Yeah, this is fun. I suppose we are debating heavy topics, but who said that couldn’t be fun?

I don’t know. Maybe Moore is hedging his bets. I noticed Doc Manhattan’s not demurral but lack of agreement, too. Is it enough to carry a the point, however? I think the weight of the narrative works against a few minor caveats. If your point is that Veidt is mistaken, I think as a storyteller you should make the point. What happens next? In the comic, things pretty much work out. My point isn’t that they can’t, but that we have on way of knowing, and betting the lives of half a million people on it is rather extreme. Like I say, I won’t even argue the morality of the act. If I knew for certain the human race was doomed unless I helped slaughter a half million, yes, I would have a hard moral choice.

The point is, for me, there is absolutely no way to know such a thing.

As for the aftermath of 9/11, maybe. I remember a little flush of togetherness. I felt similar things after my high school football games. But when we say that it WOULD have all turned out good except for Bush, aren’t we right back in the guessing game with Veidt?

I also remember that reaction I had, oh no, my country is going to be consumed by hate. Don’t forget that in all that togetherness there was a great deal of anger and hate too. We got a crew of venal clowns who used that anger and hate, but it was there and anger and hate are always corrupting influences.

Believe me, I like Moore. But all my logical and narrative instincts tell me this story is wack. Seductive, but wack. It isn’t that people don’t have the right to tell stories the way they want to. I just feel that precious little hard criticism has been attempted on this particular piece, and I get nervous when cultures seem to be basing their behavior on the emotional pleadings of stories. As far as I know, no one else has raised the questions about Watchmen that I have. Why not? Since such thinking is everywhere nowadays, shouldn’t somebody be raising those questions?

Once again, my main point is simply that nobody but nobody can predict human behavior, for fundamental reasons, not for reasons of stupidity. If Moore meant his story differently than I am taking it, I am reading it wrongly. But what I am really arguing against is not so much how he meant the story as how most people take it. I think how most people take it is unmistakably as justification. All I want to say is Wait. THINK about this.

But here’s the thing: Immediately after 9/11, and I think this is part of what gorjus was getting at, we did have a version of the Watchmen ending: Good vibes about America all over (most of) the world, liberals and conservatives put down a good 90% of their rhetorical bludgeons, lions and lambs making eyes at each other and changing the sheets, etc. Good grief, America was wiling to unite behind George W Bush, whose attempts at leadership were embarrassing and half-hearted even in the moment. Sure, a lot of us knew he would foul it up. But those first couple weeks after 9/11 were not a bad approximation of the Watchmen hugfest.

And then it all went to hell. As of course it would. But: Doesn’t Moore suggest that Veidt’s own opinion of his “success” is wrong-headed? Vedit asks Dr. Manhattan, “It all worked out all right, didn’t it? In the end?” He thinks it’s “the end,” and they can draw the curtain; or, to put it in different terms, he’s thinking in narrative arcs, in monthly adventure comic format. Dr. Manhattan has read all 8 volumes of the still-being-published TPB series, though, and he’s thinking about trying to read the manga: “Nothing ever ends.”

I dunno; you’ve all read the series more recently than I, and my copy is somewhere in the bottom of this pile of crap, so I can’t speak too specificaly to the tone of the conclusion. (Except to note that “Nostalgia” is the scent that everyone is big on—and as Don DeLillo reminded us in 1983, “War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say good things about their country.” Or words to that effect. That’s pretty close. See earlier note on location of my books.) But maybe the Doc is closer to Moore’s view there than is Veidt?

The other maybe-kinda implicit critique of Veidt’s scheme is in the final scene with the first Silk Spectre; Veidt’s plan relies upon humans being predictable, manipulable, upon the world being basically a giant Skinner box. Yet we see her planting a kiss on the picture of her rapist. Now, this is problematic in about a thousand different ways. But I wonder if it’s meant to be problematic in that way—if we’re meant to see it as something so unaccountable, unpredictable, and bizarrely/purely human that it stands as an implicit rebuke to Veidt’s whole plan, along the very lines that Jack has criticized it above?

I dunno. I may be reading too much into it or giving Moore too much credit. He wrote the book he wrote, and he chose to end it with Veidt’s “triumph”—as Jack notes, it’s a troublingly seductive ending that promises order and peace if the right Strong Man is playing Big Daddy, which is part of what got us into this stupid mess with the Bushies in the first place and what might keep us in it for another few years with St. John. That ending is more persuasive than these little moments I’ve noted. And I’ve a knee-jerk habit of leaping to the “Maybe this is really a critique of the thing it purports to be” response even when the thing is just exactly what it purports to be. (This is however an useful classroom tool.) Moore could be awfully preachy in the 1980s, and it may make more sense to see this as his mounting the rostrum once again. Nevertheless, these moments near the conclusion nag at me and stick in my mind.

This is fun.

My opinion (I stress the word) on the “hero we needed” beeswax—and remember, I must say again, I really liked the movie—was that it was just more bullshit overinflated pretentious rhetoric.

A simple question: Who do you think most of the people who saw the movie identified with, Batman or the poor schlubs who have to be protected from the truth, the hoi polloi who don’t deserve Batman? My guess is Batman. And yet the movie is breaking all box office records, which means a whole lot of people are seeing it. What are the odds that all of those people, or even a significant percentage, are like Batman?

Yeah, right. So the movie-goer accepts the argument of the movie that citizens must be protected from the truth by “heros,” but by all odds the movie-goer IS the citizen being so deluded? Does that make sense?

It is my firm conviction that the whole approach is antithetical to true democracy. I am sick of the specious glorification of the uberhero who knows what we need better than we do. Any sort of horrible action can be justified on such a basis. The Joker justifies his actions on a similar basis. Every cottonfreaking human alive thinks he or she knows what everybody else needs better than everybody else does. That’s the whole point of democratic safeguards and of telling the truth, countering that very tendency. This is a STORY, for crying out loud. It should not be taken as a serious case for peddling illusion and subterfuge.

I think your point about the manipulation of the truth is well taken. If we accept the prepared illusions of the illusion-makers, how shall we know the real thing when we meet it? If our notion of the hero is a construct, how shall we recognize the real heroes?

In one sense, it’s tempting to read that ending as Gordon distinguishing Batman as a kind of flawed hero, as the vigilante who must bring justice to Gotham outside of the law and outside of their perception of what is moral, right, and wrong. On the other hand, Gordon’s comment comes at this moment when Batman has done something selfless, allowing himself to be blamed for the deaths of 5 police officers (and various citizens). We’re told that he can “take it”...that he can carry that burden because that’s what the people of Gotham need him to be.

On the flip side, Dent is hailed as a hero in death, as the hero the city needs, the example of goodness with a face and a sense of justice within established moral codes (ie, the law).

But the problem is that, when Gordon says this, he KNOWS the truth about both Dent and Batman and that these distinctions are based on an illusion (though it’s put to the audience that they are necessary illusions) on the nature of heroism in the public mind.

Doesn’t the insistence that the people need a certain kind of hero suggest that heroism (or just goodness in general) is malleable to the point of being manufactured by a culture that “needs” it?

Or did the Nolans need to wrap the ending in a nonsensical bow so as to encourage us all to forget that the last 45 mins of the film could have been the third film?

And by the way, did anybody else think that the scene in the building at the end (the one where Morgan Freeman helps him with the sonar bat-vision) was way too much like a video game? Something about Morgan Freeman telling me to watch out for the guys on the top floor brought back flashbacks of my undergrad days spent playing way too much Counterstrike.

Acute as ever, Jack—the “grandiose thumposity” is insufferable when coming from the lips of an adult: it’s one thing to give characters a simplistic, symbolically predetermined world to live through, but after a while they do all start to seem intellectually stunted. So go read a book, Batman! For God’s sake get some perspective.

I’m still mulling Dark Knight, which I thought was excellent—strangely, though, I’m not so bothered by the lack of criticism among people who liked it, as I am by the lack of criticism among people who didn’t...it seems strange that even the most negative of comics bloggers have had more respect for the material—by which I mean the actual film, not just its riff on the comic or the property in general, or “society”, or “darkness”—than many of the people who are supposed to critique movies for a living. But, these people don’t seem to have much time for critique: too busy with other things to allocate the necessary respect for a story. Strong words from me, I guess, but as appalling as “thumposity” is in works, it’s even worse when it shows up in critical readings of works. I think.

Yeah, I found the visuals of AA pretentious rather than profound.

9/11 could have worked that way, but what are the odds? Given the unknowable complexity of human culture, can anybody, no matter how smart, predict the outcome of a given event? My answer would be no. When I first saw the footage of the airplanes crashing into the towers, my first thought—and this is the honest truth—was, Oh no, oh no, my country is going to be consumed and maybe destroyed by hatred. That hasn’t exactly happened yet, but it is closer to what did happen.

Do you gamble half a million lives on a hunch? Besides, I was never persuaded by Adrian Veidt’s supposed genius. A bit of quick mumbo-jumbo about William Burroughs-style cutting and pasting, supposedly the ability to discern the zeitgeist from random displays, a technique which has since pretty well been discredited, but must have seemed hot stuff in the eighties. Otherwise, the enormity of the horror he creates is used to prove his genius, and his genius is used to justify the horror—a completely circular argument. If you are going to show me such an act as reasonable (let’s not even get into morality), you had better convince me of the genius of the one proposing it.

As I have often said, only a genius can render genius credibly. Moore is close to genius, if not one in fact (he may be—in the arts, it is frequently difficult to tell close up—Shakespeare had to wait more than a hundred years for general recognition, Mozart was ignored, and so on), but I think he failed here. Doc Manhattan is far more successfully imagined, but I have quibbles there too.

What worries me is that someone will take Veidt’s approach seriously. Veidt, even if we accept his surpassing genius (which, again, I do not), does not exist. He is a character in a story. It is easy to make things come out the way you want in a story. Life is immeasurably harder. In my opinion, we have no geniuses capable of such discernment. Actually, in my very strong opinion, after lifelong thought, I do not think genius has anything to do with it. Being a genius does not mean that you can avoid the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which increasingly seems to me to be of a piece with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. It is a fundamental limit on knowability. The point of chaos theory is that complex phenomena are not merely more difficult of resolution, but inherently unpredictable. Even if we had an Adrian Veidt, he could not know the results of his actions.

I do agree with you about the Bush league, though, with regard to both their venality and their stupidity.

Aside to Josh: I took another look at Batman: Year One, and now I believe that is the Frank Miller Gordon you were talking about, not the Gordon of The Dark Knight and DKR. That Gordon is indeed close to the Oldman Gordon in Nolan’s film, and though he is improbably skilled in the martial arts (ALL of Miller’s heroes know 17 brands of martial arts—even though we never see them practice, and only practice creates competence—and ALL can break arms and legs and recover in a matter of days), he doesn’t smoke foul cigars and broadcast butch faux toughness relentlessly.

Apologies for misreading you.