|
A peer-reviewed
electronic journal published by the Institute
for Ethics and ISSN
1541-0099 20(1)
– June 2009 |
Film review: Watchmen
Marcelo Rinesi
Journal of Evolution and Technology -
Vol. 20 Issue 1 – June 2009 - pgs 67-69
http://jetpress.org/v20/rinesi.htm
This
piece is not about the experience of watching Watchmen (dir. Zack Snyder, 2009), but rather about what the
Watchmen were watching, and therefore what they were doing (needlessly to say,
it spoils the entirety of the movie, and assumes the reader has seen it). This
will be more difficult that it would seem at first, because some of the
characters were literally mindless, some were fighting a battle, some were
fixing a clock, and some were watching a static picture, and although those are
radically different activities, they were all patterns over the same events.
The key is that what things mean depends very much on who you are, and in that
sense Watchmen is a very clear lesson
on what happens when different kinds of posthumans interact or fail to.
Humans
as such – “baseline humans,” to borrow a useful term from comics – play
little to no role in the plot. The story deals instead with four different
classes of posthumans. The first class, and by far the most numerous, is the
handful of merely extraordinary humans, the bulk of the Watchmen, including
Rorschach, Daniel, Laurie, and the Comedian. While they are all supposed to be
within the normal range of human abilities, their fighting prowess, access to
technology, and tactical skills are clearly and enormously superior. If they
are not posthumans, they are definitely above most humans.
Still
biologically human, but at a further remove in skills, lies Adrian Veidt. He is
widely known as the world’s smartest man, and his mental and physical abilities
are shown during the course of the movie to be even greater than what could be
expected of a peak human; he effortlessly defeats other implausibly skilled
Watchmen, culminating with the act of literally catching a bullet on his hand.
As with all the extraordinarily characters in Watchmen, his gifts can be traced to chance – in his case genetic
chance – rather than being deliberately sought, but this doesn’t conflict with his
status as post- (or at least stretching the definition of) human.
Dr.
Manhattan is clearly posthuman, and definitely no longer biologically human, or
even biological. His senses, abilities, and cognitive process have been
enormously extended, to the point that he actually perceives time as a separate
dimension. “God exists,” says one of the characters, “and he is American.” The first
part of that phrase, at least, is very close to being true.
The
fourth class of posthuman entities has only one member. It isn’t seen, and that
is very important, because if it were seen it would be the end of the movie: it’s
the Russian nuclear arsenal. It might seem unfounded to include it as a
character, and perhaps it isn’t one from our point of view, but keep in mind
that individual humans show no initiative from Dr. Manhattan’s perspective. For
him, as for the Russian military as a whole, human beings are merely systems
that unfold according to certain laws. At the same time, the nuclear arsenal is
certainly more than human in the scope of the destruction it could unleash – a
destruction that even Dr. Manhattan is unlikely to be able to stop.
There
is in fact little direct conflict between these different classes of
posthumans, if conflict is understood as a deliberate, mutually-understood
engagement. For the “baseline Watchmen,” most of the
movie is about a mystery: battles fought under the shadow of an Apocalypse that
seems impossible for them to do anything against, unless it were convincing a
more powerful posthuman to help.
Veidt,
on the other hand, is fixing a clock. He can map and predict psychological,
societal and political trends, and has devised a plan to prevent the otherwise
inescapable destruction. Paradoxically, Dr. Manhattan is the character associated
in various ways with the clock motif, but from his four-dimensional point of
view, clocks are as static and constant as everything else. The universe he can
watch is a static picture that he glides his eyes across back and forth;
perhaps it’s as mechanical a view as Veidt’s, but he also includes himself in
the picture. Able to perceive reality at an almost raw level, Dr. Manhattan is
a force of nature in more senses than one, immensely more aware than the
nuclear arsenal (indeed, immensely more aware than everybody else), but at the
same time almost equally uninvested in the succession of individual events.
It’s
difficult to say that anybody has bested anybody until after Veidt’s explosions have gone off. Prior to that moment, they have
all been playing, as it were, different games over the same chess board (if Dr.
Manhattan’s mostly detached observation could be thought of as a very
particular game). It is at the end that they are all revealed to and judged by
each other, and it is interesting that this is at all possible, and that it is sought
by all the characters. Despite their sometimes radical differences in
perceptions, abilities, and modes of being, they all share what can be thought
of as a social, or at least interpersonal, bond. Their moral choices might
differ, but they are sufficiently mutually intelligible to gather
together, fortuitously or otherwise, and
interact in personally meaningful ways (though, strictly speaking, the only
thing that matters to Veidt, once he has effectively defused the nuclear
arsenal, is whether he will be able to kill Dr. Manhattan or convince him to go
along with his plan).
Ultimately,
watching Watchmen reveals an ambiguity
about the possibility of communication and interaction between different classes
of posthumans (although it might make more sense to think of them as different
variations of humanity, as the human/posthuman dichotomy itself is not the
point of the movie). The practically unbridgeable gradations of power aren’t
glossed over, and mutual isolation, more or less lamented, is at least their temporary
fate. Yet, at the same, there is enough of a common psychological framework,
distinct for each of them but at some level mutually compatible, to make it
possible for all of them to share, in a sense and perhaps for a last moment,
the same world. Human nature is shown as flexible enough to allow for some
level of mutual understanding, even if it means hate, and even when it ceases
to be strictly human.
That,
at least, is an optimistic proposition.