Watchmen/ Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons/ DC Comics

by Chaynes

Watchmen is something of an institution right now. Over two decades since its initial release, we now have a very high profile movie, multiple over-priced “companions” to the movie, deluxe hardcover reissues of the book, and some general fervor from both the comic and non-comic communities. In all of this madness (in no small part brought on by the current graphic novel-to-movie obsession) however, no one is really talking about the book, except to say how much better than the movie it is, which is not an entirely productive position.

Many cite Watchmen as a turning point in comic history, the flagship in an invasion of very dark, very adult, very complicated stories and settings that take us far away from Peter Parker and Wolverine (not to diminish those inspiring and well crafted characters). We must then understand what exactly Watchmen is before we can understand the institution it engendered.

Watchmen is simultaneously everything and nothing. It is both every super-hero dream you had as a kid and the sadistic deconstruction of such pathetic fantasies. Moore creates a frighteningly real fantasy world, set in 1985, in which the United States stayed in Vietnam looking for blood and total annihilation and Richard Nixon amended the constitution in order to stay in office for multiple terms beyond the traditionally allotted two. The Cold War is at a terrifying peak, the imminent threat of missile attacks is in full swing, and indeed much of the tension of the reading experience is conveyed through each chapter showing the doomsday clock one minute closer to midnight (and being covered progressively by more and more blood).

This is apocalyptic. No, this is the apocalypse.

Gibbons’ illustrations and Higgins’ coloring (a creepy mix of Easter pastels and doom) carry this foreboding throughout the book, and we are unable to shake the feeling that something terrible might happen every time we turn the page.

Moore’s apocalypse has much to do with the book’s most “super” character, Dr. Manhattan. Dr. Manhattan is everything the United States wished it had during the Cold War – the ultimate failsafe, the ultimate ultimatum, if you will. Due to an accident in a comic/sci-fi-convention particle separator/accelerator (in this case, an “intrinsic field” research device), Dr. Jon Osterman becomes the God-like Dr. Manhattan, who can manipulate all forms of matter and energy with nothing but a thought. This means that he can dissemble any missiles the Soviets might launch just by thinking about it. This also means, as we see from the book, that he can annihilate entire populations and singlehandedly destroy the Vietnamese.

Dr. Manhattan is the only “hero” in this book who has a specifically super-natural ability, and consequently he is the only one who really doesn’t care at all about humanity. Through Dr. Manhattan, Moore explores the human fantasy of creation, and all of the megalomaniacal complications involved. Dr. Manhattan, the U.S.A.’s lynchpin of foreign policy, protecting us from mutually assured destruction, becomes progressively more detached from the concerns of those he has been enlisted to protect; he eventually flees to Mars where he creates a massive glass watch-like machine from which he can observe the workings of the smallest atomic particles in the cosmos. He is as far away from us as he can get, and we spiral toward destruction in his absence. Dr. Manhattan is one pole in Moore’s complex spectrum of the doomed human condition.

The other side of Moore’s sophisticated spectrum finds voice through one of the most sadistic yet gripping characters in fiction: Rorschach. Our first introduction into the world of Watchmen comes through Rorschach, and I think this signifies the kind of perspective Moore entices us to engage through his book. Rorschach gets his name from the key feature of his costume – a mask made of a unique fabric which allows gelatinous material to form changing shapes continuously within it. These shapes manifest as if they were blots on cards during a Rorschach test. These ever changing shapes, evocative of the multiplicity of objects we see during Rorschach tests, simultaneously materialize and render spectral Rorschach’s relationship with the world he finds so disgusting. Rorschach is a mirror, we see in his masked face everything we fear, everything we have repressed, everything we have ever hoped for, and everything we ever thought we loved.

His face is our face, constantly shifting, resisting stability, rejecting any stable sense of morality we can conjure. Rorschach, paradoxically, is the most principled of our cast of heroes: he is the only one who has never compromised in his pursuit of the destruction of evil. We, as readers (as seen through the pathetic Dr. Malcolm who thinks he can “fix” Rorschach), in the face of Rorschach’s stoic purpose, are forced to admit that we are wholly unable to do what it takes to “fix” the world we have so completely ruined. We can think that Rorschach is a sick sociopath, that we could never revert to murder and torture to get the job done, but our condemnation falls limp when we understand Rorschach is us, and we are all him. Spawned from the very world of depravity he so yearns to cleanse, Rorschach is the dark secret lurking within each of us. Moore knows this, and exploits it.

The mirror held up by Rorschach’s face is reiterated during the climax of the book. The final devastating attack is not the nuclear holocaust threatened by the doomsday clock, but instead it is a hideous monster, a cycloptic octopus that crashes down onto the heart of New York City, slaughtering everything in sight. This hideous (and curiously vaginal) monster becomes almost a parody of the super-hero fantasies we associate with comics. It is every terrible creation cooked up by every villain in comics; it is every horrifying nightmare-creation causing children to sleep in their parents’ bed; it is everything we fear – fat, wet, slimy, pulsing, and filled with stench; this monster, in destroying the world of Watchmen, simultaneously destroys any faith we might have in the fantasy that there are super-heroes running around in costume dedicating their lives solely to protecting us. In creating this single monster, Moore dramatically crushes us with his thesis: he ridicules the ways in which humans consistently divert our attentions (either through cold wars or giant monsters) from what should be important in our lives, always passing the buck, never accepting accountability for our own fates.

Despite the naysayers, I enjoyed my time in the theater, watching Watchmen translated onto the screen. But seriously, a bomb just doesn’t cut