WATCHMEN s Directed by ZACK SNYDER
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Of course, the cold war ended for real four years after the series concluded. We now know, more or less, what a world dominated by the U.S. looks like. Yet even after two decades, Watchmen doesn’t seem quaint or outdated; on the contrary, it seems more prescient with each passing year. In the comic, American dominance leads to paranoia. At home, fear of masked vigilantes has fueled McCarthyite rioting and forced most superheroes into retirement. Overseas, a cornered USSR walks the world up to the edge of nuclear holocaust.
The story focuses on six superheroes, one of whom—the Comedian—has been murdered. These characters are hardly laudatory examples of unfettered American power. For the most part they don’t like each other, and they certainly don’t work together. The Comedian was an amoral thug who reveled in his own brutality. Rorschach is a neofascist, homophobic nutcase who uses black-and-white morality to justify his extreme violence. Dr. Manhattan is so powerful that he’s become detached from humanity, alternating terror and beneficence with a chillingly casual disinterest. The wealthy philanthropist Adrian Veidt, aka superhero Ozymandias, is a liberal one-worlder whose compassion is so aggressive it’s indistinguishable from ruthlessness: his crazed plot to save the world involves killing half the people in New York City. For him and all the other heroes, saving the world is less about helping others than about indulging their own messianic delusions, sexual hang-ups, and self-aggrandizement. As the U.S. has demonstrated for the past eight years or so, when you add moral grandstanding to great power you get not great responsibility but a huge fucking mess.
Toward the end of the story, the philanthropist Veidt claims he’s made himself feel the death of everyone he’s murdered while trying to build a new utopia. In the comic, Moore forces the reader to experience these deaths and wonder if they’re justified by the possibility of world peace. When you take that question seriously, others come up as well. What makes Veidt so certain the human race is going to destroy itself? What right does he have to play God? Veidt sneers at Rorschach for his “schoolboy heroics,” but in the comic there isn’t much daylight between Rorschach’s fascist vigilante justice and Veidt’s evangelistic UN peacemaking. Both impulses fuel our heroic American fantasies, at home and abroad. As long as that holds true, Watchmen can’t be a simple exercise in 80s nostalgia, no matter how hard Zack Snyder tries to turn it into one.v
