Lonely Blue Boys

ABBOT GENSER/MIRAMAX FILMS
Jesse Eisenberg and Martin Starr in Adventureland

April 1, 2009: They don't see me as I slip through this multiplex, down shadowy troughs of aisles that reek of the corruption of butter topping gone sour in perverse imitativeness and price inflation. Someday they will cleanse these aisles. Someday the bonelike crunch beneath my shoes, the viscosity like drying blood, will stop crying in my ears like the anguish choked back by an abused boy, the kind who's alone and smashes people and narrates highly regarded graphic novels. But not tonight. Tonight, in what we've made of America, even the dark rain that has been falling for hours in this theater won't wash away the sick popcorn of human depravity, because there are only three people left who are willing to buy tickets for Watchmen, and as I sink into a shame of lumpish upholstery the other two avert their eyes. One of them looks like Nixon.

So this is what we've become: a sparse and flaky excrescence on the surface of mass-market culture, like dandruff in the thin hair of an aging character actor. Soon the show will begin, and for 162 minutes I will witness the truth of Watchmen. Not the false truth of "a movie," which the others will see, but the true truth of a significant pattern in contemporary thought and social life, visible only to me and my dying kind. Freak, they call me. Psycho. Vigilante. Film critic.

For weeks, months, I've monitored this target. I've tracked the split between the authors of the graphic novel, the lawsuit between the owners of the movie rights, the argument among Watchmen observers over the plan to release this film with an R rating. (Yes, one of the superheroes has a big blue penis, and it's all over the trades that grasping moneymen want to expose this thing to teenage boys, but with their rancid, hypocritical R rating they've trapped themselves, because now teenage boys aren't allowed to walk down these mean aisles. They watch for free on the Internet.) I can already smell irony waft off the ideological forces, the economic imperatives, the currents of history thick with the past's nameless and forgotten plankton, all of them about to clash in this site of contention called Watchmen--and yet I know the others will see nothing of this, nothing except stop-time kung fu rumbles on the rain-slick nocturnal streets of a parallel-universe New York.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.