The politics of... the politics of Watchmen
Yeah, I think I'll do another of these. Anyone surprised by my fondness for Watchmen hasn't been paying attention, and anyone expecting me to express disdain for Zack Snyder... has. You may be surprised, though, that I watched and enjoyed Lost. So, sure, I'll give Damon Lindelof a chance here.
So... Rorschach. What kind of a character is he? Hero? Villain? Something else? I'll go with "something else." It's almost as though how you interpret him as a character says something about you as a person. Like, some kind of a test, or something. There ought to be a name for that.
Eh. Whatever. Anyway, in the original comics/graphic novel, depending on how you read it, presuming you read it, Rorschach was neither hero nor villain, nor conventional antihero, nor any of that. What made him so compelling a character from a literary perspective (yes, literary) was his complexity. His moral complexity. Which is ironic, given that part of what made him interesting was his black-and-white view of the world. But, he was a morally complex character.
He was, first and foremost, a brutal vigilante. He directed his vigilantism at some reprehensible people, though. When we, as readers, observe a fictional world, we can observe guilt and innocence, and we have a perspective on crime and punishment that the legal system cannot. We can make assessments of vigilantes and their targets based on absolute knowledge of guilt or innocence, whereas the entire point of the legal system is to try, as best as possible, to make those judgments with the standard that it is worse to punish the innocent than to acquit the guilty (the moral basis of our legal system), knowing that any institutional process is intrinsically fallible. The point, then, is that in this place called "reality," the legal system, cops, 'n all can't know with 100% certainty who is guilty, and who is innocent, so that must be factored into everything. As readers, though, we can watch a known guilty person face some consequence at the hands of Rorschach, Frank Castle, or some other brutal vigilante, and whatever we might think of it in reality, we can perhaps interpret it differently knowing what we know as readers. Because we know who is guilty as omniscient observers. The author told us.
When we read-- and yes, Watchmen is literature, taught as such-- we are posed with moral questions such as the following: what if you could have absolute, 100% certainty of someone's guilt? What would that do to the morality of punishment? Contrast that with flawed institutions, and you have one of the versions of how a flawed legal system can go wrong. There are people who get away with it. Characters like Rorschach appeal to frustration with that, rather than the other type of error-- convicting the innocent.
At the core of the appeal of Rorschach, and similar characters, then, is a contrast between trust in what is knowable, and the functionality or dysfunctionality of institutions. Distrust in institutions, along with a belief that knowledge is simple. The system has gone wrong, knowing who the bad guys are is easy, and just go get them. In the fictional world when we can see who the bad guys are, that can be appealing, at least maybe until we find out that villainy is more complex, that Ozymandias is behind it all, and everything gets more grey.
The point of Rorschach, though, is that he won't make the compromise, and that he doesn't see it that way. It's never messy to Rorschach. It's always just black-and-white. Ozymandias is the villain. Period. He killed millions to end the Cold War. With a lie. But Rorschach won't play along, because when you strip away all of the arguments and reasoning, Ozymandias just... killed too many, and it was all a lie. He was a mass murderer, and Rorschach wanted to fight for truth, justice and... oh, never mind. Truth was important to Rorschach, though. He wouldn't give up on truth. Ozymandias's whole plot was a lie. A lie for a purpose, but a lie, and one with a massive death toll. Rorschach would not go along with it. He would rather die himself than go along with that.
Anyone looking to paint Rorschach as pure villain will have a hard time glossing over that aspect of principled nobility.
Rorschach was also a bigot. Of basically every variety. How that goes along with his particular variety of vigilantism and his belief that there's no such thing as "excessive force" is... well, complicated. Rorschach was deeply misogynistic, but he wasn't Jack The Ripper. He was a bigot of every other variety, too, but that mask wasn't a klan mask, and his bigotry was not the motivating force of his vigilantism. It was an aspect of who he was, and something critical to understanding who he was, but not what drove his decisions in the plot. Frank Castle is sort of a point of reference here. Take away Rorschach's bigotry, and his actions aren't that different from a lot of what Frank Castle does. Imagine, though, if Frank Castle went around spewing hate speech while gunning down every crook in sight. The character would read a bit differently, no?
There is a nexus of sorts between Rorschach's style of brutal vigilantism and his bigotry which didn't have to exist, logically, but it was there nevertheless. And that affects the character.
More importantly, though, it affects reception of the character, and that brings me to Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series. Rorschach is a difficult character to assess, morally, because he is a difficult guy. In terms of The Good Place, ain't no way he'd get into "The Good Place" even if the point system weren't essentially rigged. Dude was messed up. But he was complex. He had a strict view of morality, and basically thought that he, personally, had permission to torture anyone to death if they crossed the line by enough. That put him, generally speaking, against some even worse people... sort of... while also being a terrible bigot, but if you were among the people victimized by the people he tortured to death, you probably didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for his detractors.
Point being, he killed child killers, and other such people a little more deserving of the phrase, "human scum." So, yeah, bad person, but "Gerald Grice..." He was something else. He was the child kidnapper and killer whom Rorschach handcuffed, tossed a saw, and then advised to saw through his own arm if he hoped to live while he torched the building because it'd never get through the metal. Yeah, Rorschach was brutal, but Gerald Grice? Kidnapper and child killer.
Classic Rorschach.
You see how one can be blinded to Rorschach's many flaws-- like... being a psychopath-- and a certain type of reader has historically been blinded to those flaws. The same kind of person who, well, would be a cop who wears Punisher regalia. That blindness is necessary for the political nexus between Rorschach's vision of vigilantism and his bigotry. That has historically been a thing.
And that makes the within-world stuff in the series interesting. Rorschach is dead, of course, but his followers are legion. And they have embraced not only his brutality, but his bigotry. While Rorschach himself had paradoxical moral complexity, his followers don't. The bigotry has eclipsed the fact that Rorschach himself went after people like Gerald Grice, and stood against Ozymandias on principled grounds. Instead, his followers are just a white power terrorist group.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, Rorschach's complexity was one of the most interesting things about the original comics. A white power terrorist organization is not an interesting villain. I want my villains interesting. This is a central theme any time I write about fiction. Rorschach's moral complexity made him interesting. Ozymandias was interesting because he was trying, in his way, to achieve world peace! I have stated before that my favorite villains are characters like Magneto, and to reference Damon Lindelof's more famous series... Ben Linus. Ben Linus was a great character, and not just because Michael Emerson is a great actor, but because the character had motivation and a perspective, flawed and twisted though it was. That's what makes for a great villain. White power groups? Mustache-twirlers. Therefore, in literary terms, boring, as far as I'm concerned. More to the point, there is a way in which it detracts from Rorschach.
But... not quite. Because this isn't Rorschach. It's his followers. And, it very much makes sense for there to be Rorschach followers who embrace both his brutality and his bigotry, with the latter eclipsing any sense of general moral principle! After all, it serves as a sort of meta-commentary on real-world reactions to Rorschach, carried into the series. So, there is a way in which taking Rorschach's complexity away from his followers really works, even if it leaves those of us who loved that aspect of the source material feeling like something is missing.
Rorschach was a bigot, but his bigotry was incidental to the plot of Watchmen, if not to understanding the character's basic ugliness. It wasn't really what motivated his actions. But, the nexus of racism, violence, distrust of institutions-- and in particular, a fixation on guilty people "getting away with it"-- this all works in a way that would bind together for followers, post-Rorschach. Reference time. Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." Yup. That one again. Sorry, long-time readers of The Unmutual Political Blog, but it's just about the most important reference there is. Here's the basic idea. Ideology is about "constraint." To have an ideology is to take a set of positions that are either consistently "liberal," or consistently "conservative" because you are "constrained" to do so. What kinds of constraints are there? There are "logical" constraints, which are Aristotelean first principles, from which you can derive any given policy position, e.g. "small government," but much as every single Republican or self-identified conservative has been trained like a Pavlovian dog to describe their belief systems in that language, that's not actually what they believe. That's libertarianism, and every single person in the political universe needs to stop letting people get away with this nonsense. But, that demonstrates a broader point: you can't derive either liberalism or conservatism from logical first principles.
And libertarians are leprechauns. They don't exist. Stop asking me about them.
Why can't you derive ideology from first principles? Because there are two other types of constraints: psychological and sociological. For our purposes here, the psychological constraints are more important. Here's a way I sometimes explain it to students. There are positions that don't logically fit together, but that seem, intuitively, to fit together in a coherent world view because that world view makes some sort of general, intuitive sense. There is a social construction aspect to this, and blah, blah, blah, but hopefully, you get the point. The nexus between Rorschach's brutality and his bigotry isn't about what Converse would call "logical constraint," and his bigotry is largely incidental to the plot of Watchmen. However, it works to paint a coherent picture of the character because of the "psychological constraint" that combines Rorschach's adherence to violence, distrust of institutions, general paranoia, and... bigotry. There's nothing about Rorschach's style of vigilantism that necessarily requires a white power perspective-- nobody looked at Frank Castle and said, "hey, why isn't he racist?! Plot hole!"-- but there's a world view within which Rorschach's violence and bigotry seem to fit together.
And Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons got that.
So Lindelof's sequel series takes that as a starting point. And it makes sense.
Now, though, let's ask a follow-up question. Does Rorschach deserve a less purely evil legacy? He was a complex character, and within-world, his legacy becomes that of basically Nathan Bedford Forrest, or someone like that. Within-world, the answer to that may be that if he wanted a different legacy, he needed to lead a different life. Of course, he was a bigot, and distrustful of institutions, so it isn't necessarily clear what he would think of his followers should he see them. His priorities were different in the source material, and he may still have thought that going after people like Gerald Grice... or Ozymandias should be a priority. But he was a bigot, so within-world, we can't actually say what Rorschach would think of the white power movement that came in his wake.
I'd lean towards-- they're worthless yokels, and vermin. They don't deserve his protection. And when he sees one of them kill a kid, or something, they get the Gerald Grice treatment, when he has a moment to spare from killing cops. Like I said, not gettin' into "The Good Place," but ironically similar to Shaft. A complicated man, and no one understands him but his... readers.
Schach!
He's a bad mother... [Shut your mouth!]
Anyway, as a general rule, I don't get bogged down in questions of canonicity, so any Watchmen fans who want to tell themselves that this isn't really the Watchmen future... fine. We're all ignoring Zack Snyder anyway. Canonicity debates are the dumbest things in fandom.
But if they screw up Buffy the Vampire Slayer or that supposed adaptation of The Fifth Season...
...
OK, um...
Never mind. Point being, at the moment, my frustration is that I like complex villains, and in general, moral complexity in my fiction. White power terrorist groups don't give me that. Pure evil. Ozymandias was interesting because he was complex. Rorschach was interesting because he was complex. What Lindelof's series is doing with Rorschach makes sense, both within-world, and as a meta-commentary, but I like my villains more interesting than white power terrorists. The set-up with the cops? That creates some interesting questions. There's stuff going on. I could write lots. Maybe I will. I dunno.
But hey. Rorschach. An all-time favorite character. I'm still not sure what I think, in total, of the choices, but I get it.
So... Rorschach. What kind of a character is he? Hero? Villain? Something else? I'll go with "something else." It's almost as though how you interpret him as a character says something about you as a person. Like, some kind of a test, or something. There ought to be a name for that.
Eh. Whatever. Anyway, in the original comics/graphic novel, depending on how you read it, presuming you read it, Rorschach was neither hero nor villain, nor conventional antihero, nor any of that. What made him so compelling a character from a literary perspective (yes, literary) was his complexity. His moral complexity. Which is ironic, given that part of what made him interesting was his black-and-white view of the world. But, he was a morally complex character.
He was, first and foremost, a brutal vigilante. He directed his vigilantism at some reprehensible people, though. When we, as readers, observe a fictional world, we can observe guilt and innocence, and we have a perspective on crime and punishment that the legal system cannot. We can make assessments of vigilantes and their targets based on absolute knowledge of guilt or innocence, whereas the entire point of the legal system is to try, as best as possible, to make those judgments with the standard that it is worse to punish the innocent than to acquit the guilty (the moral basis of our legal system), knowing that any institutional process is intrinsically fallible. The point, then, is that in this place called "reality," the legal system, cops, 'n all can't know with 100% certainty who is guilty, and who is innocent, so that must be factored into everything. As readers, though, we can watch a known guilty person face some consequence at the hands of Rorschach, Frank Castle, or some other brutal vigilante, and whatever we might think of it in reality, we can perhaps interpret it differently knowing what we know as readers. Because we know who is guilty as omniscient observers. The author told us.
When we read-- and yes, Watchmen is literature, taught as such-- we are posed with moral questions such as the following: what if you could have absolute, 100% certainty of someone's guilt? What would that do to the morality of punishment? Contrast that with flawed institutions, and you have one of the versions of how a flawed legal system can go wrong. There are people who get away with it. Characters like Rorschach appeal to frustration with that, rather than the other type of error-- convicting the innocent.
At the core of the appeal of Rorschach, and similar characters, then, is a contrast between trust in what is knowable, and the functionality or dysfunctionality of institutions. Distrust in institutions, along with a belief that knowledge is simple. The system has gone wrong, knowing who the bad guys are is easy, and just go get them. In the fictional world when we can see who the bad guys are, that can be appealing, at least maybe until we find out that villainy is more complex, that Ozymandias is behind it all, and everything gets more grey.
The point of Rorschach, though, is that he won't make the compromise, and that he doesn't see it that way. It's never messy to Rorschach. It's always just black-and-white. Ozymandias is the villain. Period. He killed millions to end the Cold War. With a lie. But Rorschach won't play along, because when you strip away all of the arguments and reasoning, Ozymandias just... killed too many, and it was all a lie. He was a mass murderer, and Rorschach wanted to fight for truth, justice and... oh, never mind. Truth was important to Rorschach, though. He wouldn't give up on truth. Ozymandias's whole plot was a lie. A lie for a purpose, but a lie, and one with a massive death toll. Rorschach would not go along with it. He would rather die himself than go along with that.
Anyone looking to paint Rorschach as pure villain will have a hard time glossing over that aspect of principled nobility.
Rorschach was also a bigot. Of basically every variety. How that goes along with his particular variety of vigilantism and his belief that there's no such thing as "excessive force" is... well, complicated. Rorschach was deeply misogynistic, but he wasn't Jack The Ripper. He was a bigot of every other variety, too, but that mask wasn't a klan mask, and his bigotry was not the motivating force of his vigilantism. It was an aspect of who he was, and something critical to understanding who he was, but not what drove his decisions in the plot. Frank Castle is sort of a point of reference here. Take away Rorschach's bigotry, and his actions aren't that different from a lot of what Frank Castle does. Imagine, though, if Frank Castle went around spewing hate speech while gunning down every crook in sight. The character would read a bit differently, no?
There is a nexus of sorts between Rorschach's style of brutal vigilantism and his bigotry which didn't have to exist, logically, but it was there nevertheless. And that affects the character.
More importantly, though, it affects reception of the character, and that brings me to Damon Lindelof's Watchmen series. Rorschach is a difficult character to assess, morally, because he is a difficult guy. In terms of The Good Place, ain't no way he'd get into "The Good Place" even if the point system weren't essentially rigged. Dude was messed up. But he was complex. He had a strict view of morality, and basically thought that he, personally, had permission to torture anyone to death if they crossed the line by enough. That put him, generally speaking, against some even worse people... sort of... while also being a terrible bigot, but if you were among the people victimized by the people he tortured to death, you probably didn't have a whole lot of sympathy for his detractors.
Point being, he killed child killers, and other such people a little more deserving of the phrase, "human scum." So, yeah, bad person, but "Gerald Grice..." He was something else. He was the child kidnapper and killer whom Rorschach handcuffed, tossed a saw, and then advised to saw through his own arm if he hoped to live while he torched the building because it'd never get through the metal. Yeah, Rorschach was brutal, but Gerald Grice? Kidnapper and child killer.
Classic Rorschach.
You see how one can be blinded to Rorschach's many flaws-- like... being a psychopath-- and a certain type of reader has historically been blinded to those flaws. The same kind of person who, well, would be a cop who wears Punisher regalia. That blindness is necessary for the political nexus between Rorschach's vision of vigilantism and his bigotry. That has historically been a thing.
And that makes the within-world stuff in the series interesting. Rorschach is dead, of course, but his followers are legion. And they have embraced not only his brutality, but his bigotry. While Rorschach himself had paradoxical moral complexity, his followers don't. The bigotry has eclipsed the fact that Rorschach himself went after people like Gerald Grice, and stood against Ozymandias on principled grounds. Instead, his followers are just a white power terrorist group.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, Rorschach's complexity was one of the most interesting things about the original comics. A white power terrorist organization is not an interesting villain. I want my villains interesting. This is a central theme any time I write about fiction. Rorschach's moral complexity made him interesting. Ozymandias was interesting because he was trying, in his way, to achieve world peace! I have stated before that my favorite villains are characters like Magneto, and to reference Damon Lindelof's more famous series... Ben Linus. Ben Linus was a great character, and not just because Michael Emerson is a great actor, but because the character had motivation and a perspective, flawed and twisted though it was. That's what makes for a great villain. White power groups? Mustache-twirlers. Therefore, in literary terms, boring, as far as I'm concerned. More to the point, there is a way in which it detracts from Rorschach.
But... not quite. Because this isn't Rorschach. It's his followers. And, it very much makes sense for there to be Rorschach followers who embrace both his brutality and his bigotry, with the latter eclipsing any sense of general moral principle! After all, it serves as a sort of meta-commentary on real-world reactions to Rorschach, carried into the series. So, there is a way in which taking Rorschach's complexity away from his followers really works, even if it leaves those of us who loved that aspect of the source material feeling like something is missing.
Rorschach was a bigot, but his bigotry was incidental to the plot of Watchmen, if not to understanding the character's basic ugliness. It wasn't really what motivated his actions. But, the nexus of racism, violence, distrust of institutions-- and in particular, a fixation on guilty people "getting away with it"-- this all works in a way that would bind together for followers, post-Rorschach. Reference time. Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics." Yup. That one again. Sorry, long-time readers of The Unmutual Political Blog, but it's just about the most important reference there is. Here's the basic idea. Ideology is about "constraint." To have an ideology is to take a set of positions that are either consistently "liberal," or consistently "conservative" because you are "constrained" to do so. What kinds of constraints are there? There are "logical" constraints, which are Aristotelean first principles, from which you can derive any given policy position, e.g. "small government," but much as every single Republican or self-identified conservative has been trained like a Pavlovian dog to describe their belief systems in that language, that's not actually what they believe. That's libertarianism, and every single person in the political universe needs to stop letting people get away with this nonsense. But, that demonstrates a broader point: you can't derive either liberalism or conservatism from logical first principles.
And libertarians are leprechauns. They don't exist. Stop asking me about them.
Why can't you derive ideology from first principles? Because there are two other types of constraints: psychological and sociological. For our purposes here, the psychological constraints are more important. Here's a way I sometimes explain it to students. There are positions that don't logically fit together, but that seem, intuitively, to fit together in a coherent world view because that world view makes some sort of general, intuitive sense. There is a social construction aspect to this, and blah, blah, blah, but hopefully, you get the point. The nexus between Rorschach's brutality and his bigotry isn't about what Converse would call "logical constraint," and his bigotry is largely incidental to the plot of Watchmen. However, it works to paint a coherent picture of the character because of the "psychological constraint" that combines Rorschach's adherence to violence, distrust of institutions, general paranoia, and... bigotry. There's nothing about Rorschach's style of vigilantism that necessarily requires a white power perspective-- nobody looked at Frank Castle and said, "hey, why isn't he racist?! Plot hole!"-- but there's a world view within which Rorschach's violence and bigotry seem to fit together.
And Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons got that.
So Lindelof's sequel series takes that as a starting point. And it makes sense.
Now, though, let's ask a follow-up question. Does Rorschach deserve a less purely evil legacy? He was a complex character, and within-world, his legacy becomes that of basically Nathan Bedford Forrest, or someone like that. Within-world, the answer to that may be that if he wanted a different legacy, he needed to lead a different life. Of course, he was a bigot, and distrustful of institutions, so it isn't necessarily clear what he would think of his followers should he see them. His priorities were different in the source material, and he may still have thought that going after people like Gerald Grice... or Ozymandias should be a priority. But he was a bigot, so within-world, we can't actually say what Rorschach would think of the white power movement that came in his wake.
I'd lean towards-- they're worthless yokels, and vermin. They don't deserve his protection. And when he sees one of them kill a kid, or something, they get the Gerald Grice treatment, when he has a moment to spare from killing cops. Like I said, not gettin' into "The Good Place," but ironically similar to Shaft. A complicated man, and no one understands him but his... readers.
Schach!
He's a bad mother... [Shut your mouth!]
Anyway, as a general rule, I don't get bogged down in questions of canonicity, so any Watchmen fans who want to tell themselves that this isn't really the Watchmen future... fine. We're all ignoring Zack Snyder anyway. Canonicity debates are the dumbest things in fandom.
But if they screw up Buffy the Vampire Slayer or that supposed adaptation of The Fifth Season...
...
OK, um...
Never mind. Point being, at the moment, my frustration is that I like complex villains, and in general, moral complexity in my fiction. White power terrorist groups don't give me that. Pure evil. Ozymandias was interesting because he was complex. Rorschach was interesting because he was complex. What Lindelof's series is doing with Rorschach makes sense, both within-world, and as a meta-commentary, but I like my villains more interesting than white power terrorists. The set-up with the cops? That creates some interesting questions. There's stuff going on. I could write lots. Maybe I will. I dunno.
But hey. Rorschach. An all-time favorite character. I'm still not sure what I think, in total, of the choices, but I get it.
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