Rorschach: Watchmen’s Abyss

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.

Tagged as: Rorschach, Watchmen