What is Watchmen about?
The initial wave of comic book heroes involved figures like Superman, Captain America, Wonder Woman, and Captain Marvel. Their positive morality mirrored the idealism of America following World War I. But, by the 1980s, the nation had lost its optimism. This was very evident in movies—like Apocalypse Now, The Exorcist, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather—but slower to take root in TV and especially comics.
While superhero stories had explored political storylines, heroes were always heroes. Alan Moore decided to change that. Watchmen, much like Frank Herbert’s Dune, has the premise that people are flawed, whether they’re heroes, villains, or completely average, so how can we trust those with power to do what’s right?
Zack Snyder translates the graphic novel’s moral tension to the big screen. Narratively, he strengthens the story’s connection to the national zeitgeist. Visually, he juxtaposes the allure of his cinematography with the ugliness of the world around the characters, capturing the beauty and horror that is the miracle of human nature.
Cast
- Rorschach / Walter Kovacs – Jackie Earle Haley
- Nite Owl II / Daniel Dreiberg – Patrick Wilson
- Silk Spectre II / Laurie Jupiter – Malin Åkerman
- Doctor Manhattan / Jon Osterman – Billy Crudup
- Ozymandias / Adrian Veidt – Matthew Goode
- The Comedian / Edward Blake – Jeffrey Dean Morgan
- Silk Spectre / Sally Jupiter – Carla Gugino
- Nite Owl / Hollis Mason – Stephen McHattie
- Based on – The Watchmen graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
- Written by – David Hayter | Alex Tse
- Directed by – Zack Snyder
Doctor Manhattan or: how I learned to stop hating humanity and love the bomb
Most Watchmen explanations will focus on ideas like “who watches the watchmen” and the whole deconstruction of the superhero. As well as on what it means to have and wield power, and on the sacred Americana of Reaganism. But there’s a theme at play that I don’t think gets enough attention.
What’s that theme? The beauty and insanity of contradiction. This is most pointedly visualized in the iconic smiley face pin with the blood splatter. The smiley face implies joy. While the blood is a violent counterpoint. Watchmen is filled with contradictions like this. For example, The Comedian is not funny. He doesn’t make jokes. He antagonizes people, hurts them, and does a lot of bad stuff. But, also, he says what others refuse to say. He recognizes the delusions people tell themselves and calls them out on it. He’s wrong in deed, but right in his philosophizing. Rorschach is similar. He serves “justice”. But does so by breaking laws and crossing moral lines.
Dr. Manhattan eventually, while on Mars, in his dialogue with Laurie, explains this theme. A bit of context, first. Remember, for most of the film, he had been losing touch with humanity (which was part of Adrian’s plot). What does he say to Rorschach? “A live human body and a dead human body have the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no difference.” When Doc goes to Mars, it’s a physical distance that matches his emotional distance.
Keeping in mind the theme of contradiction, read this conversation between Laurie and Manhattan.
Manhattan: In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon. Just look around you. Mars gets along perfectly well without so much as a microorganism. Here, it’s a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole, in ripples 10,000 years wide. So, tell me, how would all of this be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? By a shopping mall?
Laurie: So it’s too much to ask? For a miracle?
M: Miracles, by their definition, are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.
L: You know what? You can send me back to Earth to fry with Dan and my mom and all the other worthless humans. But know that you were wrong. You said this ended with me in tears, and look, nothing. Maybe you were wrong about everything.
M: You complain that I refuse to see life on life’s terms. Yet you continuously refuse to see things from my perspective. You shut out what you’re afraid of.
L: I’m not afraid. You want me to see things your way? Go ahead, show me.
[Both Laurie and Manhattan realize that The Comedian was Laurie’s father. He fathoms the profundities of this. She cries then attacks his glass structure and causes a crack that brings the whole thing crashing down.]
L: My life is just one big joke.
M: I don’t think your life is a joke.
L: Yeah, well, I’m sorry if I don’t trust your sense of humor.
M: Will you smile? If I admit I was wrong?
L: About what?
M: Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring, like oxygen turning into gold. I’ve longed to witness such an event. And yet, I neglect that in human coupling. Millions upon millions of cells compete to create life. For generation after generation. Until, finally, your mother loves a man, Edward Blake, the Comedian, a man she has every reason to hate, and out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds—it’s you. Only you. That emerged to distill so specific a form, from all that chaos. It’s like turning air into gold. A miracle. And so…I was wrong. Now dry your eyes, and let’s go home.
The big big big thing here is when Manhattan connects Laurie’s conception with a miracle like oxygen spontaneously turning into gold. He specifies that Laurie’s mother “loves a man…she has every reason to hate”. Just a few minutes before he had said life is overrated and reduced the value of humanity to oil pipelines and shopping malls. The things that we build rather than who we are. But the conversation with Laurie has him realize that the complexity of human emotion is miraculous.
Underpinning this is how Watchmen focuses on Manhattan’s logic versus Laurie’s emotions. While he stays calm, cool, and collected she leaps from debating him to yelling at him to begging him to dismissing him to completely breaking down at the discovery of her father. If that wasn’t enough you also have the giant glass structure that’s an extension of Manhattan’s mechanical view of time and the world. It’s a precise, complex, delicate thing. And what happens to it? Laurie, angered by the Comedian revelation, strikes the structure. It cracks then shatters. And right after it shatters—Manhattan has his emotional breakthrough.
In an interview with Strange Things Are Happening, in 1988, Alan Moore said: I’d say Burroughs is one of my main influences. Not the cut-up stuff, but his thinking about the way that the word and the image are used to control, and their possible more subversive effect….With Watchmen, I was trying to put some of his ideas into practice; the idea of repeated symbols that would become laden with meaning. You could almost play them like music. You’d have these things like musical themes that would occur throughout the work.
That’s why Moore kept coming back to contradiction. He infused the characters with contradictions. Not just in their personalities and actions but in their relationship dynamics and symbolism. Manhattan’s embodiment of logic and Laurie’s embodiment of emotion/passion mean that their relationship is a contradiction. And, for most of the story, that relationship fails. Until it doesn’t and is the thing that saves humanity from self-inflicted nuclear annihilation.
And it’s exactly that contradiction that’s at the heart of Ozymandias’s plan. He believes you save billions by sacrificing millions. We saw how hateful everything had been. Politically and socially. Veidt believes the compassion and camaraderie triggered by this wide-scale tragedy will lead to something better. Especially as people everywhere now share a common enemy—Manhattan. Manhattan was already viewed as a god. Now he becomes the devil. And he is fine with it, because he finally understands the power of contradiction. Mixing love and hate created Laurie. Will it do the same for the rest of the world?
Who watches the Watchmen? The death of Rorschach
As much as Dan, Laurie, and Manhattan disagree with Veidt’s methods, they all kind of begrudgingly accept that what’s done is done and the best way forward is to let the world believe in the threat of Dr. Manhattan. Then there’s Rorschach. “Keep your own secrets,” he tells them. Then “Never compromise. Even in the face of armageddon.” He has that final conversation with Manhattan.
Rorschach: Out of my way. People have to be told.
Manhattan: You know I can’t let you do that.
R: Suddenly you discover humanity. Convenient. If you’d cared from the start, none of this would have happened.
M: I can change almost anything. But I can’t change human nature.
R: Of course you must protect Veidt’s new utopia. What’s one more body amongst foundations?
Manhattan then explodes Rorschach.
So we talked about how Manhattan embodied logic and Laurie passion. Rorschach stood for truth. He’s the detective character who turns over all the rocks to figure out what’s going on. And the idea of a Rorschach Test is that it gets at some psychological truth of the person who views and describes the inkblots. Rorschach’s bluntness and relentlessness presents a challenge. To everyone he encounters. He represents that function at work within a society.
When Manhattan eradicates Rorschach, it symbolizes how the new “utopia” is built on Veidt’s idea of progress and Manhattan’s sense of logic. It has no room for truth or self-reflection, because those things will only create friction. Which ties back to that famous question: who watches the watchmen?
Credit for the phrase goes to a Juvenal, a Roman poet who was philosophizing on a wife’s fidelity.
I hear always the admonishment of my friends:
”Bolt her in, constrain her!”
But who will watch the watchmen?
The wife plans ahead and begins with them.
Essentially, it’s saying that if you’re worried about your wife cheating so hire someone to guard her, she can just sleep with the guard. So who will guard the guard? Over time, the original intent transformed to a concern about political power. Who ensures the people designated to protect are actually protecting? Are our elected officials actually looking out for our best interests? Are the police? Judges? Etc. etc.
In the comics, the later group of heroes are The Crimebusters. But the film changes this to The Watchmen. Which makes the whole idea very on the nose. This group who had promised to help people does, indeed, save humanity, but at what cost? To the literal smartest man in the world, this was the best strategy. And it works! And the remaining members agree to lie about it because they also believe that’s also the best thing to do. But who says they’re right?
We spend nearly 3 hours seeing how messed up all of these “heroes” are. Why should we trust their choices? If someone was “watching the watchmen” maybe they could have suggested that if Manhattan was going to become the villain and leave the planet that instead of murdering 15 million people you simply have Manhattan go full angry parent and threaten everyone if they don’t get along then say he’ll be watching from a distance and eradicate any country that breaks the peace. Sure, it’s forced peace rather than one gained through an earnesty to work together, but…you don’t sacrifice 15 million people. And once the countries are forced to get along, maybe they actually do start to get along.
Instead, because there’s no mechanism for feedback and this group of powerful people can act unilaterally, we get their solution.
You may notice that after Rorschach explodes that the splatter on the snow resembles, of course, a bloody inkblot. It’s cheesy. But it’s a way to visually demonstrate what Rorschach represented there—a final challenge to the viewer. What do you see? Do you see heroes making hard choices to save the day? Or do you see a bunch of insane people abusing their power? Or something else? And what does your answer say about you?
The Black Freighter
Stories will often do this thing where a character has a personal experience that is a microcosm of the larger story. We actually see this in the Watchmen graphic novel and the director’s cut of the film via the Tales of the Black Freighter comic. In an interview from 2000 with Blather.net, Moore explained that “it eventually does end up being the story of Adrian Veidt but there’s points during the pirate narrative [where] it relates to Rorschach and his capture; it relates to the self-marooning of Dr Manhattan on Mars; it can be used as a counterpoint to all these different parts of the story…
The Sea Captain thinks he’s hurrying back to prevent the pirates of the Black Freighter from pillaging his home. He wants to protect his wife and kids. So he does everything in his power to make it back. Except he becomes so single-minded about it that it warps his view of reality. Innocent people become guilty collaborators who deserve to die. When he enters his house, he doesn’t see his wife and children but monstrous pirates he must destroy. In trying to do a heroic thing, he becomes the monster. Ultimately, he joins the crew of the Black Freighter.
The final narration summarizes everything. The Captain says: All my well-meaning plans had come to this. The world I tried to save was lost beyond recall….There’d been no plan to capture Davidstown. They’d come to wait until they could collect the only prize they valued. Claim the only soul they truly wanted. I was a horror, amongst horrors must I dwell.
So if you wonder how Alan Moore felt about Ozymandias’s decision, he spells it out in Black Freighter. There’s dialogue in the comics where Adrian even says he’s been having dreams of a ship. Snyder didn’t include the dialogue, probably because the theatrical-cut of Watchmen didn’t include the freighter story.
The irony of truth. Laurie makes up with her mom. Rorschach’s journal.
One thing that I find really fascinating is Laurie’s arc with her mom. At the beginning, there’s immense tension. Once she knows Eddie Blake was her father, suddenly everything changes between mother and daughter. The truth sets them free. Sally no longer feels guilty about her daughter’s conception. And Laurie has a new-found compassion. Their final scene is jarringly cheerful, given the 15 million deaths that just happened.
But that sets up an irony. Rorschach died because he wouldn’t compromise on going public with the truth. He specifically tells the group “Keep your own secrets.” Immediately following that, we see how the revelation of a secret actually saves the relationship between Laurie and Sally. Which begs the question—when do you keep a secret and when do you tell?
If Sally had been up front with her daughter, what would have happened? Would Laurie have had a relationship with her father? Would Comedian have been a better person? Would mother and daughter have gotten along? Would all three have led better, happier lives? The same can be asked about what The Watchmen did. If you build the world on a lie, will it have the same problems as Laurie and Sally? Or is this an example of a good secret? A necessary secret?
The film’s final scene implies a journalist for a tabloid will open Rorschach’s journal and read about everything that happened. You can imagine that they’ll take it seriously and run the story. The question is, what happens after that? They could fall right back to World War III and nuclear holocaust, meaning Veidt’s plan was for nought and everyone dies anyway. Or it could be, like with Laurie and Sally, that the revelation actually strengthens the world, rather than breaking it, especially because everyone would be so pissed at the remaining Watchmen.
But, really, I think there’s something else being said. Notice that there are two moments that callback to the beginning of the movie. First, the ketchup that falls on the smiley face shirt reminds us of Comedian’s blood on the pin. And then Rorschach’s voiceover: “Tonight, a comedian died in New York.”
I’d argue the callbacks establish the idea of repetition. The ultimate joke is how this stuff keeps happening, over and over again. There’s some potential disaster. Those in power make some problematic choices. People lose their lives. They try to hide the truth. The truth comes out. There’s some potential disaster. Those in power make some problematic choices. People lose their lives. They try to hide the truth. The truth comes out. There’s some potential disaster. And on and on.
If you look back at the 1900s, especially in the period between World War II and when the Watchmen graphic novel came out in 1985, there were so many situations that fit this pattern. We see many of them in the film’s opening credit sequence. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Cold War. The JFK assassination. The Vietnam War. The Kent State shooting. Richard Nixon’s presidency. All of those involved people in power making problematic choices, lives lost, an attempt to hide the truth, then the truth (at least some of it) coming out.
So Watchmen ends in this bittersweet way. Rorschach’s journal won’t change human nature. It’s in the nature of humans to keep telling this same joke. In the past, present, and future. With that said…
“I leave it entirely in your hands”
One last thing to point out. The final scene in the tabloid is between a boss and an employee. The boss complains about not having anything dramatic to write about. Instead of solving this dilemma himself, he leaves it up to the employee.
In the movie, the line is: Take some initiative. Run whatever you like. I leave it entirely in your hands.
In the graphic novel: I’m asking you to take responsibility for once in your miserable life, while I eat lunch! Is that too much? Go on. Just run whichever you want. I leave it entirely in your hands.
The graphic novel is essentially Moore yelling at the reader to stop relying on those in power, the bosses of the world, to make the choices for you. We need to take not only responsibility but action, in order to make our hopes and dreams a reality. Which ties back to what Rorschach had said to Doctor Manhattan: If you had cared from the start, none of this would have happened. Manhattan, despite his power, almost only ever did what authorities figures told him. Much like an employee who only follows orders rather than taking initiative.
Snyder opts for less aggression. But it’s the same idea—you, the viewer, shouldn’t be passive. Others will shape the world for us, if we let them. Or we can be an active contributor. Even in small ways, we can make a difference. The lowly writer for a tabloid might not be a government official dictating policy, but if he breaks the news about Rorschach’s journal, that’s not nothing. If each of us did something…would that make a difference? Maybe.
In a 2022 interview with Salon, Moore said, about the end of Watchmen, how “you’ve got the whole fate of the world basically being left in the hands of a semi-literate copy boy…. I don’t think that it is the purpose of fiction to actually dictate a political/moral reality. I feel really uneasy about that. I think that’s why I introduced a lot of the moral ambiguities into V for Vendetta….It’s not my job to tell people what to think. If I can actually in some way help the readers’ own creative thinking, then that’s got to be to everybody’s benefit.”
So while Moore definitely expressed his views about the world and politics and heroes, he concludes not with a declaration, like a professor lecturing to students, but an invitation to think for yourself.
Does the movie connect to the HBO Watchmen show?
No. The HBO show was based on the original comic book. While the movie and comic are similar, they’re also incredibly different. Even then, I wouldn’t look to the show as a definitive follow-up. Alan Moore actually trashed it. So even though Damon Lindelof’s follow up is highly regarded by critics and viewers, Moore does not approve of where it took the story. It’s up to you, then, how canon you want the show to be.
Personally, I didn’t like where Lindelof took the story. So non-canon for me.
Does the movie connect to the DC Doomsday Clock story?
So DC made their own sequel to Watchmen called Doomsday Clock. It’s also based on the graphic novel and not the movie and was more multiverse nonsense. Surprise, surprise—Alan Moore didn’t like it. Personally, I also didn’t like it. Much like the TV show, I thought the first half was great and the second half complete trash.
How does Rorschach’s mask work?
Two liquids, one white, one black, between two layers of leak-proof fabric. The real question isn’t how it works but how he sees and breathes through it. If the material is so tight that liquid won’t escape, that makes it seem quite opaque. Even if the material isn’t opaque, how do you see through the liquid sloshing around? And if the liquid is transparent—why can’t people see Rorschach’s face?
Ultimately, though, it’s a comic book movie. Just suspend disbelief.
Did the Watchmen have powers?
This kind of bothers me. No, they’re not supposed to have powers. Except all the action sequences show them as abnormally strong. Not just “Dan lifts weights every day” strong but like legitimately super strong. Comedian punches a chunk of his wall out. Ozymandias moves with enhanced speed. When Owl and Spectre fight the gang in the alley they legitimately send people flying through the air from a punch or kick. It’s more anime than real life. They all demonstrate beyond normal strength.
You could argue that’s a stylistic choice, or even a subjective visual that embodies how they see themselves more so than the reality of what happened. That’s an interesting conversation. I just don’t think Snyder necessarily earns or supports that subjectivity.
Did Manhattan really give people cancer?
No. It was all a ploy by Veidt. Did Veidt give people cancer? Probably.
How does Doctor Manhattan see time?
Think about time as a line. Most of us experience time by moving along the line. Manhattan is everywhere at once. Meaning he’s aware of what happens but can’t change his reaction to anything. It’s like he’s watching a movie he’s already seen before. “Oh, this is the scene where I realize Veidt lied to all of us.” In the Director’s Cut he says his reactions are preordained. That he’s a puppet who can see the strings.
It gets back to the whole contradiction theme at the core of the story. Doctor Manhattan has all the information but can’t act on it. Despite his power, he’s very much powerless.
