[Apologies for the wobbly scans here.]
[Oh, and SPOILERS for a 20-year-old comic.]
I’ve been thinking about Watchmen a good bit these days—I’m teaching it this semester, and there’s the film to look forward to/worry about/lower one’s expectations for. (Though this is pretty great and gives me a small bit of hope for some reason.) Reading through it again this last time, I was struck by something I’d missed before: How Moore and Gibbons twin and contrast Dan “Nite Owl II” Dreiberg and Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt. (Though for all I know this is the main thing anyone talks about when they talk about Watchmen, and if so, apologies.)
There are obvious contrasts, to be sure: The way that issue 7 cuts back and forth between Dan and Laurie’s clumsy failed hookup on the couch and a TV broadcast of Veidt sailing gracefully through a gymnastics course. It’s of a piece with the sort of contrast that Veidt himself wants to draw in the book’s final issue—between what he sees as his own visionary genius and bold leadership and Dan’s futile, silly games of dress-up.
Except . . . for all his talk about a “new world,” Veidt is mired in the past—in his obsessions first with Alexander the Great and later with Rameses II/Ozymandias. Veidt is, dare I say it, a fanboy—a mass murdering fanboy on a mammoth scale, but a fanboy nonetheless. Note how his “origin story” begins:
“I wanted to have something to say to him, should we meet in the hall of legends.” Reading that passage this time, I was reminded of this scene from the first issue, in which Nite Owl II and Nite Owl I get together and trade tales of their exploits:
OK, so it’s not exactly a “hall of legends,” and it’s not clear if Dan actually gets to do any talking. Nevertheless, it underscores the point that Dan and Veidt are, for all their apparent differences, quite similar at a fundamental level: Both obsessed with living up to the legacy of a great figure from the past, a figure whose approval they somehow crave. With this in mind, we can read Veidt’s snark at Dan’s juvenile “schoolboy heroics” as a bit of displaced anxiety about his own achievements. It’s telling that Moore and Gibbons interrupt Veidt’s condescending monologue with the senses-shattering return of Doctor Manhattan—whom Veidt has attempted to dispatch by restaging the accident that “killed” him the first time—forgetting that Dr. M’s very first trick was figuring out how to come back from that “death.” This failed plan is marked by a lack of originality and a poor reading of history that I would argue is actually characteristic of Veidt—after all, he either never bothered to read Shelley or he badly misread him.
Anyway, all this is really just to say that, much as “Tales from the Black Freighter” helps us see that Veidt’s master plan may be founded on a major misreading of human nature, the Nite Owl/Ozymandias parallels that Moore and Gibbons construct should make us rightly suspicious of Veidt’s pretense of a mature, sophisticated vision (a pretense that too many Watchmen readers over the years have taken at face value). At the end of the day, he’s as much a schoolboy as Dan—only he’s not the hero, he’s the bully.
Thinking about all this, I’ve become even more convinced that Frank Miller’s claim that Watchmen provided an autopsy for the superhero genre and his own The Dark Knight Returns provided the brass band funeral is just typical Miller self-serving claptrap. Miller’s comment assumes that Moore accepts that the superhero genre is dead; maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. But I can’t help but think that to declare the superhero dead is to buy Veidt’s rhetoric about the futility of Dan’s heroics—rhetoric that is disproven in the most straightforward way right in the comic. When Veidt asks Dan, “What have [your schoolboy heroics] achieved?”, no one raises the obvious answer—he and Laurie save dozens of people from a burning building in issue 7. It may seem like small potatoes, but it sure beats murdering a few million people on the dubious grounds that said murder will inspire an end to war.
Sure, Dan has a spandex fetish—but this is a kink, not a character flaw. And sure, he compromises with a corrupt despot to maintain world peace and/or to save his own skin. But these are qualities that might suggest new directions for the superhero genre (especially in 1989), not traits that indicate that it’s time to get out the bonesaw.
This is a great thoughtful analysis of two strong Watchman characters. I don’t think most people bother to consider the dialectic between these two. Also, I agree with your point on Miller and Moore. People give these two books a lot of credit for destroying the superhero or whatever that means, but I would go further than you do and say that Moore hasn’t given up on the superhero. His later works, including 1963 and Tom Strong, show a yearning for return to form. I believe Moore has faith in the superhero genre, but only if it’s done right. The only thing you can definitely attribute to Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns is that they are the typographic inspiration for comic sans:
http://tinyurl.com/d2guzl
This little url here at the end is worth this entire read!
(And it is indeed the world’s favorite font. I cannot tell you how many times I change it to something less “favorite”.)
Needless to say, I wouldn’t want to inFuryate anyone by not saying how great the rest of the post is also! If I only knew.
To pretend Comic Sans is anything like the lettering in Watchmen makes me hate.
Prof., you raise an interesting point. At what point did we buy Ozy’s thesis—that he was, indeed, so totally rad? And I want to take your thoughts on the parallel lives of Dan and Ozy one further: Hollis Mason is a real person. Dan knows him—he drinks too much, he’s mired in the past, he’s lonely. Alexander—? Ramses? These are children’s storybook characters, fictions for the secluded historian.
Of course, Alan Moore knows all this. The whole point of Shelley’s grand snippet of poetry—and it is grand, it’s amazing—is that dumbass User-maat-re Setep-en-re thought he was so totally rad and listen, things don’t work that way. It was the perfect lesson for the staggering imperialism of 1818 Albion, one which was signaled by the (still very recent) loss of the Colonies, but one which would not be fulfilled until Dame Thatcher, long after the loss of India and Canada and the great air battles and the rationing and the council housing—one which, of course, was the England of 1984 in which Alan Moore scrawled Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
That question, of course, is Platonic, and one which Ozy again completely blows. Plato wanted the City’s Guardians to guard out of obligation, not self-interest—Ozy only gets the first part, where you tell them a little white noble lie that they’re Better than everybody else.
In other words, he’s a weak student of philosophy as well as poetry, and what more than a ruined and desolate NYC is evoked by Ozy’s “statute”—for it never lived, it’s just this grand and terrifying visage carved by all the king’s men—what else is evoked but:
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Alan Moore is a banger. Ozy’s a doofus.
Good stuff from Professor Fury and Gorjus. Here’s my own thoughts about Veidt’s plan, and those of Robert Loftis.
I bought into Veidt when I was twenty. I thought all the character flaws were damning of superheroes,
as if Watchmen was a serious version of Superduperman. I don’t know how I didn’t see it then, Veidt does not bring an end to the age of superheroes—-Nite Owl plans further adventures!
Professor Fury—great and thoughtful post. As you know, I have some of the same reservations about Veidt. For one thing, we have no evidence except his own assertion that he is a genius. For another, as I’ve mentioned perhaps too often, it seems to me that human interaction is too complex a phenomenon for its results to be predictable. This is a fundamental limit that no amount of genius can ever overcome. So Veidt is willing to kill hundreds of thousands for his theory. Hardly makes him different from Bush.
Moore has way too much fun with superheroes for me to believe that he intends to ever end them. Miller is full of it, of course.
Actually, people who rant against superheroes as “unrealistic” (well, duh, yeah—Chuchulain, anybody?) are giving vent, in my opinion, to an unfortunate Puritanical streak. Each and every one of them has allowed himself or herself to become, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” and forgets that we may, merely may, whip from ourselves something worthy no matter the occasion.
As for Alexander: What kind of true visionary would choose as his hero a man whose only talent was conquering with the sword? Why do people venerate Alexander? Just goes to show a bully with an army can get people to say nice things about him for a long time.
Gentlemen—
Y’all might be interested in this Neil Gaiman journal entry. It has jpegs of a 1986 story he did for Time Out.
Damn fine post, Prof! And you make me really see it: Adrian’s an idiot. “Maybe people died, who knows? But Alexander almost succeeded...” What an incredibly crazy thing to say, the logic there is absolutely like splintered glass—a viewpoint utterly uninformed about cause and effect, about history, about meaning. The need for outside validation seems to be everything to Adrian—the Plan is a ridiculous bet against fate, but even its apparent success doesn’t leave him satisfied, since he has to appeal to Jon at the end anyway. “Did I do the right thing?” An astonishing question to be able to ask…I think he really is what he made the others think he was: a self-regarding nonentity, and a fool. If the Comedian in some way “destroys” Dan and Jon and Adrian in this story, it’s only Adrian who fails to accept the rebuke…fails to accept that his limitations have been revealed. Yah: fanboy.
I like it.
A lot.