Watchmen: A Response to Radar

    select title from blog_entries where authorid = 8 order by length(body)+length(extended) desc;
    16305: Where I Boldly Went
    11273: The Watchmen: Novel or just Graphic?

My wife happened to catch a trailer for Watchmen on TV the other night and recognized it, which prompted her to ask me why I hadn’t mentioned it to her at all. At the time, my reply to her was “Because you wouldn’t enjoy it, the bad guys win at the end” (and, lets be honest, if I’ve just “spoiled” Watchmen for you, then you had no business reading this article anyway). She was, if I can speak for her, horrified by this prospect, and asked me why people like it so much. I didn’t really have an answer for her at the time, because it’s not something I can ‘answer’ in a vacuum – I’m not strong enough in my own writing or speaking to express the thoughts that I have sufficiently to satisfy my need to be understood precisely. However, having Radar’s article to reflect on has made this a little bit easier.

Radar derides the book for being “graphic”, asking:

...why choose to display or present [your point] with vulgarity, nudity, and violence? Why would you glorify the ugly things of the world to make a point?

I believe that one of the strongest themes in Watchmen is that Moore thinks life IS NOTHING BUT [d]arkness and unhappiness…vulgarity, nudity, and violence. These are not narrative devices he is using to express a point – on one level, THESE ARE HIS POINT. It’s about how terrible we are, to ourselves and each other, and where that will ultimately lead; about how there are only extreme poles of depravity as options – you’re either:

1. Manipulative and so certain of your own value and judgement that you discard everyone else as expendable pawns in your scheme (Ozymandias);
2. Disconnected (Dr. Manhattan), symmetrically fence-sitting between the poles; or
3. Incorruptible, but completely and utterly destroyed by your own capacity to feel pain (Rorschach)

The only really ‘human’ superhero, Dan Dreiberg, the second Nite Owl, is portrayed as a pitiable fool. The only one of them that we might possibly have identified with – morally, physically, mentally, emotionally – is so weak and ineffectual that it’s laughable to call him a ‘hero’ at all. He is driven by a moral code and a desire to have a meaningful life – who among us DOESN’T aspire to these things? – but, ultimately, he’s unable to conceive of the horror and brutality around him, and ends up collapsing on his own morality, sleeping with Laurel Juspeczyk in a desperate attempt to capture some semblance of his own humanity and manhood, but defeated by his inability to affect the events swirling so catastrophically around him.

Alan Moore uses Watchmen to ask, and ultimately provide his answer to, some very thought-provoking questions. It’s always irritated me when people, especially writers, ask questions but don’t provide any answers – President Bartlett from TV’s “The West Wing” used to do it all the time, and refer to it as “raising the debate” – one of the points I most strongly disagreed with in the show. My close friend Johnny Elbows rants about it more effectively than I do, but it’s a cheap trick for a writer to pull, to ask a question but not have the integrity to attempt an answer. Moore doesn’t take this common “cop-out”, and while I don’t agree with every answer he proposes, I admire him for giving one. I won’t try to capture them all here – to do so would be a grave injustice to the material – but here are just a few of the questions and answers that stand out as “highlights” to me:

• I’ll start with the most obvious one:
  

  “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” That is: Who watches the watchmen? What happens to society when they hand over the keys to ANYONE?

  There are multiple places in the narrative where people have put the burden of themselves on some kind of ‘watchmen’ – the world’s reliance on Dr. Manhattan is only the most glaring of these. Some of the more subtle ones are:

  • President Nixon has repealed the 22nd amendment and was repeatedly reelected, serving at least 5 terms.
  • Initally, people support the concept of superheroes and masked vigilantes. But, when it becomes uncomfortable to them, they instead turn to the Keene Act, and ultimately, to despair.

  • Even more subtle than either of these is Alan Moore’s expression of disdain for the CCA.

    Created in 1954 in response to public outcry about inappropriate material in many comic books, the CCA was an attempt by the publishers of comic books to regulate themselves before the government was forced to step in and regulate them. The entire method of expression in Watchmen seems directly aimed at violating the strictures of the CCA in every manner possible. For example, the CCA prohibited the presentation of “policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions … in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority”, while requiring that “in every instance good shall triumph over evil”. Depictions of “excessive violence” were forbidden, as were “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations” and love stories were to “emphasize the sanctity of marriage”. The CCA had no legal authority over other publishers, but magazine distributors often refused to carry comics without the CCA’s seal of approval.

    Moore is hardly alone in his despite for the CCA’s system of rules. Many creative teams in the comics industry over years have decried this “self-censorship”/ Another of my favorite comic book artists, Scott McCloud [1], compares the CCA to “the list of requirements a film needs to receive a G rating was doubled, and there were no other acceptable ratings!” And, not long after Watchmen was published, the CCA declined in strength, to the point where it’s more or less completely ignored today.

• 
  
  What if Superman were man first and Super second?

  A lot of professionals in the comic book and critical professions hate Superman. I don’t agree with their view, but I can understand it. However, this article isn’t about that topic – I could write another 3000 words on that alone! – so I’ll try to restrain myself to the directly correlated discussion. It should be obvious to anyone that Dr. Manhattan is a direct send up of Superman. However, in the dark and dreary wasteland that is Watchmen, he is less “Super” than he is “man”. His extreme power leaves him feeling disdainful and disconnected from all humanity – it would require not superhuman abilities, but a superhuman strength of character to remain pure in the face of that kind of power. In the “supporting material” that appears between chapters 11 and 12, we hear Adrian Veidt discussing this, in response to a reporter’s attempt to assert that Jon is “right-wing”.

  VEIDT: Jon? Right-wing? (Laughs) If there’s one thing in this cosmos that that man isn’t capable of doing it’s having a political bias. Believe me … you have to meet him to understand. I mean, which do you prefer, red ants or black ants?

  NOVA: Uh…? Well, I don’t have any particular preference…

  VEIDT: Exactly. Well, imagine how Jon feels.

  In the end, Jon has become so inhuman that he kills Rorschach with barely a word, and then walks across water to confront Veidt and tell him that he intends to go become a God in some other version of the Universe, rather than deal with the complexity of remaining in this one. Additionally, the way society relied on him for everything from fashion to industry to military might strikes me as one of the proximate causes for the fear and despair that seems to rule the world of Watchmen – and yet, I can’t help but wonder how much of their society is sustainable without Jon there to maintain things?

• What would comics look like in a world with Superheroes?

  One of the most brilliant devices of Watchmen, in my opinion, is The Tales of the Black Freighter. Ultimately, the comic-within-a-comic is the story of Ozymandias – he even alludes, just before Jon departs to “create life”, to “dream[ing] about swimming towards a hideous…”, a clear allusion to the final scene of the “Marooned” story line, wherein the Black Freighter arrives to pick up the castaway, and he eagerly boards. Written by one of the creative minds Ozymandias used and then discarded in his horrific project, the story can be correlated to that of many of the other characters, and echos the expression of Nietzsche which is the touchstone chapter 6:

  Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

  The comic-within-a-comic is delivered to the reader by means of a teenage boy who sits beside a newsstand. As the owner of the newsstand contemplates out-loud the headlines of the papers he’s selling, the two stories share an eerie symmetry that lets us view the story from within Ozymandias’ point of view. During Rorschach’s escape from prison on his way to find out who killed Hollis Mason, we see the marooned mariner struggling with the thought of what must lie ahead of him. With thoughts of his dead family filling his mind, the mariner in blunt terms, ‘chose madness.’

  There’s a wonderful project on the internet that attempts to re-construct what “Tales of the Black Freighter” may have looked like without the cut-aways to the parallel stories in the world around it. Seeing those stark blank panels really helped me gain an appreciation of the symmetry that Moore and Gibson achieved inside Watchmen.

Part of the value of a work of “art” can be in how you interpret it – that is, it’s unlikely that any two people will find the same absolute meaning in a work as complex as Watchmen, especially not if you subscribe to views like The Annotated Watchmen – or this one [requires purchase, but you can see a preview] (two attempts to “intellectualize” Watchmen). However, there’s something to be said for the concept of the shared experience of art making us richer in scope and helping us connect as people. Ultimately, I think what we can take away from Radar’s article is that he has taken a step back, evaluated himself, and found some things he wasn’t particularly pleased about – and that he’d encourage us to do the same. It’s true that you can never ‘unsee’ an image, and you can never regain innocence. However, I think consideration also needs to be given to how different people will interpret the same stimuli. Rather than making me feel as if I were “dipped in blood”, a reading of Watchmen can often leave me with a few bright points. Here are just a few:

1. Things aren’t really as bad as they might sometimes seem.

   As terrifying as the circumstances in our world today are (and they ARE terrible – the looters are in control, folks), things are still much better than they are for the characters portrayed here. Sometimes, our own burdens can be made lighter by getting perspective on them.

2. Along the same lines as the above, maybe your pain isn’t as bad as it seems right now. Certainly, there are people all around the world going through horrible things right now; however, by using such a caricature of darkness and pain as Rorschach, Moore can give nearly every one something to pity, and something to make their own pain seem trivial by comparison.

   I’ve recently started watching a new show called Being Erica, wherein a middle-aged woman is given the opportunity to go back and relive certain critical junctures of her own life; sometimes changing things, sometimes making the same choice, but making it with a more complete understanding of the circumstances. In the very first episode, as she begins to understand what is happening to her, she runs into her benefactor/guide, and exclaims querulously: What about paradoxes, the butterfly effect, Back to the Future…if I change the past, won’t that cause, like, World War III in the present? To which he amusingly, but brilliantly replies: Or, is it possible that your [past], though VERY important to you, might not play a role in influencing world events? Sometimes, reading something about REAL pain can make our injuries seem petty by comparison, and can help us refocus.

3. It’s an incredibly well-crafted work.

   ...in the most fearful of all symmetries, the world isn’t so much new as it is old…

   If you’re inclined to read it (or read it again), I’d recommend you pay special attention to the way Chapter 5 is completely symmetrical, rotating around a 1/3 page panel of Adrian Veidt on pages 14-15, a brilliant foreshadowing of the conclusion to the series; or to the way that everything in Chapter 6 relates back to the Rorschach blots, over and over and over. Repeatedly, we are introduced into the concept of a “new world” (Veidt’s advertising, Rorschach compares a blood stain to a “map of violent new continent”...), but in the most fearful of all symmetries, the world isn’t so much new as it is old – turning more towards where our reality is now.

4. In the character of Rorschach, we get a great view of the long term results of a person with an austere moral code in a world without morality. Again, in Chapter 6, on page 10, panel 3, Rorschach talks about the dress, designed by Jon, which would become first a mask for Kovacs, and then a face for Rorschach. “Not ugly at all.” he says in response to criticism of the garment. “Black and white. Moving. Changing shape …but not mixing. No gray”

   After the death of a little girl at the hands of a monster-in-human-skin, Kovacs found that he couldn’t deal with mankind anymore, and his personality effectively split into the weak Kovacs, whose life was one long scream of pain, and the morally rigid but occasionally monstrous Rorschach, who felt no pain – and, as a result, made no allowance for human nature.

   We have discussed, in our podcast, a philosophy of how feelings are sometimes rooted in the fight-or-flight directed “monkey-brain”, and so it’s fitting to see Rorschach devoid of feeling. Rorschach was to be a spirit of vengeance, and so he was until the bitter end, when Kovacs and Rorschach fought for control as Jon demanded Rorschach drop his quest to tell the world what Veidt had done. In the end, I’m really not sure who won – I think some would be inclined to say it was Kovacs who won, as he ripped of Rorschach’s “face” and begged Jon to “DO IT!” – but I’m inclined to believe that, at that point, Rorschach’s victory was so complete that he no longer needed his “face”, and chose to make his murderer look at him as a human before the end.

5. In the conclusion, Alan Moore DOES give us a kind of twisted sense of hope. As Ozymandias and Jon talk about what has transpired, Ozymandias pleads for Jon’s approval.

   Ozymandias: I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.

   Dr. Manhattan: “In the end”? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.

   In the conclusion, Alan Moore DOES give us a kind of twisted sense of hope.
   We can believe that Veidt will ultimately pay a price for what he’s done – and not just the whining, mealy-mouthed self torture he tried to pawn off several panels earlier, but real payment. Jon leaves this world, removing what may have been a massive stumbling block to human development – the Superman is gone, and we’re left with the shattered pieces of a world he created. Dan and Laurel seem to have found some glimmer of hope in the future, as has the rest of the world, pulling together – facing as a race the threat that will never arrive.

Could these have been told without the [d]arkness and unhappiness…vulgarity, nudity, and violence.? Some of them could have, others – I would argue – could not.

In the final analysis, you have to judge for yourself whether or not there’s anything of value in Watchmen. I find that, for all its darkness, it’s not as black as parts of my own soul – and thus can lift me up, sometimes. On the other hand, I’ve never even considered having my wife read it – she doesn’t need to know that people can be as dark as Alan Moore, let alone as dark as the characters he’s able to conceive of. Again I find myself back at the argument that everyone can take different things away from a given work, but consider this: very few people, in my experience, have ever been able to read it and remain ‘ambivalent’ about it.

Here are some additional references for anyone who’d like to look deeper into the world of Watchmen.

• An Analysis of Watchmen: Symmetry and the Tragic Flaw
• Watchmen observations
• Taking Off the Mask – Watchmen Deconstructed
• The Annotated Watchmen – this one is a personal favorite of mine

¹ If you haven’t read his excellent Understanding Comics, one of the most brilliant meta-comics ever created, let me know and I’ll help you get a hold of a copy.