Watchmen

“The atmosphere of the horrific and faintly sinister that hung around the Shadow was nowhere to be seen in the bright primary colors of Superman’s world, and there was no hint of the repressed sex-urge which had sometimes been apparent in the pulps, to my discomfort and embarrassment […] it set off a lot of things I’d forgotten about, deep inside me, and kicked all those fantasies that I’d had when I was thirteen or fourteen back into gear: the prettiest girl in the class would be attacked by bullies, and I’d be there to beat them off, but when she offered to kiss me as a reward, I’d refuse.”

The moment Hollis Mason is describing is where the real world splits from the alternate world of the comic. Superman was such an extraordinary cultural phenomenon in 1938 that Moore and Gibbons imagining it inspiring “real-life” imitators in their fictitious world. Hollis admits frankly that it was not only the moral absolutism of Superman that he found appealing, but its childlike innocence. Superman had all the powers of an adult, without all the murky complexities of the adult world.

“There is no shelter, and the future is bearing down on us like an express train. Blake understood. Treated it like a joke. But he understood. He saw the cracks in society, saw the little men in masks trying to hold it together. He saw the true face of the twentieth century and chose to become a parody of it. No one else saw the joke. That’s why he was lonely.”

Rorschach’s eulogy for The Comedian is not only a definitive statement on that character, but on the overall message of Watchmen. Superheroes are themselves a parody of the 20th century, a way to channel its violence into something digestible and ultimately, marketable. Blake was alone in that he recognized the absurdity of his own situation and embraced it without concealment or apology.

“I don’t think that those of us still surviving today are any closer to understanding just why we really did it. Some of us did it because we were hired and some of us did it to gain publicity. Some of us did it out of a sense of childish excitement and some of us, I think, did it for a kind of excitement that was altogether more adult if perhaps less healthy. They’ve called us fascists and they’ve called us perverts and while there’s an element of truth in both accusations, neither of them are big enough to take in the whole picture.”

Hollis states in the clearest terms The Absurdity of Costumed Crimefighting. The idea of putting on a mask is of course an act of concealment, and Hollis admits that it is not just to gain anonymity from criminals seeking retribution: Adventurers either get personal gratification out of beating people up from behind a mask, or they need that anonymity to hide something more sinister. They can’t be reduced to being “fascists” or “perverts,” but Hollis does not deny the validity of either charge.

“Dan, living with him, you don’t know what it’s like…the way he looks at things, like he can’t remember what they are and doesn’t particularly care…this world, the real world, to him it’s like walking through mist, and all the people are like shadows...just shadows in the fog.”

Laurie’s explanation to Dan is the first of many indications that Dr. Manhattan is lacking in basic human sensibilities; specifically, he prefers the company of machines or other inanimate objects (such as the rock formations of Mars, later on) to human contact. It helps to explain why in spite of his enormous power, he utilizes so little of it to change the course of events in which he has no vested interest.

“The new breed of villains, despite their often colorful names, were mostly ordinary men in business suits who ran drug and prostitution rackets. That’s not to say they didn’t cause much trouble…far from it; I just mean that they weren’t as much fun to fight. All the cases I ended up investigating during the ‘50s seemed sordid and depressing and quite often blood-chillingly horrible. I don’t know what it was…there just seemed to be a sort of bleak, uneasy feeling in the air. It was as if some essential element of our lives, of all our lives, was vanishing before we knew entirely what it was.”

Hollis Mason explains that the initial crop of superheroes prompted supervillains who were just as interested in the performance and psychology of masked adventuring as the heroes. Since it was more fun to beat up than get beat up, the appeal quickly waned, and what was left were the real criminals, with far more quotidian—and more disturbing, to Hollis—motives. These provide far less satisfaction for the impulses that inspire masked crimefighting in the first place, which craves clear moral dichotomies and relatively easy resolutions.

“We repeat, the Superman exists, and he’s American.”

The original Superman may have stood for “truth, justice, and the American way,” but he was presented as a hero for all of humanity, defending the innocent and good against evil of any sort. Dr. Manhattan is explicitly framed as a weapon in the Cold War and admits that his lack of moral compunction allows him to serve the US government, particularly in the incineration of untold numbers of Vietnamese people. Once his country alienates him, he realizes that his powers have isolated him completely from human beings, and he foreswears any responsibility to protect them.

“Which of us is responsible? Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there…a clock without a craftsman.”

Sitting on the surface of Mars, not even Dr. Manhattan can see the underlying causes of matter and the universe, despite his complete power to manipulate them. The son of a watchmaker, he develops the power to experience every moment of his existence as though it is happening at that moment, confounding all conventional notions of time and space. This makes existence itself eternal, and nothing can precede that which is eternal. Therefore, the universe simply is, and thus it does not answer to a higher cause for its own being.

“See? Apathy! Everybody escapin’ into comic books and T.V.! Makes me sick. I mean, all this, it could all be gone. People, cars, T.V. shows, magazines…even the word ‘gone’ would be gone. See, newsvendors understand. They get to see the whole picture. It’s our curse. We see every damned connection. Every damned link.”

The newsvendor acts as a Greek chorus in the comic, a recurring voice who takes no part in the plot itself but whose commentary helps to chart the development of major themes. In addition to coming into contact with main characters like Rorschach, he does have a view beyond that of the main characters, not only paying close attention to the news (the main characters are often seen near newspapers, but almost never reading them) but to the street-level moods that escape the focus of the heroes. The newsvendor may be exaggerating his importance, but with respect to the story, he does see a broader picture than any other character.

“The stories that came from his pen in this period are uniformly dark and sinister, balancing metaphysical terrors against an unnerving sense of reality, particularly when applied to matters of mortality and sexuality. Readers who came to the series expecting a good rousing tale of swashbuckling were either repulsed or fascinated by what were often perverse and blackly lingering comments upon the human condition.”

This section is a commentary on “Tales of the Black Freighter,” but it proves no less applicable to Moore himself. Via Watchmen, he is doing to superheroes what Max Shea is doing to pirates: turning a genre often rendered in adolescent fantasies and injecting it with dark and violent realism, along with a heavy dose of sexuality. While readers may still enjoy the story, the narrative gains depth by inviting readers to consider why they enjoy such stories in the first place.

“Almost forty neighbors heard screams. Nobody did anything. Nobody called cops. Some of them even watched. Do you understand? Some of them even watched. I knew what people were then, behind all the evasions, all the self-deception. Ashamed for humanity, I went home. I took the remains of her unwanted dress…and made a face that I could bear to look at in the mirror.”

Kitty Genovese was an actual person who was in fact murdered outside of her apartment building in 1964. Reports of her neighbors failing to call the police have since proven to have been exaggerated (especially as there was no 911 at the time), but her death nonetheless became symbolic of the anonymity and cruelty of urban life. Moore—who would have been aware of the urban legend regarding the bystanders’ supposed inaction—implies that she was the client for the dress Rorschach uses to create his mask. In this sense, Rorschach’s origin story and motivations are based upon his interpretation of an inaccurate, secondhand account he reads in a newspaper. That the dress from which he creates his mask is black and white—“no gray”—reflects Rorschach’s tendency to see the world in absolutes.

“Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us.”

Rorschach initially speaks like a moral absolutist and seemingly enforces a strict code of good and evil, but as he tells his therapist, his moral code is entirely of his own creation, a thin strand of idealism covering an abyss of nihilism. He is a relativist in that he has devised a morality that works for him, yet he is absolute in that he insists upon everyone else conforming to it or risking his wrath.

“That’s why I sort of regretted the Crimebusters falling through back in sixty-whenever-it-was. It would have been like joining the Knights of the Round Table; being part of a fellowship of legendary beings…but eventually I realized The Comedian was right: it’s all crap dressed up with a lot of flash and thunder. I mean, who needs all this hardware to catch hookers and purse-snatchers?”

Unlike Laurie, who felt pressured to follow the crimefighting legacy of her mother, Dan came around to it voluntarily, through a genuine admiration of Hollis Mason. Still, his was the admiration of a young boy for an adult who was himself admittedly playing out his own juvenile fantasies of good versus evil and moral purity. Dan implies that costumed crimefighting is a generational legacy in which nobody really grows up.

“The screech served merely to transfix the chosen morsel, pinning it to the ground with a shrill nail of blind, helpless terror. Not knowing which of us had been selected, I stood frozen along with the rodents of the field, my heart hammering as it waited for the sudden clutch of sharpened steel fingers that would provide my first and only indication that I was the predetermined victim. The feathers of the owls are soft and downy; they make no sound at all as they drop through the dark stratas of the sky. The silence before an owl swoops is a V-Bomb silence, and you never hear the one that hits you.”

Dan derives a true sense of terror and vulnerability from his experience of watching an owl pounce upon its prey. Long before the events of the comic, the world had been living under the threat of nuclear war; via the owl, Dan captures a feeling of absolute helplessness before a power that is utterly free to impose its arbitrary will.

“Meeting him recently, it’s like he wants to make friends without knowing how. As if the gap between us were narrowing. It’s just so hard, reaching him. I mean, all this stuff, this horror and madness, he attracts it. It’s his world. This is where he lives…in this sordid, violent twilight zone…under this shadow.”

Dan wants to be friends with Rorschach, in part because he finds him useful in the investigation of a potential conspiracy, but also out of a sense of genuine fellowship and empathy for his fellow adventurers. Rorschach makes difficult, as his milieu is among the worst of society, where he looks for constant reminders of his purpose and the fear he inspires among his countless victims. To be a friend of Rorschach is to live in his world.

“What about the Boston Tea Party? What about the Lone Ranger? What about all those occasions when men have found it necessary to go masked in order to preserve justice above the letter of the law? […] No, the [Ku Klux] Klan were not strictly legal, but they did work voluntarily to preserve American culture in areas where there were very real dangers of that culture being overrun and mongrelized.”

In a debate with the left-leaning Nova Express over the value of superheroes, New Frontiersman accepts the former paper’s comparison between masked avengers and the Ku Klux Klan, suggesting that it is a badge of honor that they should be included among such noble, if misunderstood and occasionally overzealous, heroes. It is one of the most obvious examples of Moore’s attempt to link superheroes with a fascist ethos.

“We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.”

Francis Bacon is credited with the observation that “knowledge is power,” and Dr. Manhattan has both extraordinary power and knowledge. Yet the more he learns, the more it makes him conscious of his limits, especially that even his power over matter renders him insignificant beneath the vast forces of the universe.

“I was asking the point of all that struggling; the purpose this endless labor; accomplishing nothing, leaving people empty and disillusioned…leaving people broken.”

Laurie is searching through memories to try and convince Manhattan of the charms and foibles of everyday life, the quirks of a person’s existence that make them unique and therefore a testament to the greatness of human existence. Instead, Manhattan sees only pointless suffering, of people who made one another and the world worse off in pursuit of dreams they could never achieve.

“To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold…that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.”

Standing in the middle of a scene of Martian sand and rocks that bears an unmistakable resemblance to a smiley face, Manhattan finally accepts that there is something miraculous to life, especially that a monster like Eddie Blake could father someone as good as Laurie. It does not change his opinion of humanity or his responsibility toward it, but it does commit him to ensuring Laurie’s safety before he departs from the Earth, seemingly for good.

 “‘I remember Adrian once telling me that the Egyptians regarded death as a voyage.’

‘Hurn. Nice idea if you can afford to go first class with the Pharaohs…but judging by our departures, most of us travel steerage.’”

In this conversation with Nite Owl, Rorschach offers a cutting response to Adrian’s habitual sprinkling of mythological references to his conversations. Adrian can look with ease upon a “voyage” of death when he is rich and powerful enough to pay for comfortable passage, but for most people, Rorschach points out, it will instead be a miserable trip.

“There’s a bright new world around the corner. It’s going to need heroes just as badly as this one does, and one of them could be YOU!”

Despite his reputation as the world’s smartest man, Adrian Veidt’s self-help program is similar to previous works in the genre, like The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), or their successors, like The Secret (2006). In Moore’s view, self-help is the myth of capitalism packaged for the individual, where effort alone can produce anything; if it doesn’t, it’s because the person failed, and they will therefore buy more variations of the same advice in the hope of uncovering the secrets to unlocking greater willpower. Adrian’s only innovation is to hide his plans to create a brave new world in plain sight, and not just offer his subscribers the chance to be a part of something special.

“Ruling without barbarism! At Alexandria, he instituted the ancient world’s greatest seat of learning. True, people died…perhaps unnecessarily, though who can judge such things? Yet how nearly he approached his vision of a united world!”

Adrian’s profession of admiration for Alexander the Great is revealing in at least two respects. One is that one cannot judge the butcher when he claims to be acting for a good cause, which in essence cedes morality to whomever is able to impose their will and call it moral. The other is that Alexander still failed to achieve his goal, despite coming close. This casts an air of doubt on whether Adrian’s project can long survive the immediate impact of the psychic shockwave.

“Unable to unite the world by conquest…Alexander’s method…I would trick it; frighten it towards salvation with history’s greatest practical joke.”

Adrian proves that, like The Comedian, he is in on the joke of costumed adventuring. It may seem unlikely that a gigantic and absurd act of deceit can change the course of human nature, but just as superheroes made their way from the page to exert a major influence on the course of history, Adrian has confidence that fiction can prove realer than reality.

“Jesus. He was right. All we did was fail to stop him from saving Earth.”

Manhattan’s acceptance of Adrian’s plan fits with his resignation from interference in human affairs; with Laurie safe, he is happy to fall back on abstractions. Laurie’s acceptance, however, contradicts her earlier plea for the value of each individual life; nonetheless, she manages to feel both horror at what Adrian has done and relief that he has averted something far worse.