The watchmen all uncovered documentary

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Extrapolation, Vol. 50, No. 1 © 2009 by The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College

The Human Stain: Chaos and the Rage for Order in Watchmen

BRYAN D. DIETRICH

In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes, “Distant and dead resuscitate, / They show as the dial or move as the hands of me, I am the clock myself” (67). Here, as well as throughout Leaves of Grass - scendentalist equating himself with all of humanity, even the dead. Moreover, he posits his gestaltness as time itself, as the ultimate extension of humanity’s ordering principle. Whitman, as us, is history; we, as Whitman, are part and particle of the universe, from its beginnings some fourteen billion years ago to now. We are ourselves but we are also Law. As with Emerson’s notion of the “transparent eye-ball”—a philosophy that asks us “to look at the world with new eyes” (48)—Whitman’s worldview puts humanity in the paradoxical position of both observer and observed, timekeeper and time, order and what is ordered: chaos. The graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gib- bons assesses humanity’s status in much the same way.

Watchmen, originally published by DC Comics in single magazine format from 1986 to 1987, is a little like running into Whitman with a box of crayons and a wicked gleam in his eye. While Watchmen exists

Mark Z. Danielewski, while it is clearly the grandchild of Postmodern masters such as Barth, Borges, Nabokov, Vonnegut and Woolf, it is also great grandchild

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of Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman. Though its authors hail from Britain, it is a quintessentially American book. Not surprisingly, the paradoxes do not

plot point, the sand beneath begins to shift; iconic connections, metatextual crosscurrents, all the subtleties of theme and symbol begin to tumble and lose footing. Such distillation is precisely what a great work of art resists, and what a postmodern text like Watchmen (a text whose theme is that very refusal to believe in determinant meaning) resists most ferociously.

Darren Harris-Fain admiringly mentions Watchmen - backs, multiple narratives and shifts in perspective, the very techniques which Peter S. Prescott and Ray Sawhill describe as “overreaching” (71). Prescott and Sawhill are, of course, terribly misguided. As is, for the most part, Fredric Paul Smoler when he says in his review in The Nation, “the narrative tone is melodramatic and hyperbolic, and the initial point of view seems blackly re- actionary, but the melodrama seems a sensible concession to the tastes of the intended audience, while the retro politics may be an effective way of teaching people to read carefully” (3). What Smoler does not recognize is how those “retro” and “reactionary” politics are constantly reassessed, questioned, torn down and reconstructed by the symbols he doesn’t deign to discuss. However, Smoler does go on to admit the “Ironies abound and are economically achieved through the juxtaposition of the ‘documentary’ material and the orthodox nar- rative; the pleasures of the text begin to depend on them” (3).

The thrust of the text revolves around four, main, “living” characters— Rorschach, Nite Owl, Silk Spectre II, and Dr. Manhattan—who are looking into the murder of the Comedian, one of only two superheroes, including Dr. Manhattan, who remain legally active in the world of Watchmen. The Comedian (basically Oliver North cum Charles Bronson sporting a leather death mask)

Ozymandias. The reason for the murder is convoluted, as is the rest of the plot, but in a nutshell, Ozymandias has planned to construct and teleport a fake ex- traterrestrial (one that will act as a kind of psychic bomb) to the center of New York City where its “death” will decimate half the population. The goal of all this “mad scientism” is not glory or wealth or revenge however—as would be the case with most of, say, Lex Luthor’s plots—but rather to prevent global an- nihilation. Since this is the “real world” and the 1980s, Communist Russia and America are, as usual, on the brink of nuclear war. In this alternate universe, the

man who has tipped the balance of power in favor of the Americans. He is, after all, nuclear power incarnate, a kind of macro-atomic god who can alter reality

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at will. Ozymandias believes that by providing the world with an alternative

of conscience—even he him. It is against this backdrop that the story unfolds. For our purposes, the most important characters are Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan. Rorschach (a.k.a. Walter Joseph Kovacs) is literally a sociopath, a man who probably would have ended up a serial killer had he not discovered a mask behind which he can act in the name of the law. His idea of law, however, is not even so simply blurred as Batman’s; it is, if you will, smeared and stained. One example comes midway

utter silence, we watch Rorschach piece together the crime, mutilate the dogs the killer has used to dispose of the body, apprehend the criminal himself,

the man is chained. He leaves the man a choice: cut off his hand and escape, or die (VI.18-25). In this way, Rorschach defends his vision of Law. What we see as shady at best, he sees as clear-sightedness.

Dr. Manhattan (a.k.a. Jon Osterman), on the other hand, breaks all the other laws, those of the universe. He sees space-time synchronically, across the layers of events, all things and places simultaneously. And he is able to do pretty much

only to act according to one government’s whims and, later, only according to his own. In the end, he walks away from any singular, human responsibility and wanders off to create an entirely new reality. Where Rorschach acts out of a completely introverted vision of Law (seeing little but himself, his own

different reason. Because he cannot see a self, because he is all selves and all

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arrive at the same answer to the problem posed by Ozymandias’s plan to save the world through a dangerous lie. Both choose to let the lie stand. Rorschach, because he can’t allow the lie and live, chooses death. Dr. Manhattan, because it has always been a lie and never was, because all truths are equal, leaves this universe for another of his own making.

Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan represent the extremes to which humanity goes to understand and organize the world. Both exist outside of the Law, but act in its name. Both break the law in order to keep it. Rorschach represents those who would see no gradations of good and evil; actions are either damning or redemptive, no middle ground. Consequently, Rorschach himself cannot adapt

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must lead to global annihilation. Dr. Manhattan represents those who would see all sides at once, the whole as well as the parts, what T.S. Eliot saw as “Time present and time past. . . present in time future” and “time future contained in time past” (117). Thus Dr. Manhattan, though he does act and react early on in

a hermeneutic circle that ultimately prevents him from taking a side. Looking at the issue of law, Brent Fishbaugh describes Dr. Man-

hattan as a man “who has become a scientist to the extent of losing his humanity, his appreciation for the beauty of science” (10). “Rorschach,” Fishbaugh says, “is all passion and no reason while Jon [Dr. Manhattan] is the exact opposite” (10). However, the matter is a bit more complex than Fishbaugh suggests. Both characters represent the law as well as its lack, the desire for order as well

the same problem: interpretation. How do we know what is right and wrong? How do we know what the answer is? Should we laugh or cry, now that the Comedian is dead? Can we be, should we be, saved? Is there such a thing as

gradual illumination of what lies under the hood, what makes the world tick, what is right or wrong about requiring what Frost called a “design of darkness to appall” (396).

In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes, “it is in vain that we at- tempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that [space] deployed by our eyes” (9). Here, Foucault is suggesting something about the ultimate failure

discussion, of course, leads inexorably toward postmodernism and the realm of phenomenology where meaning and being are so inextricably interwoven that one must concede, at the extreme, no meaning at all. However, Ellen Dis- sanayake, a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York City, argues, “As Homo aestheticus, we really require beauty and meaning—those answers to human questions and desires that are to be found in (what should be evident in the name we give them) ‘the humanities’” (3). Regardless, then,

Dissanayake, along with innumerable others, argues that “art is intrinsic to our specieshood” (225). On this same topic, Alan Moore himself says, “I would like to think that this disintegration of coherence that seems to be going on throughout our culture is part of some step towards some new kind of reinte- gration. I’d like to think that, but I’d have to wait before I gave any conclusive feelings upon that. A lot of the time it does look like a complete breakdown to

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shambling idiocy” (“Mainstream” 94). The search for order is doomed to failure. The search for order is intrinsic

to our being. These two notions—notions which, if both true, make the hu-

exceeding visual and verbal grace as well as spiraling complexity in Moore and Gibbons’s novel. Making use of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan—two men symbolizing two ways of seeing, two men for two eyes—Watchmen explores

masochism they imply. However, beyond the characters, beyond the meta-

both) the text also adopts a variegated complex of visual symbols to address the notion that to be human is to be inherently visually impaired. We see as if through a glass darkly, yes, but that glass through which we look is the hu- man desire for order. That desire is in our blood, it is our blood, and our blood cannot help us see.

This blood (Rorschach’s and Dr. Manhattan’s blood, the Comedian’s, New York City’s, humanity’s blood), this desire to see which breeds blind-

in Watchmen’s beginning panels and becomes a running motif throughout the twelve-part tale. Here, the Comedian has just been killed, and his logo, a smi- ley face, lies blood-spattered in a gutter beneath the window out of which he was pushed (I.overleaf-4). A streak of blood crosses the right eye of the face, angling from upper left to lower right. We see this image or its variants (signs

stain and its permutations underscore a postmodern theme that makes comedy into tragedy and humanity into has-been heroes without costumes, without cause, without any purpose but perhaps one: love. Love one another, that may be all we can do, even if, as Rorschach writes in his journal, it doesn’t exist: “American love,” he says, “like Coke in green glass bottles. . . .They don’t make it anymore” (II.25).

Let us begin with the eyes, since this is after all a book whose theme suggests something about how we see. Many of the images of (at least

scar running through the right eye of a punk biker at Happy Harry’s Bar and Grill in Chapter I (I.14) to what may indeed be a similar scar crossing the same eye of the child killer mentioned earlier (VI.23), from Kovacs’s (Rorschach’s) eye bruise and band-aid seen throughout Chapter VI to his own smeared tears

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(IX.24) to a badly weathered scarecrow (X.23) to a jack-o-lantern stained by candle wax (VIII.12), we are bombarded with the symbolic loss of vision, with the message that our sight is inherently impaired.

book takes place over a trajectory that encompasses the entire story. We see Silk Spectre’s smeared makeup in Chapter III (8) and hair across one of her eyes in Chapter IX (21), a variation repeated several more times, but notably with a pirate (V.12) and with Hollis Mason, the original Nite Owl, just before he is killed, his sight occluded forever (VIII.28). We are reminded of the trope when Kovacs burns a fellow prisoner with hot oil to the face (VI.12), when a prison bar crosses the left eye of another of Kovacs’s enemies (VIII.15) just prior to having his throat cut, again when, as a child, Kovacs puts out a cigarette in a bully’s right eye (VI.7), and yet again when we see Nite Owl’s owl ship half- submerged in the river, a broken pier piling crossing its right “eye” (X.4). But while these examples provide a context, a new syntagmatic structure of their

can be most clearly seen in a sequence of variations involving the Comedian (a.k.a. Edward Morgan Blake).

In the early 40s, the Comedian was a member of a superhero group called

from the group, a scene where he attempts to rape the original Silk Spectre (Sally Jupiter, nee Juspeczyk), begins with Jupiter changing out of her cos- tume in front of a large convex mirror ostensibly taken from the criminal Moloch and labeled as such (II.5). Most interesting here is that as the Spectre

eye-stain in a fashion we will see repeated several times. This human specter which occludes the eye clearly images our theme and is very quickly built upon in the following panels. When the Comedian tries to rape her, the Silk Spectre scratches his face, just below the mask covering his right eye (II.6). Later in this same chapter, we see the Comedian shirking his obligation to a Vietnamese woman who is pregnant with his child; when she confronts him, he denies her and she cuts his face (same eye) with a broken bottle (II.14). Only

Blake stands on the front of the second Nite Owl’s Owl ship, covering the left “eye” of the ship in much the same way as Silk Spectre crossed the lens of Moloch’s giant mirror (II.16). His leather mask, designed like some bondage loving scarecrow’s, includes outlines around both eyes, but the left is crossed by a vertical oblong, again imaging both the smiley face and his own scars (if

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crossing a different eye) (II.17). The scars themselves we don’t see fully until later in this same chapter

when Moloch (a now retired villain) recounts a late-night visit Blake paid him shortly before his death. As the Comedian comes into the light, grabbing hold of Moloch’s night clothes in a fashion similar to how Hooded Justice grappled with him years before while stopping his intended rape of Silk Spectre, his scars become painfully visible (II.23). They have torn the right side of his face deeply, leaving a huge depression in his jaw, a partially missing lip, and a keloid marking that stretches from the corner of his right eye clear down to his mouth. We see them again in Chapter IX when Silk Spectre II (Laurie Juspeczyk, Sally Jupiter’s daughter) confronts Blake about the attempted rape of her mother. These scars, perhaps emphasized by his sexist and racist comments during this particular party, make his whole face appear skull-like when he turns. Just after Blake, rather circumspectly, reveals to Laurie that he is her father (a recognition that she will not fully digest and understand until much later), she disgustedly tosses her drink in his face, dousing the bottle scars that cover her mother’s nail scars (IX.20-21). Stains on top of stains on top of stains.

The Comedian represents Watchmen search for meaning that both Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan (and others) will later have to face. Though he may be irredeemable in many ways—rapist,

Watch- men’s costumed heroes to discover the truth about Ozymandias’s plans, the

engineered tragedy would not have come to Rorschach’s attention. Sally Jupiter herself, Blake’s intended rape victim, says of him after the funeral, “Poor Ed- die.” When her daughter questions how her mother could possibly pity such a man, Sally says, “Laurie, you’re young, you don’t know. Things change. What happened, happened forty years ago. . .” and later, “Listen, gettin’ old, you get a different perspective. The big stuff looks smaller somehow.” Finally, she says, “Laurie, I’m 65. Every day the future looks a little bit darker. But the past, even the grimy parts of it. . . well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time” (II.1-4).

Clearly, Sally has let go of seeing Blake as would-be-rapist only. In fact later, after the attack, he became her lover and the father of Laurie. Because of this fact, Laurie herself will have to come to terms with the complexity of seeing, of ordering her perceptions. How can she hate her father, particularly when the encounter that led to her existence appears to have been consensual? How can she still love her mother when she loved and now pities the man who would have raped her? How can we, the readers of Watchmen, watch such a

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man and not despise him? How do we not simply laugh at his death? If such a

then what does our sight mean? Perhaps it, like the Comedian’s symbol itself, is always already tainted. Watchmen tells us that one way of seeing an event is rare enough, but more, time can alter the valence of any perceived meaning for any given event. One day, rapist. Another, lover and father. Yet another, pitiable memory.

In Watchmen, in Hollis Mason’s autobiographical book within a book, Under the Hood, he writes about an old friend who loved practical jokes and erotic novelty items. This friend, Moe Vernon, found out one day that his wife had been cheating on him. He discovered this news while in the midst of a practical joke, while wearing, in fact, a set of false breasts. Mason says of Moe, “He stood there. . . the tears rolling down over his multiple chins to soak into the pink foam rubber of his bosom, making tiny sounds in his chest and throat. . . . And everybody started laughing.” Mason, the original Nite Owl, then goes on to write,

Maybe it’s safe to tell you why I’m crazier than Moe Vernon ever was. I didn’t have a drawer full of erotic novelties, but I guess I had my own individual quirks. And although I’ve never worn a set of false bosoms in my life, I’ve stood there dressed in something just as strange, with tears in my eyes while people died laughing. (I.29-30)

Whether the eye’s tears or the skin’s tears, real eyes or eye-like simulacrum, the image of ocula obscura repeats in more ways than can be counted here. From

Nite Owl’s steam-stained right eyeglass lens (VII.12) to a TV screen, itself a

affronted and attenuated, converted and conditioned both by what and how we see. Finally, perhaps the most evocative sequence of eye occlusion symbols occurs in Chapter VII when Laurie, having recently left Dr. Manhattan, stays over at Nite Owl’s house. In this sequence, she has just discovered Nite Owl’s basement and is poking around all the secret contraptions that he has kept (ala Batman) even after being forced into retirement by the Keene Act which banned all costumed heroes but two.

away are we able to recognize the left lens of Night Owl’s distinctive goggles hanging from the neck of his mothballed suit, the suit itself hanging in a closet in front of his famous Owl Ship, now nearly derelict. All is covered in dust,

smudged with the dust of having just rubbed one goggle lens. The lens, stained

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everywhere now except “eyes” of the Owl Ship. The reverse stain on one “eye,” then, apparently oc-

removal of stain becomes stain, and then, to further complicate an already rich

inside the reverse stain on the goggles, apparently existing, full-body, within the stain showing across the Owl Ship’s right “eye” or window (VII. overleaf-4). Add to this matrix Laurie’s beauty mark, just below her right eye, and the eventual entry of the two into the ship itself where they take up residence behind the ship’s right window, and we have the two humans (who are arguably

behind an eye that isn’t an eye in an eye that also isn’t an eye and crossed by a stain that, well, isn’t a stain (VII.6-7). Nite Owl’s own posture behind the window conforms to this reverse stain; thus he, and by extension the humanity he protects and hides, becomes the stain.

Ultimately, this whole chapter is about what we hide and what we reveal. It lets us into the heads of two rather broken individuals, Laurie and Daniel Dreiberg (a.k.a. Nite Owl), and paints a heartbreaking and touching portrait of what it means to be both hero and human being. The two are stumbling through life, making few if any real human connections, even though they once chose to save humanity. They have so descended into their alternate identities that they cannot remember who they are without the costume, without the cape. In

the two (which may be little more than pity, at least at the outset), they have to put on their costumes—have to go out, save others, before they can go in, save themselves; have to be heroes again before they can be human, again. They put on their costumes so that they can, ultimately, take them off, together (VII.27). This chapter ends with our only partially costumed crusaders em-

but, as the mysterious message from the stars says in Twin Peaks: “The owls

humanity-as-stain is repeated many times later, but as with the Comedian, as with Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, the notion of seeing through a glass darkly, of being unable to see what is right before us, of revelation found only after re-veiling, is indeed revealing.

We are the shadows. We are the stains. We are what gets in the way of

Watchmen are important, but it is these two apparently contradictory perspectives that provide

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the phenomenological underpinning of the novel. It is all too easy to forget this now, what with the explosion at Chernobyl and the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, but Watchmen is set in a time and place perceived then as the End of Days. For some time during the course of the book, both Manhattan and Kovacs see this possible future coming the same way. And Ozymandias’s ostensible answer to the End? This, they also see the same way until Jon makes the human connection that Rorschach cannot. To this end, the book is full of images of shadows, stains to be interpreted like the patterns on

or a dead dog with its head split open? Is the future full of promise, or have we used up our lease on this planet? Is there any more American love?

The dog just mentioned we see in chapter VI, the “Abyss” chapter. Ror- schach (really Kovacs, now that he has been captured and “outed”) is asked by Dr. Long to interpret some literal Rorschach blots (VI.1, 17). What he sees is the skull of the dog he killed the night he “became” Rorschach. What he says

is reminiscent of the Comedian’s visage when he confronts Moloch or when,

(V.24). It is the same visage we see when Ozymandias grabs the Comedian just before he kills him (I.3), and also when he feeds his fake assassin the as- sassin’s own poison capsule (V.16). It is effectively the same stained face we see in Kovacs’s memory of having fruit smashed in his face as a child, the day he remembers being called a “whoreson,” being taunted about his mother’s indiscretions, and getting even by putting out a cigarette in one of his tormen- tors’ eyes (the right one).

Of course the most obvious stains are ones that make up Rorschach’s mask (VI.10, etc.) and the “real” inkblots (VI.overleaf, etc.); the idea of interpretive

perhaps the most interesting stains or blots are not about blood or ink. Chapter six reveals one of the roots of Rorschach’s pathology: seeing his mother and one of her cheap Johns having sex and casting a combined human shadow on

his mother. When he walks in on them to really see what’s going on, she loses her “earnings” for that night and takes it out on her confused son. The next shadow we witness is the one that more clearly and indelibly stains the young, budding sociopath’s psychology. After saying, “You know what you just cost me, you ugly little bastard? I shoulda listened to everybody else! I shoulda had the abortion,” we watch Kovacs’s mother hurting him, but only in shadow,

(VI.4), save now the hurt is real, both physically and mentally. Again, when

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we see Kovacs/Rorschach extrapolate this latter shadow from the ink blot Dr.

We will witness this same image of the human shadow, or shadow hu-

his suicide-by-Dr.-Manhattan, when Kovacs stumbles across Dan and Laurie comforting each other after they’ve discovered Ozymandias’s awful truth (XII.22). The very next panel shows Rorschach’s mask, this time the ink blot mirroring both what he’s just seen and what we know he saw as a child (23). However, for this Kovacs, this Rorschach, the blot is just that, a blot, for he can no more make connection with another human being, now, than he could understand, then, what was likely at the root of his mother’s rage: shame. Kovacs has no shame, only anger, and without shame, no pity. Without pity, no redemption. Thus, only one page later, unmasked and angry, knowing now that he cannot lie about what he knows, but also, somehow, that he cannot let the world die just to serve his sense of propriety—his face contorted into the face of the dog he killed, the face of Moloch, the face of the Comedian, of the

for Jon to disintegrate him (24). Other images of shadow humans, human stains, can be seen in the mo-

ment when Jon is himself disintegrated by light, by the experiment to remove

has of himself and Laurie stripped to bone by an atomic blast (VII.16-17), in the Hiroshima shadows some street artist has painted on the walls of alleys of this world (V.11, 18), in the second time Jon is disintegrated, this time by

news vendor and the boy who has been reading Tales of the Black Freighter.

zero, the place where Ozymandias’s nefarious, world-saving enterprise, erupts. Here, both the boy and the vendor hold each other, like Rorschach’s mother and her lover, like Dan and Laurie, like the shadows (real and imagined) of Hiroshima, and wink out into blankness—the last image, one of light over- whelming darkness, of the darkness becoming a solid, singular stain, the exact same shape of the blood stain crossing the eye of the Comedian’s incongruous

This shape and the stain it implies is not just a repetition of the Chapter I

by condensation on the surface of Ozymandias’s Xanadu, his pleasure dome (echoing Jon’s) full of tropical wonders and genetic creations, his Antarctic

the Owl goggles earlier, this stain is actually absence, and behind it we see

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end of this chapter, we must ask ourselves, is the stain empty or full? Is it even a stain at all? Is it the end or beginning? And, given that both versions are ef-

chapter begins with the clock at Madison Square Garden (XII.overleaf-3), at the scene of the murder of half of New York’s City’s citizenry, stopped at the stroke of midnight, November second, All Souls Day, near signs reading Pale Horse, Krystalnacht, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Utopia, Promethean Cab Co.: Bringing Light to the World. . . . Considering the fact that the clock is covered in the kind of blood that would, of course, begin with a similar stain to what we’ve seen before, the idea that such a sign could ever mean life is perhaps a strain. But remember that Adrien Veidt’s plan is to bring life out of death, and remember too that all we have seen up to this point suggests that the choice of interpretation is up to the one who reads the blots. The doctor may have a preconceived notion of what we will say, of what that which we do say means, but this does not make the blot any less our own making.

In May of 2002, Luke Helder was arrested for “placing pipe bombs in mailboxes to create a ‘smiley face’ across America” (Barton 1A). An article by a writer from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel were arranged in two circles, one in Illinois and Iowa and the other in Ne- braska. On a map, the circles could resemble the eyes of the popular 1970s

an arc that could be the beginning of a smile” (1A). Upon his arrest, Helder was described as anything but distraught: “His demeanor was very jovial. He didn’t seem to be taking anything seriously at the time. . . . It was almost as if we were old friends and we’d thrown a surprise party for him” (1A, 5A). The great wonder of being mired in postmodern thought is that everything is about perception and interpretation. The great terror of being part of the postmodern era is that everything is about perception and interpretation. One man’s smiley face is another’s lost arm, lost living, lost hope. Thus we arrive at the central question of the Watchmen. Yes, the novel asks what is a hero, and even what is a comic book, but it also asks, what do we know and how do we know it? It is, as are most postmodern texts, a book about its own textuality. How can we know what we think we know, when what we know is predicated on symbols that cannot be “known”? And if we can know nothing, if nothing is true, isn’t everything? Is Ozymandias sane, more sane than those who have attempted

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