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.

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.

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.

Nonetheless, the rioters that Doc Manhattan sent home were demanding regular police. This is difficult to reconcile with an overall anarchist intention.

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.

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.

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”.

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”.