Pah

Sex and Death

Doing a search for watchmen+feminist turned up this article about reading approaches by Tom Spurgeon. It offers an approach to reading Watchmen as a feminist text by Cole Moore Odell, but before I get to that, here’s some disputing the article.

Spurgeon in his third approach, “As A Symphony Of Meticulous Applications Of Craft”, is in every way disrespectful of Gibbons and his contributions. Similarly he sleights Higgins in his sixth approach, “As A Liminal Experience”. I’ve already written about the importance of the illustrator and colourist as authors of Watchmen, so I’ll let Sean Witzke lay the smack down.

Chris Mautner’s approach, “As An Indictment Of Baby Boomer Hubris”, is wrong in that only Laurie (born in ’49) is a boomer. Walter is born in ’40, Adrian is born in ’39, etc, making them, apparently, members of the so-called Silent Generation. As their musical tastes show, they are pre-rock and roll.

Lastly, Odell has an error in his approach, “As A Feminist Text”: the mariner (not a pirate) does not kill his wife and family; he beats his wife, then runs away, leaving them all alive.

But don’t let these points stop you from reading the article, which might give you a useful insight into how to read Watchmen. Odell’s comment about “The Giant Vagina That Killed New York” certainly sparked something in me.

Reading the squid with Odell as a “vagina dentata” I then remembered the imagery mentioned by one of the monster’s makers, where baby dentata eat their way out of mother squid. Again and again in the novel, sex and death are linked. Again (and contra Odell), we can see that Veidt’s trick can’t work, because fear of VD or monstrous progeny never stopped any man (the latter didn’t stop Moore and Gibbons in their misprison, for instance).

Odell says the squid “serves as a sly commentary on the one thing with power enough to utterly defeat superheroes for young male readers—the discovery of girls”. This is not entirely true as we see in both Flex Mentallo and here.

The aborted sex of the seventh chapter is often read as demonstrating something unhealthy about Dan. On the page, the sex is contrasted with Adrian’s televised virility. But let’s look at this with adult eyes. Dan is anxious and this affects his sexual performance. He is not impotent. He is in many ways quite healthy, and after pages of back and forth flirting, is co-initiating a new relationship. He and Laurie show how normal adult relations can co-exist with traditional adventuring. Contrast this with Veidt, sublimating his sexuality into individual gymnastics, living in frigid isolation. If he casts a woman’s sexual organs as the monster it’s likely because he fears something that Dan does not. In the seventh chapter he is avoiding something that Dan is not. He demonstrates how superheroes grown up can still be an escape from the realities of sexual expression.

(Veidt as homosexual cultured Euro-villain says as little as the women not having masks. Reading Adrian as gay is more profitable in relation to Jon.)

Costumed Crimefighters

Capes are a common visual characteristic of a superheroes, and the term has become metonymic in recent years. Here’s the word from Watchmen: “In practice” the original Nite Owl found his cape “too unwieldy” and was “always tripping over it or getting it caught in things”. Hollis abandoned the idea and blamed the death of Dollar Bill on his “damned stupid cloak”, designed for “maximum publicity appeal”, when it “became entangled in the bank’s revolving door and he was shot dead at point-blank range”.

It’s a sentiment Edna Mode agrees with. Get the picture? Well, no, the pictures tell a different story: Hooded Justice, Mothman, Captain Metropolis, the new Nite Owl, and Ozymandias (“the smartest man on the planet”) all have capes or similar devices. So capes are okay, they can work, they’re just not for everyone. But “cape” is not a metonym for “superhero” in Watchmen.

Rorschach instead uses the term “mask”. It’s an interesting choice.

Did you know that the word “novel” doesn’t simply mean a fiction prose book? The term originated in opposition to “romance”. Romances were fiction prose books that descended from epic poetry. Their titles put the hero’s name front and centre. The heroes were role models with special signs of grandeur and performed inimitable feats. By contrast, novels descended from the genre of history. The names of novels focussed on the meaning they sought to impart. The protagonists could be average human beings, and it was from the surprising results of their actions that lessons were taught. (See also.) This etymological knowledge informs how Watchmen is an attempt at a graphic novel rather than a comic romance.

The sympathies or voice of Moore and Gibbons don’t lie with any one character. Every choice made is held up to show what it excludes. In the case of Rorschach using the word “mask”, we can picture who is not wearing masks: the Silhouette, the first and second Silk Spectre; the women. Rorschach’s reason for exclusion is obvious, but what of the women’s exclusion of masks from their costumes? Do the men hide themselves so they can gaze freely? Do the women reveal themselves to be gazed at? What does it mean that the undisguised Silhouette is only killed after leaving the company of men?

Small details such as these are easy to overlook in light of the rape storyline. Perhaps they don’t mean anything more than that, once you turn the novel’s key, Wonder Woman didn’t wear a mask. The objectification of women in superhero comics is obvious and it’s probably as well it was played lightly in this history. In this way the women get to stand more freely as characters rather than symbols.

Laurie has another costume item, one she wears both as Silk Spectre and as herself: the earrings that mark her as Dr Manhattan’s girlfriend. These were passed to her (unbeknownst?) from his previous girlfriend, a visual cue to remind him of her role. She takes them off when she leaves him, and reclaims her Silk Spectre earrings when she returns to adventuring with Nite Owl… but once the nostalgia is gone, she decides to wear a “mask over my face” for the new millennium.

Further Reading

Haven’t had enough of me writing about Watchmen? Well, the comments are all still open, and you have my email address, or blogs of your own to provoke me to comment. Or if you’d like to hear from someone else, check this out: five years ago there was a conversation worth re-reading about Watchmen in the comics blogosphere.

Steven Berg kicked it off with a July 2003 post giving the comic a good kicking. John Jakala responded with a defense in October (including some more criticism of Veidt’s plan).

The conversation proper started on 23 January 2004 with Eve Tushnet comparing Watchmen to Shakespeare, criticising Veidt’s plan some more, and discussing the role of female pain. This prompted more posts from Jakala, Berg, and Jim Henley. Jim Henley then followed up with posts on supehero comics as a literature of ethics and yet more citicism of Veidt’s plan. After another post by Henley and Todd Murray, David Fiore entered the fray, discussing the comic in the context of Marvel. Finally, John Pistelli added his thoughts on the formalism and politics of the work.

Of course there are other tangential posts that I have not linked, including a whole other related discussion of The Dark Knight Returns which is worth re-reading too. And make sure you read the comments.

People are still reading

People are still reading Watchmen, though it is hard to find them writing about it in these last days. The Squidbag has just re-read it for (at least) the 22nd time, a testament to the fact it is worth reading.

S Krishna, on the other hand, has just read it for the first time. She is a mainstream reader who keeps a reading log. She read a whopping 265 books last year and wrote reviews for many of them. She doesn’t read comics. She knew Watchmen by reputation, but read it in preparation for the film. She found it “really hard for me to read” but “definitely a novel worth reading”.

It’s interesting to consider the question of genre, because Watchmen won’t be worth reading for everyone. No, ticking the reviewer’s checklist (plot, setting, characterisation, theme, style) is not enough. Genre is at least one way that people can discern what they might like from what they won’t. It’s also at least one way that people decide how to read the work.

Watchmen covers subjects such as superheroes, superhero history, science fiction, philosophy, politics, etc. More succinctly, Plok suggests it is a contemporary English novel, circa 1987. I am not a mainstream reader, so I’m not sure I understand this genre, especially in that era. I know the superhero history that Watchmen is a part of, but I don’t know the literary history. What should it be read alongside?

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry? Beloved by Toni Morrison? White Noise by Don DeLillo? Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy? Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey? These are award-winning novels from the era. Three of them join Watchmen on Time magazine’s list of 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. What do you think?

Lateral Readings

Jessica Fure and Stuart Moulthrop do literal lateral readings of Watchmen, looking at juxtapositions of panels across the page fold. They are following the same logic as Christopher Miles, who said “Dr Manhattan’s chapter on Mars could be viewed as a primer on how to read the book, or how to ideally prepare one’s mind for the experience of reading it.”

This kind of fruitful random juxtaposition reminds me of reading The Invisibles, and you might say that “Watchmen could be viewed as a primer on how to read The Invisibles, or how to ideally prepare one’s mind for the experience of reading it.” That novel starts (before we know it) with a search for one of those disembodied hands that Gibbons draws so many of, then kicks up a gear with the explosion of an extra-dimensional squid in an American city. But here the squid is just a hint that the characters must learn to become trans-temporal avatars like Dr Manhattan. In the end (JLA May 2000/The Invisibles June 2000) we all become watchmen/policemen/superheroes, taking time out to fight for grace, but always returning to the world and beginning again our everyday human relationships…

Pareidoliac apophenia? Perhaps…

How about placing The Dark Knight Returns (February–June 1986) next to Watchmen (September 1986–October 1987)? Gibbons and Moore have multiple Batmans, perhaps suggesting that Miller’s synthetic Batman must inevitably exclude historical properties of the character, especially with regards to politics. On the other hand, where Miller sees Superman as enforcing power, Gibbons and Moore see the protection of power as being an unintended side effect of a character who could never be bound by politics. But The Dark Knight Strikes Again with a response to Watchmen. Miller agrees that it isn’t politics that binds Superman, but with a double-headed strike (Superman and Green Lantern) asserts Dr Manhattan could never be truly beyond human concerns. He then takes us out of the age of realistic crimefighters and into the age of romantic superheroes, casting his old self and Moore—who previously kept the superheroes under lock and key—as Luthor…

Veidt as teenage fan

Continuing the criticism of Veidt, the Pretty Fakes crew have a nice post and comments on his failures. (via Plok)

Why Blue?

When Jon Osterman is literally dis-integrated, he substitutes will for his intrinsic field, and builds himself a new body. He masters the nitty-gritty of the nervous, vascular, and muscular systems, but when it comes to the final assembly, instead of recreating Jon Osterman’s body, or something slightly better, he comes out smooth and naked and blue.

Plok is right about the extreme multivalence of Watchmen. I’m suddenly reminded of Bruce Coville’s 1994 short story, Am I Blue? Plok points to Adam Star’s list of blue people, Brahma’s rebuke to Indra, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (though I must say that I don’t understand the last two references). But these are poetical possibilities entertained by the authors. I want to imagine why the something that was Jon Osterman chose blue.

One can say that he chose blue because he knew that’s what he was going to choose. This is the paradox of his new existence. But it is a paradox that simply mirrors free will. If a decision is not determined by conditions, yet isn’t random, it is a decision that appears to magic itself into existence too.

Damien points to Cerenkov Radiation, and labels the choice a concession to the common people.

I have an idea. Dr Manhattan worries that “They’re shaping me into something gaudy and lethal…” but he has certainly already done that himself. Professor Milton Glass understands: “God exists and he’s American.” The big blue guy is not the being that was Jon Osterman. The big blue guy is an avatar, as Krishna was of Vishnu. He’s the part that remembers being Jon Osterman, who is coming to terms with not being Jon Osterman (in an echo of Swamp Thing coming to terms with not being Alec Holland).

This idea dissolves my binary: is Dr Manhattan post-human or just a big nerd? Jon Osterman was a big nerd, and his human interactions are patterned on Jon Osterman. But there’s a big invisible thing all around the big blue nerd that is post-human. That is the part choosing how to incarnate. That is the part sending the message.

The Veidt Method

Robert Loftis has written a nice little essay on the philosophies of Rorschach, Veidt and Watchmen. During the writing, he blogged his proposal, outline, thoughts, notes, and final submission. He’s also posted the final version, called Means, Ends, and the Critique of Pure Superheroes, which has been published in the pop philosophy book Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test. The essay ties in well with my last two posts.

I like this comment of his which didn’t make it into the essay:

I’ve been wanting to say that the real critique of consequentialism comes from Dr Manhattan, especially with his comment to Veidt implying that the ends can’t justify the means because nothing ever ends.

He also points out that the epigraph for the eleventh chapter, being from Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, implies that Veidt will not succeed (though he implies caution about taking these epigraphs too far: the novel’s epigraph comes from a poem “about the difficulty men have keeping their women in line”).

Nothing Ever Ends

Tandoori to go. That’s all they went out for, these people… and instead they got squid. Some people like squid. Some don’t. Chris and Plok didn’t like the squid. Here’s what Dave Gibbons had to say about it in Artists on Comics Art:

As it progressed, Watchmen became much more about the telling than the tale itself. The main thrust of the story essentially hinges on what is called a macguffin, a gimmick… so really the plot itself is of no great consequence… it just really isn’t the most interesting thing about Watchmen. As we actually came to tell the tale, that’s where the real creativity came in.

Me, I like squid and hate macguffins. I don’t think the squid is a macguffin, because I don’t think there is such a thing as a macguffin. “Macguffin” is an intentional term used by authors who are too clever for their own good, and I cringe whenever I see it used in criticism. So Gibbons doesn’t think the squid or the plot is of consequence—who is he to tell me how to read the novel?

It is as easy to say that the characters are macguffins or the themes are macguffins. Everything in a novel can be claimed as excuses for the novel’s specific narrative innovation(s). Yet narrative innovation, and all meaning, is not just there on the page. It must be read, and each reader finds their own meaning, and each re-reading finds its own meaning.

I like the space squid. I like how visceral it is. Its 50s look (and Veidt’s later reference to Republic Pictures) makes me wonder if Star Wars was another casualty of Dr Manhattan’s existence. I like how Veidt’s plan takes its inspiration from The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Outer Limits.

It’s also likely he received a fax of “If I Were An Evil Overlord” (there’s no way he’s connected to CompuServe on that joke of a computer he’s got). Where the heroes have been pulled down by gravity, the villain gets to soar on a childish power fantasy. He does everything right and it all just works. The only hitches (the Comedian’s discovery of his plot, and the survival of Dr Manhattan) are easily dealt with, as are the subsequent consequences.

Or are they? There is Rorschach’s diary. Will it be read or will it be thrown in the fire? But to focus on this is to buy into the power fantasy and read far too literally. The diary is emblematic of the “something in the universe” of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Even in 1987, it must have been apparent, upon reflection, that Veidt’s peace could not be sustained. After 2001, it must be immediately obvious that no cooperation can be guaranteed by mutual risk of violence.

Veidt is cast as the villain, but he also partakes of the qualities of the superhero. He appears to save the world. Yet he cannot save the world any more than standard superheroes can. New threats appear, old threats return; nothing, as Dr Manhattan says, ever ends. The world is not saved because of Veidt, but despite him. His utopian thinking is the same coin as the apocalyptic thinking of the Comedian. In each case it is just an excuse. An excuse for hedonism in the former, an excuse for intellectual exercise in the latter. It is macguffin thinking.

The world is “saved” by the people going out for Tandoori.

Who watches the watchmen?

I am trying to read Watchmen as a political novel. The novel’s title is drawn from its eipgraph, which is explicitly linked to the Tower Commission to suggest such a reading.

“Who watches the watchmen?” What does that mean? What does the political novel mean? I’m having trouble working it out.

The Tower Comission was a contempoary investigation into the Republican party’s then-latest dirty tricks, the Iran-Contra Scandal. In the alternate history of Watchmen, the Comedian covers up the Watergate burglary and other dirty tricks. Along with Dr Manhattan’s technological successes, this enables Nixon to become the most popular president in American history. After the 22nd Amendment becomes the second to be repealed, he sits for five terms. The story allows the inferences that there would be no US hostages held by Hezbollah with agents such as the Comedian, and no need to support anti-communist groups following Dr Manhattan’s success in Vietnam (leading to it becoming the 51st state).

The criticism of Nixon is purely formal. We are never given any indication that America under his dictatorship is a particularly bad place to live. He does not hang on as tenaciously as Mao, Stalin, Franco, Kim Il-Sung, or Castro. It is not V’s Britain, yet the cry for anarchy goes out. “Who watches the watchmen?”

Meanwhile, Veidt is thinking, and at the end of the novel, he acts. The lie he sells is the heart of Starship Troopers. The truth is the heart of Nineteen Eighty-Four. With the enemy not being real, other attributes can be manufactured at will; while the world increases its military capacity, in preparation for anything. It is an environment conducive to the Nixons of the world.

Yet Veidt doesn’t act for or with the Nixons of the world. If the overt political message is one advocating the scrutiny of power, it does not apply to Veidt. He is a private businessman, enacting a secret scheme, with no component that would warrant public oversight.

The larger, more subtle message seems to be an assault on the very idea of those who act undemocratically. To act autocratically, Watchmen suggests, is to create an autocracy. Am I wrong in my reading? And am I wrong in thinking this message, which seems positioned textually (as opposed to pictorially) as the central message, is the least interesting?

New York, New York

I wrote that Watchmen only speaks to DC’s Big Two with its aspirational and socially-unencumbered heroes, but I think there is a candidate ripe for the mighty Marvel treatment. A well-off forensic psychiatrist with aspirations to fame comes across a case that ruins his sunny disposition. Tension rises in his marriage, but he just can’t look away. Even with the promise of reconciliation, he can’t stop himself from trying to help others. Yes, a well-timed pseudo-scientific conversion would give Malcolm some perspective, perhaps a little something to help him keep divorce at bay for a while, but it sure wouldn’t be a power fantasy. With his gift for being at the wrong place at the right time, seen at the end of the eleventh chapter, it would only be a matter of time before he was involved in a case with Matt Murdock or taking a referral from Stephen Strange. What do you think, true believers?

Superheroes

2009

Hi, my name’s David Golding, I’m from 2009, and I’ve just finished re-reading Watchmen.

1997

Hi, my name is also David Golding, I’m from 1997, I’ve just finished reading Watchmen for the first time, and this is a fictional dialogue.

2009

So tell me what you liked most about it?

1997

I guess I like the way it addresses me, as an adult, as a reader of a novel. You know you read something like X-Men for years and you get to a point where you discover that all the promises you thought were being made are never going to be delivered on. Not so much broken, as deferred. Satisfaction will never come. And this is true of all the superhero comics I’ve read. But with Watchmen you get a beginning, a middle, and an end. You get character development.

2009

That structure, for me, makes it feel, almost, like it’s not a superhero comic. I’ve got a friend reading it at the moment, she’s three chapters from the end, and she says to me that there could be three hundred more, it’s such a rich story. Dr Manhattan says, nothing ever ends, and I think that’s true of superhero stories. Nite Owl and Silk Spectre talk of further adventures…

1997

Further adventures, but only on the terms established by Veidt, that is, only as escapism. I think Watchmen isn’t a superhero comic. It is and it isn’t. It’s the ultimate superhero comic. It’s the end. It gives the ending that the whole genre needs, that adults need it to have. It deconstructs superheroes by privileging what has previously been secondary and placing them under the constraints of the real world, so that they crack open and you can see what makes them tick. All the repressed sexuality and politics comes tumbling out. Things that cripple superheroes, yet, without them, as an adult, all you have is nostalgia.

2009

I was wondering about the real world of Watchmen, because it didn’t seem that real to me. Possible, yes, but not convincing. And I was wondering if it was kind of a dead end, because to argue with it, to offer up more convincing ones, is just question begging. I mean, why do we even need real world superheroes? But now I see that, of course, it’s there as part of a binary. I didn’t see that before, because the fantasy/real binary is not one I see as very interesting.

1997

Another way to look at it is as a fantasy/fantasy binary, where the former is children’s fantasy and the latter is adult fantasy. If the child’s fantasy is about being good, being strong, a childish power, then the adult’s fantasy is about sexual or political power, something superhero comics would have to take in to interest adults.

2009

I don’t see superhero comics as being power fantasies, or at least, not as only power fantasies or always power fantasies. Perhaps Watchmen isn’t a commentary at all, perhaps it’s just setting up its own scenario, using comic book history to give it strength, so that it can talk about philosophy and human nature. Comics can take that weight, they’re like Atlas, as Watchmen points out. I mean, what actual superheroes can you see it being about? Rorschach reminds me of the Blank, from Dick Tracy, but that’s the pulps, not superheroes…

1997

I see Batman and Superman everywhere. The original Nite Owl’s described as a boy scout, Dr Manhattan is literally “big blue” and the first real superhero, Veidt has an Antarctic fortress of solitude, I think Geoff Klock makes some other good Superman-related observations in his book. As for Batman, Rorschach grapples up that wall like Adam West or Michael Keaton, Veidt’s the self-made man who makes the same realisation as Miller’s Batman a year earlier, Nite Owl has the fortune, paraphernalia, costume, and in-depth plans, and the Comedian is the darkness of Batman without any Comic Code-mandated break in the 50s and 60s.

2009

Now we’re getting into it, I was reminded of the confrontation between Reed Richards and Galactus when Veidt holds up his remote control to Dr Manhattan. But your examples are of DC’s Big Two, who have almost always lacked the subject-thickness to take part in what Dave Fiore calls neo-existentialist romance. Watchmen doesn’t speak to Marvel, to the Incredible Hulk, to Daredevil, to Spider-Man, or even to DC titles like Doom Patrol. What these titles have is what Grant Morrison put into his own superhero comic history, Flex Mentallo, and really, his entire oeuvre, which by itself shows the good health of non-nostalgic adult-friendly superhero comics, revisionary or otherwise, post-Watchmen.

1997

I don’t think I’ve read any Morrison.

2009

Let me put it another way, do you really think Bernard is reading his pirate comic as some power fantasy, like Mark Millar’s Wanted come twenty years early?

1997

I’m not sure, I’ll have to think about it. So where are we?

2009

You’ve convinced me that Watchmen is a deconstruction of at least some kinds of superhero stories, and I think it uses this to start a discussion about sex and death, philosophy and politics.

1997

Well that seems like a good place to take a break. Any questions from the audience?

Alan Moore

Alan Moore. You know him.

I like to imagine the text piece on pirate comics is a bit of self-deprecating humour. Watchmen starts with a first chapter that’s “cliched and predictable in comparison with the work that [Moore] did later”. The scripts “gradually improve in quality” with him “increasingly resentful of [Gibbons]’s clearly important role and harassing the artist with impossibly detailed panel descriptions and endless carping requests for revisions”. Pretty funny stuff!

As a writer he does have flaws. The novel is heavy with clumsy info-dumping. In the first chapter, one detective tells another: “Since the Keene Act was passed in ’77, only the government-sponsored weirdos are active.” If only he’d started it with “As you know…” The second chapter has Laurie inform Sally that they’re both in California, when the very next panel offers the same information in an un-forced manner. Sometimes diary entries want to be thought balloons. The text pieces are variable, but the Kovacs documents seem wholly redundant.

There’s also counter-culture dodginess: Platonism (intrinsic fields) and supernaturalism (Osterman’s deja vu—anticipating Moore’s afterlife theory—and a simple acceptance of psychic powers).

But these are overlooked or forgiven because there is so much to love.

I love the Dreiberg article on owls, which can be read as Moore writing about superheroes, and which hints at the good parts of Promethea.

I love Janey’s line: “I feel like there’s big invisible things all around me.” Which philosophically describes so much of the human condition.

(Look away now if you haven’t read Watchmen.) I love Veidt’s answer to Nite Owl questioning how he could have planned to send a potentially lethal assassin after himself: “I suppose I’d have had to catch the bullet, wouldn’t I?” I’m always as shocked as Nite Owl, yet also riotously amused at his reaction. Of course he’d have to catch the bullet!

I love that he has a Pole desperate to integrate into 40s America spell her superhero name “Silk Spectre”. Bless him.