That scene is one of those in which the differences between the comic and the movie adaptation are instructive. The Watchmen movie is consistently more violent than the comic, and never more so than in this sequence: on the silver screen we see Rorschach split Grice’s head in half with a meat cleaver, then keep hacking – nine times, in total. The comic implies violence, but cuts away before we see any and the vivid colouring adds to the lurid unreality. Moore has said of his relationship to comedy, ‘I don’t think I’m one of those crying-on-the-inside clowns so much as sort of sniggering on the inside tragedian. My favourite comedies are ones that have an edge of tragedy. My favourite tragedies are the ones where you almost find yourself laughing. It’s too awful, and you’re taken to that edge.’ Or, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: to have one bright red dead bloodstained dog thrown at you is a misfortune, but to have two thrown at you borders on absurdity.
Traditionally, darker narratives have used comic relief that takes the form of an interlude between serious scenes. Moore rarely does that, instead tipping throwaway puns, ironies or absurdities into the darkest material in the story, making it even more unsettling. There’s more than a touch of the Grand Guignol to much of his work, a theatrical exuberance that leads to fully fledged musical numbers in stories like The Killing Joke and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910. A good demonstration of this is ‘This Vicious Cabaret’, which kicks off V for Vendetta Book Two, first published in Warrior #12 (August 1983). Formally, it’s a summary of the story so far, presented as a song, sung by V who sits at a piano, inviting us to the show. The musical notes are printed below the panels (the song was recorded at the time by David J from Bauhaus and released as a single). It ends with a flourish, and a nasty twist:
There’s thrills and chills and girls galore
There’s sing-songs and surprises.
There’s something here for everyone,
Reserve your seat today!
There’s mischiefs and malarkies
But no queers, or yids, or darkies.
Within this bastards’ carnival,
This vicious cabaret!
The effect is almost one of lifting the audience a tiny way before a final plunge. Again, there’s the ‘ironic counterpoint’ between the pictures of a man singing a jolly song and the nasty words. As with Watchmen (and The Killing Joke), whatever is happening, whatever horrors the words are telling us about, we’re confronted with the image of a fixed grin.
Critics who’ve accused Watchmen of an adolescent preoccupation with nihilism and violence focus on Rorschach and assume Moore is endorsing Rorschach’s view of the world, setting him up as a hero to be emulated, or even using him simply as a mouthpiece for his own ideas. With that reading, Moore’s view is that Grice’s fate represents a just punishment for a cruel man.
Thinking Rorschach is the main character is an understandable mistake. The story opens with Rorschach’s narration, while the first issue follows his lonely investigation of the Comedian’s murder. And it’s through Rorschach we first meet the other superheroes, as he goes to each of them in turn and warns them to be on their guard. Rorschach sets the scene and the tone. But Moore has said, ‘I don’t think there is a centre of the book. I mean, part of what Watchmen is about is that all of the characters have got very, very distinctive views of the world, but they’re all completely different.’ Subsequent issues are told from the points of view of other characters with contrasting perspectives; as Moore has also said, ‘I don’t think Dr Manhattan is dark; I don’t think that Nite Owl is dark.’ Even reading the first chapter of Watchmen, before we’ve seen chapters told from other viewpoints, it ought to be clear Rorschach is not ‘right’, or representative of the norm. It quickly becomes clear he is, as Moore put it at the time, ‘a psychotic vigilante, driven by strange fascistic notions, who’s not particularly fussy about whom he kills’. It might be possible to imagine that Watchmen’s opening line, presented as an entry in Rorschach’s journal – ‘Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face’ – is Alan Moore presenting his own view of New York, through Rorschach. An avid fan might recall Moore’s write-up of his visit to the real New York City, and – if that fan felt Moore was invariably ‘serious’ – conclude that he had a particular vision of the place: ‘making sure I don’t get eaten by subway cannibals or end up sleeping on the grating … the [hotel] room is big enough to induce agoraphobia … there is a little plate informing me I should keep the door double-locked at all times and always look through the peephole before answering it, in case it’s a bag lady with a meat cleaver and a shopping bag full of index fingers … I pass the night without hearing a single murder … manage to walk all the way to the DC offices without getting shot or sexually assaulted’. Although that fan should also have spotted there are clear echoes of Grit!, Moore’s spoof of grim and gritty comics (see right).
It might equally be possible to read a subsequent line, also from Rorschach’s Journal and the first page of Watchmen, at face value: ‘They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay.’ A few pages later, when a policeman describes Rorschach as ‘crazier than a snake’s armpit and wanted on two counts Murder One’, we might distrust this authority figure and imagine that a corrupt regime has framed our hero for crimes he didn’t commit. (As it happens, Rorschach is eventually framed for a murder he didn’t commit, even though he admits to the two mentioned here.) For similar reasons, we might distrust Laurie’s summary of him, ‘I just don’t like Rorschach. He’s sick. Sick inside his mind. I don’t like the way he smells or that horrible monotone voice or anything. The sooner the police put him away, the better.’ But by the end of the issue, when Rorschach asks himself ‘Why are so few of us left active, healthy and without personality disorders?’, there’s unmistakably a gulf between what we readers can see and how Rorschach is interpreting it.
A key exchange in the first issue is this:
RORSCHACH: Maybe someone’s picking off costumed heroes.
DREIBERG: Um. Don’t you think that’s maybe a little paranoid?
RORSCHACH: That’s what they’re saying about me now? That I’m paranoid?
Rorschach’s last line is, of course, a straightforwardly set up and paid-off joke, but not one that the character himself is in on. Elsewhere, tellingly, Rorschach has trouble recognising irony or when someone is trying to be funny. His belief that he is the only sane man in a crazy world is, of course, what every crazed loner thinks. By the end of the first issue, at the very latest, every reader should understand Rorschach is over-the-top, ‘too awful’ – at that edge Moore identified between tragedy and comedy.
There’s a broader point being made. Moore based Rorschach’s writing style on the notes left by the serial killer ‘Son of Sam’, whose second note, from May 1977, is practically a description of the first page of Watchmen:
Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood. Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks. Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed in the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.
Towards the end of Watchmen, when the editor of the newspaper New Frontiersman hears the first line of Rorschach’s journal, he declares, ‘Jesus, who’s it from? Son of Sam? Sling it on the crank file.’ The joke is that the real-world equivalent of the only superhero in Watchmen who hasn’t compromised his principles is a notorious serial killer.
There are further ambiguities about Rorschach’s character. His insistence that, like his mask, the world is sharply divided between black and white is clearly a symptom of mental illness. But the idea that the world – or at least its superhuman population – can be neatly divided up between ‘superheroes’ and ‘supervillains
’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, underpins the whole of the genre. In those terms Ozymandias’ plan, as he says himself, is reminiscent of a Republic Serial villain, whereas Rorschach, in overcoming all obstacles to investigate and confront Ozymandias in his base, is the hero.
At heart, Ozymandias’ plan to destroy New York to shock Russia and America into co-operating is an entry-level moral dilemma: ‘Is killing X number of people justified if it saves more than X number of people?’ The familiarity of the question does not mean there’s one morally absolute answer. It is also, of course, a dilemma familiar from the history of atomic weapons. In Chapter VI, we learn that a young Walter Kovacs (who would become Rorschach) had written, ‘I like President Truman, the way dad would of wanted me to. He dropped the atom bomb on Japan and saved millions of lives because if he hadn’t of, then there would of been a lot more war than there was and more people would of been killed. I think it was a good thing to drop the atom bomb on Japan.’ Yet Rorschach is the only one of the heroes who defies Ozymandias. He sees this mass killing as unjustified. Is this because of some form of patriotism? Millions of Americans die, America comes to co-operate with Soviet Russia – does Rorschach truly believe ‘better dead than Red’? Or, as has been speculated, is it a gender issue? Does Rorschach think Truman and war are masculine, whereas Ozymandias is liberal and effeminate? Moore gives us plenty of material to work with, including a whole chapter dedicated to an in-story psychiatric analysis of the character, but leaves us to interpret what we’re told.
This holds true throughout Watchmen. The character who stands for ‘the American Way’ is the Comedian – a man we see attempting rape, shooting a pregnant woman, and who almost certainly assassinated JFK. Dr Manhattan is the only character with ‘superpowers’, and is compared with both Superman and God in the story … but while they are by definition moral paragons, Dr Manhattan is utterly amoral, capable of saying ‘a live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?’ When he walks among the ruins of New York in the last chapter, his deterministic, materialistic view of the universe means he’s unable to make a meaningful distinction between the corpses and the rubble. Moore’s point is that none of these people are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, it all depends on your perspective; not even the creators of Watchmen can make such rulings.
So can Alan Moore’s own opinion be disentangled from the narrative?
There’s a deep irony evident in Watchmen, one that we see in Moore’s other work, and so we might identify this as approaching a cohesive Alan Moore worldview. The critic John Loyd identifies the sequence where Rorschach kills Grice as containing one of the keys to such a worldview, which he terms the ‘Big Joke’. As Rorschach recounts the story to his psychiatrist, he concludes that the human condition is that we are ‘Born from oblivion; bear children hell-bound as ourselves; go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague, metaphysical forces.’ The ‘Big Joke’ is that although various characters insist that the world is ‘rudderless’, in fact it isn’t. Watchmen the comic is the opposite of ‘rudderless’; it was almost certainly the most carefully designed comic ever created, with extraordinary attention to detail. In the first script, Moore takes fifty-six lines to describe the opening panel, the close-up of a smiley badge lying in a gutter. Throughout, Gibbons finds room to add even more intricacies than appear in the scripts. And as the series progressed, the writer and artist became ever more confident and the end result grew ever more complex. Issue 5 is structured as an elaborate palindrome, with an almost perfectly symmetrical sequence of events. So does this mean Dr Manhattan is right? He has the ability to remember the future as well as the past, so he sees nothing but pattern. But this isn’t liberating, it means he is constrained within a clockwork mechanism of cause and effect, condemned to see every one of the connections that bind the world, to be locked into a fixed course of action, to merely be the only puppet with the ability to ‘see the strings’. Dr Manhattan and Rorschach can’t both be right – at least not comfortably – but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter: either way is equally bleak and nihilistic.
Watchmen presents a world where the driving force of destiny is a dark irony. It is, as more than one character observes, all one big joke.
COMEDIAN:
Listen … once you figure out what a joke everything is, being the Comedian’s the only thing that makes sense.
DR MANHATTAN:
The charred villages, the boys with necklaces of human ears … these are part of the joke.
COMEDIAN:
Hey … I never said it was a good joke! I’m just playing along with the gag …
There are similar sentiments at work in The Killing Joke:
JOKER:
It’s all a joke! Everything anybody ever valued or struggled for … it’s all a monstrous, demented gag! So why can’t you see the funny side? Why aren’t you laughing?
BATMAN:
Because I’ve heard it before … and it wasn’t funny the first time.
And it’s there even in a light-hearted example Moore gives in a 1986 essay about the craft of comics writing, when he illustrates character by having a stamp-collecting policeman describe his formative moment as follows: ‘I was just standing there, looking at my stamp album and the priceless collection that it had taken me years to build, when all of a sudden I realised that since I had foolishly pasted all of them directly into the album using an industrial-strength adhesive, they were completely worthless. I understood then that the universe was just a cruel joke upon mankind, and that life was pointless. I became completely cynical about human existence and saw the essential stupidity of all effort and human striving. At this point I decided to join the police force.’
It’s possible to see this consistent, extremely pessimistic worldview across a lot of Moore’s work from the eighties. The world is a fragile place, on the brink of economic, social and environmental collapse. The ‘man on the street’ is wilfully oblivious to politics, but it doesn’t matter because the apocalypse is imminent and it’s only a question of how society is going to collapse under the weight of intractable social problems. The proximate cause is the right wing – Norsefire in V for Vendetta, Nixon and his cabal in Watchmen – using the logic of the Vietnam War: that it’s necessary to bomb the village to save it. The liberal left might mean well, but do more harm than good. In V for Vendetta, CND get their way, the UK disarms unilaterally and a nuclear war promptly starts. In Watchmen, the ‘liberal’ Ozymandias kills millions. V for Vendetta, Watchmen and Marvelman all end with the collapse of the old order. In the end, everything we’ve strived for is pointless, and it’s all going to be swept away.
So is this also Moore’s view of our world (or, more precisely, was it his view around the time he was writing Watchmen)? This is how he saw things in 1988:
The big chill is coming down for sure. All that bad science fiction and all those paranoid hippy prophecies about the way the country was going … as it turns out they were true! Outside my door the other day was one of those ‘Dark Riders of Mordor’ policemen, those with the visor and the cloak, the horse wears a visor too. One of these horses was shouldering a couple of kids up against the garage door. Just football fans on the way down to the match. We ran outside to get a photo of it and one of those vans with the rotating video cameras came by. The police stated in the paper: ‘We are looking forward to this match so we can try out our new crowd control methods.’ It was obvious looking at it that it wasn’t designed just to handle football fans. You don’t put that much money into stopping trouble erupting at games between Northampton and Sunderland! Sure enough, two weeks later at the Clause 28 rally the police had them out again. They turned up and arrested girls for kissing and for holding placards, saying they w
ere offensive weapons.
The eighties saw Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party win successive landslide General Election victories, doing so on a platform of an economic policy based on closing down or selling off great sections of manufacturing industry, taking power from local councils and centralising it in Westminster, breaking the trade unions, selling off council housing and opposing at every turn the ‘permissive sixties’. Every feature of the British political landscape of the eighties appalled Moore, although – erudite and opinionated as he was – he was reticent about what could be done: ‘Please understand that I’m not yet so drug-addled or enthused by my own intellect as to suggest that we’re going to reach a solution, or anything like a solution. All I want to do is present the questions as I see them in as interesting a light as possible.’
More recently, Moore’s view has remained similar, but has mellowed: ‘The apocalyptic bleakness of comics over the past 15 years sometimes seems odd to me, because it’s like that was a bad mood that I was in 15 years ago. It was the 1980s, we’d got this insane right-wing Boadicea running the country, and I was in a bad mood, politically and socially and in most other ways. So that tended to reflect in my work … I wouldn’t say that my new stuff is all bunny rabbits and blue-skies optimism, but it’s probably got a lot more of a positive spin on it than the work I was doing back in the eighties. This is a different century.’ When he describes the world, he does so in terms that Ozymandias might have in Watchmen: ‘We’re an inventive bunch and when things sort of get as dire as they are at the moment, it comes down to a basic thing whether we will come out of it with some way round this or we won’t … impending death hanging over us does tend to focus the mind wonderfully, so it might be that some of these problems incite their own solutions. That’s what I’m hoping.’ And while he still can’t see the broader solution for civilisation, there’s a recognition of some resolution at the human scale:
Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore Page 24
