Watchmen - Graphic Novel (Spoilers)

Fanny Cradock

With the imminent release of Watchmen on the big screen, I decided to pick up the graphic novel before heading along to the cinema. Whatever about the film, apparently the novel it features highly in a number of peoples' opinions. For example, Time Magazine, as the cover of the book informs us, rates this novel in their top 100 novels of all time.

So after a quick trip into HMV on Friday and then a casual read over the weekend (it's not a long read), I'm now finished and left in two minds about this book. It certainly had a gritty type of realism that was fascinating to read, but I felt it so needlessly negative in its world-view. My goodness, just thinking about it - what a remorselessly bleak and violent read! Everything the world over was so broken and so full of decay that the overriding message I got from the novel was that life was essentially meaningless or at best a crude and tacky joke. A view shared and often reiterated by the god-like Dr Manhattan and some of the other characters. Indeed, the nihilistic existentialism that underpins the novel bears an affinity to Dostoyevksy at his most po-faced moments.

Even form writing this piece, I now believe that my opinion has been somewhat clrystalised. The book most certainly would not be anywhere close to my favourite read of all time. It certainly affected me as a reader, which is a good thing, but it left a bitter after-taste and I don't like that. I'm now left less feeling less enthusiastic about the film.

Has anyone else read this?

994

But isn't "Crime and Punishment" basically an attack on nihilism? The real "crime" is not the murders, but Raskolnikov's rejection of his own humanity; the real "punishment" is not Siberia, but the despair he plunges himself into.

As for all the negativity, what do you expect in a book about nuclear war? And what about the unification of the world in the face of an outside threat; the comic book reader and the newspaper seller embracing each other as New York explodes; Dreiberg and Laurie actually managing to move on with their lives; etc.

As for

"the overriding message I got from the novel was that life was essentially meaningless or at best a crude and tacky joke. A view shared and often reiterated by the god-like Dr Manhattan and some of the other characters. "

Firstly, Dr Manhattan actually changes his view and realises life does have meaning. And if Rorschach and the Comedian have such negative views, that doesn't mean that the author is demanding that you agree with them. The point of the story is to ask: what sort of person would dress up in a fancy costume, buy some gadgets and start fighting criminals? And the basic answer is, not a normal one.

Fanny Cradock

You might want to put spoiler tags on the specifics of your post.

Well, Dostoevsky wrote more than Crime And Punishment. I guess that if you want to debate whether he was an Existentialist then there might be better suited fora for that. Not sure I'll be joining you though. Granted he probably wasn't an existential nihilist, but I'm not really sure if such and issue is really all that central to my post.




Plot lines below

A few points.

I thought the main them of the book was not to conclude that the heroes were abnormal, rather it was about the death of heroes - both of the animated type and of our real world characters of heroes (be they in politics or wherever) who believe will see the ship through the storm. In certain regards this notion might fit in well with the BBC 2 documentary The Power of Nightmares.

However, Dreiberg and Laurie certainly were a positive outcome in the story. So you are certainly correct that it is not all relentless doom and gloom. But what of Dr Long? Chapter VI ends with him staring into the abyss.

As for Dr Manhattan, yes, he certainly does change his mind about the worth of humanity. But to what end? He doesn't really do anything other than bugger off to another galaxy because life was too complicated on earth.

I'm not sure what ultimate significance the embrace actually had. I mean they were vaporised. There silhouettes bore a resemblance to the spray painted silhouetted 'Hiroshima lovers' in the alley.

In the end it was a lie that stopped the war, but with New York as the cost. And you wonder was it all worth it - what of the diary, for instance? The blood still trickles down to cover the clock as it strikes 12.

copacetic

Personally I don't think you can disconnect it from the time it first came out, it's what 22years old or so. The idea at the time to look at the long term impact on the rest of the world of having 'superheroes' was groundbreaking. I'm not sure it has aged too well, but that may be because there have been hundreds of homages throughout the graphic novel and actually novel world as well as in film.

Did the world go that way because of them and the sense of not even lives of quiet desperation but lives of meaningless desperation it left the rest of the people in the world?

The terrible plan to try to resolve the problems they caused by the smartest of the heroes and the weird imagery in the pirate stories backing it up and running in parallel was fascinating for me at least at the time.

There is no doubt Moore has a bleak world view and still does though.

The Mad Hatter

Watchmen is one of my favourite books, and I intend to write an essay on why when I get around to my first blog post in the next week or two.

I have also seen absolutely no evidence that the film won't be (as seems to be habitual when adapting Moore) bloody awful.

From a structural point of view, the book is peerless. Moore was writing to show off that the comic was just as valid as the novel, short story or play as a form of literature, and in that he succeeded. (This has always been his aim in writing comics, before and since, but Watchmen was almost certainly his greatest achievement in the eighties.)

The general go-to chapter for demonstrating this is Fearful Symmetry, in which the frame layout is reflected half-way through the chapter, so that the first page mirrors the last, the second page mirrors the second-last, etc. Further, the first and last pages have the same setting, and the same character; ditto the second and second-last and so on. The climax, therefore, is halfway through the chapter, with a picture spread across two pages which is diagonally symmetrical.

From a stylistic point of view, (and I'm going to push into spoilers here),

the character in Tales of the Black Freighter, which mostly reflects the path of Adrian Veidt, has an interesting manner of speaking, almost always beginning a sentence with a sub-clause or adjective before the main sentence, and this is reflected in Veidt's dialogue when he is at his most misguided.

This, to my mind, is an extremely powerful, subtle way of tying the two characters together.

Tonally, yes, it is very dark (especially with the black joke in the last panel), but as copacetic pointed out this was merely a reflection of the time it was written. It wouldn't have taken much to nudge one side to nuclear assault in 1987, nor would it in the world of Watchmen. I disagree with him that the book has lost any of its impact, though - I haven't read anything since that hasn't been second-rate by comparison.

Talliesin

Firstly. It was published and written over 86/87 and conceived largely in 85 with some input before then. Think back to how things were then.

Reagan was in power. Thatcher was in power. The second two Brixton riots were happening. The H-Block hunger strikes were just a couple of years ago. Grenada had been invaded two years ago. The Iran-Contra affair was just about to come out. And seemed quite likely that we'd all be killed in a nuclear war.

Politically, especially if you were left-leaning, things seemed pretty darn bleak. At the same time, the idealism that went along with political strife in the 60s and 70s seemed to many to have died. It seemed to many that Thatcherism/Reaganism was becoming more and more powerful without any sort of checks or counter (nicely reflected by the fact that in Watchmen, the US won the war in Vietnam, so the biggest set-back to American right-wing values since WWII hasn't happened in its diegesis, and hence the Thatcherite/Reaganite ideology is even more powerful).

For all that. There's a certain optimism amidst the bleakness. Dr. Manhattan represents the completely nihilistic viewpoint. He understands things at the purely physical level only, and hence sees life as meaningless (because from that perspective it is; it's just a bunch of amino acids interacting). But he is convinced to come back, as the meaning in life exists at the level of what it is we actually do. And when he leaves it's from both a despair that is equally meaninglessness without giving value to life (if he didn't, it wouldn't cause him to react), and also to create life. Ultimately his viewpoint is rejected.

It rejects superheroes, and grand schemes, but it doesn't reject normal heroism. What is left when the superman is no longer walking in the world are normal people trying to do the best they can. The mistrust of grand schemes (think of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative) it places its trust in humanity. Even with the utter carnage at the end. Even when the clock has struck midnight and the worse has indeed happened, it's up to humanity to continue as best they can. And the suggestion is that they will.

Fanny Cradock

Talliesin wrote: »

Firstly. It was published and written over 86/87 and conceived largely in 85 with some input before then. Think back to how things were then.

Reagan was in power. Thatcher was in power. The second two Brixton riots were happening. The H-Block hunger strikes were just a couple of years ago. Grenada had been invaded two years ago. The Iran-Contra affair was just about to come out. And seemed quite likely that we'd all be killed in a nuclear war.

Politically, especially if you were left-leaning, things seemed pretty darn bleak. At the same time, the idealism that went along with political strife in the 60s and 70s seemed to many to have died. It seemed to many that Thatcherism/Reaganism was becoming more and more powerful without any sort of checks or counter (nicely reflected by the fact that in Watchmen, the US won the war in Vietnam, so the biggest set-back to American right-wing values since WWII hasn't happened in its diegesis, and hence the Thatcherite/Reaganite ideology is even more powerful).

For all that. There's a certain optimism amidst the bleakness. Dr. Manhattan represents the completely nihilistic viewpoint. He understands things at the purely physical level only, and hence sees life as meaningless (because from that perspective it is; it's just a bunch of amino acids interacting). But he is convinced to come back, as the meaning in life exists at the level of what it is we actually do. And when he leaves it's from both a despair that is equally meaninglessness without giving value to life (if he didn't, it wouldn't cause him to react), and also to create life. Ultimately his viewpoint is rejected.

It rejects superheroes, and grand schemes, but it doesn't reject normal heroism. What is left when the superman is no longer walking in the world are normal people trying to do the best they can. The mistrust of grand schemes (think of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative) it places its trust in humanity. Even with the utter carnage at the end. Even when the clock has struck midnight and the worse has indeed happened, it's up to humanity to continue as best they can. And the suggestion is that they will.

I'm not sure that it actively promotes heroism. Ultimately all the heroic acts - rescuing the people from the burning tenement to Night Owl and Rorschach attempts to stop Veidt - are failures. It is certainly a good read, but nevertheless a difficult once because it was almost entirely devoid of hope.

LoLth

Going to move this thread to comics as it is a graphic novel and might get more response/debate there. however I do like the literary arguments and examples being given so I'll leave a link in the literature board for it.

niall mc cann

I think you're missing the point completely, FC.

Clearly, the book doesn't end on the idea that life is meaningless drudgery... the final scene on Mars has a man with (for all practical purposes) God's perspective accept that human life is fundamentally meaningful. Who can argue with that? Only Rorschach and Ozymandias, I reckon, and they're deeply damaged people. A pair of sadistic, narcisistic psychopaths who frankly deserve to destroy each other as they did.

Ultimately, Watchmen's a morally thorny book, not only for the problematic fact that the villain wins, but because all but one one of the heroes decide not to bring him to justice. You have to look to Dan's ornithology essay to really get where the book's coming from. It's all very well for Rorschach to say there's no meaning to anything, that every inkblot is just another shape, but Dan instinctively knew from the beginning what Doctor Manhattan took a long time to figure out... in a world full of people, it isn't just a shape. We have to able to find meaning in those inkblots, just like we have to be able to see wisdom in an owl's eyes. If we can't, well... that's a kind of sickness. As Rorschach ably demonstrates.

Fysh

The OP has some interesting points, but I think that a greater understanding of the historical context of comics leading up to Watchmen at its release would explain some of them away.

As others have said, at the time of its release it was groundbreaking in its depiction of costumed heroes. Gone were the lantern-jawed aliens and supremely dedicated defenders of all that was right and simple about the world (with "the world" typically reduced to American values, ideals and interests) and in their place came a series of flawed or in some cases outright damaged individuals trying to make sense of a world that they perceived to be in need of extralegal "heroes".

The specifics of the characters appearances are related to the Charlton Comics characters which DC had purchased at the time, but if you examine the general personality types of the characters as they ended up in the story you get ideas and themes that are recursive throughout superhero comics, and arguably throughout adventure or pulp fiction.

On the whole, though, what you get are characters whose morality is much closer to that faced by those of us in the real world than it is the simplistic "good vs evil" morality that so often underpins superhero or action adventure stories. So Rorschach and the Comedian might both convincingly argue that they did what they thought was right, but the crux of the matter is down to the beliefs that they act upon and how that informs their worldview. And where the darkness of the world is so much more oppressive than might normally be expected in action adventure stories, this just serves to highlight the importance the smaller acts of kindness and compassion that are littered through the book. From the doctor's journey as he tries to understand Rorschach through the newsstand vendor and the comic reader right through to Dan and Laurie, there is an optimism expressed in the book that basically the small things are what matter and where we can make some kind of difference to the world we're in. Rorschach's small-time but ideologically extreme approach is every bit as flawed as Veidt's macroscopic but ultimately simplistic approach, because they try to make the entire world, with all its complex and varied individuals with their wants and needs and fears, fit into a reductive world view. All those smaller moments involve people setting aside their world view and its restrictions, and dealing with each other as people. For me part of the book's overall idea is that for the world to be made better than it is, there can be no reliance on costumed heroes or government forces or anyone else - we all have to take collective responsibility for it and be involved in it, by making an effort to deal with each other as people. This isn't something that can be done once to fix a problem; it needs to be something that everyone chooses to do every day. Compassion and a willingness to understand each other are what will help us develop and move forward as a civilization, not technological developments which let us put power into the hands of individuals tasked to act on our behalf. When a single individual can be as complicated as the average human being, how can one person honestly undertake to act on behalf of the masses? (In this regard there are interesting parallels to V For Vendetta and its anarchy vs fascism).

Fanny Cradock

niall mc cann wrote: »

I think you're missing the point completely, FC.

Clearly, the book doesn't end on the idea that life is meaningless drudgery... the final scene on Mars has a man with (for all practical purposes) God's perspective accept that human life is fundamentally meaningful. Who can argue with that? Only Rorschach and Ozymandias, I reckon, and they're deeply damaged people. A pair of sadistic, narcisistic psychopaths who frankly deserve to destroy each other as they did.

But Ozymandias wasn't destroyed. And the fundamental meaning to life that Dr Manhattan detected was only sustained by Ozymandias' lie.

niall mc cann wrote: »

Ultimately, Watchmen's a morally thorny book, not only for the problematic fact that the villain wins, but because all but one one of the heroes decide not to bring him to justice. You have to look to Dan's ornithology essay to really get where the book's coming from. It's all very well for Rorschach to say there's no meaning to anything, that every inkblot is just another shape, but Dan instinctively knew from the beginning what Doctor Manhattan took a long time to figure out... in a world full of people, it isn't just a shape. We have to able to find meaning in those inkblots, just like we have to be able to see wisdom in an owl's eyes. If we can't, well... that's a kind of sickness. As Rorschach ably demonstrates.

I'm not sure there is a villain - not in the typical sense of the word anyway. One might argue that Ozymandias turned out to be a saviour of humanity - though the cost was so high that the truth should never be revealed. Which rather leaves the Sword of Damocles hovering over the diary.

Fysh

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

But Ozymandias wasn't destroyed. And the fundamental meaning to life that Dr Manhattan detected was only sustained by Ozymandias' lie.

I haven't read the comic in a while, but I thought that Dr Manhattan's perceived value of life was down to the sheer improbability of any one human being coming into existence, and that the reason he hadn't thought about it before that point in the story was the number of people on the planet made humanity's presence seem mundane.

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

I'm not sure there is a villain - not in the typical sense of the word anyway. One might argue that Ozymandias turned out to be a saviour of humanity - though the cost was so high that the truth should never be revealed. Which rather leaves the Sword of Damocles hovering over the diary.

You could convincingly argue that every costumed character in the story was a villain of some sort; either by helping Veidt keep his conspiracy secret, or by being brutally indifferent to the suffering and death of their fellow man. Ozymandias avoided the seemingly-inevitable short term problem of nuclear war between the US and Russia, but even he didn't grasp that he would have to continue his machinations if he wanted to continue to manipulate human behaviour at the international level...

Talliesin

niall mc cann wrote: »

Ultimately, Watchmen's a morally thorny book, not only for the problematic fact that the villain wins,

Nobody ultimately wins. Just like in real life, nobody ultimately "wins". Time passes, we all die, all empires fall. The empires of the USA and USSR would have fallen anyway (in real life, the latter largely did already, and the former will some day). The most obvious line of Shelley's poem "Ozymandias" - "Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!" - is explicitly referenced (twice? more?) but the rest of the poem is implied:

Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

It is Dr. Manhattan that points this out before he leaves, but rather than stating that everything ends, he states "nothing ends". Because as the eventual destruction of everything, with every peak having its decline, means everything ends, in another sense it means nothing has a final end. There is no ultimate victory, or ultimate defeat. Life continues. It would probably have continued without Oxymandias' plan, and it'll certainly continue long enough to defeat much of what he wrought. While the impossibility of an ultimate victory can be interpreted as implying futility and despair, it can also be interpreted as a source of hope. The miracles that Manhattan saw happening in life, continue to happen every day.

Because nobody ultimately wins, nobody ultimately loses.

niall mc cann

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

But Ozymandias wasn't destroyed. And the fundamental meaning to life that Dr Manhattan detected was only sustained by Ozymandias' lie.

Well, the thing is, I would argue that that's not the case.

I always feel like a fraud pointing this out to people, 'cause it's not something that i noticed myself but something that was pointed out to me, but i find it a very compelling and convincing observation, so i keep bringing it up.

All the way through the book, Moore returns to a bunch of street level everymen that don't seem to have much to do with the story; the newspaper vendor, the kid reading the comic book, the gay couple who's relationship is falling on hard times. Throughout the book, we see along with the other spectators that the gay couple's relationship is deteriorating, becoming frostier, until they can't speak to each other without arguing. This comes to a head in the penultimate chapter where their arguing finally collapses into an actual physical confrontation. Now, just as the people around them move to intervene, to end the confrontation, Ozymandias springs his masterstroke, and anhilates the city around them.

The person who pointed this out to me suggested that Moore was using the micro to evoke the macro, so to speak. That just as the frosty relationship descended into actual violence, people actively moved to prevent the worst happening and if nature had been left to take its course the pair would have been pulled apart and left to go their seperate ways relatively uninjured, living to fight (or maybe even reconcile) another day. That didn't happen, because Ozymandias felt his way was better.

There are other reasons why i disagree with what you've said too, of course. The two main one's being that in reality, we know that Ozymandias' actions weren't necessary to end the cold war... it really did just kind of fizzle out in the end. Also, even in the world of Watchmen, this wouldn't have been the first time the doomsday clock stood at five to midnight; would anyone argue that the cuban missile crisis would have been resolved better by having Kennedy indulge in a spot of mass murder for stage effect?

With regard to Veidt being destroyed, well, the book ends with Rorschach's journal about to be published. Maybe people will take it seriously and maybe they won't, but that's incedental. even as a dismissable conspiracy theory it's more than enough for people to hang their old prejudices and aggressions on. Which is all it will take to engineer another five-to-midnight scenario really. So the question stands at the end of the book (at least if you fundamentally believe Veidt acted in people's best interests)... how many deaths will take to save us next time? Even if Veidt's economic empire remains unscathed, the existence of such a question lays Veidt bare as the morally bankrupt scarecrow that he is.

I'm not sure there is a villain - not in the typical sense of the word anyway. One might argue that Ozymandias turned out to be a saviour of humanity - though the cost was so high that the truth should never be revealed. Which rather leaves the Sword of Damocles hovering over the diary.

I don't buy that argument. Killing people to prove you're smarter than Alexander the Great (and ultimately, by my lights, that's why he did what he did) doesn't get you a free pass. He's a terrifying figure, Veidt. To me at least.

niall mc cann

Talliesin wrote: »

Nobody ultimately wins. Just like in real life, nobody ultimately "wins". Time passes, we all die, all empires fall. The empires of the USA and USSR would have fallen anyway (in real life, the latter largely did already, and the former will some day).

Sure, you're absolutely right.

As far as I can see, the only morally acceptable argument in favour of Veidt's plan - that he saved more people than he sacrificed - is an empty one; the situation will recur, and if Veidt's way is acceptable once, then it'll have to be acceptable again, eventually. Which i find unacceptable, frankly.:o

If we're fundamentally self destructive, what's the point of preventing the destruction? It's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.

RAMAN

I picked Watchmen and V for Vendeta up while I was in London. I found them both to be excellent books but I have to say I preferred V as it seemed that bit more realistic. That said I have only read a few graphic novels and none of them have been of the super hero nature.

I guess as has been said already you have to place Watchmen in the time period it was written to truly appreciate its message. But leaving out all the arguments its still a bloody good read.

The Mad Hatter

Stephen Fry just twittered about it. He's apparently really enjoying it:

Stephen Fry wrote:

Steed Reading Watchmen, btw. Wow. That's all I can say. W-fucking-ow!