Tag Archives: Alan Moore

Rorschach, Abolition, and the Higher Law

HBO’s Watchmen is set in the universe of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel. Moore’s central characters are current and former masked vigilantes, anti-heroes, and psychopaths. While Moore’s masterpiece tackles Cold War paranoia, Damon Lindelöf puts white supremacist violence at the heart of his show. The show opens with the razing of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921. In the graphic novel, Nixon is elected to a third term and the U.S. is on the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. In the show, the cultural pendulum swings back the other way, as Robert Redford is elected president and institutes a policy of reparations to African Americans for events like the Tulsa Massacre.

In the graphic novel, Walter Kovacs becomes the vigilante Rorschach when he dons his trench coat and mask decorated with the shifting ink blot of a Rorschach test. Rorschach embodies a zealot’s fervor. He wars on crime with Batman’s conviction, but with no compunction about killing. Rorschach believes that drastic action must be taken against evil and immorality. He follows what 19th-century abolitionists called the “higher law.”

Abolitionists had an awkward relationship to the Constitution. The notorious Three-Fifths Compromise enshrined slavery in the nation’s founding charter. From Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward to newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison to Transcendentalist and pond enthusiast Henry David Thoreau, abolitionists turned to the trope of the higher law to escape this bind. According to this idea, God’s law is higher than man’s. While the Constitution might consider slavery legal, God considers it evil. Although we think of them as being “on the right side of history” today, abolitionists were widely considered fanatics in the 1850s.

Perhaps more than any other abolitionist, Rorschach resembles John Brown. In what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown executed five slave holders in Kansas. He also helped fugitive slaves escape to Canada. He felt called by God, like the ancient prophets, to fight the slave power. Leading a small cadre of followers, Brown seized control of the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. After a series of bizarre tactical decisions, his plan to spark a widespread slave uprising failed and Brown was eventually executed for treason. Brown became the ultimate martyr to the abolitionist cause. Unlike more pragmatic figures like Lincoln, John Brown waged a sacred crusade against evil. Brown was uncompromising; he rejected gradualism, pragmatism, and half-measures. He felt justified dispensing with the law to follow the Higher Law.

john brown higher law

Like Brown, Rorschach becomes a martyr. Dr. Manhattan disintegrates Rorschach because the latter is determined to reveal to the world that Ozymandias staged an alien attack to end the Cold War by creating a common enemy for humanity to fight. Rorschach would rather die than keep quiet about Ozymandias’s plan.

In “The Abolitionist Imagination,” Andrew Delbanco argues that abolitionism left us a troubling legacy. The trope of the higher law and the abolitionist fervor to defeat evil leaves no room for compromise, negotiation, or gradualism. While the logic of the higher law is inflexible, its content is infinitely flexible. The KKK follow a higher law diametrically opposed to the one cherished by abolitionists, but both groups justify violence for the sake of their cause.

Inspired by Rorschach, the Seventh Kavalry are a fictionalized version of the Klan. The Seventh Kavalry are terrorists who believe they are carrying on Rorschach’s legacy by killing cops. Lindelöf seems to be satirizing misguided fans’ love for Rorschach. This is a world of masks: like super heroes and super villains, the Kavalry are the eerie doppelgangers of the masked cops they fight.

The show’s third episode features a fascinating encounter between Angela Abar, an undercover cop known as Sister Night, who survived an assassination attempt by the Kavalry, and Laurie Blake, who has forsaken her identity as the heroine Silk Specter in favor of becoming an FBI agent on the anti-vigilante task force. Laurie asks Angela, “What’s the difference between a masked cop and a vigilante?” When Angela replies that she doesn’t know, Laurie says, “Me neither.” Laurie has totally disavowed her past as a costumed heroine and now sees masked vigilantes as dangerous, even when their intentions are good.

Watchmen and the Divine Watchmaker

In Watchmen, Jon Osterman a.k.a. Dr. Manhattan is Alan Moore’s critique of the idea of a personal God. Far more so than in the film version, the original graphic novel frequently compares Dr. Manhattan to God, yet the overarching effect of this comparison is to suggest that even if God does exist he would be incapable of saving humanity from itself. Dr. Manhattan has various god-like characteristics: he knows the future; his power is unlimited; he can be in two or more places at once; he does not age and apparently will not die; he can rearrange atoms and it is suggested that he can even create life. There is even a panel, toward the end of Watchmen chapter XII, with Dr. Manhattan walking on water. What can we call a being like this other than a god? Yet, despite all of his power, Dr. Manhattan is incapable of ending the misery and suffering of humanity upon which Moore’s dystopian landscape focuses so intently. Dr. Manhattan’s character arc implies that even if God were walking around on earth, literally glowing with unimaginable power, he would still be unable to save the world.

Moore explicitly connects Dr. Manhattan to God in the final panel of Watchmen chapter III. After leaving Earth for Mars, Dr. Manhattan sits on a rock, which looks a bit like a throne, on the red planet. The epigraph for the chapter, from Genesis 18:25, is written below the image: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” The biblical context of the verse is Abraham’s “negotiation” with God about the impending judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah. When God reveals to Abraham that he will destroy these cities for their wickedness, Abraham beseeches God to spare them for the sake of the righteous, including Abraham’s own nephew Lot. Abraham says, “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” Using this verse as the chapter’s epigraph, Moore puts Dr. Manhattan in the position of God, as judge over humanity, yet, Dr. Manhattan refuses such a role, leaving Earth for Mars when humans weary him.

Deism in Watchmen

Moore consistently uses Deist imagery to characterize Dr. Manhattan. Deism conceives of God as the Divine Watchmaker: he created the world with the care of a watchmaker designing a beautiful watch, but once it was finished, he merely sat back and admired it for a moment before moving on to other things. According to Deism, God created an orderly world that functions on its own (governed by the laws of nature), but he is not personally involved in the vicissitudes of human life. Deism partly resulted from Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of universal laws of motion. Unlike earlier medieval models of the cosmos, the Newtonian universe is mechanistic, like a finely tuned clock. Once God set it in motion, it simply ticks indefinitely. Before he was transformed into Dr. Manhattan by a lab experiment gone awry, Jon Osterman was a physicist. He becomes a physicist because his father, a watchmaker, insists that he not pursue “an obsolete trade.” Jon, however, is fascinated by the internal mechanism of watches. He enjoys taking them apart and putting them back together again. Even before gaining god-like powers, Jon has the detached temperament of the Deist God, content to toy with the gears of a pocket watch.

Ironically, though others believe him to be a god, Dr. Manhattan is an atheist. After leaving Earth for the solitude of Mars, he muses, “Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there . . . A clock without a craftsman.” In the 19th century, the argument from design was used to support belief in God. If the universe is so intricately crafted, like a fine clock, then surely there must be a clockmaker? Dr. Manhattan, however, accepts the beauty of the universe without assuming that it was created by a divine being. He doubts both the Deist myth of of a divine watchmaker and the Christian claim that the world was created by the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.

At his father’s urging, Jon studies atomic physics. Jon is transformed into Dr. Manhattan when he is accidentally locked into the “intrinsic field” test chamber. The watchmaker motif continues as Jon enters the chamber to retrieve a watch he had fixed for fellow scientist and girlfriend Janey Slater. It appears that Jon is utterly disintegrated, but instead he is transformed into the invincible Dr. Manhattan. Jon learns to reassemble his body as he learned to reassemble the pieces of his father’s pocket watch: “Really, it’s just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence.” First, Jon appears as a floating nervous system. Then, a circulatory system. After that, he puts together a “partially muscled skeleton” before he finally reappears in a body that looks essentially human other than the blue glow. The panel depicting Jon’s reappearance in Watchmen chapter IV is reminiscent of Raphael’s depiction of the Transfiguration of Jesus. Dr. Manhattan, floating above the terrified scientists, is surrounded by a halo of light. In the biblical scene, Jesus goes up a mountain with his three closest disciples, Peter, James, and John. Jesus “was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:1). This is a “proleptic disclosure” of Jesus’ coming post-resurrection glory. It is a foreshadowing of Jesus as he will be when he returns to claim his place on David’s throne in the New Jerusalem, and of the Jesus whom John witnesses, “one like a son of man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash around his chest. The hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined in a furnace, and his voice was like the roar of many waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining in full strength” (Revelation 1:13-16). In his transformation into Dr. Manhattan, Jon Osterman’s body is permanently transfigured with the same kind of radiant light as Jesus in the Gospel narratives: “Their bleached faces stare up at me, pale and insubstantial in the sudden flare of ultraviolet. Sunburn in November.” Dr. Manhattan, however, does not aspire to be humanity’s savior.

Dr. Manhattan as a Divine Figure

Immediately after Jon’s transformation, people begin to think of him as a god. The Viet Cong who surrender to Dr. Manhattan feel terror “balanced by an almost religious awe.” Janey says, “They say you can do anything, Jon. They say you’re like God now.” Jon replies, “I don’t think there is a God, Janey. If there is, I’m not him.” Jon has no desire to play the role of God, to eradicate evil or create a just society. He soon reveals his defining character trait–detachment. He is so detached that he does not bother to inform his father that he is still alive, after the military notified Mr. Osterman of his son’s “accidental disintegration.” Dr. Manhattan becomes the willing servant of the U.S. government, fighting crime and turning the tide in Vietnam, yet he does so with profound indifference. He says, “The morality of my activities escapes me.” He bears so little empathy that, when he and Laurie return from Mars, he hardly notices that the streets of New York are littered with corpses. Adrian Veidt has killed half of the city’s population, yet far from grieving or even feeling sorrow, Dr. Manhattan is elated that he is temporarily incapable of seeing the future (it is obscured by “tachyon” particles). The opening panels of Watchmen chapter XII show him to be utterly oblivious to the atrocities around him.

The film version of Watchmen depicts Dr. Manhattan as simply not caring that much about humanity, failing to convey that he is incapable of acting decisively to alter the future. Janey is bewildered and outraged, for instance, when Dr. Manhattan does not intervene to save President Kennedy from assassination. Dr. Manhattan explains to Janey, “I can’t prevent the future. To me, it’s already happening.” It is not, as in the film, that Dr. Manhattan is extremely apathetic, but that he actually cannot change the future. This is a direct critique of the Christian concept of Providence, in which God superintends all of human history (“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28). Dr. Manhattan cannot change the future because he experiences past, present, and future all at once. On Mars, Dr. Manhattan explains to Laurie, “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time.” The film portrays Dr. Manhattan as a human being who has can see the future but does nothing about it, but the graphic novel attempts to imagine how God must feel, seeing all events–past, present and future–unfolding simultaneously. Dr. Manhattan explains his determinism to Laurie, “Everything is preordained.” When she accuses him of being a “puppet following a script,” he replies, “We’re all puppets, Laurie. I’m just a puppet who can see the strings.” The terror of Moore’s dystopian world is not super-villains or nuclear war, but the idea that not even God may be free to save humanity from destruction.

Throughout Watchmen, Moore emphasizes Dr. Manhattan’s utter inability to alter the future in his encounters with the Comedian. Edward Blake a.k.a. the Comedian is half masked superhero half mercenary, fighting for the U.S. in Vietnam. The Comedian intrigues Dr. Manhattan because he is the most “deliberately amoral” human he has ever met. Jon appreciates the Comedian’s amorality because, in his detachment from human life, he has become fully amoral. Whereas the Comedian believes that there can be no meaningful morality in such a bloody, ugly world, Dr. Manhattan is amoral because he sees past, present, and future all at once. Moral frameworks are absurd to Dr. Manhattan because he realizes that everything is predetermined, that choice is an illusion. The Comedian understands the “madness, the pointless butchery” at the heart of the human condition, as exemplified by the war in Vietnam, and he responds with gleeful, violent rage. Dr. Manhattan, too, understands the evil that afflicts human nature, but his perception of time prevents him from feeling any emotion about it at all. Hence, he fights on behalf of the U.S. military, securing a victory over the Viet Cong.

The Comedian impregnates a Vietnamese woman, and when the war ends she urges him to take responsibility for her and their child. When he refuses, the woman slashes his face with a broken glass bottle. The Comedian shoots her without hesitation. Dr. Manhattan observes the whole thing, and even seems upset by it, but does not intervene. In one of his few displays of something approaching compassion, Dr. Manhattan says to the Comedian, “Blake, she was pregnant. You gunned her down.” The Comedian, of course, does not care; he is more annoyed by the wound to his face than the fact that he just murdered his lover and unborn child. Blake replies, “Y’know what? You watched me. You coulda changed the gun into steam or the bullets into mercury or the bottle into snowflakes! You coulda teleported either of us to goddamn Australia . . . but you didn’t lift a finger.” Dr. Manhattan is the powerless, all-powerful: he is not bound by any human weakness, yet because of his perception of time he is unable to help even the most innocent victims. Dr. Manhattan’s character suggests that if God exists, then he is, at best, merely a silent, pitying witness of human suffering and, at worst, utterly indifferent to our plight. The Comedian’s final indictment of Dr. Manhattan is “You don’t really give a damn about human beings.” The Deist God truly does not care about humanity. He enjoys the orderly world which he has created, but then moves on, perhaps to create another one.

Dr. Manhattan does come to a belated appreciation of life when Laurie realizes that the Comedian is her father. He realizes that the probability of Laurie’s existing is astronomically small: it not only required a genetic chain generations long, but also Laurie’s mother loving a man who had once tried to rape her. Only when Dr. Manhattan sees life as a “thermodynamic miracle” does he regain enough interest in humanity to return to Earth. Yet, this is not divine love, but rather the fascination of a scientist. Dr. Manhattan is compelled by the sublime, particularly in the very large, like the chasms and mountains of the Martian landscape, and in the very small, like the mysterious patterns of atoms: “I’ve walked across the sun. I’ve seen events so tiny and so fast they hardly can be said to have occurred at all.” Despite his transformation, Dr. Manhattan retains Jon Osterman’s love of exploring how the universe works. Nevertheless, in neither the graphic novel nor the film version of Watchmen is this enough to compel Dr. Manhattan to remain on earth.