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Rorschach, Abolition, and the Higher Law

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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.

Racial Passing in Megamind

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The animated film Megamind offers a coded analysis of racial passing, as the clever, but largely unsuccessful, villain, discovers that he is actually better suited to being a hero. While the film conveys a number of themes common to children’s movies, such as the importance of being yourself and the value of friendship, it also serves as a reflection on racial passing.

Racial Passing in American Literature

“Passing” generally refers to the attempt by a person of one race to pose as a member of another. Typically, black figures pass as white. Ellen Craft passed as a white man, with her darker-skinned husband posing as her slave, to escape bondage. The protagonist of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man passes as white after witnessing a lynching. In Nella Larsen’s novel Passing Clare Kendry passes as white, marrying a white man who has no idea that she is “black.” Sometimes, however, white people pass as black. Rachel Dolezal, for instance, controversially passed as black while serving as the president of the N.A.A.C.P. In both history and fiction, the issue of passing suggests the fluidity of racial identity which is socially constructed and performed through external signs. Megamind can be read not just as offering a generic message about being yourself, but more specifically as a parable about the temptation to pass.

Megamind as a Re-telling of Superman

An alien from another planet, Megamind has light blue skin. Megamind’s identity as an alien and his phenotypic difference metaphorically liken him to African Americans, especially since all of the film’s other characters are white. His nemesis, Metro Man, possesses roughly the same powers as Superman, but with an all-white costume. Metro Man represents the idealization of whiteness in American society. From childhood, Megamind is forced to occupy the role of villain in relation to Metro Man’s hero, despite signs that he is not suited for it. If Metro Man wears all white, then Megamind must, inevitably, don black. An ingenious inventor, Megamind is much more creative than Metro Man, who relies on his super strength, ability to fly, and laser vision. The hero-villain relation between Metro Man and Megamind reflects the binary opposition between whiteness and blackness, in which white is always superior and black is always inferior. Megamind embraces his assigned role, pitting himself against Metro Man in an ongoing feud. Megamind resembles Lex Luthor, except that he really is not evil. He enjoys puzzles and competition against Metro Man more than he wants to actually hurt anyone.

The film opens with Megamind having captured Roxanne Richie–based on Lois Lane–for the umpteenth time and Metro Man ready to save her. Except this time, Metro Man uses the opportunity to fake his own death. He is tired of being a super hero and wants to become a musician. One can read Metro Man’s decision as a colossal denial of responsibility. Should he not use his powers to continue saving people? Yet, when one interprets Metro Man as embodying the idealization of whiteness, then his decision to abdicate his role as the defender of Metro City seems a salutary attempt to divest himself of the illusory perfection with which his white skin invests him. Metro Man’s retirement from super hero status represents a white man’s resistance to white privilege.

With Metro Man gone, Megamind takes possession of the city. Yet, beyond moving into city hall and stealing some art, his deviousness is quickly exhausted. He simply lacks interest in committing actual evil. The film draws attention to Megamind’s “blackness” through a red and blue poster of Megamind that parodies the Barack Obama Hope poster. The parallel is cemented with the phrase “No You Can’t” under Megamind’s face, parodying Obama’s “Yes We Can” campaign slogan. Megamind is further associated with African American men by the fact that he grows up in prison. An orphan from another planet, Megamind ends up living in jail, taking the bus to school every day. This fanciful arrangement metaphorically captures the situation of millions of black men who are incarcerated at a young age. Megamind’s blue skin and orange jump suit equally brands him as a threat to his nice, white class mates.

Racial Passing and Romantic Relationships

Megamind is in love with Roxanne Richie, but can only spend time with her by adopting the identity of the white, intellectual Bernard. Megamind uses a holo-projecting watch to achieve this illusion. Passing as white allows Megamind to begin dating Roxanne, who is genuinely attracted to his personality when it is cloaked in whiteness. While Megamind uses technology to pass, others do so because their skin is light enough to make their racial identity ambiguous. Megamind’s watch malfunctions, however, during a date with Roxanne. The illusory white image of Bernard disappears and Roxanne finds herself kissing a bald, blue Megamind. She shrieks with alarm, as the film dramatizes the moment of recognition when the white partner first realizes that her partner is only passing for white.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEQWFnMGUZ8

In the second half of the film, Megamind and Roxanne get to know each other on more honest terms and renew their romantic relationship. Roxanne gets to know the “real” Megamind, discovering that he is not the villain she thought he was. She helps Megamind stop Titan, an immature and misguided man who is accidentally given Metro Man’s powers.

Megamind resorts to racial passing again, however, in an attempt to stop Titan. Using his watch, Megamind cloaks himself in Metro Man’s image. Posing as Metro Man, Megamind initially scares Titan away, until he perceives that it is only Megamind in disguise. Megamind’s idiosyncratic speech gives him away: he pronounces “Metro City” as “Metrocity” (rhyming with “atrocity”). Megamind’s curious speech patterns–pronouncing “melancholy” as “mell-onk-olly” and “hello” as “oh-lo”–signify the way that minorities often depart from Standard English.

As Megamind passed as the white Bernard to gain Roxanne’s affection, so he passes as the white Metro Man to intimidate Titan. In both cases, however, Megamind’s passing is discovered and he is forced to face the situation in his own skin. The film, therefore, treats passing as an unstable solution to one’s problems, implying that a black person passing for white will inevitably be discovered. Megamind defeats Titan using his own courage and ingenuity, demonstrating that passing is unnecessary.

The film ends with Metro City honoring Megamind for saving them from Titan. Megamind and Roxanne dance to Michael Jackson’s “Bad,” reinforcing the film’s theme of racial passing. In his attempt to remove the pigment from his skin, Michael Jackson embodies the anxieties surrounding passing. The film uses the double meaning of “bad” as evil or cool to humorous effect, as Megamind and Minion argue over what is “good for bad.”