Watchmen - With SPOILERS

I've been thinking a bit about Watchmen lately, since viewing the clips of the upcoming movie. I'm so old that I actually collected it in individual issues when it first came out. If you've read it, you can only imagine how hard it was to wait between issues. When I pick it up now, I can hardly put it back down.

What I've been thinking about...

SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT -- SPOILER ALERT















... is the Veidt plot.

First, I haven't re-read the thing lately, so I fully embrace my G-d-given right to change this post entirely if I go back over it and come to a different conclusion.

Second, it seems clear that events, and specifically the fatalism of the ironically-named Comedian, convinced Ozymandius that some great thing had to be done to unify the people of the earth before the insane Cold War leadership - still President Nixon and the Soviets - turned the entire thing into a glowing radioactive rock in space.

As he perceived that 'masks' would be outlawed two years before it happened (and he may have had a hand in that), and resigned on his own, so too did he realize that one day Dr. Manhattan would lose interest in humanity. So he made that day come sooner, destabilizing the Cold War and bringing the planet to the brink of suicide.

So far so good.

But what was his big plot? To use the same semi-operative teleportation equipment that created Dr. Manhattan to teleport a big ugly monster to New York. So people would come together as a planet to face the would-be alien invasion. Hmmm.

And the Comedian saw the Bug Eyed Monster (BEM) from an airplane, so he went a bit nuts and Ozy paid him a home care visit and threw him out a window.

Hmmm.

Don't get me wrong, the whole thing is a masterpiece, probably the best comic book in history and a work of great achievement by any measure. I just don't know how well it holds together at that larger scale.

The intent, if I'm reading it correctly, is a look at human nature. What are our greater and less moral qualities? Who are we really? And - can we change? Do events (like BEM's blowing up half of New York) move people? Do leaders move people? Or do people move themselves, as the saying goes: "people get the government they deserve."

Alan Moore couldn't have seen 9-11 coming, but he did. That was the BEM moment in real life, playing in slo-mo on a continuous loop. It was a moment for a people to decide who they were and what they stood for.

Bush had cheated to win the presidency a year before. His administration represented (and still represents) the absolute nadir of American life. He and his close advisers showed the worst parts of America, the hubris, the violence, the scorn for law and decency. The inability to make anything like a moral choice. And the unfettered selfish greed.

That greed led them to use the defining moment of a generation as a bloody shirt to wave - in their own narrow interest.

Certainly, Al Gore would have written as different story. A few hundred stolen votes and a deeply corrupt Supreme Court decision took it away from him, but would he have provided the moment of world unity that Ozymandias was looking for?

Perhaps the biggest irony of the 9-11 comparison is that Moore has Dick Nixon keep his presidency through 1985 or so. If Bush is anything, he's the guy who makes Nixon look like a saint. Right wing neocons are the same now as then.

If Nixon were president for the BEM event, he would have used it for partisan gain, and Dr. Manhattan would have had to stop an entire nuclear war. And win it for Dick.