"Television and movies have short-circuited reality," Alan Moore told me back in 2004, when his dense classic Watchmen was just a canonical comic rather than a popcorn movie. "I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen."
The situation, as the English writer sees it, has only worsened since. His distaste for director Zack Snyder's forthcoming adaptation of Watchmen has gotten nastier, but Moore's having a swell time watching the film get kicked around like a financial football by Fox and Warner Bros.
"Will the film even be coming out?" Moore wisecracked to Los Angeles Times' comics blog Hero Complex. "There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic. Perhaps it's been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come."
He's got a right. Watchmen fanboys might squeal over the forthcoming adaptation, but Hollywood has royally screwed Moore's pooch before. Cinematic adaptations of Moore's brilliant From Hell, clever The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, influential Constantine and still-topical V for Vendetta were worse than forgettable; they were nearly unforgivable exercises in bloat and waste. And Moore isn't in a forgiving mood, especially when it comes to film.
"I find film in its modern form to be quite bullying," Moore told Hero Complex. "It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms."
The only exceptional worm in the Moore feeding frenzy may in fact be a documentary about him, called The Mindscape of Alan Moore, an excerpt of which is above. If you want to see his true genius at work on the wide screen, start there and work your way outward. It may be the longest, strangest trip you ever take.
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