50 pages • 1 hour read
Alan Moore, Illustr. Dave GibbonsWatchmen
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | YA | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Absurdity of Costumed Crimefighting
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains depictions of graphic violence, violence against animals, suicide, alcohol addiction, and attempted rape. The source text also contains outdated, racist, and misogynistic language, which is reproduced in this guide only through quotations.
Watchmen earned its status as a classic of the superhero genre by turning its standard tropes upside down. Early on, the text makes note of the fact that costumed heroes disproportionately suffer tragic fates in the form of alcoholism, an early death at the hands of a villain, a murderous sex scandal, and—for the few that survive into old age—dreary lives feeding off nostalgia for bygone times. Hollis Mason, a generally sympathetic character and chief chronicler of the early costumed hero era, admits that the motives for costumed crimefighting range from psychological fixations to ideological fanaticism: “We were crazy, we were kinky, we were Nazis, all those things that people say. We were also doing something because we believed in it” (72). The latter part of that sentence conveys a noble sentiment but implies that heroes’ deeply held beliefs consisted of fascism and white supremacy. In some cases this is overt, such as The Comedian leveraging his talents to the overthrow of left-wing regimes (at tremendous human cost) and Rorschach’s conspiratorial ravings he derives from New Frontiersman, a newspaper that praises both masked vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan for their shared efforts to “preserve American culture in areas where there were very real dangers of that culture being overrun and mongrelized” (276).
Even the more sympathetic figures, such as Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, realize the meaninglessness of what they are doing, outside of a very personal motive. Dan confesses to Laurie that it was “just a schoolkid’s fantasy that got out of hand,” to which she replies that “at least you were living out your own fantasies. I was living out my mother’s” (216-217). Dan, like Hollis—who first wore the costume of Nite Owl—is drawn to the thrill of crimefighting, such that he cannot perform sexually until he is in his costume and aboard his floating ship.
The most telling absurdity is that nothing the characters do helps to change the outcome. Nite Owl and Rorschach work furiously to unearth a plot that is already in motion. Dr. Manhattan, with all the power in the world, simply chooses not to help a world that he feels has dealt him a personal slight. The Comedian embraces the absurdity and wears it as a badge of honor. Ozymandias similarly devises “history’s greatest practical joke” (372), a ludicrous plot so real in its effects as to transform the world itself. He appears to have succeeded by the end, but Manhattan warns him that in the long run, even the most ingenious plans can become absurd trivialities.
Discovering a Purpose for Existence
A major trope of the superhero genre is the origin story. In addition to explaining how a person acquired particular powers, the act of “creation” imbues the hero with a very particular purpose that will inform their crimefighting career. Superman is a refugee from a dying planet, too young to have saved Krypton, but in adulthood charged with protecting the people of Earth who took him in. Spider-Man initially uses his powers for fame and money, until his carelessness helps facilitate the death of his Uncle Ben, after which he relentlessly pursues criminals to assuage his guilt and cover up his teenage insecurities. For its part, Watchmen contains three distinct origin stories that generate not only a purpose for a particular character, but a range of perspectives on the meaning of existence itself.
The first is Dr. Manhattan’s, who—like Bruce Banner (the Hulk) or Barry Allen (the Flash)—experiences a laboratory accident that infuses him with remarkable powers. A man of science and a victim of new technology, he becomes the ultimate scientist, interested in the mechanics of the universe but almost completely uninterested in their moral significance. His lingering sexuality is more interested in relieving his still-human side rather than pursuing intimate relationships, which is why he so promptly drops his longtime girlfriend for the teenaged Laurie Juspeczyk. When Laurie leaves him, he finds life to pale in comparison to the “thermo-dynamic miracles” of the natural world, which possess a meaning all their own, with or without organic life.
The next origin story is Rorschach, who begins experimenting with his mask and vigilante detective work after a woman he made a dress for—Kitty Genovese, a real-life figure—is murdered outside her apartment building in 1964 and her neighbors reportedly looked on rather than assisting (see entry 11 in the Important Quotes section). While this experience plays a formative role in hardening his views toward society, he declares himself “born” at the moment he butchers two German shepherds, hurling them at their child-murdering owner, chaining the owner inside his home and burning the house to ash. Rorschach agrees with Dr. Manhattan there is no inherent meaning to the universe, but rather than treating it with detachment, he imposes his own meaning, having made himself “free to scrawl [his] own design on this morally blank world” (204). It is a meaning that extends no further than Rorschach and those with whom he interacts, but it gives a meaning to his own life, if not existence itself.
The final origin story is Adrian Veidt’s transformation into Ozymandias. In contrast to the others, his is mainly an act of self-creation, a conscious attempt to model heroes of the ancient past, such as Alexander the Great, and “match his accomplishment, bringing an age of illumination to a benighted world” (356). Where the other two perceive themselves as having become new people, Ozymandias is a self-conscious mask that Veidt presents to the world, even more so after he reveals his identity. His persona as “the world’s smartest man” is part of an effort to prepare mankind for their own transformation into an age of unity and enlightenment (380). He is thus writing his own origin story for a brave new world.
The American Psyche
Alan Moore has described superheroes as a particularly American phenomenon, which other people consume as entertainment but for Americans represent an obsession that reveals a great deal about their national character. The clearest example of this is The Comedian, his costume a clear reference to Captain America, who gleefully pursues violence on behalf of his government against foreign and domestic targets. Only 10 years removed from the Vietnam War, Moore revisits and frames that era as a colossal act of mass violence against a people who posed no threat to the United States, which became an absurdity for the notion that Americans were bringing freedom and democracy (in the comic, Vietnam becomes the 51st state). Eddie Blake personifies this nihilism, killing scores of Vietnamese people before killing a woman pregnant with his child, just as the United States killed millions before leaving their allies to languish in refugee camps, cling to rafts, or otherwise suffer. Dr. Manhattan, the real instrument of victory in Vietnam, is a personification of America’s post-WWII supremacy, its seemingly unlimited power to shape the world according to its interests and values, and yet its patent refusal to understand the world beyond its own interests and values.
Rorschach is also a distinctly American cultural figure. Unlike European private detectives like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, who relies on wit and intuition, Rorschach has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, plowing ahead with an unshakable sense of righteousness. He doubles as the exaggerated voice of a postwar American conservative movement that, in its more extreme variations, came to see the nation as doomed for having lost the mythical virtues of previous generations; lacking hope of a better future, the nation settles instead for cruelty against its perceived enemies.
The final distinctly American figure is Adrian Veidt, who immigrates to the United States as a baby in 1939 as his family flees Europe upon the outbreak of World War II. Adrian thus imbibes American culture from an early age without being born within its confines. Adrian plays the part of a consummate American: the self-made man and titan of capitalism who is able to make countless millions on toys and warmed-over self-help advice. Yet as a European by birth, he retains the European critique that a violent and overly self-interested America must be brought to heel for the peace of the world. The central question at the end of the text is whether such a thing is possible, or if America’s fondness for conspiracy theories and insistence on going its own way will ultimately ruin his plans for global unity.
