I’m impressed at how Snyder’s pornography of violence meshed so well with Alan Moore’s repulsive nihilism. The end result was a very good movie that still left a really bad taste in my mouth.

As for the “cometary halo,” the problem with the model is that it propagates backwards in time, starting as a diffuse mist of knowledge and anticipation, then slowly converging to a single hard core when the media text itself goes “live.” In its countertemporality it’s like the Devron anomaly in “All Good Things …” — a reference I suspect you’ll get. Geek high five!

Occasionally I find myself justifying the appeal of what I consider genre expanding works like Watchmen or the new Battlestar Galactica (before its recent decline) in conversations with those like my wife who are highly educated but who don’t share these interests.

Since aesthetic discussions have a tendency to regress towards justifications of personal perference rooted in conceptions of self identity, I try to steer clear of these types of conversations. When I do engage in them, I try to describe a work in terms of what other works in its genre have done before it. In the case of science fiction, sometimes its appropriate to look across genres for these comparisons.

That brings us to the Watchmen movie. What has been missing in so much of the mainstream reviews of the movie –NYTimes, Washingtonpost, Salon, etc. is this very comparison to other superhero movies, an attempt to situate the film within the conventions those movies, and at least an acknowledgement that this film is in many ways very very different.

My wife will never see this movie, and even if she did, she probably wouldn’t enjoy it. But she did appreciate Watchmen more when I told her what the graphic novel repesented an attempt to show the superhero–and by extension the genre–as politically suspect, morally flawed, and sexually perverse.

I actually try to make that point about literature: the “high culture” and “classics” mostly exist and are revered not because they appealed to some abstract aestheticism, but because people enjoyed them over and over and over until other artists imitated them and did variations and it became a “classic” by hard-won longevity. Opera and Shakespeare, both overwrought in our imaginations, are great entertainment at a lot of levels without a whole lot of preparation, but we put them on pedestals and it kills them.

Pete Seeger said, “The worst thing you can do to a song is make it official.” The worst thing you can do to a work of literature is make it a “classic.”