Watchmen writer Alan Moore compares superhero films to Birth of a Nation
Alan Moore, creator of the Watchmen and V for Vendetta comics, has compared superhero films to DW Griffiths’s 1915 work Birth of a Nation in a newly-translated interview.
“The superheroes [on film] themselves,” Moore told the Brazilian writer and editor Raphael Sassaki in 2016, “would seem to be largely employed as cowardice compensators, perhaps a bit like the handgun on the night-stand.
“Save for a smattering of non-white characters and non-white creators,” he added, “these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race.
“In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.”
Moore’s comments continue a recent debate around the dominance of superhero films at the box office, and the fundamental value of the genre.
The director Francis Ford Coppola last month branded them “despicable”, adding that “we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration.”
His peer Martin Scorsese had, a few weeks before, likened Marvel films to “theme parks”, saying that blockbusters such as Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel were “not cinema”.
In the interview with Sassaki, Moore goes on to make a similar argument about infantilisation.
“Mass-market superhero movies,” he says, “seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or b) the relatively reassuring 20th century.
“The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest.”
Moore himself exerts careful control over his work, and rarely shows any approval for new versions or adaptations.
Damon Lindelof, showrunner for HBO’s new adaptation of Watchmen, light-heartedly suggested to Vulture that Moore has placed him under a “hex” for daring to create the television series, starring Regina King.
Moore previously refused to attach his name to – or even watch – the 2009 film adaptation, which starred Billy Crudup and Carla Gugino.