The Death of a Comedian: A Symbolic Review of 'Watchmen'

Watchmen is one of my favorite films. It's a good commentary on Americana and American social policy. After the Nolan Batman triology, it's my favorite superhero movie. It can be long and rambling at times, but I like the noir feel and pace of it. The uncut version has a lot of grotesque (but, as I'll discuss below, illuminating) nudity of the radioactive man-god Dr. Manhattan which is detestable. But here's a series of fragments on my commentary. I know it's not in line with Alan Moore's philosophy, and I'm not sure what the film's director intended; but I'm reading it off in my own way.

-Rorschach is the official narrator of the film, and Adrian/Ozymandias drives the story forward with his massive, and successful, conspiracy to rewrite the world script. But the real soul in the film is Silk Spectre II, even as she is relatively hollow character. Her hollowness is important because she represents the future of America. She is the America of the late 20th-early 21st century. She is a kind of shell and mirror for the other characters to project fantasies on, have relationships with, and, in do so, constitute their own symbolic character. She is the central object that multiple characters' plans intersect with. It's also for this reason that she is left out of the final confrontation between Night Owl II, Ozymandias, Rorschach, and Dr. Manhattan. It's telling she's the only living super hero not present. It's because she's the central object of a plot that asks about the future of the US.

-If Silk Spectre II is the future of America, her mother, Silk Spectre I, is the America that is passing away. She is the early-mid 20th century US and represents a fleeting image (hence her obsession with always looking on the past). A repeated line, which becomes filled in throughout the plot, is that when Silk Spectre I looks back on the past, even the grimy parts get bright. She, of course, is referring to her near rape by the Comedian, and its consensual consummation later. Despite mom having a steady marriage to a banker/bureaucrat, her affair causes her to conceive. Now it's crucial that her husband, who is a kind of typical bankster type, can't impregnate her and the Comedian can. The Comedian, as it's clear from the film's typology, is an image of Fascism. He is a violent and brutal superhero who, after the masks are banned, becomes an agent of covert ops. The film even shows him being the second shooter on the grassy knoll, killing Kennedy. In symbolic terms, America is nearly raped by Fascism, but eagerly embraces him, conceiving the future, even as she remains married to a low-key financial establishment. Such reflects America's shift towards pro-fascist policies after World War 2, eagerly reinstalling those ex-fascists willing to fight the Communists. This policy is the gist of the US' interaction with Europe post-war, manifest in programs like Gladio. The America of the future is shaped, but not necessarily determined, by the US' fascistic turn in foreign policy. Neither the old nor the new America is fascist, but embraces it in an external way.

-Dr. Manhattan symbolically stands for the Nuclear Age. Silk Spectre II begins a love affair with him, even though she is, throughout the film, dissatisfied with his lack of attention. Dr. Manhattan gives her all the "loving" necessary, according to his calculations. But she wants his full attention. Dr. Manhattan, as the nuclear man-god he is, is mostly naked throughout the film. This represents the promise of raw power in the Atomic Age, where a kind of shallow scientism flowered. There was a kind of shock-and-awe sense throughout some sectors of the American academy and public that the modern age had finally dawned. After the Bomb there was no going back. Apocalypse was on the cusp, and there was even a psycho-social fascination with the end of all things. Hence there was the film boom in Sci-Fi apocalypse (e.g. Planet of the Apes, Space Odyssey 2000, Twilight Zone, etc.) However, the Nuclear Age did not have much room within it for particularities. The ideology envisioned Humanity, not Americans, as the future. At the film's end, Dr. Manhattan became handcuffed to Adrian's master plan, being linked to a series of explosions bearing his energy signature. Dr. Manhattan hates Adrian and what he has done, but confesses that, post-facto, following through is the best idea. He exiles himself from Earth, even as the whole world united together to oppose Dr. Manhattan. This self banishment represents the shift of the nuclear option, more or less, out of foreign policy. Atom bombs and nuclear energy dropped out of the public imagination. People were no longer intoxicated with the fear and delight of a scientific Armageddon.  Adrian's consolidation represented the excision of the nuclear option in his future world.

-Ozymandias has a fitting name because of his grandiose view of himself, which, in the poem, is immortal even as it is self-effacing. The statue remains, but the visible glory has been buried beneath the sands. Such was Adrian's plan, using the Dr. Manhattan bombs to unite the world against the man-god of Nuclear energy. Adrian represents, rather clearly, the neo-liberal globalism that rapidly engulfed the world through Anglo-American corporate interests. Adrian is a CEO of the world's largest corporation. His power and interests span multiple nations. He hopes, in subjugating the world to a faux-unity, he can direct them as a benevolent, corporate, overlord. Adrian depended upon the Comedian for awhile, but as his plan came together, he killed him and used his death to be a domino to set his plan in motion. According to the film's logic, neo-liberalism utilized fascism, and, when its networks were consolidated, buried it. There was no love-lost, but the corporate power required the use of unsavory means. The Comedian functioned as a hit man for Adrian after he lost his contracts on the government's payroll. And, per neo-liberalism's rather invisible role, Ozymandias has no direct hand in governing the globe; however the film gestures to his power in seeing that it is Adrian's company leading the way in repairing the damaged cities.

-When Adrian completes his plan, he allows Night Owl II to go home, where he rejoins Silk Spectre II. Night Owl represents an old school, moderate, liberalism, the kind of establishment platform between conservative New Dealers and east-coast Republicans. When we meet Night Owl I, he comes off as blue-collar working man, the kind of unionist who supported the New Deal Democrats. Night Owl II is more professional; it's not clear what he does, but it's not manual labor. He looks college educated and professional, the future of liberalism's base of support. While he has an off-and-on relationship with Silk Spectre II, she eventually chooses him against Dr. Manhattan's delusions of grandeur and self-absorption. As a kind of "husband" figure, he shows the formal wedding between the new America and this new liberalism. However, there's a catch. Night Owl only leaves his conflict with Adrian alive by agreeing to not talk about what happened. There's a silent complicity between neo-liberal globalism and the retired Night Owl II, who is the last gasp of liberalism. The Clinton presidency represented a traditional liberalism who is in the pocket of neo-liberal globalism, at least off the surface. The end of film is a phony home-sweet-home, the world squarely under Adrian's design, but where Night Owl II and Silk Spectre II can live happily ever after.

-This, of course, leaves us with Rorschach, who does not leave the conflict with Adrian. In fact, he dies by the hand of Dr. Manhattan. He knows he is going to die, but he refuses to back off of his commitment to the truth. While Rorschach comes off with brutally conservative morals (i.e. he comments, with disgust, on the whores and drugs that fill the city), he is not quite the Objectivist that Alan Moore designed him to be. He has a radical empirical streak in him, and he's jaded after being broken by confrontation with the vicious murder of a little girl. Rorschach, perhaps, stands in for American radicalism, an amalgamation of left and right concerns that rejects the establishment, both of the old and new America, and dies because he refuses to keep quiet about Adrian's plan. Rorschach misses the old America, in that he worked with Silk Spectre I. It's a sort of wistful commentary on the possibility of real reform back then, even if things were bad then too. Rorschach rails against "Tricky Dick", who, in the film's alternate history, has become president for the fifth time by winning the Vietnam war and reversing term limits. Nixon represents a fantasy of what MacArthur could've achieved through wanton nuclear diplomacy, but, more importantly, he is a figure for the whole establishment, melded into an aged liberal, but militant, Republican. Rorschach's death represents the obliteration of radical movements, but he left his diary of investigations for a small new organ. The film ends in a kind of quasi-optimism. Radicalism still lives on in the life of Rorschach which was preserved in his investigations, connecting the Comedian, Adrian, and Dr. Manhattan together before he perished.

I should say, for clarity, that this is how I'm reading the film's plot elements and characters. My analysis is not so much what I think, but what I think the film conveys. There is much of the analysis that is pretty revealing and true as regards America post-Cold War and pre-War on Terror. However, I don't agree with all the analyses and, now being in a different epoch of American geo-politics, it's not so much a powerful commentary, but an allegorical history of where things were at 9/11.