The Hog's Head » Themes

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

revgeorge — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 07:02:51 +0000

Just a quick shout out on one of my favorite poems. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe was first published with his name attributed to it on this day in 1845. Very haunting and very Gothic. Anyway, if you’d like to read it, go here. If reading isn’t your thing, you can find a recording on Librivox here. If you want to see a video of Vincent Price reading The Raven, go down to the bottom of the wikipedia page on the poem and you’ll find it under external links/video. He does a dramatic reading of the poem, not literal, but hey it’s Vincent Price! And if you want to see the best adaptation of The Raven ever, go here for The Simpson’s Halloween special version. So, if you like really depressing, gothic poems, enjoy!!

Chapter 15: The Goblin’s Revenge

Dave the Longwinded — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:02:50 +0000

This chapter opens with an ominous moment: Harry searching for a place to bury Moody’s eye. He does so under “the oldest, most gnarled, and resilient-looking tree he could find.” Harry’s symbolism is clear, and the scene will be repeated later.

All-in-all, this chapter has an Empire Strikes Back feel to it. Our heroes are stuck in the wilderness, hunting for clues to puzzles they know are important, but coming up empty. As Rowling writes it, the scene reduces the three of them to “three teenagers in a tent whose only achievement was not, yet, to be dead.” The dark magic of the locket, now being passed among them to diffuse its effect on any one of them, is taking a severe toll. And it is most assuredly the prime cause of discord within the tent.

Hermione’s realization that this is so does little to assuage the Horcrux’s effect on all of them. Endless boredom and hunger in the midst of the stress of being hunted like animals isn’t helping the situation. It all creates a vicious psychological cycle within the trio, most notably Harry: “[He] was starting to fear that Hermione too was disappointed by his poor leadership. In desperation he tried to think of further Horcrux locations, but the only one that continued to occur to him was Hogwarts, and as neither of the others thought this at all likely, he stopped suggesting it.” In other words, out of fears over his lack of leadership, Harry quits being a leader. Any reader who has paid close attention to the series knows Harry has to be right, or at least on the right track. The importance Hogwarts holds for Voldemort and others is unmistakable. All of them are ignoring the evidence, from Ginny’s possession and Voldy’s other repeated attempts to penetrate the school, to what Harry learned in his Pensieve lessons in Half-Blood Prince.

But, what we do learn very clearly here is that the other Trio (Ginny, Neville, and Luna) are trying to wreak a bit of havoc at the school. More importantly, Harry, Hermione, and Ron learn from their eavesdropping exercise that the true Sword of Gryffindor has gone missing — hidden, perhaps by Dumbledore, to keep it from the hands of those who don’t deserve it. But, the most significant piece of information they learn while listening to Griphook and the others at the riverbank is that the sword can be used as a weapon against Horcruxes. Hermione realizes the sword has absorbed some of the effects of the basilisk’s venom. Harry feels that some answers are “tantalizingly close.” Yet, they’re just out of reach.

And the chapter ends in catastrophe. Ron’s emotional implosion pushes the group over the edge, leading to the Trio’s collapse. He storms out of the tent angry, misanthropic, and believing that Hermione has chosen Harry over him. We’ll learn later the true outcome, but I count this moment as one of Rowling’s most significant red herrings in the series. Upon my first read, I was convinced that this fracture doomed Ron. For a while, I waited nervously to see Harry and Hermione stumble across his body somewhere. Thus, the later moment when Ron rises to his real potential is all the more emphatic and powerful to me.

What makes this book so hard to read is the persistent pounding of death in every corner, upon every page. Chapter 15 opens with a burial, one that will be echoed painfully later. The Horcruxes presense, the pervasive fear and hunger, and final moment when it seems that the central friendship in the series is fully broken all make this one of the darker chapters in the entire HP saga.

Nosferatu: The Symphony of Horror

revgeorge — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:26:01 +0000

Nosferatu, The Symphony of Horror (How’s that for a catchy name?) was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It is, as far as I can tell from a brief research, one of the earliest adaptations of Dracula. Directed by F.W. Murnau and released in 1922, the film attempted to get around the problem of not having the rights to the Stoker story by changing the setting from London to the fictional German city of Wisborg and also changing all the names of the characters. Count Dracula becomes Count Orlok, Harker becomes Thomas Hutter, Renfield becomes Knock, and so on. Minus the ending, though, the story is essentially the same as Dracula.

Which is undoubtedly why, when Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, sued Prana Film, the producers, for copyright infringement she won very handily. Prana Film declared bankruptcy in order to avoid paying a settlement to Florence. The court also declared that all prints of Nosferatu should be destroyed, but fortunately this was impossible since the film had already been distributed around the world. The film is not copyrighted in the USA and so various versions of it may be found, including online. Most versions nowadays restore the original names from Dracula to the film. You may find versions here and here.

Nosferatu comes out of the German Expressionism movement, which is itself a sub-genre of the Expressionism movement. Expressionism was a response to Positivism. Now, if all this sounds complicated, don’t worry…it is. Needless to say, my brief explanation won’t do justice to any of these movements, so I refer you to the applicable Wikipedia pages.

Positivism “…holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience. Metaphysical speculation is avoided.” Expressionism “…sought to express the meaning of ‘being alive’ and emotional experience rather than physical reality. It is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect; it is a subjective art form.” As the Wikipedia article goes on to explain, Expressionism used very intense emotions to convey a sense of drama and horror. Thus, in film, the mood, the setting, the symbolism employed, and the emotive actions of the actors, both facially and in body language, drive this emotional depth.

Another interesting fact, the screenwriter of Nosferatu, Henrik Galeen, had specialized in Dark Romanticism, which took a very pessimistic view of human nature, once again in response to another genre that had gone before. Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Emily Dickinson are considered to be exampes of Dark Romantic writers. Dark Romanticism also has some similarities to Gothic fiction, which we’ve discussed much on this site. This quote, though, I think sums up the differences between the two genres: “In general, with common elements of darkness and the supernatural, and featuring characters like maniacs and vampires, Gothic fiction is more about sheer terror than Dark Romanticism’s themes of dark mystery and skepticism regarding man. Still, the genre came to influence later Dark Romantic works, particularly some of those produced by Poe.”

I think it’s fascinating how all these various genres influence one another and how they play out for us throughout the centuries. We’ve talked on the Gothic elements of Harry Potter and how Rowling shapes them to her own effect. Nosferatu and the German Expressionism out of which it rose also drank heavily of Gothic and Dark Romantic influence, and German Expressionism also went on to influence future genres such as horror and film noir.

So, I encourage you to watch Nosferatu. It’s only about an hour and twenty-four minutes long. Certainly it will take a bit of mental readjusting to watch. It’s black and white and silent. Except for the music score that accompanies it, which is also all about setting the mood. Just thinking about a recent post Dave the Long-Winded did on Paranormal Activity, I can already see a few tie-ins with Nosferatu. So, watch the movie and post your thoughts here. Looking forward to them all!

Paranormal Activity and Fear

Dave the Longwinded — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 01:55:42 +0000

Like a lot of the general movie-going public, Jamie and I plunked down some change to check out Paranormal Activity Friday night. First, my quick review: very, very good. The story is simple, and the audience is really supposed to focus on the characters as they sink ever deeper into their fear over what is in their home. The film’s style is much like that of The Blair Witch Project from ten years ago. But, I didn’t find that movie at all engaging, much less frightening. Part of the issue for me was the migraine I left the theater with after enduring nearly an hour and a half of people who couldn’t hold a camera steady. Paranormal Activity solves both of those problems. In short, if you enjoy thrills and confronting your own fears, you need to go see this film.

Movies don’t frighten me very often. In fact, I’ve tried to remember the last film that really unnerved me when I saw it in the theater, but I came up empty.** Paranormal Activity actually left me rather shaken. It is frightening in a way I have never experienced with a film.

Most of what passes for modern horror isn’t interesting. Slasher films that rely on the “gotcha” moment were too effectively skewered by the first Scream for me to give them credit. The torture film phenomenon of the last six or seven years has only baffled me. Gore for the sake of gore isn’t frightening — it’s just disgusting. The first-person, documentary-style of The Blair Witch Project never seems to be done very well for some reason. And ghost films have come to depend on computer generated imagery that works fantastically well for large, space-alien robots. But it never seems to create convincing ghosts.

And the latter has often left me scratching my head. I love a good ghost story, which makes Halloween my favorite time of year. I love to curl up under a blanket with all the television programs about monsters, myths, legends, ghosts, and the general “paranormal” stuff that overtakes the History Channel and its kin throughout October. Whatever you or I may think about its legitimacy, it sure makes for a dang good story. So, why has Hollywood had such a dismal record with ghost-themed movies since, well, Poltergeist?

I think I found one answer in Paranormal Activity. In case you don’t know, the film was reportedly made a couple of years ago in one week for about $12,000 dollars. As far as I could tell, there is virtually no computer generated special effects, except for possibly the last 3 or 4 minutes. Buying into a film technique well documented with movies like Jaws, PA leaves its monster off-screen. Unlike Jaws, that monster never actually appears at all. We see a shadow where one shouldn’t be. A door moves for no reason. Lights flip on and off with no explanation. The action escalates nicely throughout, well paced and efficient. While details can be passed off as coincidence or electrical problems at first, the lead the audience to eventually confront details that can’t be explained conventionally.

To put it another way, Paranormal Activity allows the mundane and commonplace to not just build up to the extraordinary, it makes the viewer rethink the mundane as extraordinary — right up until one character is pulled by the foot from her bed while she is sleeping. Watching this movie, I had a stark realization. I knew where the film was going. I was conscious that it was a piece of fiction, although it was shot so as to breach my suspension of disbelief. But in the last 25 minutes of this movie, I was terrified of what I was watching. I began to understand that I was matrixing the visual and auditory contents of relatively explainable sounds and events with my own experiences in my own home. I’ve heard things in my house that made the hair stand up on my neck. But Jamie and I also live in a house that is 55 years old — we hear things all the time (especially with 4 cats running around!).

Look at the shadow on the door on the left side. Simple, yet effective.

Paranormal Activity’s real genius is that it relies on the audience to substitute their own fears into the void left by simple sounds and shadows. And does so so very effectively that I could just imagine the terror and horror that awaits once one of the characters is pulled by her foot from her bed in the middle of the night by an unseen force. It’s the first film I’ve seen in a long while that really relied on the audience’s imagination, and it does so in creative and tension-filled ways. It made me confront MY fears in my own emotions and psyche, not the spectacle on screen. That is what I think makes for not only a good horror film, but for a great film, period. It wasn’t frightening in an intellectual sense. It was terrifying in a visceral sense. I’ve never felt tension and adrenaline in a movie like I did Friday night.

What are your thoughts, either about Paranormal Activity or about quality scary movies in general? What makes some work and others only mildly interesting exercises?

**I saw Pan’s Labyrinth in the home theater of a friend over a year after it was released in the US, and not in theatrical release. Very good and very unnerving — but that’s something for a later discussion!

Immortality: On the Way?

revgeorge — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:48:11 +0000

Saw an interesting article from The Telegraph in the UK the other day wherein a scientist postulates that in about twenty years human beings could become immortal. This would come about through accelerating technology such as nanotechnology and a better understanding of how the human body works.

What do you think? In Harry Potter we discuss the desire of Voldemort to overcome and conquer death while the true master of death, Harry, realizes that death can’t be avoided. We’ve been discussing vampires this week on the site, and there is certainly undertones of human mortality and immortality going on in the vampire mythos.

Mull over the article and feel free to share your thoughts on the subject.

Chapter One: The Dark Lord Ascending

Travis Prinzi — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 22:00:04 +0000

The first thing that struck me that I hadn’t noticed before was Voldemort’s response to Snape’s information about Harry’s departure from Privet Drive:

“Saturday … at nightfall,” repeated Voldemort. His red eyes fastened upon Snape’s black ones with such intensity that some of the watchers looked away, apparently fearful that they themselves would be scorched by the ferocity of the gaze. Snape, however, looked calmly back into Voldemort’s face and, after a moment or two, Voldemort’s lipless mouth curved into something like a smile.

The eyes fastening, the others looking away, and Snape’s calm response all suggest that Voldemort is in the habit of regularly performing Legilimency on every one of his Death Eaters, every time they bring him information. This says a few things to me: (1) Snape was a tremendous Occlumens; (2) Snape was in incredible danger every moment he returned to Voldemort; (3) Dumbledore was right not to divulge his entire plan to Severus.

The last of those three claims will be the most controversial, but the first two are important, however obvious. We’ve discussed a bit how much Snape’s identity – double agent, needing to fool a very skilled Legilimens – affects his need to maintain a harsh and cruel demeanor. This verifies that Snape was in danger, every moment he reported to Voldemort, of being “found out.” Snape, his most trusted Death Eater, was still examined every single time.

The second issue of importance in this chapter is the Malfoy foreshadowing. The Malfoys have been thoroughly rattled, and are not the arrogant practitioners of the Dark Arts that we met in earlier books. Allegiance to Voldemort did not work out so well for them. I’ve written elsewhere of Dumbledore’s strategy, rooted in his belief in the power of love, to “save the Malfoys” and in turn, save the world. The shaken Malfoys in this scene will become instrumental to Harry’s survival and victory at book’s end.

Finally, we have the death of Charity Burbage. I recall on first reading this that learning the prisoner’s identity was a bit anti-climactic, given the build-up of the mystery earlier in the chapter. But symbolically, it all works very well. Voldemort spews his racist message, and then, quite literally, kills “Love.” The cries for help from Snape are a foreshadowing of the exchange we’ll later learn he had with Dumbledore just a few weeks prior – that he’s only watched the deaths of those he could not save.

The White Tomb

Dave the Longwinded — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:30:43 +0000

Half-Blood Prince’s final chapter opens with a favorite device of Ernest Hemingway, the simple declarative sentence:

“All lessons were suspended, all examinations postponed.”

It really is one of Rowling’s finer moments as a writer, poignant and rich with subtlety. In this one statement, she wipes away all the carefree wonderment of childhood with pointed irony. Hogwarts shifts in symbolism from a place of comfort and safety where the worst worry was two parchments on werewolves for horrible Professor Snape, to a place in which parents are spiriting their children away as fast as possible because Snape has murdered the headmaster.

We see the Centaurs and Merfolk gather and pay their respects in ways I believe would have left Dumbledore deeply honored. His entombment is rich with symbolism, as Harry thinks “for one heart-stopping moment, that he [sees] a phoenix fly joyfully ino the blue.” Yet, the “next second the fire had vanished,” and a brilliant “white marble tomb” sits in its place.

In Dumbledore’s death, Voldemort has seemingly gained a devastating victory. Harry and Hogwarts no longer have their protector. The last bastion of paradise is now vulnerable — very vulnerable. Hogwarts has become, in one sense, a graveyard.

A palpable threat glares at us from the edges of this chapter, never clear and explicit, but there nonetheless. It peers at us from the Riddle mansion. The effect is amplified in the explicit declarations that our enchanting rhythm of nearly six long books has been broken. We’re no longer tied to time as it is dictated in school. Instead, everyone’s concerns take on much more urgent tones, emanating from a great emergency — war and death. Like the disjointed feeling new-minted graduates experience upon leaving school for “the real world,” so, too, with the Wizarding World as we’ve known it. Rowling is playing with an emotional realism like never before. Even as the Trio debate whether or not Hogwarts will be open in the next year, Harry makes it clear to readers that it doesn’t matter: “I’m not coming back even if it does reopen.” The chapter’s overriding emotion is not only sadness, but anxiety.

Harry understands his childhood is over. Yet, Rowling isn’t ready to declare him “ready.” To lift a line from another heroic opus, Harry must complete his training. In Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Yoda’s warning to Luke refers to a need to complete both a physical and mental training that prepares him to confront ultimate evil in the form of his father. The trope is a common one, and often serves as a way to remove our Hero’s wise mentor out from under him. In Half-Blood Prince, Dumbledore is taken from Harry so that Harry has to complete his heroic quest on his own.

I’ve always argued that HBP’s central plot thread is Dumbledore’s intense efforts to educate Harry in a more hazardous, yet consequential, way of engaging Voldemort — the fine art of speculation and inferrential reasoning. The Pensieve lessons are always about piecing together incomplete pieces of Voldemort’s past so as to anticipate his plans.

Yet, there are sharp indications that Harry still has much to learn now that he has been thrust prematurely into his adulthood. Trying to decipher who might be R.A.B, his feelings betray him:

He did not fell the way he had so often felt before, excited, curious, burning to get to the bottom of a mystery, he simply knew that the task of discovering the truth about the real Horcruxes had to be completed before he could move a little farther along the dark and winding path stretching ahdead of him, the path he and Dumbledore had set out upon together, and which he now knew he would have to journey alone. There might still be as many as four Horcruxes out there somewhere. … He kept reciting their names to himself, as though by listing them he could bring them within reach.

This picture starkly contrasts what we’ve seen from Harry before. Whenever confronted with a problem, excitement and curiosity have coursed through him, often uncontrollably. Philosopher’s Stone describes his first use of the Invisibility Cloak in terms of pure adrenaline: “The whole of Hogwarts was open to him…” Yet, in two years Harry has watched both Sirius and Dumbledore die as his intelligence and heroism failed him. His rash dash into the Ministry’s aptly named Department of Mysteries ends in tragedy. One year later, he can do nothing whatsoever to fight off Dumbeldore’s killers. In two crucial moments, Harry believes that his greatest attributes have betray him completely.

Now, harry must rely on the kind of reasoning (incomplete as its bases may sometimes be) in order to think through the journey in front of him. And we see examples of incomplete thoughts seeping forth from Harry:

Neville and Luna alone of the D.A. had responded to Hermione’s summons the night that Dumbledore had died, and Harry knew why: They were the ones how had missed the D.A. the most… probably the ones who had checked their coins regularly in the hope that there would be another meeting.

The ellipsis points the reader to something omitted here. Harry attaches a kind of childish need-to-belong to their loyalty. Yet, I don’t think it’s a stretch at all to add that Neville and Luna missed the D.A. the most because they believed in its cause. It was surely one of the first places either had experienced social acceptance, but they also chose what was right over what was easy. And Neville will prove it in grim and terrifying fashion at the end of DH.

Harry’s breakup with Ginny is another pointer that Harry hasn’t quite thought his plan through. As Harry laments what might have been, Ginny’s response is both knife-edged and sympathetic: “‘But you’ve been too busy saving the Wizarding World,’ siad Ginny, half laughing. ‘Well…I can’t say I’m surprised. I knew this would happen in the end. I knew you wouldn’t be happy unless you were hunting Voldemort. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.’” Without question she resents his choice here, but accepts it without too much protest. There’s a sense in which she seems to say to him, “Do you really think my safety is what matters now? Don’t you see my importance to you in all of this?” Harry hasn’t quite recognized in his friends and true love what we as readers see in John Granger’s eloquently explicated alchemical narrative. All of them are absolutely important for Harry’s efforts to overcome Voldemort’s plan.

In addition, we witness the Trio speculate on Snape’s motives by looking at the past hinted at in Harry’s illicit Potions book. Snape’s lineage leads Harry to conclude quite simply that Snape is “just like Voldemort.” As determined as Harry needs to be, this reads alongside what we learn in Deathly Hallows, as a warning against thinking dismissively. Admittedly, Harry is thinking emotionally. But, if we learned anything from Dumbledore in the last three chapters, it’s that facing a crisis with a calm mind and steady courage is absolutely important. Harry has to relearn this now that his challenges have grown more sinister.

Other moments Harry takes notice of are just as compelling in light of Deathly Hallows. The appearance of an anonymous Elphias Doge foreshadows his role in DH. Harry dismisses the man’s eulogy because “It did not mean very much. It had little to do with Dumbledore as Harry had known him.” Immediately, Harry flashes to his first vision of Dumbledore and his wonderfully odd welcome to Hogwarts: “Nitwit! Oddment! Blubber! Tweak!” What Draco and the other Malfoys want to construe as Dumbledore’s senility, Harry recognizes as Dumbledore’s playfulness. In light of Doge’s highly romanticized view of Dumbledore in DH, the one Harry so desperately wants to cling to, his entire performance here reads as a bright warning to Harry not to read too much into Doge’s sentiments.

Harry declares he is “Dumbledore’s man through and through,” but this final chapter is full of flashing warnings of Harry’s biggest fight to come. He’s faced down Voldemort multiple times on pure instinct, and he’s felt the warmth of victory and chill of defeat. He’s even forced Voldemort from his mind and body. Along with that metaphor in Order of the Phoenix, “The White Tomb” shows us that one of Harry’s greatest foes yet to come is his own self. Dumbledore has armed for this battle more than perhaps any other.

Lord Voldemort’s Request

Dave the Longwinded — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:21:13 +0000

Travis asked some of us to fill in on the HBP read-thr0ugh, since he’s busy, you know, editing a book!

It would be easy to skip through Chapter 20 thinking that the most important thing we learn is how Voldemort/Riddle came into possession of Hufflepuff’s Cup and Slytherin’s Locket. We know that both end up becoming Horcruxes at some point later. In addition, the connection between these devices, Hogwarts, and Horcruxes is foreshadowed both here and in the earlier Pensieve lesson. Slughorn’s distorted memory points to a conversation about such things with young Riddle, but it’s clear that he’s gone to great pains to hide important elements of that conversation — the wizard’s version of “trying to forget.”

It’s striking to look back on these Pensieve lessons after Deathly Hallows and realize just how much of the last book’s plot is set up within these chapters.

But, some interesting character details emerge from them, as well. Dumbledore emphasizes this observation of Riddle’s actions:

“Now,” said Dumbledore, “if you don’t mind, Harry, I want to pausce once more to draw your attention to certain points of our story. Voldemort had committed another murder; whether it was his first since he killed the Riddles, I do not know, but I think it was. This time, as you will have seen, he killed not for revenge, but for gain. He wanted the two fabulous trophies that poor, besotted old woman showed him. Just as he had once robbed the other children at his orphanage, just he had stolen his Uncle Morfin’s ring, so he ran of now with Hepzibah’s cup and locket.” (439-40, American edition; my emphasis)

I’m always struck by this observation. It’s obvious now that Dumbledore was pointing Harry not only to what would become Horcruxes, but also how and where Voldemort might hide some of them: Hogwarts. Dumbeldore is drawing a connection between a childhood behavior (packrat-like theft and hiding) and what would become Voldemort’s trademark.

I have ideas why the connection matters, especially given that Voldemort (or some symbol of him) appears as a whimpering infant in the King’s Cross chapter of DH. The “child” metaphor is carried through by Voldemort’s desire to return to Hogwarts. Dumbledore emphasizes the practical reasons, but do you think this reveals something of Voldemort’s psychology?

Heroes and Villains

Dave the Longwinded — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 03:03:26 +0000

I wouldn’t normally cite anything from Entertainment Weekly as an especially interesting analysis of things literary, but the most recent issue (3 April 2009) has a piece by Jeff Jensen exploring modern America’s fascination with villains and significantly flawed heroes (“Heroes and Villains”). This passage struck me:

The current state of heroism can be summed up in a word: Lost. Lke the castaways of ABC’s mystery drama, today’s would-be heroes are so flawed or messed up, they need to be saved from themselves before they save anyone else. Some succeed, like Iron Man’s ethically murky Tony Stark. But many others — Anakin Skywalker; the meth-cooking cancer dad on Breaking Bad [an AMC drama]; almost anyone on HBO, Showtime, or FX — find it more empowering to embrace the dark side. These characters reflect a culture that feels powerless and pissed: We desparately want good to triumph over evil, but we can’t staunch our doubts that good is up to the task.

…

The decade’s plague of monolithic fantasy villains are just as tortured. Voldemort and Magneto are timeless and timely embodiments of evil: intolerant, fanatic, corrupted. Yet like so many morally iffy heroes, these scarred rogues have world-saving ambitions, albeit warped by hateful worldviews. The Joker and Saw’s Jigsaw Killer are psychotic vigilantes persecuting society for failing to live up to their potential or ideals. We need more from pop culture than just seeing good guys and bad guys in action — we need to see how they’re made. Case in point: Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling’s seven-book saga took us deep inside the boy wizard’s trial-and-error transformation from a world-wounded young boy to a young man who saves the world without compromising himself of his values. We believed it, because Rowling — and Harry — did the hard work of proving it.

I sure don’t agree with it all. For one thing, Harry seems about as far removed from their description of jaded, cynical heroes as a character could possibly be. And the last couple of sentences paint a radically different picture than the ideas encapsulated in the first few sentences. Harry has his flaws, for sure — but, unlike the examples mentioned by Jensen, I for one never bought into the idea that Harry could ever become Voldemort, a la Anakin Skywalker. And I definitely don’t see anything especially world-saving in Voldemort’s motives (or Joker’s, for that matter). To be sure, they operate with a kind philosophy or ideology, but their motives are purely about dissolving anything we would recognize as civilization.

A good example that I think counters Jensen’s point is Watchmen. Huge, big-budget movie, sold to the public as a superhero action flick. All the promotional materials showed a film full of action superheroes kicking butt. Most of the trailers for the film showed technical gadgetry and lots of fight scenes; most prominent were those scenes set in a jail, when the “good guys” were kicking the crap out of prisoners. But, anyone familiar with the story knows that such an impression has nothing at all to do with the actual story.

And how have people reacted? Rather poorly, for the most part. Even my jaded students found it all too much to stomach, and not because they found it too hard to follow. Their favorite criticism is that the good guys aren’t “bad ass,” or willing to kick butt and take names when the chips are down and the bad guys just need killin’. Watchmen is very much anything but such a story. Per BoxOfficeMojo.com, the film’s opening weekend American box office gross was just over $55 million. It’s second weekend? $17.8 million. The next? Just over $6million. Last weekend it grossed $2.7 million. By contrast, The Dark Knight grossed fully one third more in its first weekend than Watchmen has grossed in four weeks. And that was in the middle of the summer blockbuster melee. (FYI, OotP made $77 million in its opening weekend.)

I know the comparison isn’t perfect — different time of year, different marketing campaigns, Heath Ledger, etc. Still, Watchmen got the big-budget treatment and the proper marketing campaign, to boot. And the reception of the film has been largely negative because people don’t know what to make of it. The heroes aren’t heroic. And I think the box office gross demonstrates this.

I’ve mentioned the American monomythic superhero, before. Think John Wayne, or perhaps John McClaine, from Die Hard. I think that idea is still at work. We like more complicated heroes, but I think we still like heroes — at least in the end.

Rorschach: Watchmen’s Abyss

Dave the Longwinded — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:17:43 +0000

Figure 1. The film's take on Rorschach is nearly identical to the graphic novel's.

Rorschach (aka Walter Kovacs) is easily one of the more (in)famous characters from Alan Moore’s world. And Dave Gibbons’s visual take on him has become iconic to many comic fans. Figure 1 demonstrates the film’s desire to be as faithful to his character design as the medium allows. The look clearly seems to draw from older comics characters like The Spirit and Dick Tracy. He wears the uniform of the old fashioned detective, right down to the trenchcoat and fedora. Of course, the suit is also the uniform of the well-spoken and well-connected man. Wrapped into the visual of a pinstripe suit and trenchcoat is a feeling of respectability, even success. And Rorschach’s tactics are to be streetwise and fearless — he will confront his adversaries head-on without hesitation.

In short, much of the character’s visual symbolism is designed to harken towards the old-fashioned. And his character reflects this old-fashioned appeal. Alan Moore’s vision of 1985 is visceral and deeply troubling. New York’s streets are dirty, and as Rorschach writes in his journal in Watchmen’s opening pages: “This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face” (I.1). He continues with a statement that immediately sets the mood for the story. Referring to New York’s inhabitants as “vermin”, he states:

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “SAVE US!” …

…And I’ll look down and whisper “no.” (I.1)

Rorschach’s rhetoric is starkly political, blaming the moral corruption he perceives all around him on “lechers and communists,” “intellectuals and liberals” (I.1).

While it all seems a bit odd to an audience accustomed to characters who seem relatively a-political, it’s important to remember that so were many characters established in the era from which Rorschach’s costume draws its inspiration. Captain America fought the Nazis (see Figure 2), and one of Dick Tracy’s primary villains was a Nazi spy, Pruneface. Even though the comic book faced immense legal pressure during the 1950s (eventually leading to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority), the medium was used to great effect as pro-American propaganda, too.

Figure 2. Captain American says hello to Hitler.

And Moore’s book is, among many other things, a meditation on the fear and paranoia established during the Cold War, as children huddled under wooden desks to await “the bomb,” and the movies were overrun with the constant threat of a Soviet first-strike and/or American military technology run amok, a la Red Dawn or Wargames. Even though I started grade school in the mid-1980s, I distinctly remember bomb drills.

Instead, Rorschach’s character suggests that anyone taking up the mantle of a “mask” (one of Watchmen’s several synonyms for “hero”) would almost certainly have a political bent of one sort or another. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Jewett and Lawrence unpack the Americanized hero-type as a character willing to operate outside of the law when necessary. But, his tactics betray an uncompromising personal will fashioned in a cultural and political context.

Rorschach becomes a metaphor in which Alan Moore unpacks this type, perhaps more severely than in any other character. While Rorschach is efficient, his brutality is unflinching.

Figure 3. Three panels from I.16. Rorschach casually breaks an innocent man's hands.

Edward Blake is the name of another Watchman, The Comedian. His murder sets off the novel’s plot, and becomes the primary crime occupying Rorschach’s attention, leading Rorschach to a theory about a “mask killer” systematically “picking off costumed heroes” (I.12). Everyone Rorschach conveys his theory to finds it ridiculous. Of course, in Moore’s “comic” twist, Rorschach is in fact relatively close to the mark concerning the conspiracy that undergirds the book. What you see in the panels from Figure 3 is typical Rorschach. His brutality is mind-boggling, yet he remains totally unaffected by it all. The bar patron is simply a means to a larger end. The romanticized American type is pulled from the constrained and idealized world of popular fiction and placed into a much more realistic world, facing real reactions from regular people. In that idealized world, Rorschach would miraculously get the answer to his question because he infallibly picked the right place to ask it, alleviating him of the responsibility for actually harming anyone. Moore’s world says, “No, that’s not the way this would work.” Not only does Rorschach destroy the man’s hand, but Moore recognizes that any character willing to threaten such an action wouldn’t care about the bar patron’s welfare to begin with. Even his syntax betrays a kind of calm detachment; he often speaks only in monotone, clipped sentences.

Then, of course, the reader must confront Rorschach’s name. His mask is a cloth filled with an amorphous fluid that can continuously reconfigure itself visually. And Rorschach takes his name from this mask, what he calls his “true face.” His origin story is appropriately placed in the novel’s central spot, Book VI, and it details the mask’s genesis. After suffering under a mother whose prostitution career makes him a target for bullying, a ten year old Walter Kovacs defends himself from one of these bullies by “partially blinding him with a lighted cigarette” (VI.6-7). He is removed from the home, placed into an orphanage. Then:

Aged 16. Left children’s home. Became unskilled manual worker, garment industry. Job bearable but unpleasant. Had to handle female clothing. (VI.10)

The short, chopped sentences overlay intensely emotional moments that destroyed Kovacs sense of the world’s purpose, ingraining a fixation on distinct barriers between right and wrong. The mask is the remnant of a specially ordered dress that is rejected by the customer for being ugly: “Wrong. Not ugly at all. Black and white. Moving. Changing shape … but not mixing. No gray” (VI.10). The mask forms “a face that I could bear to look at in the mirror” (VI.10). The intensity of this last sentence is heightened because Kovacs/Rorschach briefly (but only briefly) sheds the staccato tone he maintains throughout the chapter.

All this is revealed while Rorschach is in police custody and under psychiatric examination. But, instead of using Rorschach’s pathology to somehow cynically justify his crimes, Moore deconstructs this tendancy as well. The examining psychiatrist (who enters the chapter as the eternal optimist) is emotionally and mentally shattered by his brief run-in with Rorschach. The final story Rorschach tells, in which his full persona is shaped involves the brutal death of a young kidnapped girl, in which the kidnapper butchers her and feeds her to his dogs. The overriding image of the chapter, framed around a Rorschach ink blot card, is of one of those dogs with its skull split open. Rorschach does it as his initial act of revenge, then waits for the kidnapper, ambushes him and chains him to a woodburning stove. Rorschach then soaks the man’s dilapidated home in gasoline and sets it ablaze. The truly frightening aspect is that he hands the man a saw: “Shouldn’t bother trying to saw through handcuffs. Never make it in time”:

Stood in the street. Watched it burn. Imagined limbless felt torsos inside; breasts blackening; bellies smoldering; bursting into flame one by one. Watched for an hour.

Nobody got out. (VI.25)

The hero’s need to avenge an innocent fully turns him into a viscious predator of his own. His mask reflects his overriding belief that “Existence is random…No meaning save what we choose” (VI.26). As the psychiatrist notes of the inkblot near Book VI’s end: “The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty black meaninglessness” (VI.28). The heroic facade is peeled back, and reflected in Rorschach’s persona is that the superhero is only a cipher of the values of those who read it. Every section of the novel ends with an epigraph. Book VI ends with Nietzsche’s infamous quote about staring into the abyss. Moore seems to intend Rorschach as an empty well into which readers might poor their hopes, only to have their social and political frustrations revealed to them.

In the end, once the final plan is put into effect and the conspiracy Rorschach has been relentlessly tracking through the novel is fully revealed, he is (intriguingly) the one Watchman unwaveringly committed to fighting it: “Back to America. Evil must be punished. People must be told” (XII.23). But, forces beyond his control will not allow him to at least try to complete his mission:

Figure 4. From XII.24. Rorschach meets his end at the hands of another Watchman.

He peels off his mask and screams “DO IT!” It’s the first real emotion from the character, frustration running over and finally catching up to his motives.

Perhaps most intriguing is that Rorschach, of all the Watchmen, is the only one intently focused on fighting crime. He is the most famous, and probably most beloved, of all the book’s characters because underneath all the nihilism unveiled at the end of Book VI, Moore reveals the character to be the only character whose motives fit with the classical hero tradition. His brutality strikes a raw nerve for the reader, but he is unwavering in his commitments to justice (or, more appropriately, his concept of it). With his death, Moore unflinchingly kills the old-fashioned ethos associated with more traditional comic book heroes.

The Hog's Head » Themes

Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore.”

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