This is the war handwavium score for “Watchmen”, a 12 issue comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.
Total: +327 points.
NOTE: SPOILERS!!!
-10 point: Chapter 1, page 16: Rorschach breaks anonymous mans’ fingers trying to get information. Turns out he doesn’t know anything. Showing realistic issues with torture.
-5 points: Chapter 2, page 15: Comedian kills Vietnamese woman, pregnant with his child. Would be -10 points, but she initiates physical violence by slashing open his face with a broken bottle. Protagonist kills innocent civilian.
-2 point: chapter 2, page 18: Comedian shoots rubber bullets at anonymous kid spray painting graffitti. possibly protagonist overusing force. Possibly just a paper target.
10 points: chapter 2, page 21: Rorschach threatens to break Moloch’s arm unless he tells truth. Moloch tells the truth. Fantasy Torture.
12 points: chapter 3, page 13: Nite Owl and Laurie beat up 6 paper targets in alley way.
10 points: chapter 3, page 14: Nite Owl and Laurie beat up 5 paper targets in alley way.
3 points: chapter 4, page 14: Dr. Manhattan vaporizes man with gun. paper target.
6 points: chapter 4, page 20: Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam jungle, kills 2 paper targets.
5 points: chapter 4, page 23: Comedian, operating alone brings back the Americans held hostage in Iran. Apparently, not a single hostage is killed. This, we are told, silences “even his harshest critics”. Unrealistic portrayal of violence.
3 points: chapter 4, page 23: Rorschach leaves dead body on police doorsteps. Paper target.
10 points: chapter 4, page 23: Rorschach kills a multiple rapist that police did nothing about. violence superior to social structures.
10 points: chapter 5, page 5: Rorschach uses torture to get truth out of Moloch. Fantasy Torture.
6 points: chapter 5, page 7: three dead paper targets being investigated by police.
3 points: chapter 5, page 14: Veidt’s unnamed female companion killed by assassin. paper target.
3 points: chapter 5, page 16: Veidt kills unnamed assassin with poison pill. paper target.
5 points: chapter 5, page 27: Rorschach attacks three policeman. paper targets.
Observation: chapter 6, page 4: Rorschach as child is struck by mother and by john/client. Could be pointless demonstration of evil. Could be Mary Sue-ism.
4 points: chapter 6, page 7: Rorschach as child attacks two paper targets.
3 points: chapter 6, page 12: Rorschach kills anonymous prisoner with hot grease. paper target.
10 points: chapter 6, page 14: Rorschach captures two bad guys and leaves them for police. Violence superior to social structures.
2 point: chapter 6, page 15: Rorschach beats up anonymous bad guy. Paper target.
10 points: chapter 6, page 18: Rorschach uses torture to find kidnapped girl.
6 points: chapter 6, page 23: Rorschach kills two dogs. paper targets.
10 points: chapter 6, page 25: man makes repeated mentions that there’s no evidence and Rorschach can’t “prove” he did anything, implying “prove” in a court of law. Rorschach handcuffs man to pipe, gives him a hacksaw, tells him he’ll have to saw through his arm to get out, then lights the building on fire. Man is killed. Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine. Violence superior to Social structures.
10 points: chapter 6, page 28: Dr. Malcolm starts story as a “positive” person. Always looking on the bright side of life. Rorschach tells him how the world is Nasty, Brutish, and Short, how there is no one but us, that there is no God (p. 26), and that hell is other people. By page 28, Dr. Malcolm takes on Rorschach’s view that it’s a dark world, we’re all alone, the horror of empty and meaningless. Violence over social structures. Bad philosophy from sociopaths winning over positive philosophy from well adjusted people.
5 points: chapter 7, page 12: Police shown beating passive women peace protestors with baton. Police and the “masked adventurers” are basically on opposite teams. Government is shown as ineffective. This is a pointless display of evilness.
5 points: chapter 8, page 6: inmate talks cop into abandoning post and giving inmate some private time with Rorschach. Violence superior to social structures.
5 points: chapter 8, page 15: Rorschach breaks paper target’s arms (Larry), then inmates kill Larry to get to Rorscharch. Paper Target. Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine.
3 points: Chapter 8, page 17: Rorschach kills paper target with arc welder. (Michael?)
+8 points: Chapter 8, page 27: anonymous gang breaks into wrong superhero’s apartment, thinking he had something to do with Rorscharch breaking out of prison. 4 nonlethal hits against the mob of paper targets.
-5 points: Chapter 8, page 27: anonymous gang breaks into wrong superhero’s apartment, thinking he had something to do with Rorscharch breaking out of prison. Vigilanteism misidentifies innocent target. Half points because its an anonymous group, rather than one of the main characters.
10 points: chapter 9, page 24: Laurie’s mom, Sally, was nearly raped by Eddie (the Comedian) chapter 2, page 6. During the attempted rape, Eddie says standard rape justification of “I know what you need. you gotta have some reason for wearing an outfit like that.” We now find out that the attempted rapist Eddie was right. He did know what Sally wanted. Sally wanted to have sex with Eddie, and Sally ended up getting pregnant with Eddie’s child, and that child was Laurie. Misrepresentation of Rape.
-5 points: Comedian attempts to rape Laurie.
Observation: Chapter 10, page 6: While Rorschach has been continuously identified as the craziest of the masked vigilantes, he actually shows the decency to keep the fact that the landlady is a prostitute a secret from her kids.
10 points: Chapter 10, page 14: Rorschach successsfully tortures useful information out of the correct person and gets the clue he needs.
10 points: Chapter 10, page 16: Nite Owl successfully tortures useful information out of the correct person and gets the clues he needs.
6 points: Chapter 10, page 18: shown two paper targets killed in ship explosion.
Observation: Chapter 10, page 8: Veidt reveals his hero worship of Alexander the Great.
15 points: chapter 10, page 11: Veidt kills his three assistants for no functional reason whatsoever. Pure demonstration of his insanity.
Observation: chapter 10, page 28: 11 paper targets shown killed as a result of Veidt’s plan. Civilians. Note that civilians killed in the crossfire of a battle would normally reflect negative points, but in this case, civilians are intended targets. Since all the main characters alive at the end (Veidt, Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, Laurie) all agree that the ends justify the means, then these civilians are paper targets that they must kill to get to their goal (world peace).
Observation: Chapter 12, page 1: 50 dead paper targets.
Observation: Chapter 12, page 2: Another 50 or so dead paper targets.
Observation: Chapter 12, page 3: 10 dead paper targets.
Observation: Chapter 12, page 4: 4 dead paper targets.
Observation: Chapter 12, page 5: 7 dead paper targets.
Observation: Chapter 12, page 7: 7 dead paper targets.
10 points: Chapter 12, pages 2 through 7 seem to exist mostly to show a lot of dead bodies and blood and gore and veins in teeth. There are approximately 150 dead civilian bodies shown on those mostly static pages. Normally, if a story had a war going on and showed civilians getting caught and killed in the crossfire, that would subtract points from the war handwavium score. But this isn’t that. This is something different. This is intentional targeting of civilians. And it produces a positive effect, world peace. There is also the issue of whether to count every single body represented on the page, all the way to the tiny stick figures in the far background. If I were scoring a movie, I’d count only the people you see actually killed on screen. But this is a different media. So I don’t know what to do with this scene. I won’t score it as paper targets, but I’ll give it 10 points for showing violence as superior to social structures.
10 points: Chapter 12, page 19: Veidt’s plan to unite the world against a common, alien entity works. Peace breaks out world wide. Hobbes’ Leviathan fantasy come true. Violence over social structures.
30 points: Chapter 12, page 20: Dr. Manhattan, Laurie, and Nite Owl, all agree to keep the truth a secret. They become complicit in Veidt’s plan. Violence over social structures.
10 points: Chapter 12, page 24: Dr. Manhattan, who couldn’t care less about the human race just a couple hours ago, who had to have Laurie convince him that Earth was worth saving, who has shown a penchant for determinism and argued for the non-existence of free will, and who is demonstrably as smart as a God, goes beyond complicity with Veidt’s plan and actually actively engages in killing Rorschach (who is the only one in the group to hold truth more important than anything else) to keep the secret.
summary:
“Watchmen” is a twelve issue comic book series that was first published in 1986. It is set in an alternate history of 1986 where super heroes exist and masked heroes without super powers are running around as well. The point of view character for the story is mainly a masked vigilante named Rorschach. Rorschach is described as mentally unstable. He is shown to use torture and vigilanteism to effective ends. We are never shown Rorschach kill an innocent man he thought was a criminal. We are shown Rorschach torture a man by breaking his fingers who we find out doesn’t actually know anything, but Rorschach continues to use torture until he gets the informaiton he needs. His torture never produces false leads. His history is that of a boy with no father, born of a prostitute mother, abused by his mother, abused by her johns, abused by the kids around the neighborhood, taken from his mother and placed into a foster home. His psych evaluation says he’s crazy. People call him crazy.
But it turns out that Rorschach is not only the only person who figured out that something bad was going down long before anyone else did (He realizes that the Comedian’s death wasn’t a robbery gone wrong), he is also shown to be the only one who manages to maintain the integrity to not go along with mass murder to achieve world peace (He refuses to be complicit in covering up the truth about Veidt’s actions at the end of the story).
For this, he is killed by Dr. Manhattan, a god-like character, whose lack of people skills make him more of a sociopath than Rorschach. The only thing Manhattan has going for him is that he is all powerful. He doesn’t even have a weakness like Kryptonite. He can do anything, and yet, he decides to go along with the idea of wiping out half of New York city to maintain the international solidarity against what everyone else thinks is an alien attack from another dimension.
He can do anything, but he decides to kill Rorschach to reinforce a lie, rather than, say, undo the catastrophe, and use his infinite powers and infinite wisdom to lead the world to a lasting peace. Instead, the best he can come up with is to go along the a madman’s plan to scare the world into uniting against what they think is an alien threat.
That’s the problem with introducing a character with god like powers into a story. The author really needs to have god like intelligence to make the character believable, otherwise, the character just comes off as a wish fullfillment fantasy of what a finite mortal would THINK they would do if they HAD god like powers.
Along the way, a lot of violence is shown to the reader, which racks up the war handwavium score.
The death of civilians might usually count as negative points (bringing the war handwavium score down), showing the ugly cost of war, however, since all the main characters alive at the end (Veidt, Manhattan, Nite Owl, Laurie) agree that the death of those civilians are worth the world peace induced by fear of death and world annihilation. So, they don’t get counted. The first time I scored “Watchmen” I counted them as paper targets, which increased the score by 300 points, but there are issues with how many bodies do you count, you don’t actually see their deaths, and I haven’t come up with a good way to score something like that, so I withdrew those points in favor of 10 points for showing violence being superior to social structures.
The story tells us that all the social structures in the world were driving headlong into WW3, and the only way to avert it was to cause the innocent deaths of half the people of New York City. Not only does this avert WW3, it transforms the world into a bunch of peace-loving peace-niks. Everyone agrees to help everyone else. Group hug.
The world’s smartest man, Veidt, wants to bring peace to the world. His plan? Kill half the people in New York City. But that’s not the main problem, the problem is it fricken *worked*.
The God character, Dr. Manhattan, is even smarter than Veidt, and also able to alter anything and everything literally. His response to Veidt’s plan? Yeah, now that you’ve killed all these people, we should just go with it. Not only am I willing to let you live after killing millions of people. I’m going to kill Rorschach because he won’t lie. That’s “God”s response.
This is, ultimately, the fantasy of war handwavium, that war, and violence, and the use of force, can achieve good ends, better ends than social structures can achieve. The world is shown tearing itself apart, the social structures, the UN, national governmetns, international relations, all are failing to achieve any sort of peace, and all are marching inescapably towards war. And Veidt fulfills the war handwavium fantasy of bypassing all these failing social structures and imposing a world peace by killing half the people in New York City.
In Watchmen, we are shown on screen 5 scenes where a main character tortures some anonymous character and gets useful information. We are shown on screen 1 scene where a main character tortures an anonymous character who doesn’t know anything. We are told after the fact that a main character had to go through 14 people before he was able to get useful information.
Folks can argue that Moore did that simply because he didn’t have time to show all fourteen that failed. But he didnt have to show all five that worked, either. WHether he made these choices consciously to make some point about war, I don’t know. But his choices in narration, standing by itself, without people trying to post-insert explanations into the narrative that aren’t actually shown in the narrative, tells a story that torture is an effective method for producing information.
Folks can argue that Moore was trying to show these heroes were really anti-heroes, that they’re not good people, whatever, but Moore does this inside a narative that shows us that torture works.
If Moore wanted to show me that these folks were anti-heroes, fine. Then to keep the war handwavium score down, he would have to do it in a way that showed torture being ineffective, producing many more false leads than positive ones, showing us more of those innocent people beign tortured on screen.
Same thing goes for vigilantiesm. While folks argue that Moore wanted to show these guys as anti-heroes, what Moore shows us in the narrative is that vigilantism works. We are never shown or even told about a scene where Rorschach killed an innocent person that he thought was guilty. We are shown Rorschach committing lethal vigilantism against a number of people, and they’re all guilty. We are never shown cases of misidentification.
With Comedian, we are shown two instances where he commits violence against an innocent individual, but in both cases he is “off duty”. Neither are vigilantisms gone wrong. Both are his own amoral behaviour coming out. But we are also shown that the backstory of the Comedian is that he alone went in and ended the Iranian hostage crisis, apparently without the death of a single hostage, since it was enough to silence all of his critics at the time. So while Comedian is shown to be an amoral anti-hero capable of being violent against innocent people, the one act we are shown on screen of his vigilantism is super successful.
So, the score with Comedian gets +5 points for the Iranian Hostage bit and -5 for the two violent acts we see him commit against innocent people. With the Comedian, the score goes to zero. Probably the number you want for an “amoral superhero” story.
Rorschach, though, gets numerous points for his vigilantism against guilty parties. And there are no negative points because he never misidentifies and kills an innocent person. We are shown one instance of him torturing an innocent persion, and that subtracts some points.
But we are shown far more instances of violence being more effective than social structures than we are shown violence being inferior to social structurs, that the final score ends up being a large positive number.
Whatever Moore intended to tell us with his story, I don’t know. But what he shows us is a world where torture works, where vigilantism works, where governments can’t stop the rush to WW3, but an act of mass genocide will cause an outbreak of world peace.
drachefly | 30-Mar-09 at 8:00 am | Permalink
What is the motto of this volume? “Quis custodiet custodies?” “Who watches the watchmen?” This is not a supportive motto.
The mass murder doesn’t work. It hasn’t fallen apart yet by the end of the series, but it’s a house of cards. What is the last page of the book for if not to show that (I believe it’s the journal being picked up)? Plus, Ozymandias. His name gives it away. This will fail, and either we get our acts together on our own or we die and all that remains is Doc Manhattan’s experiments with life in some other place.
And so we see that the heroes have really screwed up the world. Without them as a crutch and an imbalancing force, we actually did make it through the cold war (or at least at time of writing, were doing better than that); Nixon was found out rather than being catapulted to 4 terms; and so on.
So, the point is, “Be glad we don’t have superheroes”.
Greg | 30-Mar-09 at 6:34 pm | Permalink
Ozymandias. His name gives it away. This will fail, and either we get our acts together on our own or we die
Except Moore’s intent appears to be to create a world where anarchism is the only solution. In the world of the Watchmen, the government is the source of doomsday. The Watchmen are only slightly better in creating a minor doomsday to prevent the bigger doomsday. Moore’s world does not seem to support the notion that we can “get our act together” so much as advocating that we should all rise up against all “watchers” be they government or superheroes or anyone else.
If Moore is saying “be glad we don’t have superheroes”, then he seems to be saying even more loudly “I wish we didn’t have any government”. The governments as Moore portrayed them in Watchmen are actually worse than the superheroes.
The parallels between the role of government in his “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta” stories seem to point to this same conclusion. And in both stories, the role of “V” and “Veidt” are the same: an anarchist who tears down the government to make room for not utopia but at least something better than the government.
Moore’s answer to “who watches the watchmen?” seems to be “we shouldn’t have any watchers at all”.
drachefly | 31-Mar-09 at 7:38 am | Permalink
I’m not sure about that. To start with, the primary consideration is to compare real life against the watchmen world. Which is better, the one with rampant unchecked powers in and out of government and a populace rendered passive, or the one with a functioning press and societal participation?
The best characters in the book (and by this I mean those I would trust the most) are the ordinary policemen. Seriously. 1) I trust Veidt was smart enough not to leave many direct clues, so failure to catch him is not a serious failure. 2) Taking down Rorschach was totally legit, and done about right. 3) The inspector who meets Dreiberg and warns him that being a volunteer fireman is the limit? Very reasonable. 4) When Dreiberg goes over the line, that response, too, was legit.
The police are the only checked power in the book, and they are the only power that acts with anything approaching responsibility.
We get to the question of effectiveness.
Now, Rorschach can find some really bad people that the police didn’t, and he thinks the police are weak. And to some extent they are. But we as a society can live with some level of crime. Showing his methods, even if inaccurately shown as effective, we see that we cannot live with them. Even the people that Rorschach tortures for information successfully didn’t actually [i]do[/i] anything, or in the case of Moloch, had already served his time. And the information he gets is only useful due to extreme luck.
The police are able to take down Rorschach, and they are able to give the ludicrously well equipped Dreiberg a close call. That the superheroes give the police some trouble is just a restatement of their being superheroes, the premise of the book, not an indictment of the effectiveness of the police.
I look at the cheerful psychiatrist rehabilitator arc and see a critique of some specific methods of handling criminals (a stupid criticism, I doubt many psychiatrists would be naive enough to think he was making rapid progress with Rorschach). But this critique seems to aim towards the justice system being stronger and harsher, not nonexistent.
As for the prison guards not being seen effective, well, they weren’t where the story was. The story was not where the prisoners were aiming for the outside, which is where the guards would be concentrating their efforts; it was around Rorschach’s cell. And declining to use chemical weapons against inmates — overkill, anyone? I don’t have the book on me. Was there an indication that anyone was actually going to escape? I somewhat doubt it.
So that’s a wash on effectiveness.
Stepping back from local issues, the other face of the government is Richard Nixon. Right there, we get a hint that this is not the best government has to offer. Why is this face presented? The ‘superheroic’ ideal of unaccountability struck. The watergate investigation was shut down hard. So we see that this is not government in general, but a rather specific case of government, and one of the worst.
Meanwhile, the gang members who took down Night Owl #1… again, acceptance of going out and doing it yourself without anyone making sure that you’re doing it right.
On the balance, it seems to me that the demand is for checks on power. There are many people who feel no checks on their power in the story, and they are where all the problems come from. And the lack of checks can be traced back to the superheroes. Superheroes are unchecked power, and tend to make unchecked power appear legitimate; and unchecked power is societal poison.
Greg | 01-Apr-09 at 4:15 am | Permalink
The main problem is that we’re doing Forensics on Moore’s story, and Forensics can tell you “how”, but it can’t tell you “why”. Forensics can tell you that some unknown individual used a 9mm to shoot John Smith dead, the shooter was standing here when he pulled the trigger, the victim was standing there, and so on. What forensics can’t tell us is the motive of the shooter. Murder? Self defense? Did the 9mm belong to Smith and the shooter wrestled it away from him and fired in self-defense? We don’t know.
With Moore’s stories, we see how his world operates and how his characters act. We cannot be certain of his motive. And in the case of Moore’s work, especially Watchmen and V for Vendetta, I’ve found that different people have wildly different interpretations of what Moore’s motivation was.
Moore himself said in an interview that he wrote the character “V” so that he could be interpreted as insane or brilliant. Which means people can have two completely different interpretations of the story and both would fit the forensics of the story. I think V was insane. You could think V was brilliant. We can debate that particular point endlessly because Moore confessed that he wrote it to be ambiguous.
Personally, I think that’s horrible writing. The author’s job, in my mind, is to make choices, to be specific, and tell a story from there. There may be mystery through the story, but in the end it ought to resolve. Ambiguities like what is in the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction” is fine, since MacGuffins aren’t really important to the reader, they’re important to the character. But the characters are important to the reader, and ambiguities about the character, to the point that V could either be a hero or an insane psychopath who just happens to be effective at overthrowing the government, doesn’t fly for me. But that’s a whole other conversation.
I think with Watchmen, people can read it and study the forensics of it, how the world works and what the characters do, and they can legitimately extract two completely different motives from Moore. Either he is advocating anarchism or he is advocating for a more limited goal of stopping unchecked power. The fact that Moore IS in fact an anarchist might be relevant. I think Moore wrote the story like V. I think he wrote it to be ambiguous. I think he wrote it so that some people who want government but don’t want unchecked power could extract that meaning if they wanted, and I think he wrote it so that anarchists like himself who don’t like government at all could extract THAT meaning as well.
Which, from a marketing point of view, is brilliant. The reader gets to see whatever they want to see. From a writing point of view, again, I think it sucks.
Looking purely at the forensics of the story, I see a government that is completely without any benefit to the people. The police are never shown to stop crime. Criminals in the prisons remain completely unreformed. The government can’t prevent its march to nuclear war. There is not one positive benefit from government shown directly on the pages of Watchmen.
I look at that and the fact that Moore is a confessed anarchist and I say that his motive for writing Watchmen showing the government the way he did was to make a case for anarchism.
Others can look at that and say it was specifically meant as a story against unchecked power, but that government as a principle, was OK.
We don’t actually have enough forensics to know. And I’m pretty sure that Moore intentionally wrote it to be ambiguous. Moore would have to show the world of Watchmen after Veidt’s device’s went off and after the war was avoided and we’d have to see if he ever shows a government that provides some concrete benefit to the people.
I haven’t read all of Moore’s stories, but I haven’t seen government portrayed as beneficial to the people in Watchmen or V for Vendetta. And so two completely different motives fit the same story.
drachefly | 01-Apr-09 at 7:47 am | Permalink
I did not know that Moore was an anarchist.
Nonetheless, the rioters that Doc Manhattan sent home were demanding regular police. This is difficult to reconcile with an overall anarchist intention.
Greg | 01-Apr-09 at 12:21 pm | Permalink
If you’ve seen the Watchmen movie, then read my post here:
http://www.warhw.com/2009/03/17/watchmen-movie-first-impressions/
It’s got lots of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it on the big screen yet, don’t click. But there’s a link there about Moore saying he’s an anarachist in an interview.
As for the rioters, well, Moore’s portrayal of the civilian population is less than flattering. The people voted for Nixon for several terms. The people don’t riot against the impending nuclear war. When they did riot against the Watchmen, they turned violent, destroying property. The rare civilian character we actually see in the story isn’t flattering either. The prison psychologist is naive and gullible in the extreme. You would think Rorschach was his first criminal client or something.
I think Moore sees the average civilian as “sheeple”.
Again, that’s “motive”, but it fits the “forensics” of the movie.
It also fits “V for Vendetta”. Listen to V’s speech to the people some time, when he takes control of the TV station. He lays the blame for the fascist government at the feet of the people. They were afraid. They sold out a little bit at a time. It’s their fault. They are sheeple. And now they’ve got this fascist government that is too powerful. And only “V” is brave enough and strong enough and has the will enough to do something about it.
Obviously, you can look at the forensics and come up with different motives that fit, and I can’t prove my version is Moore’s true motiviation. But it does fit.
drachefly | 02-Apr-09 at 7:42 am | Permalink
>>The people voted for Nixon for several terms.
Something they didn’t do in real life, so this cannot be attributed to the normal operation of society. Focus on the difference.
>> The people don’t riot against the impending nuclear war. When they did riot against the Watchmen, they turned violent, destroying property.
I thought there were oblique mentions of demonstrations against the march to war; but they are not the focus of the story. Regardless, it is a great deal easier to get angry enough to protest something which is actually happening rather than something which could happen if everything you knew about the world was wrong (i.e. leaders willing to kill everyone rather than just sit there).
And again, world war 3 never actually did start in the comic. We stepped back from the brink a few times in real life. Would they have stared at each other angrily for a while and then never sent an attack? We’ll never know; but I can see why a lot of people would suspect that to be the case.
As for the demonstration becoming a riot – I need to reread this section. How much was destroyed?
Our main window on the views of ordinary folk is not the psychologist — he’s part of The Man — though his family and friends count, we hardly see them. It’s the newsstand man, the black kid with the car recharging station, and the lesbian couple I haven’t done a careful reading of them, but beyond the obvious conclusion that decisions in general are only as good as the information they’re based on (and that the press has been scared into submission), I recall their being reasonable.
Overall, even with Moore being an anarchist, The Watchmen does not make this case. It pushes in the direction of less governmental power, but from a position so extremely laden with unchecked governmental power that this is hardly an objectionable direction to push in.
Greg | 02-Apr-09 at 6:23 pm | Permalink
> Something they didn’t do in real life, so this cannot
> be attributed to the normal operation of society.
> Focus on the difference.
The difference is they voted for Nixon several times, to the point of overriding the 2-term limit. That is the equivalent of the people voting for George W. Bush for four terms. Doesn’t reflect well on the people.
> I thought there were oblique mentions
> of demonstrations against the march to war
See “distancing” in the War Handwavium scoring system. If Moore shows War handwavium on screen (on panel), and the only “realistic” effects of war are only mentioned second or third hand, then it doesn’t count the same.
> And again, world war 3 never actually did start in the comic.
It would have if Veidt hadn’t done his thing. Veidt being the smartest man on the planet (And Moore demonstrates Veidts super intelligence in the story) said WW3 is around the corner and the only way to avoid it is the squid/bomb. We can take that as fact. Veidt never made a mistake, other than getting discovered by Comedian, which he rectified.
>ordinary folk is not the psychologist … It’s the newsstand man,
Yeah, unfortunately, he didn’t exist in any meaningful way in the movie. None of them were in the movie.
> even with Moore being an anarchist,
> The Watchmen does not make this case.
That is the difference between forensics and motive. The forensics are ambiguous. It is a possible motive that Moore wrote the story as a call for anarchism. There are no huge leaps of logic to get to that point. Like “V for Vendetta”, Moore made it ambiguous, so it has more than one interpretation, but Anarchy is a valid interpretation. Viewers can watch it and extract a call for checks on government. Anarchists can watch it and extract anarchism.