Rorschach's Journal October 12th, 1985:
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout "Save us!" ... and I'll look down and whisper "No."
They all had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day's work for a day's pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers ... and all of a sudden, nobody can think of anything to say.
So begins the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. A friend lent me the book, my first graphic novel actually, and I must say I was quite impressed and now eagerly anticipate the upcoming film. The trailer reveals some of the obligatory book-to-film combination of scenes and the allegedly obligatory simplifying of dialogue. Still, the scenes look like life-like renditions of Gibbon's artwork. Reading the novel worked well for a home-life schedule that's peppered with split moments of time in between giving my son the complete attention he demands.
The story takes place in an alternate 1985 in which costumed heroes once battled villains (such vigilante work is now illegal) or intervened successfully in major events such as the Vietnam War (America won) and the Iran Hostage Crisis. Richard Nixon has amended the Constitution so as to still be president. The prospect of nuclear war with Russia, however, still weighs everyone down in fear. It is the backdrop of fear - fear of total annihilation - that Moore sets his story. The plot begins with the murder of a not-so-virtuous, government-employed costumed hero called the Comedian and another masked crime fighter's investigation into the mysterious killing.
The moral journeys of each of the characters develops the narrative. Each hero seeks to uncover the meaning of his unorthodox fight against evil and his identity in that fight. There is the tale of Rorschach's uncompromising will to punish all evildoing he encounters whatever the cost. The Comedian's tale is the tragedy of a crime fighter who sees the absurdity of fighting the forces of darkness, laughs at the darkness and at the absurdity, and fights anyway until he sees something so horrifying that he can no longer take the joke. Inspired by the Comedian's comical realism is Ozymandias, the world's smartest man, who passionately believes that a plan born of human intelligence and the right unconventional thinking can end all war and even all fighting and save humanity.
While the moral choices presented to the characters involve the choice of doing evil for the sake of a good, the climactic choice that defines and distinguishes the heroes twists the consequentialist dilemma. The question they face could be posed this way: suppose you knew a great crime had been committed, but that the crime had produced a magnificent and much hoped for good; would you expose the criminal and the crime knowing that the good for which the crime was committed would evaporate like bodies in a nuclear blast?