OT: watchmen on trial

Chris · 10 Apr 2005, 01:20 · from 2005-April.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rasputin_ at hotmail.com (Chris)
Date: Sun Apr 10 01:20:41 2005
Subject: (urth) OT: watchmen on trial
In-Reply-To: <003001c53d73$ada062f0$60a3f63f@wynnhouse>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F15380B8876F4EE70BA850786310 at phx.gbl>

I generally agree with Crush that we have somewhat overdiscussed the 
Watchmen, but I dug up something interesting from the archives so I thought 
I'd revisit the topic one more time. It appears that there have been 
repeated discussions of this over the years on the list, and that the 
comparison of Severian and Ozymandias is almost comulsory. Some links below.

For what it's worth, while I am not going to argue that there's a wrong or 
right answer on this, the intuitions of *almost* everyone who reads Watchmen 
is that Ozymandias is a villain, and that his "answer" is not seriously 
endorsed by Moore. So I do not think that such a reading is really out of 
line, I think it's pretty solidly there; perhaps if anything Crush is 
reading a little bit more into certain scenes (and a little less into 
others) than most.

Now, back to the old days... from a batch in 1999:

Mantis: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0118.shtml
John Bishop: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0113.shtml
Tony Ellis: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0116.shtml
Jim Henley: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0114.shtml
Alex David Groce: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0111.shtml
Alex David Groce (2): http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0117.shtml

>Well, of course I do read Wolfe but he takes a *lot* of pretty obvious 
>steps
>to signal that his narrators are unreliable. First, he tells the story in 
>first
>person, he sets up the narrator so that he is clearly insane, stupid,
>clearly covering some awful truth, or some combination of the three. In the
>case of "1984", Winston is defeated and his arguments do not win over
>O'Brien, but Winston *does* carry on a quite adamant argument which he 
>never
>concedes ~ even after he betrays his sweetheart. Night Owl does not put up
>much of an argument to Ozy (if he put up any at all) and in the end he
>concedes that he cannot *condemn* the argument...that it is somehow beyond
>conventional morality (just as Commissioner Gordon absolves Batman and FDR
>for their actions, and I *still* believe that viewpoint in the "Dark 
>Knight"
>series was influential to "The Watchmen").
>
>Despite all this, Dan'l suggests that Moore did not intend Night Owl's
>concession to be his own, that he intended Rorschach's diary to expose
>Ozy's plan in the end. Hm...maybe. I'm not convinced, but I can see
>that one could take that stance if he were strongly so inclined.
>
>Sooooo.....the question is, how do we know when an author POV is coming
>through such as, say, is Silk's attitude on gun-control Wolfe's view as
>well? Or does the revolution in Dorp reflect Wolfe's own view of the 
>current
>temperament of the American Judicial branch? What is Wolfe's attitude 
>toward
>Severian, the Hieros, and even Typhon.  The last question it is difficult
>to answer because Wolfe has taken so many steps to separate himself from
>the story. But there is even lots of room for argument in the other two for 
>the
>same reason.  I took it that Night Owl's final conclusion on Ozy's plan was
>the one Moore would have adopted in his place because he didn't have Night
>Owl put up much of an argument against it (implying he didn't see a serious
>argument against it) and because of the point in the story at which Night
>Owl comes to that conclusion. I could be wrong. But I'm far from convinced 
>that I am.
>
>~ Crush
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Urth Mailing List
>To post, write urth at urth.net
>Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net