This Won’t Be Pretty

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Katherine Wirick

Sometime in the early 1990s, a troubled New Jersey teenager named David Klasfeld began to experiment with makeup. The hobby brought some solace into a difficult life; he was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder at fourteen. “I had 42 shampoos and conditioners because I could never use the same ones twice in a week, so I could go six weeks without using the same combination,” he said in 2013, in a New York Times piece on the company he founded: Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics.

OCC is a mid-range line, more expensive than drugstore brands like Revlon and more affordable than cosmetics lines from couture brands such as Chanel and Dior. Their signature product is Lip Tar, a liquid lipstick packaged in paint-like tubes which boasts brilliant pigmentation, exceptional wear and a rainbow of shades beyond the traditional pink and red. They’re hugely popular among professional makeup artists and beauty bloggers. There’s more to celebrate about the company: their stance against animal testing is the strongest in US cosmetics, and in 2013 they helped a trans woman who worked at their boutique pay for surgery her insurance company refused to cover.

The name, though.

I probably inherited my OCD from my father. He became a hand-washer at about the same age David Klasfeld started collecting haircare products. Later in life my dad would drive around in circles, looking for bodies in the road, because he was convinced that some minor violation of traffic etiquette he’d committed had caused a chain reaction behind him, resulting in wrecked cars and mangled pedestrians. Anxiety had killed his mother, years before I was born: she was obsessed with the notion that she might become pregnant again, which so terrified her that she was going to multiple doctors to get multiple birth control prescriptions. This was in the early years of the Pill, when the drugs were stronger and the risks less well understood, and she was a middle-aged woman with high blood pressure and heart disease.

An OCD episode starts with “what if?” A thought comes into my head that frightens me. It’s almost never based in reality, but I can’t brush it off. Suddenly I can’t think of anything else. My heart hammers; my guts churn; sweat runs down the back of my neck. I try to use logic to prove to myself that the imaginary scenario won’t come true, but that only makes it worse. There’s no thinking my way out of this situation; I just have to wait until the chemicals in my brain change. I mostly don’t have compulsions, but often I wind up on the internet, desperately trying to Google my way out of the panic hole. I’m not delusional–I know perfectly well that what I’m worrying about is ludicrous, and that makes me feel worse, out of control and crazy. The episode can be as brief as a few hours or go on for months.

It doesn’t help to distract myself with people and things that I love, because anything that makes me truly happy eventually becomes a focus for anxiety. The anxiety itself, the loss of feelings that were precious, and the inability to find refuge form, in combination, the most devastating mental experience I’ve ever had, and I’ve had it every year since 1994. Five years ago it came pretty close to breaking up my marriage. If there’s something good in your life, mental illness will poison it.

There’s only one coping mechanism I’ve found that has remained–fingers crossed!–unaffected: makeup.

Like many OCD sufferers, I also have a problem with depression. Sometimes my chest feels heavy, like my heart is a stone, and everything is bleak and empty and I don’t want to live anymore. It was on one of those days that I did the eyeliner look above; it helped.

There are a lot of people who take a moral position against makeup. “You’re just hiding your real face” is something they say, and they’re right–that’s exactly what I’m doing. You can’t seriously expect me to trust a world of strangers with my real face.

If I had more disposable income (or any at all, really) I’d be something close to the ideal Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics customer. I’m an arty type, I like to slap bright colors on myself, and I hardly ever have to conform to a dress code. But I wouldn’t use OCC products if they gave them away for free.

Isn’t it David Klasfeld’s right, you might say, to deal with his condition in his own way, and discuss it however he wants to?

Yes, absolutely. But we are no longer talking about one person’s coping mechanism when we talk about OCC–we are talking about corporate marketing. OCD is David Klasfeld’s disease; OCC is his brand. It’s sold at Sephora stores across the US. You can buy it in England and Australia and Singapore. Money and time and the expertise of advertising executives have made OCC what it is. Klasfeld is selling makeup, but he’s also selling mental illness.

In his public statements, he places strong emphasis on the “positive” aspects of OCD. He has to; he probably wouldn’t move a lot of product if the name of his company were associated in people’s minds with sick, gnawing, bowel-disrupting fear. Instead he links OCD to marketable concepts such as order, precision, cleanliness, attention to detail:

“What’s been amazing about the company is turning what’s viewed as a negative into a positive,” said Mr. Klasfeld of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Coordinating and matched sets are definitely things that are born out of an O.C.D. mind.”
—NYT

Sounds nice. But OCD is a negative. It’s not a social-model disability like deafness or Asperger’s syndrome; if everyone in the world had OCD, OCD would still make people want to die. If there were a pill that promised to cure my OCD forever but make my depression twice as severe, I’d take it. I’d commit crimes to get it.

My father was fanatically tidy and clean, the way all OCD sufferers are in the popular imagination. I’m not tidy or clean or organized, and nothing I own matches anything else. During my second year in grad school, I was afraid to be alone in my apartment, so I spent as little time there as possible; once I went three months without cleaning my bathroom. Kelp-like fronds of mold waved at me when I flushed the toilet. I am not what Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics would like you to envision when you think of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

OCC probably doesn’t need attention-getting branding to maintain their position in the crowded cosmetics market. Unlike Urban Decay, whose line, without the veneer of danger, would be difficult to distinguish from Make Up For Ever or Stila, OCC has a genuinely unique product in Lip Tar–there is no competitor at any price point. But they’ve decided to run with the theme (their professional discount program for makeup artists is called “the Obsessive Compulsive Discount (OCD) Program”), and if it’s hurt them in the market, I can’t see any evidence of it. Even in hotbeds of activist outrage like tumblr, there’s a distinct lack of concern about OCC.

I hear a lot of jokes about obsessive-compulsive disorder, and throwaway references that aren’t really jokes: “I’m a little OCD about my spice rack.” That kind of thing. I don’t usually have it in me to call anyone out, and when I do, I’m circumspect about it, trying to get people to think about OCD as a serious illness without putting them on the defensive. One of these days it might even work. It’s hard to be sick; being a punchline makes it harder.

How would the focus groups have gone if David Klasfeld had been diagnosed with something else?

Social Anxiety Cosmetics: acronym less than ideal
Post-Traumatic Stress Cosmetics: respondents said the name evoked images of soldiers, which have a certain glamour but not the kind of glamour that sells makeup
Clinical Depression Cosmetics: “Does that mean the products only come in one color and it’s gray?”
Generalized Anxiety Cosmetics: name did not evoke anything; respondents don’t know what it means
Schizophrenic Cosmetics: respondents said it sounded “scary”
Bipolar Cosmetics: “So… everything’s either black or white?”

The general public has a warped conception of every mental illness. Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics only works as a brand because the warped public conception of OCD happens to be marketable. OCC does nothing to combat this.

Q: Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics? What’s up with the name?
A: “The first step is admitting you have a problem,” says company founder David Klasfeld, “I did and the result is a line obsessively crafted from the finest ingredients possible, to celebrate the driving compulsions of makeup fanatics everywhere.”
–from the OCC FAQ

It’s frightening to speak in public about being mentally ill. I probably wouldn’t be doing it right now if Emily Thomas hadn’t cleared the path. There can be repercussions. You can lose credibility; you can lose the benefit of the doubt. A guy can bull-rush you during a baseball game and break your collarbone and people will say it was your fault because you’re not normal. You become Other.

I recognize and salute David Klasfeld’s courage. But by perpetuating misconceptions and contributing to the trivialization of OCD, his company ultimately does harm to sick people. The good intentions I’m sure Klasfeld had went wrong the moment an illness became a commodity. Despite the “100% vegan and cruelty-free” promise, OCC is casually cruel.

This is not what obsessive-compulsive disorder looks like:

It looks a lot more like me, hunched over in sweat-soaked pajamas, staring without focus into the vacant middle distance, scared out of my fucking mind. It’s just not pretty.

Kent State — The Movie

Posted on January 9, 2013 by Katherine Wirick

In 1981, NBC aired Kent State, a two-hour dramatization of the May 4th shooting at Kent State University. Although it won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing in a Limited Series or a Special, the film is out of print; the easiest way to see it is to watch the poor-quality copy uploaded to the Internet by the film’s own historical consultant.

Two years later, four communications professors at Kent State published the results of their study of the film’s effect on faculty, staff, and students. The faculty and staff they surveyed had been present at the university in 1970, but the students had not. The study asked whether viewers perceived docudramas as fact or fiction, and the authors seem to have been surprised by their results:

The students presently at Kent State can scarcely be said to represent a completely uninformed audience. There are symbolic reminders of the event on campus and, far from being forgotten, there is a commemorative ceremony held annually which receives media coverage. For these reasons it would be logical to assume that Kent State students are an informed and therefore critical audience, lacking only firsthand knowledge. Yet, the students used in this study found the Kent State docudrama to be highly believable despite their critical advantage over a completely nai?ve audience. One student said that the film “made the events real.”

This is the perfect simulacrum. People who park their cars on the blacktop where bodies fell require a re-presentation of those deaths, performed ten years after the fact, on a different campus, by no one who was there, in order to be moved.

I watched Kent State, partly as research for my own work but mostly out of curiosity. As a film, it’s just not very good, which may be fortunate; if it functioned effectively as entertainment, if it were skillful and engaging, it might be more obscene than it is.

In the classic sense of obscenity, it exploits the sex lives, real and imagined, of the dead students; Allison Krause lounges in her boyfriend’s shirt and nothing else, sorority girls fall into Bill Schroeder’s lap. Historical consultant J. Gregory Payne wrote about the development of the project, “According to my NBC informants, network programmers felt the screenplay was too political. Apparently the NBC executives preferred a more human focus and had considered developing a romantic theme between some of the principal characters.”

More obscene, to me, is the leaden dialogue. Sandy Scheuer (Talia Balsam) tells another student, “I care about helping people, and my family, and my friends, and grilled cheese sandwiches.” What would be a tolerable, though clumsy, bit of shorthand if it were used to mark the boundaries of a fictional character seems like an injustice when it recreates someone who was real and is dead. It’s not that I believe real people should never be the subject of fiction—I am an eager audience for art that plays with history; but most of the time the historical figures concerned have already left behind a substantial record of their presence in the world. Shakespeare in Love does nothing to diminish Shakespeare while King Lear is still in print, and it matters very little whether the Siegfried Sassoon who appears in Regeneration is strictly accurate when anyone can read Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and know Sassoon as he wished to be known. However, the students of May 4, who were all between nineteen and twenty when they died, are unable to speak for themselves now. Bill Schroeder was a nice kid, an athlete, a Stones fan; he had little time to be anything else.

Worst of the movie’s sins is the contrived dramatic irony that loads almost every line the four students speak: “Big stuff happens and it’s never where you are,” says Jeff Miller (Keith Gordon). It makes the deaths seem prefigured, when the twin tragedies of Kent State were that no one—save the members of Black United Students, who did not attend the Monday demonstration—expected that the Guard would carry live ammunition, and that no one expected Miller, Krause, Scheuer and Schroeder to be the ones to die. The screenplay’s sense of irony brings a false order to the workings of chaos.

The film, though it offers color, motion and sound, is less alive than black-and-white photographs of Allison Krause laughing or Bill Schroeder playing basketball—except for two scenes, both of which get an assist from pop culture contemporary to the shooting. The first is the National Guard rolling into Kent as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” plays; the second is a young Guardsman resting in a troop transport and playing the Grateful Dead’s “Uncle John’s Band” on an acoustic guitar.

The Dead started playing “Uncle John’s Band” live in late 1969, and released it on Workingman’s Dead in June 1970. It is a fantasy of unification, buoyed by three voices in close harmony. By this time the band had been through a traumatic experience at the Altamont speedway: “It was like a nice afternoon in hell,” Jerry Garcia said later. Along with the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, the first two albums by the Band and the work of Gram Parsons, Workingman’s Dead was part of the country rock movement, an attempt to return to the womb of American folk culture. Coming as it did mostly from people who had only a few years earlier attempted to set themselves apart from America in the most dramatic way, this movement could be called a retreat. Considering that they were required to rebuild by hand the America in which they hoped to find a place, you could also call it courageous.

On record “Uncle John’s Band” fulfills itself: the three voices ask for a homecoming and create one as they reach for the chorus. In Kent State, there is only one voice, a small one, and one tinny guitar. The singer is fresh-faced and young, innocent-looking; now he calls softly for a joining of hands, but in less than twenty-four hours he’ll be looking out at the students from behind a gas mask and a gun. Without harmony the song’s requests—Will you come with me? Won’t you come with me?—lose strength and falter, too fragile for their circumstances. People bring pop culture into their lives and invest it with meaning, whether or not it is strong enough to hold up the weight. The night before I wrote this essay, I learned that my father had cancer. I sat in my studio the next day, under his army jacket, and watched the rain fall on Broad Street while “Uncle John’s Band” played, and then I hid my face in my hands.

God damn, well, I declare—have you seen the like?

A more startling intersection between pop and power occurs two scenes earlier. The ROTC building has just caught fire, an event the film does not depict accurately; it shows a group of students lighting the building, then cheering as it burns, when in fact, as my father and many other eyewitnesses have recalled, the students made multiple attempts over the course of roughly twenty minutes to set fire to the building but failed, and had long since wandered away when it exploded into flames.

As the building burns, Professor Glenn Frank (Michael Higgins) says to Professor Ted Arnold (John Getz), “I look at that old pile of burning junk, and all I can see is my old man. And his old man before him, and the grandchildren I don’t have yet. And I wonder what the hell on this earth really matters.” Frank was a real person, a geology professor who saved students’ lives on May 4 by standing between them and the Guard, but this is no real human language; the words assume the shape of profundity but contain nothing. They back away from the building. An assembled crowd of students claps anemically and sings, “Come on baby, light my fire.” The words fade away but the clapping continues. Then it gives way to a low rumble; students and professors turn their heads, there are shots of headlights and huge wheels, and then, as the film cuts to a Dutch-angled shot of a troop transport approaching on the road, we hear the riff that opens “Ohio.”

This is a story my father told me: Gary Lazaroff, one of his college friends, worked at Cleveland’s Gund Arena in the mid-‘70s, and when CSNY passed through on their reunion tour, one of them told him how “Ohio” came to be written. On the fourth of May, Crosby, Stills and Nash were in the process of sobering up from their previous evening’s high when Neil Young appeared. Earlier in the day, he had heard the news from Kent, and had gone out and walked the streets alone, weeping.

I grew up with the song. My father had the So Far LP, and he used to play it every year on the fourth, until the turntable broke and the speakers stopped working. Long before I found out what it meant, it was the sound of a wound, something unresolved, that riff like clenched teeth. At the end of each verse the voices marked out every syllable in the name of the place where I lived: O-hi-o.

The shot goes on for a full minute, as the first transport drives toward us and out of the frame, followed by another, and another, and another. The glare from their headlights blurs the Guardsmen’s faces; astride their Jeeps they look mass-produced. The vehicles seem oversized, out of scale, the embodied will and power of the state. This scene cracks the film’s fac?ade of artificial realism; real life doesn’t have nondiegetic sound, and “Ohio” wasn’t recorded until thirteen days after the Guard arrived in Kent. The effect is conspicuously cinematic, yet nothing else in the film feels as “real.” “In a world that really has been turned on its head,” Guy Debord once wrote, “truth is a moment of falsehood.”

In the end Kent State offered neither a sufficiently comforting myth nor a pleasurable enough spectacle to consume the events that inspired it, as Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation consumed Reconstruction. It produced no image more powerful than John Filo’s photograph of Mary Vecchio with her arms outstretched, and no real lasting effect. The damage it did was minimal. It might even have done some good: if a few channel-surfers happened to learn Sandy Scheuer’s name, if Allison Krause became, for a moment, “real” to a student in the Kent State communications program, that doesn’t make up for the years they should have lived, but it’s better, arguably, than being forgotten.

Still, I hate Kent State, for its inaccuracies, its obscenities and its failures; I hate to look at it and yet I want to. I want to confuse the simulacrum with reality, because I know the simulacrum isn’t bound by reality’s rules. The film does not depict the classroom where Bill Schroeder and Dave Wirick sat side by side that Monday morning, but as the students assemble on the Commons I begin to look for my father in the crowds. Again and again I’m drawn in by the promise of fiction—the hope that, this time, the invisible storyteller might change the story.

Heroic Proportions

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Katherine Wirick

I can’t quite summon the kind of tooth-grinding indignation over the very concept of DC’s Watchmen prequels that I think I probably should, because, when I was a sixteen-year-old reading Watchmen for the first time, I remember wishing earnestly that American comics had a doujinshi subculture. (It would be more than a decade before Tumblr came along.) Setting aside—not that we should do so for long—corporate exploitation of artists, the difference, it seems to me, between doujinshi and DC’s prequels lies mostly in the profit margin. Watchmen doujinshi, had they existed, would’ve almost certainly been unsanctioned by Alan Moore, and I would’ve bought them anyway.

So it would feel a bit hypocritical for me to dismiss the prequels out of hand. I’m more troubled by the idea that they might be lousy than by the sheer fact that they exist. Recently released images, however, do not fill me with optimism.

For one thing, Lee Bermejo seems not to have realized that Rorschach is short.

He has, according to the script, the physique of Buster Keaton. Of course, Dave Gibbons didn’t draw Rorschach short either; I have immense respect for Gibbons’ achievement on Watchmen, but when asked to deviate from heroic proportions, he just couldn’t manage. All his adults are tall and broad. On the other hand, Zack Snyder, who for all his flaws showed an impressive grasp of the granular details that comprise Watchmen’s world, cast a 5’6″ actor, and—even more remarkable—framed him next to taller actors and let him look short.

If Snyder, whose films indicate that he has the moral and aesthetic intelligence of an eleven-year-old, could get Rorschach’s body right, what’s holding DC back?

I’m not very familiar with Bermejo’s work and I don’t mean to trash him; taken on its own merits, the Rorschach cover is a clever conceit gracefully executed. But a comic book illustrator’s job is to build a world, and the story’s world starts at the protagonist’s body.

Rorschach’s height is important. It sets him apart from the others. I’m 5’6″, and I am not a physically intimidating presence in most situations. Unlike the other male crimefighters in Watchmen, and most male superheroes in general, Rorschach doesn’t have overpowering physical size as an automatic advantage. His defining characteristic in battle is resourcefulness; we see him fight with improvised weapons over and over again—a cigarette, a rag, a can of hairspray. He needs them; he has to be faster and smarter.

I’m afraid that this looming, broad-shouldered Rorschach is the canary in the coal mine.

The differences between Watchmen and other superhero books are much greater than a little nudity and a little moral ambivalence. It is a delicate, subtle story whose spirit is easily betrayed. For an example, let’s look at Zack Snyder’s version of a pivotal scene from chapter 6.

FLASH OF: Rorschach as a little boy looking up at TWO OLDER BOYS, teasing him. Calling him “son of a whore.” Rorschach just wants to be left alone when one of the Boys SPITS in his face. Suddenly, Rorschach’s face changes. He attacks the Boy like a wild animal–biting, clawing.

This is a formative moment for Walter, in both film and book: it’s the first act of violence we ever see him commit. In the film, he’s motivated by an insult to his pride. In the book, it’s quite different:

As a teenage girl reading Watchmen I was stunned by this scene. Never before in my travels through fiction had I seen a male character—a male protagonist—have to fear and defend himself against sexual assault. And that’s what it is; the threat the boy is making just before Walter burns out his eye is an unmistakably sexual one: “Get ya pants down.”

I wonder why Snyder and his team changed that scene. Did the generic, truncated version really seem like an improvement to them? Was it merely a cut for time? Or is attempted rape a trauma that heroes do not suffer?

Like Rorschach’s height, this is more than a minor point of characterization to me. The book puts a lot of emphasis on Rorschach’s hatred of his mother, and his associated disgust and fear of female sexuality, but if his mother were the beginning and end of the problem, one would expect him to attack prostitutes. That’s not what he does. He uses violent and misogynistic language, and as a result, many readers see him as willing and able to physically hurt women—but we never actually see that happen, nor are there any references to off-panel incidents. Except in the flashback scene in which his mother hits him, Rorschach never has any physical contact with a woman at all. Who does he target when he’s under the mask?

Of the two murders he admits to after he’s arrested, one is Gerald Grice, the man who butchered Blaire Roche. Take note of the sexual connotations of that episode: it’s not a little girl’s shirt or shoe Rorschach finds in the wood stove—it’s a fragment of underwear. The other is Harvey Charles Furniss, a serial rapist. And one of the few moments of satisfaction, or even something approaching happiness, Rorschach gets in the book happens on page 18 of chapter 5, where he interrupts a rape attempt in an alley: The man turned and there was something rewarding in his eyes. Sometimes, the night is generous to me.

He’s disgusted by women who are sexually active, but his targets, the people he attacks with the most unrestrained violence, are sexually-abusive men. I think Rorschach can actually be read as a rape victim.

Think about his history: he spent his early childhood in a home to which adult male strangers had frequent access, then was placed in an institution. And there are strong overtones of gang rape in the final page of chapter 5:

He’s beaten and held down by a group of men who strip him forcibly, insult his body and sexuality, and suggest that he’s enjoying it—note the cop’s line in panel 5: “You like that? You like that, you goddamned queer?”

But, one might ask, what about his apparent lack of sympathy for Sally as Edward Blake’s victim, which made Laurie so angry in chapter 1 (“I’m not here to speculate on the moral lapses of men who died in their country’s service. I came to warn…” “Moral lapses? Rape is a moral lapse?”), and which would appear to contradict my interpretation of the character? I have three ways of looking at this:

1) Alan Moore was flying by the seat of his pants to a certain extent. Half the series was drawn, lettered, printed and on the stands before the last chapter was even written. He’s said in interviews that it was when he was writing chapter 3 that he realized how Rorschach’s story would end; it wasn’t until that point that he really saw inside the character. His initial intention was for Rorschach to be completely unsympathetic, which end is furthered by the scene in chapter 1 with Laurie and Dr. Manhattan; when he wrote that, he probably didn’t have Rorschach’s backstory worked out.

The disorganized, intuitive fashion in which Moore developed his characters is demonstrated by this interview in which he’s asked why Rorschach takes his mask off in chapter 12:

I’m not sure, it just seemed right. I mean, a lot of these things you just—I kind of felt that’s what he’d do. I don’t know, I don’t know why. I couldn’t logically say why the character should do that but it just felt right… I couldn’t really explain why I did it, it just seemed like what I’d do if I was Rorschach, which is the only way that I can really justify the actions of any of the characters.

So, some disconnect between earlier and later chapters can, in theory, be explained by the serial nature of the book’s publication and the impossibility of late-stage rewrites, although this isn’t my preferred explanation.

2) As I mentioned above, Rorschach fears and loathes women who express their sexuality openly. He refers to Sally in his journal as a “whore”; in his perception, she falls into the category of Bad Women—whether there really are any Good Women in his world is an unanswerable question, although his attitude toward Laurie is less negative—and he is unable to acknowledge her as an innocent victim, like Blaire Roche or the woman in the alley. Or Walter Kovacs.

Also, he liked the Comedian, when they met at the Crimebusters meeting in 1965, and seems inclined to believe the best about him. It’s hard to prove, but I think Rorschach conflates Edward Blake with his father—”men who died in their country’s service”—similar to, although less explicit than, his conflation of his father and Harry Truman. His support of Blake despite abundant evidence that Blake doesn’t deserve it is one of his defensive illusions.

3) The things that Rorschach says do not line up with the things he does.

Throughout the book, though most noticeably in chapters 1 and 6, Rorschach talks in his journal about the hideousness of humanity in general and New York in specific, how much it disgusts him, and how eagerly he’s looking forward to some kind of apocalypse that would wipe the slate clean. In chapter 12, he gets his wish, and he breaks down in tears.

In my opinion, his reaction to Veidt’s catastrophe proves that everything he says on the first page is self-deception. He wouldn’t whisper No. What he says about humanity in his journal and to Dr. Long is part of his attempt, ongoing since at least 1975, to kill the vulnerable part of himself, the part that loved and felt pain, the part that was helpless and afraid. In the end, he fails, and walks forward, weeping, into his own death.

Let’s talk for a minute about 1975.

Here’s another change Snyder made: the removal of the line, “Mother.” In the book, this is the last word Walter Kovacs ever speaks—at least until page 24 of chapter 12. It’s a strange, loaded, exposed moment, and in the movie it’s not there.

Violence against children and rape are Rorschach’s triggers. The former is made explicit by the dialogue on page 18 of chapter 6, as Rorschach sets up the scene for Dr. Long: “Days dragged by, no word from kidnappers. Thought of little child, abused, frightened. Didn’t like it. Personal reasons.” I think we can infer the latter from the argument I made above. The murder and implied sexual abuse of Blaire Roche combines both triggers in a particularly horrific way, and drags Rorschach back into the childhood he put on the mask to escape.

Blaire Roche has become Walter Kovacs in that moment when he closes his eyes. He is the child who was abused and frightened, butchered and consumed, and “Mother” is a plea for help and an accusation: “Why didn’t you protect me? How could you let these things happen?”

The foundation of Rorschach is in powerlessness, and those are the parts of his story that Snyder chose to excise. I don’t want to see that happen again.

Rorschach matters a lot to me. I have never felt any comparable level of emotional connection to a character in a superhero comic. I’m not anti-cape; there are some superhero books I like, for a variety of reasons—but my emotional investment remains minimal. Whatever need lives in the heart of the superhero fantasy is, apparently, a need I do not share.

But to be knocked down and get up again, to demand the humanity you’ve been denied—I can understand that. Rorschach is a portrait of the body under threat, and, even more crucially, a portrait of resistance to which I can directly relate. I am a pacifist; I do not condone violence; but I also have some understanding of trauma: the feeling of helplessness, the shame, the rage.

Of course, my reading of Rorschach is only my reading. I make no claim to be objectively correct in every point; I have not read Alan Moore’s mind; I don’t expect or demand that every Watchmen reader will agree with me. But I think we can agree that Rorschach is, for better or worse, not just another comic book crimefighter, and I dread DC reducing him to that: just another brawny beast of a man with heroic proportions and nothing to fear.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Katherine Wirick

This Won’t Be Pretty

Kent State — The Movie

Heroic Proportions