Tag Archives: television

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.

Fargo Third Season Finale

The third season of Fargo ends with a conversation between protagonist Gloria Burgle and antagonist V.M. Varga in a Homeland Security detention facility. Gloria expects that Varga will soon be arrested and charged with a series of white collar crimes, whereas Varga is confident that his release is imminent. Gloria appeals to hard facts–what really happened–while Varga describes narrative’s power to shape facts through (mis)perception.

This season of Fargo feels much more attuned to Christopher Nolan’s work than the previous two seasons. Varga’s pitch forks-and-torches monologue evokes Christopher Nolan’s Bane and his mantra–that “perception of reality becomes reality”–is reminiscent of Nolan’s Memento. Varga succeeds in covering up his crimes throughout the season by creating the appearance of patterns that aren’t there, such as a serial killer with two M.O.s.

This theme is especially relevant in the context of the “fake news” controversy that has afflicted us since the 2016 presidential election. Varga acts under the assumption that whatever story you put out there becomes true, which is precisely the effect that fake news or propaganda more generally has on the populace. When Varga claims that the lunar landing was faked, he is observing that the event is only “true” insofar as the image of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon was disseminated through television.

The final conversation between Gloria and Varga builds on one of Fargo’s critical moves. The show inverts the central trope of detective fiction, so that instead of the audience following the detective as he or she solves the crime, we watch the characters try to piece together events which we have already witnessed. The third season especially is a sustained exercise in dramatic irony. We already know every detail of the numerous murders throughout the season, as we watch the police try to makes sense of the strange circumstances and seemingly contradictory evidence. Like the show’s first two seasons and the original Coen Brothers film which inspired it, Fargo’s third season suggests that what is true often strains credulity. Human motivations are so tangled and people behave so irrationally that the truth is generally implausible, grotesque, and bizarre.

Although Gloria has managed to uncover Varga’s crimes, even her knowledge isn’t completely accurate. Gloria believes that Varga ordered the murder of Emmit Stussy, although we know that Varga wasn’t involved. Although Gloria closely resembles her counterparts from the original film and the first two seasons of the show–all whip smart female officers hampered by overconfident, unintelligent male superiors–her character is even more plagued by the difficulty of discovering what really happened.

The finale ends, like the ending of Inception, without revealing whether Varga or Gloria is correct. This puts us, the audience, in the uncomfortable position of the characters for the first time all season. Now we have to decide what happened without the omniscience that we have heretofore enjoyed. This ambiguous ending works well because both Gloria and Varga are right. Gloria is right that there is a fundamental difference between events, especially crimes, which “really happened,” and those that are only supposed, conjectured, assumed, or alleged. Yet, Varga is correct that, in practice, (mis)perception creates narratives which become “true” insofar as they are widely accepted.