Thoughts

Hey, this blogging thing’s pretty neat.

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Some thoughts on Alan Moore’s Watchmen with regards to the Comedian. Also a meditation on the viability of the inarwebs as a forum for discussion.

Why did the Comedian Cry?

tentacles posted:

I think Comedian cracking at all was a monumental miswrite on Moore’s part. He’s seen (and done) things most people only read or hear about… Does anyone seriously think he’d bat an eyelash at Ozy’s little joke?

Later on Ozy states what really cracked Blake was the thought of a world where the Comedian was obsolete, which I didn’t take as anything but a distractingly sloppy band-aid even in my first read through.

Jim Jam posted:

That’s how I feel as well, kind of. Explosions don’t really do the trick, I mean, governments in real life conduct secret bombings, why would a military man be upset? An unfathomable nightmare, like the squid, is what you’d need to mess with the Comedian’s mind. I always figured that’s why he’s meticulously built into a character completely unfazed by the horrors of the world around him, so that you know whatever Veidt’s plan is it must be unspeakably bizarre and horrible.

The speech at the end by Veidt I always took as him talking out of his ego. Like, he’s been around this plan so long and reconciled it that now he can’t even understand why the Comedian is so upset, so his ego turns it into a jealously thing, an opportunity to dominate a rival.

SUPERMAN’S GAL PAL posted:

I can never quite wrap my head around that after every awful, fucked-up thing he’s done, I still feel bad for him at the end of the story. Although I wonder if that’s more an overall sympathy for a life full of tragedy as opposed to the character.

I always read that differently, took it as more of Ozymandias justifying how perfect he is and everyone else is either useless or jealous. I can’t imagine Ozy ever admitting that anyone else “gets” his plan – especially someone who caught onto it early.

tentacles posted:

…What? The entire conclusion of the story, movie or book, plot-wise or thematic, hinges on every single one of the main characters “getting” his plan. He even gambled his life on it. It was the culmination of the whole fucking story.

And Moore made a point to have Ozy recognize the Comedian as an intellectual equal.

Fangz posted:

But why the heck is the Comedian so upset? It’s not like he (or anyone else) has problems with Nixon planned to first strike the Soviets.

I get the strong impression that he is upset, because Veidt’s actions makes him reflect upon his own. (Which isn’t the same as what Veidt says, of course.) Dreiberg et al are horrified, but they don’t have a breakdown. And what’s more, the Comedian knows about Veidt’s plans, and could easily have stopped him. But he decides not to, and instead sits in his room, unarmed and unarmoured, waiting to die, because he realises that this is what his choices mean he must do.

arioch posted:

He says repeatedly that the whole world is a terrible joke, the state of the world is a terrible joke, he’s just the one who gets it and plays along.

Then Ozymandias plays the practical joke to kill millions to save billions. It’s a much bigger bad joke than anything he’d ever been part of or perpetrated.

tentacles posted:

Anybody who thinks anybody will break down and cry like a baby over the prospective deaths of millions of people they don’t know needs to turn the bullshit-o-meter down a notch. I doubt Mother Teresa would have a nervous breakdown for all the children, much less someone who treats slaughter, rape, and the killing of his unborn daughter as a joke.

I bet it felt really nice to type out though.

Edit: Did you know Mother Teresa doesn’t take an h?

FoxDragoon posted:

It’s interesting how apparently open to interpretation the Comedian’s breakdown is. I tended to focus on two parts where he says something like “I thought the world was tough and you just had to be tougher, well not anymore!” and “What’s so funny about that? Someone explain it to me!” and what Ozymandias says about Blake when he says, “the perfect fighting man finding the end to war” and, “his practiced cynicism cracked.”

I think that what Blake went through was something of an existential crisis: his whole world view, and the parody of it he had made himself to represent, was coming to an end. His whole persona centered around being a personification of the harsh, cruel, savage views of governments and human nature, and it would no longer make sense if and when Ozymandias’ plan when through. Here you have a guy who thinks that mankind’s inevitable destruction by its own hands is something to laugh at: someone with a very cynical sense of humor.

In comes Ozymandias and turns this entirely on its head, and actually saves mankind through a calculated and ridiculous plan involving a very harsh, cruel and savage way of killing millions.

There’s nothing cynically funny about this to the Comedian, especially since the end result is seemingly quite a positive one (which is why he really has no reason to stop it and accepts it). The “it was professional jealousy” line comes in, in a way, because Ozymandias had really made a joke of the Comedian’s own world view by tricking mankind’s savage nature into saving itself from itself.

e: Any interpretation which makes Blake somehow upset about the death of millions, or even being upset about being the inspiration to the death of millions, strikes me as incorrect since he is the only one that seems to accept the inevitable death of mankind with open arms, at any pace, as long as it eventually dies in the end. However, if the death of mankind is no longer inevitable, as Ozymandias tries to make sure, then the Comedian’s “act” (including the violent acts he has done in the past) ceases to have a point.

tentacles posted:

This was the most plausible examination I’ve seen up to now. The scene was open to interpretation because it involved quite a number of contradictions, notably the hardass breaking down and crying. Having gone over the panels again, I’d say only two possibilities exist: (1) Moore was setting us up for a payoff (that never came) and sacrificed internal logic to do so, or (2) the Comedian’s breakdown actually serves as the endpoint of his character’s personal arc.

The second point of view does have some elegance, particularly in how it humanizes the character and explains his inconsistencies. The Comedian and the Bad Things(tm) he did were defined by a bleak acceptance that the world would end. The salvation of the world doomed him personally, as it forces him to re-evaluate his past crimes. His breakdown would be him realizing just how lost he is, through his own actions.

Edit 2: I suppose that was the final joke. He lived his life certain he’d die tomorrow. By a terrible miracle, he was saved – only to realize he was irrevocably damned, and death would have been a release.

I could see him not seeing the humor in that. It adds another layer of nuance to Rorschach’s Pagliacci anecdote. It also makes more sense than him being upset over holocausts or, hah, tentacles.

All of this assumes that we’re not reading too much into it. I’m undecided on that, but given the attention to detail evident in the rest of Moore’s work, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt – as well as props for one of the most powerful and intricate character studies I’ve seen.

Edit: Hmm. Yep. Given Moloch’s line about that little episode being the Comedian’s last performance, I’d say we’ve got it. The symmetries resonate in a way that could only have been by design.