Richard Dansky

There are a couple of different types of people who don’t like the recent film adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen. Some just don’t like it, either for its over-the-top violence or comic books-gone-wild subject matter. Some are hardcore graphic novel fanboys, who would only have found a movie satisfactory if it had consisted of loving close-ups of each panel in the book itself, narrated by Alan Moore as scantily-clad waitresses fed them skinless grapes and ambrosia.

(I’ll give you a minute to let that image dissipate. Terrifying, isn’t it?)

And then there’s the ones who just Don’t Get It. They don’t understand why the heroes aren’t heroic. They don’t understand how the superest of superheroes can’t actually manage to save the day, effortlessly. And they’re the ones who open pretty much every critique with a factoid from the film’s setting that they absolutely cannot get past: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon is President. How can this be, they ask. It’s wrong! It’s not what happened (an amusing commentary about a narrative that asks one to accept the possibility of a nearly omniscient, blue, omnipotent nudist)! And so on and so forth, and they hang their dislike off of that first, initial peg. If the film got that wrong, goeth the logic, then the rest of it must be disregarded. Start on a bad foot and never find your way, or something to that effect.

Why does this seemingly minor detail of setting matter so much? It’s because it’s a signifier, and it means much more to the narrative than it would seem. The Nixon presidency, trumpeted early and often, signifies that this is not our world. It tells the viewer that this is a place where the crooked are in power, where power has been kept in the same hands for too long, where Tricky Dick got away with Watergate.

(Those who wish to dive deeper into the murky waters of literary criticism and postulate that the four-term Nixon administration posited in the graphic novel is also a subtle commentary on the implicit fascist motif inherent in the superhero narrative are welcome to do so. Just not right now.)

Why that signifier? There are lots of reasons. It’s because it’s a powerful one – Nixon is one of the most polarizing figures in American political history, one whose mere presence is enough to evoke a strong emotional response. It’s because it instantly contravenes the rules we all instinctively know and observe – Presidents get two terms, not four; Nixon is dead, not the President – and that simultaneously gets our attention while pointing out that things are indeed sub-optimal.

In short, it uses a variety of techniques to go straight to the literary equivalent of the lizard brain, where it jacks up an immediate response with no exposition necessary. In other words, it acts as a highly effective signifier.

Signifiers are shortcuts. They’re instantly recognizable symbols that tell the audience something big in quick shorthand. For example, the movie Taken opens with a scene of Liam Neeson’s character hanging out in his living room with some empty Chinese food cartons on the table. These are, of course, the standard Hollywood signifier for “sad and lonely single man” because, you know, sad and lonely single men can’t cook. And through this quick visual shorthand, the audience instantly understands that Neeson’s character doesn’t really care about himself, doesn’t really worry about keeping things up, and so forth – in other words, that he’s a divorced middle-aged dude who isn’t terribly happy. That preps us for all the exposition that follows, wherein we learn that he’s divorced, has a daughter he’s trying to reconnect with, retired from his job and doesn’t do much with himself, etc. – all summed up in those lonely, empty cartons.

And of course, it works for books, too. Think back to every steampunk novel you’ve ever read. What’s the first thing on the page? The zeppelin. Why? Because it’s a potent symbol of a time that isn’t now and never quite was, an easy signifier for the time before technology took off in its current direction, and most of all it’s big.

Not just physically big, either. It’s a statement about transportation, about technology, about the politics and culture and world necessary to support commercially viable zeppelins. All of that is bundled into that solitary image of the giant gasbag soaring over the skyline, which says “this world is not yours.”

When used properly, signifiers are a tremendous help. They take away the need for a great deal of lengthy up-front exposition by hauling out a bulk set of reader expectations. This in turn allows the writer to get to the important stuff, like where the zeppelin is going, or why precisely Liam Neeson is now a shiftless slob of an ex-secret agent.

Then again, they’re not always used properly. Signifiers can and often do go really wrong, in which case they engender far more work than they eliminate. The first is the choice of a signifier that doesn’t resonate well. If your choice of signifier doesn’t mean what you think it means to your audience, doesn’t immediately call up everything you want it to stand for, then you’re in trouble. Here’s where it makes sense to channel your inner Carly Simon and remember that it’s not all about you. It doesn’t matter that two of the shiftless middle-aged slobs you know share the trait of leaving DVDs out of their packages on the coffee table. That’s not something that’s perceived as a universal character trait, one that helps define a class of character (except, perhaps, “people who hate DVDs”). It’s something that defines the specific people you know, and the people outside of your immediate circle – who, ideally, will make up the bulk of your audience, unless you know a lot of people – won’t view it as anything other than one particular character’s quirkiness. The signifier must stand for something that is accessible, not just to you, but to anyone who might pick up the book. Individuate it too much in the quest to dodge cliché, and you wind up with something that isn’t a signifier at all.

And that brings us back to Watchmen, and its initial declaration of unreality in the form of the extended Nixon Presidency. In the graphic novel, it was largely left out there by itself, a “wait-a-minute” spit-take inducer for those reading the text carefully. The film, however, doesn’t trust the signifier to stand on its own, instead offering up an extended montage of the movie world’s alternate history over the opening credits, the better to gently prepare the audience for what comes next. It lacks the all-or-nothing wager on the image that the iconic signifier contains, but then again, in theory it leaves far less room for wiggle and misinterpretation and misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, of the fact that this is indeed a corrupted alternate history. Ultimately, it’s a lesson in the power of strong signifying images to establish the terrain for a work, both for good and for ill. It’s also a cautionary tale for the would-be signifying writer to choose signifying moments and images carefully, and with good reason. A good signifier saves the writer a lot of less-interesting up-front work. A bad one runs the risk of poisoning the well for the rest of the project . And that’s all the more reason to be careful and sure when unleashing one.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go order some Chinese food to my hotel room. With luck, they’ll clean out the empty cartons in the morning.