The Watchmen DVD. Also: in defense of Laurie Juspeczyk

So Watchmen comes out today. But I'm not buying it. Because it's not done yet. Dagnabit. I'm so tired of companies trying to milk DVD releases for all their worth. It's bad enough that my 100+ DVD collection isn't in BluRay (and double bad that I picked HD DVD at first!) which means I've got half of BSG in standard def and one day will have half in high def, but why not just release the damn full version concurrently with the director's cut?

You know the one I mean. The one with "Black Freighter" and "Under the Hood" intercut with the movie. The one Snyder promises is coming. What if DVD sales of this version suck? Do we not get it? Will they poll how many of us are waiting for the full version before deciding?

By the way, now that Watchmen is dropping on DVD, it gives me an excuse to write about it. In case you couldn't tell. I was chatting about it with Anika of Fantastic Fangirls (whoa, I totally just name-dropped) yesterday, because I was thinking about writing this post and what I would say that would be 1) different to what I wrote in my livejournal when it came out and 2) hopefully different than what's been written about before. Though probably not, because the internet is big and mighty and I am small and uncreative.

Women! Specifically: Laurie! See? The title was relevent. (Oh. This will have spoilers.)

So I vaguely recall reading somewhere something about Alan Moore and women. I don't remember what it was, but I remember it being negative. I never really thought his women were particularly weak or anything, especially since the first thing I ever ready by Alan Moore was V for Vendetta. But in chatting yesterday, I could see how, yeah, the women of Watchmen (the few there are) could certainly be seen as weak. In a dated kind of way.

Like.

Nothing happens without Laurie Juspeczyk. That's it. She's the lynch pin of the entire story. But at the same time, she's defined by the men in her life. The Comedian (passively for most of the story), Dr. Manhattan, and then Dan Dreiberg. She's not moving forward on her own volition, it seems like, she's tumbling from man to man. That's pretty classic. We say women are important but we always then have to throw in this thing about some man they're with, to make them more human to us. A woman isn't human without a man, you know (this is why I have mixed feelings on the Uhura/Spock relationship of the latest Trek movie; it's very nice to watch, and Uhura is an interesting character, and I get that she's the exact opposite of Spock, but.. I don't know, let her me on her own for a movie... and NO LOVE TRIANGLES). Sorry, digressive parenthetical. Right, Watchmen, women, Laurie.

(By the way, I'm using the picture above because I love the art of the movie version of Watchmen. I want the photography book. I love looking at the stills. It's amazing. It turned a comic with art I wasn't too keen on - nothing against Dave Gibbons, but I'm just not into that style - and made it into something that blew me away.)

So Laurie is defined by the men she's with. Or... is she?

She's the one person that Adrian doesn't seem to have a handle on. He manipulates almost everyone else, but not Laurie. Of course, there could be a reason for that. He's pretty clearly, if subtextually, set up as either asexual or homosexual, so it's possible that's an anvil. But Adrian does just fine jerking Janey Slater around, so I'm choosing to ignore that possibility for now. Laurie, by virtue of being who she is - a second generation mask raised/pushed by another mask, a woman, and a daughter of a single mother - makes decisions that change the world, and that, despite the ending turning out the way Adrian wanted, don't fit into Adrian's plan.

Now, I'm not saying Laurie is the central character to this story. One of the good things about Watchmen is that it's everyone's intertwined choices and actions that lead them to the inevitable result (squid or no squid, it's all the same, thematically, to me). But Laurie is a woman in a man's world, and she's arguably the strongest of all of them. She can handle things Dan can't. She can know truths reserved for Doctor Manhattan. And she can make decisions without having her strings pulled. And it's the way people react to her decisions that change things, not vice versa. Dan puts back on the costume largely because of her. The Doc leaves largely because of her. Rorschach... is insane. But you get the idea. Laurie is important, and not just passively, but also because of what she chooses to do, how she chooses to do it, and who she chooses to do it with.

Oh, and she can kick your ass.

So Laurie's not as bad as she seems at first blush. Sure, she dresses awfully (like every other woman in comics, really). She's a bit angry. She smokes like a chimney, and has some weird mullet-like hair cut. She's got mommy issues, daddy issues, and probably a few other issue to boot (like every character in that story). But in the end she's not a weak character, and I don't think she's defined by her relationships with men quite as much as they're defined by their relationships with her.