The overarching theme of this column being the relationship between a song, a given movie scene, and that scene’s relation to the given film as a whole, this week’s selection is an instance when the song choice did not work. The 2009 screen adaptation of Watchmen, directed by Zack Snyder from a script credited to David Hayter and Alex Tse, was met with mixed reactions, and is indeed a bit of a mixed bag. Snyder is a filmmaker with no shortage of visual imagination, and his fidelity to Dave Gibbons’ art is manifest, taking great pains to replicate Gibbons’ panels with camera moves and edits. Sometimes this works, sometimes—as in the occasionally disastrous attempts to recreate Gibbons’ yellows—it doesn’t. But the film is, by and large, an impressive-looking thing, and very much of a piece with the comic.
It’s in other areas that Snyder’s Watchmen falters, as in the entirely-too-literal approach to Alan Moore’s story, which in its original form existed almost entirely as an excuse to deconstruct superhero comics as a genre, and even comics as a medium. As a story it’s not a bad one, but stripped of that original context it’s not enough to hold up the piece as a whole, and certainly not to the standard the comic is held by its fans. Snyder himself does the material no favors by, in contrast to the lovely subtlety of some of the framing and design, completely disregarding any kind of nuance with the sound, with every scene mixed to ear-splitting, bone-rattling volume, and, per our purpose today, some of the most jarringly on-the-nose song selections in living memory.
This is, of course, a subjective judgment. And, admittedly, some of the extremely famous songs the film uses work. The opening titles, featuring Snyder’s marvelous knack for concise, imaginatively staged visual exposition, are not ruined by Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” although the visuals themselves adequately conveyed the idea of temporal progression on their own. Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” to a funeral scene is, again, not a disaster but not particularly necessary either, with the ubiquity of the song (not to mention its inelegantly prominent place in the sound mix) acting more to alienate than anything else. Still, it’s a brief enough scene as to not be a real problem.
But there is one scene where tone-deafnesss—narrative rather than literal, to be clear—derails the entire movie. This is, a bit past the halfway point in both the theatrical and extended editions, when Dan (Patrick Wilson) and Laurie (Malin Akerman) celebrate their successful (and illegal) rescue of the inhabitants of a burning tenement building by having sex on Dan’s airship as it flies on autopilot. It’s reasonable that they do so; they tried in an earlier scene only to be foiled by Dan’s angst-induced and heavily symbolic impotence. Now, having ceased trying unsuccessfully to repress his desire to return to costumed adventuring, and having successfully pulled off some superhero business with the lady of his affections, why not seize the thrill of the moment and the eroticism of danger and try again? Indeed, why not?
Alas, this is the very moment when “Hallelujah” intrudes. To be clear, “Hallelujah” is an excellent song. It’s a marvel of construction by Leonard Cohen, one of the great songwriters. It spawned two cover versions, first by John Cale and then Jeff Buckley, that each became classics in their own right. Both versions are better recordings than Cohen’s, though, and it’s Cohen’s original that features on the Watchmen soundtrack. It’s a bit stiff-sounding, hampered by the tinny, artificial production that predominated in the early-to-mid 1980s, especially in contrast to Cohen’s soulful vocal. That said, it’s not a bad recording, merely a lot less emotionally moving and bound to this earth than one might infer from the title or reading the lyrics (which are, per Cohen’s usual standard, sublime).
It is a stunningly awful choice for a sequence where two lovers, having rediscovered their passion for adventuring, consummate their passion with each other. And, to a degree that even seen does not inspire belief, the sex is choreographed and cut to the music. That the sex looks absurd to anyone who’s ever had it is one thing—at one point Laurie is mounting Dan from an angle that makes it appear as though his penis is emerging from his knee—but another entirely is that Dan’s thrusts into Laurie are timed exactly in sync with Leonard Cohen and his backup vocalists singing, “Hallelujah!” The SYMBOLIC! jet of flame triggered by Laurie’s elbow (a bit of business taken straight from the comic) as they near climax also syncs up with the song’s title.
There are as many ways to have sex as there are configurations of people to have it. This is not the issue. What is, is that this fairly crucial scene in the film (the revelation that Laurie has slept with Dan nearly causes her blue, nudist, healthy bepenised omnipotent former lover who represents perhaps humanity’s last hope against nuclear annihilation to consider abandoning humanity forever) ends up being—rather than erotic, poignant, cathartic, or any number of other narratively valid readings—sidesplittingly funny. It may, indeed, be the funniest bad sex scene in the history of film.
It would not be so without “Hallelujah.” Or, more accurately, the complete absence of judgment that led to its selection for this scene. It’s perfectly clear what went through the person’s mind who made the decision: “Well, the dictionary says that ‘Hallelujah’ is an expression of joy, praise, or gratitude that translates literally to ‘praise ye the Lord,’ so because Dan is like relieved that he can get erect and have sex with Laurie, the song can be like his saying ‘Hallelujah.’” But the thing is, we know the two of them are about to have really good sex. We know this because we’re watching the movie.
This is, really, the biggest problem with this scene. If left well enough alone, it is, at worst, a competently composed (except for the bizarre apparent penis placement) sequence where two people who look rather nice naked have an R-rated good time for a couple minutes. Letting the audience fill in the textual significance by finding the scene titillating would be, however gratuitous some might find the nudity, infinitely preferable to screaming in the audience’s ear “LOOK! THIS IS A TRIUMPHANT MOMENT FOR THEM, AND ESPECIALLY HIM! LOOK!” (And “screaming” is most certainly the word, given how loud the song is in the mix.)
Life is, among its many splendors, full of missed opportunities. This scene was certainly one of them, but for all its absurdity and almost surreal tonal inappropriateness, it is still nothing to get all that worked up about. Watchmen is still a movie with some good bits in it, and “Hallelujah” will be “Hallelujah” for as long as there is music. Their overlap, however, was unfortunate. Unless, of course, one needs a good laugh, in which case it’s absolutely splendid.
