Watchmen: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

When I put a mask on my face, it instantly changes the relationship between you and me. Whereas, only moments ago, there was you—a three dimensional human being troubled by various difficulties—and me—a similar type of entity also with similar kinds of problems—now there is you and it, a third thing, a new entity that has entered into the relationship. This third entity, more often than not, evokes some type of strange, otherworldly being: a monster or a demon or an evil spirit, or else, if it is a mask of another human being, tends to evoke a cliché, such as, say, Richard Nixon. In either case, the I that was me only moments before has temporarily—one hopes—disappeared into another realm entirely, namely, the world of ritual, dream, myth, superstition, stereotypes and even clichés. It is, in other words, a flatter world, simpler than ours, more iconic, two-dimensional rather than three dimensional, in which beings tend to exist as eternal icons.

Now that my individuality has been temporarily swallowed up—depersonalized, as it were—by this other dimension, I momentarily become capable of doing things that I wouldn’t ordinarily do. Maybe, if it’s a monster mask, I growl like a demon and say, “Raaaa!” Or, if it’s Richard Nixon, I might put my fingers up in the air to make the Tricky Dick V-symbol. In either case, it is understood by us both, that I am no longer just myself, but have rather undergone a metamorphosis that temporarily gives me new license to behave in strange and unusual ways. In certain respects, I become less human and start moving into a “becoming-other”: a “becoming-animal,” let’s say, or a “becoming-demon.”

And therein lies the problem. Do certain criminals don masks to disguise themselves, or rather to avail themselves of behavior patterns that they wouldn’t ordinarily otherwise display? Is it easier to shoot someone while wearing a mask, than not? Do rock stars find it easier to deal with gigantic crowds when they put on costumes? I wouldn’t, of course, personally know the answers to these questions, but my guess is that the answer in both cases would be ‘yes.’ Putting on a mask changes human behavior patterns in startling and sometimes unpredictable ways, and this, it seems to me, is one level, at least, of what Alan Moore’s Watchmen is all about. It is an exploration of the darker implications which the myth of the superhero—that is to say, the myth of the masked avenger—has for our contemporary society.

An example: at one point early in the film, Dan Driberg and his new girlfriend Lorrie attempt to have sex for the first time, but Dan discovers to his dismay that he is impotent. Once they each don costumes and masks and go out on an adventure together in Dan’s flying mechanical owl ship, however, Dan has no problems and the juices are able to flow. The presence of the mask changes things. But in doing so, it can also numb human sensitivity, as in the case of Rorschach, a man who becomes a kind of superhero when wearing a faceless mask that spontaneously creates its own Rorschach patterns. Because he as an individual can disappear into a faceless entity, he has no conscience about killing criminals or else maiming them to get information out of them. And while the film is quite explicit in telling us that he is an intrinsically violent individual, it is important to Moore’s point, I think, that Rorschach, once his mask is taken away from him while in prison, shows a great deal of anxiety about getting it back. Once he puts it back on, his sensitivities to the pain of others is sufficiently numbed for him to go on killing, maiming and murdering people.

The character of Dr. Manhattan is instructive on this note, for he is stuck in a permanent costume. Having been the victim of a physics experiment that altered his genetic structure in order to give him superpowers—more of them than any other character in the story—his permanent human exodus, as it were, to the realm of masked, tribal beings shows us how he becomes gradually more and more numb to the sufferings of others around him. He finds himself drifting away from human concerns entirely, lost in his equations and dreams of building new machines of power for the military industrial complex. Eventually, he exiles himself to the planet Mars, where he sits in Buddha-like contemplation wondering whether living beings are worthwhile things. His standpoint is more or less that of a Hindu yogi who has attained one-pointed meditation—the atomic nucleus and its orbiting electron between his eyes are in the same spot as Shiva’s third eye, which the yogi imitates with red paint—and is on the verge of disappearing into Enlightenment altogether but, at the last moment, is held back by some newfound shred of compassion for the sufferings of the human race. Like a Bodhisattva being, Dr. Manhattan returns to the earth in order to help save it.

Adrian Veidt, the character whose superhero persona is known as Ozymandias, makes the mistake of identifying his ego too strongly with his hero role and begins to see himself as a theocratic-style Asiatic emperor. This ego inflation enables him to become the head of a transnational corporation that very nearly conquers the entire planet: yes, Veidt’s goal is to avert a nuclear war between the superpowers, but it is at the cost of casting himself in the role of a god-king who moves the political pieces about on his own private chessboard to suit his whims. Needless to say, none of the other Watchmen like him or even seem to care much about him.

So, we have the mask of the theocratic emperor; the Hindu-like yogi who wants no part of civilization; the Batman-style superhero dedicated to defending the metropolis in good fascist style; and with Rorschach, a retrieval, more or less, of the private detective tough guy from the average noir narrative; and with Lorrie Jupicyzek, the ancient Amazonian warrior woman. In other words, these are the masks that can be worn today by any member of civilization in its current state: you can be the head of a multinational corporation that is gobbling up the planet or you can be the disinterested philosopher who refuses to participate and rises above it all with an Ivory Tower ascenscionism; or you can stay and fight your way through the daily grind of modern city life, like Driberg and Lorrie. With Rorschach, you can even join the criminals.

But, of course, we all wear masks all the time, every day. For instance, the moment you climb into your car, you have put on the mask of the traveler for whom pedestrians are merely objects in the way, and other “travelers” are not people but “its” competing with you for spatial domination. Every new technology, in fact, is a kind of mask that its wearer uses in order to accelerate certain powers: the teenager riding in the city bus with the Ipod in his ears has chosen to wear the mask of invisibility, rendering himself a specter who no longer participates in what is going on around him. The guy with the laptop open at a Starbucks might be aware of what’s going on around him, but he is participating in the myth of communing with higher powers that he has direct access to via his special magical portal to the luminous realm where those powers reside. And so forth.

Masks, furthermore, are a staple characteristic of tribal societies. The Native Americans, for instance, used masks as a basic feature of their religious life. If you got sick, you might need the aid of a masked being to bring you special power from the Other World in order to heal you, so a medicine man would wear a mask, as in the case of the Iroquois False Face Society, in order to try and heal you with magical powers.

Thus the cult and mythology of the superhero constitutes a kind of retrieval of the tribal society: in an age in which any overarching pantheon of gods and divinities has disappeared, each individual must now choose his own masked apparition for himself in order to become, like the superhero, his own kind of god or ancestral spirit. We ourselves, Watchmen seems to be saying, have become as gods, and so in the movie, it is apposite when Rorschach points out that in the absence of God, it is only we ourselves who are the makers of our own world. So choose your mask and you’ve chosen your own myth. Put it on, plug in, and welcome to the new tribalism.

You’ve become your own god.

[See also my review of the Watchmen graphic novel on Pop Syndicate.com]