Watchmen at Thirty, Pt. 7: A Brother to Dragons

"Just a schoolkid's fantasy
that got out of hand. "

In the seventh chapter of the Watchmen story, the simmering sexual tension between Laurie and Dan finally boils over. Haltingly at first - 

but once they get their costumes on and go out and save some folks, it's all systems go.

That bit about putting on the costumes as a prerequisite for taking them off again is an important part of the superhero deconstruction playing out over all twelve issues of Watchmen. Revolutionary stuff in 1986, to be sure. These few panels of Laurie and Dan hooking up - with Dan's skyship emitting a torrent of flame at a "climactic" moment followed immediately by full frontal post-coital cigarettes (not shown; look it up yourselves, pervs) - were a liberating mash-up of Hitchcock, New Wave artsiness, and superhero comics. All at once and right on down to now, sexual dynamics in comics - the kind you'd find in a book or a film - were on the table. Moore and Gibbons, as brazenly and effectively as John McClane at the end of Die Hard 2, had lit the runway.

Unfortunately, most of the sex-planes that landed in the wake of Watchmen were of the Catwoman New 52 variety: Catwoman and Batman have a Wrestlemania rooftop bang. ("And most of the clothes stayed on." OMFG.) This is not so surprising. As a species, the ability and freedom to do something usually brings a lot more Paradise Hotel than Paradise Lost. Just makes the Paradise Losts of the bunch all the more special. But yeah, as with its other deconstructions and motifs, the sexual boldness of Watchmen was widely imitated but rarely wielded to such effective purpose.

After their first attempt to have sex - all while Ozymandias is flipping around (for charity, of course) on parallel bars on the TV screen in the background, as narrated by a fawning TV commentator. No wonder Dan's not feeling romantic! - Laurie and Jon fall asleep on the couch.

Whereupon Dan begins to dream, remembering this portrait given to him from a disturbed foe of yesteryear.

What's going on here? You can likely figure it out, but just in case I'm not providing enough context: in her guided tour of the Owl-Cave, Laurie discovers the framed memento from Twilight Lady, who had "a thing" for Nite Owl. After the unsuccessful sexual encounter, Dan summons the image of Twilight Lady to mind, then dreams he is embracing her. She unzips his skin-suit to expose his true self, and he does the same, revealing Laurie. Your standard sex fantasy. 

Thing is, it probably would be your standard kind of sex fantasy for a superhero. As we saw in the Spider-Man in the 80s series, this sort of thing was the subtext for a whole lot of Peter Parker's relationship angst. All Moore and Gibbons did was read between the panels and be more explicit about it.

Laurie and Dan decide to fire up the Owl-Ship (Archie, short for Archimedes), and don their costumes, for old time's sake/ blow away the cobwebs.

They save some people from an apartment fire, which gets the ol' juices flowing. Afterward, they park Archie and waste little time in finishing what they began before.

Visually, this issue  makes considerable use of reflections, notably in the post-coital scenes at issue's end -

but earlier as well:

As befits the issue's theme, we see lots more of traditional superheroics in this issue. We're a little closer to Nite Owl's equipment being standard military issue in 2016 than we we were in 1986, but otherwise we're in recognizable comic book territory.

"A Brother to Dragons" ends with Nite Owl's suggestion of springing Rorschach from prison. Rorschach himself doesn't appear in this issue except in flashback.

His landlady does, though.

The supplemental pages are excerpts from a flowery essay Daniel Dreiberg wrote for the American Ornithological Society, "Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas." I think this is a rare supplemental-material misfire from Moore - the voice is completely off for the Dreiberg we see in every other issue. Undoubtedly, this is intentional, i.e. Dreiberg, like most of us, assumes a more scholarly tone for his American Ornithological Society musings, but the effect is jarring and there's no real point to it. I'm not sure it accomplishes anything except hey, here's a fake article from Dan Dreiberg about birds. Perhaps I am missing some huge symbolic meaning. 

If so, please feel free to school me in the comments. Otherwise, see you next time.

~

The Twilight Zone: The Invaders

Next up:

Season 2, Episode 15.
Originally aired January 27, 1961.

"This is one of the out-of-the-way places. The unvisited places. Bleak. Wasted. Dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude. A house without electricity or gas. A house untouched by progress." 

"This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years. A strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat." 

"A woman about to face terror which is even now coming at her... from the Twilight Zone."

"The Invaders" is one of those Twilight Zone episodes that takes a classic Hollywood star - 

Agnes Moorehead, one of the original Mercury Players and later rebranded even more enduringly - something that irritated her greatly - as Endora on Bewitched.

and places her in the fantastic scenarios the series so often explores. 

This undoubtedly worked to the show's advantage - much easier to accept said-fantastic-scenario if the face on the screen is the trusted celebrity of yesteryear. And unlike the faded-celeb-sploitation of later eras, the presence of so many classic Hollywood actors and directors - Mooerhead, Dana Andrews, Richard Conte, Buster Keaton, Ida Lupino, Jacques Tourneur, Ann Blyth, Mickey Rooney, to name some of the more prominent ones - in so many classic episodes only enhances their already considerable CVs.

In Moorehead's case, she gets to carry a mostly wordless episode where she communicates only via pantomime, hissing, and guttural moans. As the from AV Club notes: "(Her) performance almost completely lacks vanity, and it’s a wonder to behold. She thrashes around on the floor in pain. She lets drool drip from her lips in her one extreme close-up. She acts more like some strange creature than a human being."

"And, of course, she is a strange creature."

The story is simple. Moorhead's wordless character lives in this remote ramshackle home and hears something land on the roof. (Or, rather, crash through it.) She investigates to discover a flying saucer and two Michelin-men-looking spacemen, armed with ray guns. She knocks one of them down the hatchway, and the other shoots at her.

These clever little spacemen adapt quickly, making good use of one of her knives to lay in wait and slash at her ankles.

They also trick her into reaching for the doorhandle to slash at her hands.

Of course, things can end only one way: 

As she smashes the ship, she hears something from inside - the final report of the last of the invaders, sending out an exhausted last transmission: "Gresham is dead... Incredible race of giants here. No counter attack... too powerful! Stay away! Gresham and I are…finished." At which point we pan over the only part of ship left intact:

"These are the invaders: the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined. The invaders, who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag. And we have just seen it entered into a ledger that covers all the transactions of the universe, a bill stamped 'paid in full,' and to be found on file…in the Twilight Zone."

As mentioned at the ol' vortex: "One of the most memorable features of this episode is the panic-laden score composed by Twilight Zone veteran Jerry Goldsmith. No doubt taking a cue from Bernard Hermann's famous score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which was released the year before, Goldsmith uses mostly harsh strings and occasional piano arrangements which greatly add to the unsettling atmosphere in this episode."

Poor Bernard Hermann. In the days before sampling, his work for Hitchcock must have been lifted in a hundred different ways, but his work for Psycho - so much more than a score and more like contributing new vocabulary to all of cinema, still in circulation today - more than any. Not that I mind here - the score for "The Invaders" definitely elevates an already-great episode into the absolutely-essential.

~