the 2,000-word mark on my "goth Sherlock Homes" story.

Woooo.