Comments on Kyle Cupp: Watchmen and the Absurdity of Salvation

I'll have to see this now; thank you!

2009-03-09T18:56:00.000-05:00

I'll have to see this now; thank you!

I didn't see the character Dr. Manhattan as a stat...

2009-03-09T12:37:00.000-05:00

I didn't see the character Dr. Manhattan as a statement about God per se, but a depiction of what becoming godlike might have on a human person. He loses touch with humanity, his own and those he loved. He might serve as an example of what man's attempt to be like God might look like, but I didn't see him as making some statement about, say, the God of Abraham.

While I agree that the vision of Watchmen is almost entirely devoid of light and goodness - unrelentingly bleak in the words of John Henry - I didn't get the sense that this vision is being proposed as an accurate statement about reality. My small encounters with people in the movie theater show me otherwise. Rather, I think the story is purposefully inaccurate. It doesn't present the light, but not presenting something isn't the same as rejecting or denying something. The ways of the Watchmen may not work, but that doesn't mean there are not alternatives worth trying. The story seems meant to subvert the superhero mythology, not everything. More precisely, what is reveals as absurd is Adrien's statement, "We can save this world."

I recently finished a book called An End to Evil by David Frum and Richard Perle. They conclude the book with the following: "A world at peace; a world governed by law; a world in which all peoples are free to find their own destinies: That dream has not yet come true, it will not come true soon, but if it ever does come true, it will be brought into being by American armed might and defended by American might, too. America’s vocation is not an imperial vocation. Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies. It is a vocation that has made us, at our best moments, the hope of the world."

That's the kind of nonsense that Watchmen characterizes as absurd.

The reasons why I would consider it nihilistic are...

2009-03-09T08:15:00.000-05:00

The reasons why I would consider it nihilistic are two-fold:

One, Dr Manhattan is an attempt to make a statement about God. The character himself doesn't see evidence for God, but then becomes God-like himself, and the more he becomes "godlike" the further removed is from humanity. His morality is such that he will do as you said, kill for the sake of a small peace (a death which was, of course, pointless, since the truth was going to come out, as he knew, when the journal is read by the newspaper).

Second, the whole presentation of humanity; no light, none whatsoever. Life is a joke; the attempt to do good leads only to evil. Etc.

Many of the messages could have been done properly; but to do so would have required balance. This didn't have it. It rejects God and man in one. That's as nihilistic as you can get.