This is one of the two reasons that I thought The Watchmen would never make a good movie. It was set during the Cold War and that war’s over.
Back in 1986, you could make a reasonable argument that the world was on the brink of nuclear destruction and killing a million people might be acceptable if it was the only way to bring the United States and the Soviet Union together.
But how do you make this argument in 2009? We all now know that the Cold War did in fact end with a nuclear war. So the millions of eople that Veidt killed died unnecessarily. Instead of creating a mock alien attack, he should have been clandestinely starting glasnost and perestroika.
The apparent lesser-of-two-evils situation fell apart when we found out there was a viable non-evil alternative.
True, but I think a lot of the movie was left-wing wish fulfillment, a reaction against the rejection of the '60s political movements. “Sure, we made a right royal hash of things, but here’s a caricature of what’d happen if our right-wing opponents won, and see how much worse everything is!” Thus we get the idea that military successes are irrelevant, containment can never work, a rudimentary moral equivalence between trigger-happy Communist and a trigger-happy West, and no mention of the effects of the inherent economic inferiority of Communism.
(Plus a extra-martyred JFK, Nixon as a caricature of Reaganite hawkishness, etc.)
One could argue that, while obviously Moore couldn’t know the future at the time of writing, this state of affairs actually works itself into the superhero deconstruction theme - namely, that superheroes tend to apply drastic, immediate and ultimately simplistic solutions to problems and rarely think things through or give non-capes time to adress issues the “right” way. Which, of course, is part and parcel of the decision to put on a costume and fight crime rather than, say, join the police or become a lawyer.
There’s a criminal. The superhero punches him in the face, when society would have given him a fair trial, maybe examined the reasons *why *he became a criminal and tried to adress them etc…
There’s the World War 3 looming. Rather than letting everyone work through their differences, cautiously open dialogue, etc… Veidt does something horrible and rash that he believes will get an immediate result.
In real life we didn’t have a giant blue penis on our side in 1986. At the beginning of the movie, and in the comic too I think, one person on Crossfire posits that the existence of Dr. Manhattan is driving the Soviets to keep up their own aggression and nuclear program. In real life I don’t think any of us in the United States thought that Afghanistan would trigger open hostilities between us and the Ruskies. Conditions in the Watchman are different. Viet-Nam was a communist lost. I don’t doubt the USSR feels as though their backs are to the wall.
I’m not sure there was a viable non-evil alternative in the alternate timeline of this story. Nixon had already ordered DefCon 1, and appeared to be willing to order an all out nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. It’s not clear to me that Veidt actually knew that, but going to DefCon 1 is going to produce certain observable events that would be a pretty good indication to a knowledgeable person. The B-52s would have been fueled, armed and ready to launch from their bases, other bases recalling all personnel, heightened alerts, etc.
The comic also expands on that point at length in the SUPER-POWERS AND THE SUPERPOWERS academic piece I’d mentioned above: Milton Glass goes on and on and on about how “there have been numerous occasions when the USSR has had to step down over some issue rather than risk escalation into a war it certainly could not win … this has perhaps fostered the illusion that the Soviets will suffer such indignities endlessly. This is a misconception … Our current administration believes otherwise. They continually push their unearned advantage until American influence comes uncomfortably close to key areas of Soviet interest. It is as if – with a real live Deity on their side – our leaders have become intoxicated with a heady draught of Omnipotence-by-Association … One single being has been allowed to change the entire world, pushing it closer to its eventual destruction”.
Of course, Glass can’t make that point explicitly; he can’t actually know how the world of WATCHMEN differs from our own. Moore, though, can, and does so in the notes that accompany the recent reprint:
I don’t know. Did Doc Savageever catch a bullet? In the comic it seems to be obvious that Veidt was a human optimized by extreme training. Comic book optimized, of course, which may not exactly match reality.
Imho, the point of that ending was that what humans would do to themselves would be far worse than what Veidt did. Dr. M pushed the balance of power too much towards the US’ side, and thus left the world on the edge of mutally assured destruction. Killing 150k saved 6 billion, essentially.
In essense, Veidt was the good guy, and actually Rorsarch was the bad guy. Rorsarch would prefer the world be doomed to death rather than sacrifice his personal ideals.
He does do that in the comic but he leaps backwards and catches it with both hands, kind of slapped, together. It also leaves his hands bleeding quite a bit (he’s barehanded in the comics). Again, far-fetched indeed, but supposedly in keeping with his extreme peak human conditioning.
The first bullet catching (from the “assassin” was staged). The second bullet catching (in Antarctica) was real.
It’s true that the Watchmen characters were inspired by the Charleton characters that DC had recently acquired. Alan Moore thought it would be cool to use them, but DC decided they’d rather fold the characters into the main DC continuity, so he just filed off the serial numbers. Yes, Rorschach was originally The Question, Dr. Manhattan was Captain Atom, the Comedian was Peacemaker, Nite Owl was Blue Beetle, and so on.
But Rorschach (and all the characters really) are commentaries on how various superheroes would really be, if they really existed. Batman, a guy who beats up criminals all night, would have to be something of a psychopath. Either that, or a dilettante like Nite Owl.
I never thought he caught the bullet, more like he blocked it with his hands. As far as i remember he didn’t drop the bullet afterward meaning it was probably embedded in his hand. That’s not catching, he just got shot in the hand rather than the chest.
In the movie, they showed the bullet in his hand, barely breaking through his glove/skin, with some blood. I’d call it more of a catch than a block. Dunno how they handled it in the comics.
I’m not so sure of that at all, and in the movie at least, it’s left open too. What the protagonists agree on in the end is that it’s better to leave the secret secret because the alternative is worse. Nightowl for one doesn’t seem to agree with Veidt’s solution one bit. Rorsarch is killed just because he wants to expose the secret.
