Watchmen
Watchmen has been out in the theatres for awhile now so I hope you’ve all been to see it. I’ve read reviews that say it can only be understood by fans of the comic but I was able to follow it and I’ve never read the comic so I wouldn’t worry about that. I was a bit worried going in that the violence was going to be of the type that is a kind of pornography for some people and yeah I guess it was in parts but it is used to underscore the story and there is a lot of dialogue between the action scenes so that the movie can actually tell a story rather than just be a series of CGI spectacles inter-spliced with gags, sex and clumsy plot-explaining like so many other action-adventure movies.
Spoilers follow probably.
My take on Watchmen is that it’s the story of how people respond to a flawed world. Or to put it less politely, how people respond to the really fucked up things that human beings do to each other every day.
The first person we meet is The Comedian – as the story unfolds we see him in flashbacks engaged in crimes worse than most of the criminals that he fights. The Comedian embraces Nihilsm and Anomie (I had to look those up), seeing the world, his own life and the life of others as a meaningless cosmic joke. His response is bitter anger, hedonism and senseless violence.
Rorschach / Walter Kovacs our narrator also responds with consuming rage and vengeance. Like The Comedian, he doesn’t believe he can change anything but instead resolves to get as much retribution as he can against those whom he judges.
Rorschach takes us on a tour as the story gets started to introduce us to the cast.
First he visits the Night Owl / Dan Dreiber who has run away from his heroic past. He knows all the crimes happening outside but buries his head in the sand, afraid to act, impotent and disempowered.
Silk Spectre / Laurie Juspeczyk like Night Owl is not too happy to see Rorschach. She is an optimist, putting her faith in the work of others, John / Dr Manhattan, Adrian / Ozymandias and the government. In a way she is also in denial, unable to admit that things might not be as in control as she would like.
Meanwhile Dr Manhattan/ Jonathan Osterman is lost in a state of detachment. The more hurt he is by those around him, the more he retreats and seeks to deconstruct all things around him into their component parts, thus disarming them. He uses the scale of the universe and time to try and minimise the experience of the present which he still seems to be anchored in even if his perception of it is radically non-human.
Finally Ozymandus / Adrian Veidt, the smartest man in the world uses his intellect to control and manipulate. He plans to make a difference but is utterly devoid of faith in the ability of humanity to find peace. Instead he cynically uses the collective psychology of humanity to forge a peace born of necessity and common hatred instead of through learning and understanding.
There is a gestalt to all these characters in the story as they touch each others lives bringing little transformations: Rorschach finds friendship in Dan, Dan finds hope in Laurie, Laurie finds the strength to face her past with John and John finds compassion with the help of Laurie. Adrian is brought down from his throne as his peers find philosophical flaws in his solution and I’m not sure that he learns anything except maybe that he is not as smart as he thinks he is.
And I suppose the movie asks us which of these characters are you? I’m assuming most of you are not psychotic killers which leaves Dan, Laurie, John and Adrian. How do you respond to the inhumanity of man towards man (or woman towards woman or man towards woman or woman towards man)? Disempowerment, hoping someone else will fix it, detachment or seeking control?
All in all, Watchmen was a thought provoking film set within a blow-your-socks-off fantasy action adventure with excellent special effects and a kick-arse soundtrack.
EDITED: got the names right.
I do disagree slightly with the analysis of Rorschach. I don’t think he is as nihilistic as The Comedian. In fact, I think Rorschach does believe he can create change—he just knows his limitations, and knows as one man there’s not much he can do against an increasingly violent and mistrustful world, especially after the 1977 banning of costumed vigilantes.
But that’s one reason why he refuses to hand in his mask when all the other vigilantes do, and secretly (or not so secretly) despises those who do.
Yes, he’s violent. (Though the book makes clear—and the film implies—that he has only killed two men prior to the events of the narrative. He’s violent, but not truly psychopathic.)
Yes, he has little affection for anyone.
Yes, his techniques leave a lot to be desired.
Yes, he has become increasingly dissociated over the years as he moves from being Walter Kovics to being Rorschach.
But he has a fierce integrity of his own, and he follows that through the narrative without wavering. He’s the only one who doesn’t compromise in some way—though this was, I admit, less true in the film than the book: in the film, some of the other characters were compromised more than they did in the book.
Rorschach in some ways is the most honourable of the characters. In the movie, we see him murder three people but it is implied that he has no qualms with killing – then again, when he goes to jail, it is clear he didn’t kill all those other inmates. It is the mask and the revelations of his past in the psychological evaluation that made me think he was a psychotic mad-man hell bent on teaching every school-yard bully the ultimate lesson. Even though Rorschach gets it in the end, I think his healing moment is when he recognises the friendship he has with Night Owl.
And he knows (generically, anyway) what’s going to happen to the man whose hands he ties to the bars of the cell.
So we see (or very nearly see) him kill three men and actively contribute to the death of the fourth.
All of those deaths took place in gaol. All but one were in self defense, as responses to immediate and direct threats—that doesn’t excuse, but it does ameliorate, a little.
He’s not a nice man, and he does torture people for information, but he’s not a cold-blooded psychopath. Not exactly.
(I see your point about the narrative revealed through the psychiatric evaluation. But that is one point where the changes in the film—which were in a way subtle, but which actually made a big difference to the tone of the narrative—did shift the characterisation. I’m not going to say how the book differs (unless asked) because I don’t want to give things away, but, in either case, it seems to me that that murder is ritualistic. It’s not something he does every time he meets a criminal, but that transition from Kovics to Rorschach (and the heinousness of that crime) required something different. The same is true of the other murder we know about prior to prison, but that’s omitted from the movie.)