More about Watchmen, the comics-flavored film product

[womzilla]

Over at Howling Curmudgeons, the group comics blog to which I contribute far too infrequently, there has of course been some discussion of the film Watchmen (not the Saturday-morning cartoon). I said this:

I have spent so many years looking at the precise telling of Watchmen--the emblems, the sigils--that I'd forgotten how much I like the story. But every time Snyder missed an opportunity to layer on a sigil or an emblem, I felt it sharply. No triangular bloodflow on Moloch's face? Why not?

(Laurie isn't water in the film. That's just bad filmmaking.)

to which one of my fellow curmudgeons, who is intimately familiar with the source material, replied, "I don't understand that comment."

So, I elaborated:

The six major characters all have physical emblems. Laurie's is water--the snow globe, the perfume bottle, the pool in Karnak, tears, rain. That's all lost in the film, just not there at all.

(This is distinct from the characters' sigils--Adrian's triangle, Blake's smiley face, Jon's circle.)

...

Emblems: Adrian is knots, surprisingly. Jon is watches, unsurprisingly. The others don't come to mind as readily--I might never have worked them all out to my satisfaction. (Is Dan eyeglasses? Maybe.)

Other sigils: Laurie is a wavy line. Rorschach is a stain. Dan is, I believe, a crescent.

Back in 2000, I wrote that I thought that the "minute hand at 11:58" might be Blake's sigil, but I think it belongs to all of them, a loss of innocence and the awareness of death--the most important image of the book, of course, since each of the characters is an answer to the question, "How do human beings respond to the awareness of death?"

The sigils and emblems recur throughout the book, sometimes very blatantly, sometimes very subtly, to connect each part to each other part. Motifs, you might say.

Another commenter, "Scavenger", pointed out that Dan's emblem is probably eyeglasses, which seems right; another commenter, "Jeff R.", added that "Associating Veidt with knots gives him a strong connection to Hooded Justice", which pleased me a lot--one sign of a good theory is that it explains things one didn't think of when one first came up with the theory.

On reflection, I am coming to think that tears are, in fact, the Comedian's emblem, separate from Laurie's. Are reflections Rorschach's emblem? I think they have to be.

Anyway. My biggest single disappointment in the film is that most of this dropped out completely. Even when it would have taken no effort to include the emblems and the sigils, they are (mostly) aren't there. And that's just odd, and sad.

Comments

[avram]

Here's the old Usenet thread with the glass thing. The second message, by bsvitavsky, lays out the theory. I think he's straining to include Rorschach.

Now that I think about it, I think Moore may have included all the glass references deliberately, and excluded Roschach. Glass reflects, and an alternative identity can be thought of as a reflection, a different face seen in the mirror. Rorschach denies the existence of his other self, Walter Kovacs. He's all other-self, nobody to see in the mirror. Perhaps that's why he wears a reflection on his face, and why he bookends the symmetrical chapter.

All of the major Watchmen characters are in some kind of denial. Rorschach denies his own identity. Dr Manhattan denies being a god. Laurie denies her true father. Veidt denies the moral horror of his plan. Blake, like Veidt, denies the immorality of his actions. Dan... I'm not sure about Dan. Maybe he's in denial about his own sexuality.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Why, then, does Rorschach take off the mask at the end?