Watchmen: Getting Started

Preliminaries (Updated)

Update:  Here’s another link that appeared online:  IGN’s “Top Ten Most Memorable Moments from Watchmen“.

First, here are a couple of links to online “annotated” versions of Watchmen (the book):

• Watching the Detectives:  The site bills itself as “an internet companion” to the book; it’s akin to a Wiki, although the layout is different from anything like Wikipedia.  It’s provenance is excellent.  Maintained through the University of Baltimore’s School of Information Arts and Technologies, one of its founders is Stuart Moulthrop.  He’s a noted and very well respected media artist/theorist, especially in my world of games studies.
• The Annotated Watchmen:  If Watching the Detectives leans toward the academic side, this site is geared toward the lay-reader (and the parent site suggests exactly this!).  It’s a bit easier to navigate, though perhaps not as detailed.  Pay special attention to the “Characters” and “World of Watchmen” links on the left-hand side — the better parts of the site, in my opinion.  Like any good postmodern fiction, Watchmen plays heavily with historical events, mixing the accepted historical record with alternate histories and plain fiction.  Catching on to the idea that Richard Nixon is still president in 1985 can be a bit disorienting…

Also, the February 27th issue of Entertainment Weekly has a cover story on the film.  It’s not much, really — only a few pages.  But it’s a quick primer to some of the news and details that surround Watchmen and the film adaptation.

And…they did rip my title from my last post for their article!  Or maybe “Who will Watch Watchmen?” is a little too obvious!?

Mythologizing America

For the Batman article I wrote for Journey to the Sea, I read a book on the “American monomyth” called the Myth of the American Superhero, by Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence  (ht to Randy Hoyt).  The defined that monomyth in this way (a quote I used for that essay, too):

A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task.

By now, most readers here are familiar with the Hero’s Quest/Journey that Travis and John Granger have found situated firmly at the heart of Harry Potter.  In the Americanized version, Jewett and Lawrence argue, the hero is an isolated loner who has the moxy to step forward and circumvent the traditional structures of law and society if it means saving both from their own inadequacies.  The character type they find predominant is the Virginian — a rugged individual who can survive on his own and is willing to forgo his romantic fulfillment for the greater good of society.  Thus, if the hero gets the girl (and the hero is invariably a vigorously heterosexual male), it’s always at the end of his quest.  She simply waits for him, both chaste and unwavering in her support, as he completes the work that will return the landscape to balance and bounty.

While we see similarities to Harry’s purpose (and perhaps to Ginny), the demarcations are rather clear, as well.  Whereas any Western posits a character who can seemingly overcome all odds on his own (think of nearly every John Wayne and Clint Eastwood cowboy flick), one of HP’s central themes is Harry’s growing need of others (and his recognition of such need).  While a seemingly trivial difference, the fact that Harry is emotionally connected is a radical departure.  In a parallel case, my father-in-law finds the new James Bond (Daniel Craig) deeply disconcerting in Casino Royale because the character evinces an emotional vulnerability never before present.  The scene in which he comforts a traumatized, shocked Vesper Lynd after a particularly brutal fist fight left him saying, “He ain’t James Bond.”

And we see this pattern repeating itself for nearly every comic book hero one can imagine.  Heroes may no longer be islands unto themselves, yet they clearly operate within an enclosed psychological world that still finds them loners, even if unwilling ones.  Whereas the woman was often domestic and only supportive in the monomyth outlined by Jewett and Lawrence, modern comic book narratives  posit heroes as concerned about the safety of those they love as the hero’s identity becomes a closely guarded secret and the woman moves into the public sphere of work and social/economic mobility.  If the hero’s identity is ever compromised, those to whom he is emotionally connected suddenly become targets.  Thus, women are often not overtly domestic in modern hero narratives, owing concessions to the changing social perspectives on gender differences and norms.  (It needs to be noted that, for many feminist critics, there is still a problem.)  But, the monomythic American hero remains largely intact in many ways.  As a character like Joker demonstrates, American comic writers have generally only scratched at the monomythic hero while they have gone to radical lengths to redraw the complexities of the monomythic villain.

The heroic ideal saturates American culture, pooling in many corners of its self-perception.  Advertising, in particular, plays with these identities.  Hence, beer commercials always portray the man as a being content to only mock the emotional needs typically associated with women — I’m thinking here of the beer commercial whose tagline is “Let’s vent!”  Even the need to express frustration finds itself suppressed under a simple beer drinking session.  Most video games use exaggerated examples  of such emotional detachment:

My favorite game character, Solid Snake. From IGN's image gallery for Metal Gear Solid 4.

I don’t need to offer an elaborate analysis of the image for you to see the visual metaphors symbolizing self-imposed isolation.  In this game franchise, Metal Gear Solid, the primary way of playing is to move unseen and undetected.  The player should avoid contact with other characters at all costs.  Not only is it an immense challenge that yields a huge emotional sense of accomplishment if you can pull it off, but the gameplay engenders the need to try it over and over until the player masters the skills to move efficiently, quietly, and (if necessary) with deadly force.  That last detail is especially important — contact means the player needs to kill the enemy character.

How I’ll post on Watchmen

Watchmen is an uncompromising deconstruction of these monomythic characteristics.  Every male character works at one level within the monomythic archetype.  But unlike their mainstream counterparts, Watchmen’s psychological isolation has frighteningly real and catastrophic consequences.  And the female hero characters evolve as interrogations of the super-sexualized (even fetishized) heroine operating in a predominantly male worldview (as much as I like Frank Miller’s Batman, he too often tends to create female characters in precisely such a fetishized way).  The men find themselves emotionally cut-off from others, by choice, necessity, and inability to do otherwise — and they are destroyed for it.  The women are strong characters, but they are often victimized by their male counterparts as they are objectified and commodified.

My plan for tackling these characters will probably follow this:

1. Rorschach, aka Walter Kovacs:  He is the heart of the novel’s storyline in many ways, and is a fan favorite.  Yet, much like Snape, his character is deeply troubling because his ends might be justified, but his means are terrifying.  His mask (from which he takes his “heroic” identity) betrays much about him, especially as he calls it his “true face.”
2. Nite Owl I and II, aka Hollis Mason and Dan Dreiberg:  Nite Owl is one of two heroic personae actually occupied by two different individuals in different eras — perhaps a sly comment by Moore on character continuity in comic books.  Mason is very much the quintessential monomythic character type.  Morally upright (in a traditional sense), honorable, and isolated, his death is tragic and alone.  And he happens to write a tell-all autobiography of his experiences that is part of Watchmen’s narrative.  Dan Dreiberg, Mason’s heir to the Nite Owl persona, is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story, but also the most immasculated of all the male characters.
3. Dr. Manhattan, aka Jon Osterman:  Watchmen’s superman, he is the common comic book product of the atomic science experiment gone awry.  We watch him slowly detach from his own humanity as he is able to operate outside every human limitation.  As he willingly drifts from his human identity, his concern for the conflicts brewing in the novel’s plot are treated as philosophically unimportant questions.
4. Ozymandias, aka Adrian Veidt:  Veidt is the “world’s smartest man” whose athletic ability and wealth are unrivaled — a clear shot at Bruce Wayne.  He cashes in on his hero persona, using the image and brand to market everything from toys to perfume.  And he comes to a devastating conclusion about how to solve humanity’s problems.
5. The Comedian, aka Edward Blake:  Without question, Blake has one primary reference point in mainstream comics — Captain America.  Only Blake is no benevolent expression of the valorized American ideal.  Like early versions of Captain America, he carries a .45, but he kills with it.  And he does so ruthlessly once he loses sight of the monomythic narrative.  His murder in the opening pages sets the novel’s plot in motion.
6. Silk Spectre I and II, aka Sally and Laurie Juspeczyk:  They are mother and daughter.  Sally eventually traded on her sex appeal, posing as a pin-up model in the 40s and 50s, and literally laying the groundwork for her daugher, Laurie.  Laurie is a “modern” woman, sensitive and scornful of her mother’s status as sex-object.  Yet, to open the novel, she has also become something of a kept woman.  In the novel’s storyline, she is in her mid-thirties and is Dr. Manhattan’s lover — and she has been since she was 15.  Her character is a complicated one, made all the more so by her relationship with her mother and the sexual identity passed on to her.

Alan Moore drew all of these as complex character studies, and the webs that connect them are vast and layered.  Thus, I’ll devote a post to each, but don’t be suprised if I veer into elaborate commentary on other characters in those posts, as well.  Further complications stem from the fact that these Watchmen are the inheritors of an earlier league of “masked adventurers,” the Minutemen.  Silk Spectre I, Nite Owl I, and the Comedian were all members of that group, as well.  And though the Minutemen are not central to the main plot, their characters provide interesting backgrounds against which to draw comparisons of the Watchmen.

The book is dense and sophisticated, and I cannot guarantee that I’ll avoid spoilers in the posts to come.  The need for detail will simply be too great for me to avoid them entirely. I’ll also post some relevant panels, if at all possible.

I look forward to your reactions to the story and to my posts!

Tagged as: Alan Moore, American monomyth, hero, Watchmen