(Spoiler alert, naturally)
It's not a story with a whole lotta love for liberals. Adrian Veidt, whose distaste for both Nixon and the war in Vietnam is atypical of crime fighting superheros, turns out to be the bad guy, and bad in that Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, What's A Few Million Dead People If You're Building Utopia way. Plus, because Rorshach's search to find the superhero killer drives much of the plot, the reader winds up looking at the world through Rorschach's eyes. And Rorschach would just as soon break your fingers one by one as listen to you explain to him how all evil is structural, and how the petty criminals who fill our prisons are really victims, not perpetrators, victims of unjust and oppressive systems.
Rorschach would fit in well in a Martin Scorsese movie. He has a strong (shall we say, Reformed?) doctrine of sin, but no correspondingly strong doctrine of grace. Rorshach's abhorrence at the spilling of innocent blood and his uncompromisingly pessimistic assessment of human nature make him both more principled and realistic than Veidt, but his loss of faith and his frankly nihilistic view of life (no God and no meaning other than what we impose on life--hence the name and the mask) make his principles arbitrary, and he winds up skating dangerously close to the abyss that he's fighting so hard to keep society from falling into.
I understand that the movie minimizes the Black Freighter subplot. For those of you who haven't read the book but are reading this post in defiance of all the spoilers, a minor character reads an old comic titled Tales from the Black Freighter, whose narrative intersects in uncanny ways with the ongoing Watchmen dialogue and plot. Maybe a comic book panel is better equipped than film to highlight the contrapuntal rhythm of Watchmen and The Black Freighter, but I'm guessing that the absence of The Black Freighter would be a deficit in the movie version.
I finished Watchmen the night I watched Stephen Colbert interview this crazy birther chick, Orly Taitz:
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Womb Raiders - Orly Taitz | ||||
| ||||
Did you notice how she compared Barack Obama to both Stalin and Hitler in under five minutes? I thought that the conclusion to Watchmen--in which both the truth and untold millions slain have been buried under the foundation of Adrian Veidt's Brave New World and only the John Bircher types at The New Frontiersman are the wiser--looks eerily like what movement conservatives have deluded themselves into believing a second Obama term might look like. Foreigner Muslim terrorist Obama's socialized medicine kills all the old people, and only World Net Daily knows the truth! Although Watchmen was written in the '80s and is preoccupied with Cold War politics, it's surprisingly contemporary.
It's not my politics, but it's quite well-written and well-drawn and I can't wait to see the movie.
Recent Comments