I’d read Watchmen years ago, and I recently decided to read it again, what with the movie coming out and all.
The first time I read it I hated the Comedian. He was a horrible person in almost every way. He disgusted me to a degree that it actually detracted from my enjoyment of the comic. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the comic, but I dreaded the scenes that showed him doing aweful things, and even more so the scenes that tried to make him sympathetic.
During my recent re-read, though, I realized something. He’s not just a dick who enjoys hurting people. He’s deliberately turned himself into a parody of the worst aspects of humanity. That’s the joke. That’s why he’s the Comedian. That’s incredibly fucked up.
While it doesn’t really make me like him any better, it does make me have more respect for his role in the story. If that makes any sense.
I think that’s more or less correct. To the Comedian, man’s civilized nature is just a facade – a joke. Or, as Dr. Manhattan put it: “As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding. Blake’s different. He understands perfectly … and he doesn’t care.”
If Blake despaired he wouldn’t have been so unhinged when he discovered what Ozymandias was doing. Blake reveled in his understanding of the world because it let him be brutal and amoral. It’s a bit like what Rorschach says about his own revelation. Yes, it’s true that he has that “scratch a cynic” thing going on, which he reveals in the riot scene, but he likes it.
I would argue* the Comedian fits into a tradition of the Broken Hero. They are done a bit different from thing to thing. The idea is fairly simple: a good man, a clear-eyed man, and an honest man who is stuck in a world so evil it simply doesn’t even make sense anymore.
If he insists on trying for the good consquences/results, he becomes a villain himself (See Londo Mollari in Babylon 5, or Ozymandius). If he just tries to help things along the way by destroying evil, he winds up coopted by the monstrous nature of the world (The Comedian and Rorcharch, or the Punisher in Marvel), unable to effectively do anything of importance but scream out against the madness that closes in upon everything.
The only alterative to this in these kinds of worlds is to simply walk away and let the world do as it will, and take refuge in your own interests (Night Owl). But this isn’t a solution, it’s simply an abandonment. It might be the best option, but not everyone can accept that.
*Disclaimer: I have no read the Watchmen, though I hope to. Ihave, however, gotten a good long look at the entire plot as well as detailed descriptions, with ample quotation, of the most important selections and scenes.
This is one of the reasons that I hope that the whole drama with Silk Spectre I (and II) is kept. (Well, that, and that Laurie’s whole trip to Mars will be pretty fecking pointless without it.)
Compare and contrast the similarities in outlook and actions between the Comedian as “hero” and the Joker as “villain”, give examples.
Ahem. Yeah, naming aside, the Comedian is essentially the Joker as a hero: he might fight on “our” side, but the man essentially don’t give a fuck. Alan Moore’s seminal take on the Joker in The Killing Joke, written a couple of years after Watchmen, has a great deal in common with the Comedian.
Yeah. The thing that kind of brought me to the same realization was reading about the original Charlton character the Comedian was based on, The Peacemaker. His whole story was that he was a pacifist and diplomat who turned to violence (presented as non-lethal, but violence nonetheless) in a secret identity to advance his cause. Moore was commenting on humanity on several levels; though the Comedian’s “joke,” and also that it says something about us that the whole comic book concept of a heroic, violent diplomat who uses force instead of diplomacy was presented and accepted unironically and with a straight face.
There’s a vast difference between the Comedian and The Joker.
The Comedian is, in the end, a normal man who gave himself over to indecency and brutality because he saw the world as a brutal place without hope. In the end, his reaction to the revelation of Veidt’s plot reveals that his humanity and compassion has not been completely lost. He is simply overwhelmed when he finds out and later resigned to it. He’s realized that he has no ability to deal with it. His revelation to Moloch is one of those things that show his hopelessness. Had he wished, following his knowledge, to deal with Veidt’s plan he could have taken it to his governmental handlers or directly to Dr. Manhattan, also a government functionary at that point. But, in truth, he had given up. When Veidt came for him he seemed to not really be info the fight and again, resigned to his death. The plot was bigger than him and he let it roll over him.
The Joker, on the other hand, is truly mad. Like the Comedian he sees the world from a nihilistic stance but instead of trying to channel his impulses into government work or otherwise allowing someone or something else to harness his brutal impulses he goes on random or elaborately plotted killing sprees. He feels the same hopelessness that the Comedian does but attempts to demonstrate to the world that hopelessness.
They both perceive this joke: Humanity has no purpose, no overarching morality or function. But they respond to this knowledge much differently. The comedian would never go on a killing spree akin to The Joker’s passing out of poisoned cotton candy at an amusement park, a la The Dark Knight Returns, because he would see no personal gain in it and is aware of the potential consequences of such an action. The Joker, being a true sociopath, sees no reason beyond impulse and personal amusement to do so and doesn’t give a damn about the consequences and, in fact, welcomes the involvement of The Batman as the consequence-bringer.
So they’re close, but not identical. There’s a HUGE difference between amoral dick (The Comedian) and murderous sociopath (The Joker) even though both stem from a form of existential despair of humanity.
I never thought about it that way, but I can definitely see it. If the Comedian hadn’t been killed, he would have just been one major psychotic break from becoming the Joker. It’s like both characters made the same horrific realization about humanity. It drove the Joker completely insane, but the Comedian turned it into something he could “own”.
I generally agree that Blake is driven to despair by the human condition, and that leads to his abandonment of morality. But to me it’s more complicated than that – he was just a kid when he brutalized Sally Jupiter, not the monster he’s transformed himself into by Vietnam. As an adult, he’s using his rage at the injustice of it all as a rationalization for the fact that he in particular is a bad man. So while it’s true that under the amoral Comedian there’s a man who embraces horror because he is confronted with an immutably horrible world, under that is a guy who just likes doing horrible things and uses that psychological malaise to absolve him.
The fact that even a soul as corrupt as this is horrified at Veidt’s plan is one of the great complexities of the book.
BTW, Argle, I’ve read Watchmen at least eight or ten times, and there literally hasn’t been a single time when I didn’t realize something else about what’s going on.
And yet the more I think about it, the more I think Veidt’s plan was probably the right thing to do in that it likely saved a lot of lives, although the ending may undo it in any case.
What concerns me is that the ending of the movie is changed. I don’t know what the change is, but I presume they have made Veidt’s plan more of a personal gain for him, which unbalances the moral dilemma.
My theory is that they did away with the alien part because, with the artists’ colony plot, there was just too much exposition and too many characters who are only in the story for a few minutes - so I expect Veidt ends up killing the leaders of the USA and USSR and taking power himself. That’s much more of a standard “supervillain who says it’s for everybody’s own good” plot.
I think the idea was that all of the characters became heroes for idealistic reasons. But the act of being a hero transformed all of them. Rorschach became a fanatic; the Comedian became cynical; Nite Owl became apathetic; Ozymandias became amoral.
If lives saved vs. lives lost is the sole measure of morality, then a doctor should deliberately kill his patient if he believes they’d save more than one life as an organ donor. But I don’t think that would be moral, and I feel Veidt’s plan was morally flawed for an analogous reason. Basically, I think you have a higher moral obligation not to hurt people yourself than you do to help others. (I think there’s a moral obligation to help people when you can as well, just not one that trumps your obligation not to do harm.)
Anyway, that’s one thing I love about Watchmen, that it brings up these interesting questions.
Do we know any specifics at all about how the ending is changed? Because I’ll be pretty unhappy with it if they do it like you describe in the spoiler box above.
This was my take on him too, and for much the same reason. From the very beginning, he was a bad man doing “good” things, one who revelled in violence. I don’t think his despair over the human condition happened until well after he started his costumed hero-ing; maybe as a result of his stabbing, or the years of war, or the working for the government. I think the whole Comedian as laughing at humanity and embracing nihilism didn’t happen until later, after he had done some seriously bad things. And at that point, it was simple rationalization for him to try and give an explanation for his own violence and hatred.
I’m torn on this. Veidt describes Comedian’s response as being horrified not at the plan, but at the resulting end of war. I don’t think Comedian would give a crap about a bunch of dead people. What he couldn’t grasp though was the destruction of his excuses for his being a raping, murderous bastard. He was terrified that the world COULD make sense again and that humanity could prosper. It was the success of the plan that paralyzed the Comedian, not the price of enacting the plan. At least I think that was Veidt’s take on it. And who am I to argue with the greatest mind ever.
Right. That is why Veidt killed him, because in Veidt’s mind (& Moore’s?) that’s who the enemy of Veidt’s plan is–those who seek to prolong the existence of war.
Never mind that what Veidt is doing in itself is an act of war &/or terrorism, & leads to a massive run-up of actually futile defense spending to fight non-existent aliens. Veidt’s blind to the idiocy of this out of vanity–he’s in love with his own idea. And I’m not sure that any awareness of this is in the text as intended. I got the impression that we’re supposed to find Veidt oh-so-clever, & that he is both the antagonist & the hero of the book as Moore meant it.
