Shades of moral grey

I love how Moore plays with the morality of the superheroes in Watchmen. First, we've got the superheroes themselves - in the American psyche, superheroes are supposed to be the embodiment of all that is good. But the Watchmen (and their successors) have questionable motives and methods. They enter the superhero business not only from a sense of civic duty and a desire to fight for justice, but also for their own satisfaction and profit - except for Jon, these men and women don't even have superpowers.

Then, of course, there are the individual characters. The Comedian is violent, misogynist, power-hungry, and a rapist. Yet he is one of the few Watchmen to remain on the side of the US government, one of the few who is not cast out of society as a danger.

Roschach is wanted on several counts of murder, uses questionable rationalization for his actions, and is generally a wretched, ungrateful, unhelpful human being. Yet he sticks firmly to his morals (questionable though they may be), and Dan trusts him to help save the world.

And then there is, of course Ozymandias - Adrian Veidt. He's "the smartest man in the world," handsome, successful, helpful, everything you think a superhero is supposed to be. Yet - he chooses to kill half of New York, a cruise ship full of artists and thinkers and builders, and half of the Watchmen. He does it to save the world... but is he justified? Even putting aside the question of whether it would really work (Watchmen suggests it does), is it justifiable to make decisions for an entire species?

Not to mention Sally Jupiter's self-serving sexuality, or Dan's dependence and hero-worship, or any of the other all-too-human flaws of these superheroes. Moore paints a grey picture of morality: it's impossible to say who, of these heroes, is good, and who is evil, and what constitutes which.

The Ending of Watchmen

First of all I would like to say that reading a graphic novel is not as easy as it first appears. I thought it would be a simple task to skim through the text and get it done in an hour or so; I was wrong. Looking at the pictures along with reading the text makes for very slow going, not to mention those terrible scenes in which the boy on the street corner was reading the pirate comic. When I first encountered one of those scenes I stopped attempting to skim.

Meanwhile, What was with the ending of the novel? The whole time there is a huge build up of something terrible about to happen. When it does finally take place only one person objects and then allows himself to be killed very easily. Then quickly, following the destruction and murder of most of New York suddenly everyone bans together and stops the feeling of impending doom everywhere because something terrible has already happened so nothing worse could come after that, right? I'm not so sure. Even though the theme of this week is exceptions, how much is being accepted here? These masked men are just people like the rest of us but training to fight crime in a way that the police cant / wont / don't. That one of them suddenly finds a way to stop social degradation is implausible at best for me. We can see that terrible events do not stop other terrible events from taking place. Somalia and Cambodia are excellent examples that no one apparently learned anything from. I do not think that a creature invented in someones mind would have a greater effect upon the world. Instead I think that encountering the other might make human kind more divisive, and less inclined to change their nature simply because something entirely new appears on the scene. Perhaps the character John is the best example of people not changing because of encountering the other... or perhaps he is not other enough to use here. Just some thoughts...

Watchmen

I am more than halfway through Watchmen, and I have to say that so far, I love it. This is my first graphic novel, but I'm learning that I really like graphic novels as a medium. I never realized how they allow a number of different stories to occur simultaneously in a way that other mediums do not allow. Point in case--the overlapping and interplay of the guy reading The Black Freighter and the newspaper guy talking. It's awesome.

I can see why this falls into the "Exceptions" category on the syllabus because it takes place on our planet, but history as we know it is altered. I find Jon interesting because of the aspect of a super-soldier who, in the book, is an integral part of the US's national security strategy. I really like how Moore and Gibbons tell the story of his "becoming" and overlap all the different time sequences within that. What I find interesting is how it all relied on a series of coincidences--ie, forgetting the watch, the fat man stepping on it. The prominence of watches in how they interplay into fate in the story of Jon's becoming is a bit reminiscient of a discussion of Deist philosophy that I had in high school in which my teacher told us their views that God created the world as a perfect machine, like a clock, and stood back and did not interefere. But that's a stretch...
Still, I think the presence of clocks=watch(men)= time ticking toward the end of the world throughout the story so far is interesting and really want to see where it goes. Also, we have the aspect of the meaninglessness of time in Jon's case.

Another theme that has emerged so far that I find interesting is what I guess I would phrase "The Golden Rule and limits thereof"--namely, for criminals, what is just punishment for their crime? Should crime fighting be left to "official" channels (police, government) if it is ineffective? The distinction in Watchmen seems to be that only violence/force sanctioned by the state is justifiable (and therefore the superhero crimfighters are not), which kind of goes with Weber/Schmitt's ideas (although I'm not arguing they do so wholly).

I can't wait to see where the story goes because I'm really into it so far...