Apocalypse, Dystopia, Revolution: Fury Road’s New Future

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Kristian Williams

The end of the world is not what it used to be. Fury Road is not Mad Max.

Fury Road is a fast, loud, spectacular, fight-scene, car-chase, big-explosion action film; but, though it seems strange to say, the original Mad Max was, in its way, a slow and even a quiet movie. While Fury Road is relentless in applying its high-volume, high-velocity, high-violence formula, with barely a pause between frenzied battles, Mad Max lingered in long, still moments, alternately banal and desolate. For a film that was in large part about fast driving and senseless mayhem, Mad Max really took its time, and it was the strained sense of anticipation, rather than stunning moments of explosive action, that supplied its sickening, despondent effect.

The climactic final scene, in which Max chains his enemy to a truck and rigs it to explode, then leaves him a hacksaw and the advice that “it will take you ten minutes to hack through” the handcuffs, but “you can hack through your ankle in five” — turns exactly on this sense of time, and the fear of what is coming rather than the image of what is happening. Here, as with the death of Max’s family, the most horrific violence does not even appear on the screen. What we imagine is worse than what we actually see.

Recall, too, the most stressful moment in the series: the long, agonizing scene in which Max, mostly crippled, lies in the road, arm outstretched, reaching, reaching for his gun, while in the background a motorcycle approaches, bearing down on him, full throttle. I have seen that minute of film a dozen times, probably, and I always find myself hoping, rather desperately, that this time, he will reach the gun, or roll away at the last second, or just pull back his arm. Of course he doesn’t. And, if we were really paying attention, we would know even at the first viewing that he won’t.

Fury Road is more optimistic. It tells the story of a group of women escaping sexual slavery, aided by Max — who is escaping slavery himself — then returning to the water-rich fortress where they were held, killing the warlord, and triggering an uprising. The film ends at the moment of their victory, and the promise at the end — or the hope, rather — is that civilization might be rebuilt on a more humane and egalitarian basis, that human beings might be redeemed.

It’s a long way from the apocalyptic finish of the first film — Max driving into the wasteland, becoming at last one of the barbarians he has spent the movie fighting. Mad Max shows us a slow apocalypse. The end comes not as a matter of nuclear war or biblical cataclysm, with a creeping nihilism tha overtakes everything, including eventually the hero himself. The film shows us what it is like as civilization fails — not merely its institutions, but its values and norms. The stumbling pace and grainy visuals, the marked lack of polish in every regard, all contribute to its hopeless mood, its disconcerting atmosphere, and its lasting, haunting quality.

It is for these same reasons, I think, that Mad Max still speaks to us. Human extinction has only been a real possibility for about half a century. For most of that time, the acknowledged threat was nuclear war. Now it is the destruction of the natural environment. Our apocalypse is slower, and it is therefore harder to conceptualize even as we begin to feel its effects. It is harder to face, and harder to fight. Armageddon, it turns out, will not come as a final battle with mushroom clouds on the horizon and cities reduced to dust, but as a slow rise in global temperatures, the acidification of the oceans, and wildfires, draught, refugee crises — in other words, the nightly news. It is not a question of a few men doing something to end the world, but of all of us doing nothing to save it.

“Who killed the world?” one of the escaping concubines demands. The answer is that we did. Or more to the point: We are — right now, every day.

The future Fury Road presents is a judgement on the present — but also a warning and a challenge. It makes our choices very clear. As the slave-brides learn, at first to their sorrow, escape is impossible for the simple, terrifying reason that there is nowhere to escape to. The promised green utopia is a poisoned wasteland plagued with crows. The only hope for freedom, then, is not escape but rebellion.

The feminism of the message has been much remarked on. But the system the warrior women overthrow is not only patriarchal. It is a political economy in which those who control the resources needed for life, water especially, use that control to enslave some people and reduce others to sordid destitution. It is a military death cult dependent on adolescent skinhead “War Boys” eagerly sacrificing their lives for the glory of battle. And it is a personal dictatorship, with the ruler feared and obeyed almost like a god.

The women — is it too much to call them Furies? — succeed in killing the tyrant. Yet it is far from certain what will come next — and it is uncertain, most of all, for Max. Every film in the series has ended with Max outside of civilization. At the end of the first film, he renounces the old world, its laws and morals, and drives into the desert alone. In Fury Road, it seems, he renounces the new world as well. As the women — once captives, now liberators — ascend into the Citadel of power, Max again turns away. He disappears into the crowd without a word.

Out of Continuity: Superhero Time, the Eternal Recurrence, and the Forking Path

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Kristian Williams

In a lecture titled, We are who we choose to be,” Eric Berlatsky remarks on the strange construction of time in superhero narratives and the way it undermines any sense of moral responsibility. Heroes make choices, and choices have consequences; but in superhero stories, Berlatsky notes, “rarely, if ever, are these consequences permanent.” He provides several examples: the death and return of numerous heroes (most notably Superman), Peter Parker’s repeated reversion to high school, marriages that do not end but are simply forgotten, Superman rewinding the world to save Lois Lane. Sometimes these miracles are achieved through time travel, sometimes heroes are literally resurrected. Sometimes such “events happen . . . ‘in the continuity’ of the basic Marvel or DC universes,” sometimes “in ‘alternative continuities’ in the comics,” and sometimes in “other media like video games, television shows, and movies.” Occasionally, the existing continuity is scrapped altogether and a new one introduced. But whatever the mechanism, “all of [them] continually elaborate new paths forking.”

The result, Berlatsky argues, is the decay of the idea of artistic choice:

like their own characters, the editorial staff of Marvel and DC never have to live with the ethical and material consequences of decisions they make about characters and worlds. Instead, time can be rewound, universes rebooted, and/or alternatives created, allowing mutually contradictory outcomes to coexist, just as they do when Superman both fails to save Lois and rescues her.

The observation brings to mind a comment Stanley Cavell made about television:

“serial procedure can be thought of as the establishing of a stable condition punctuated by repeated crises or events that are not developments of the situation requiring a single resolution, but intrusions or emergencies — of humor, or adventure, or talent, or misery — each of which runs a natural course and thereupon rejoins the realm of the uneventful. . . .¹

The conservatism of such a structure is obvious: There is a permanently stable universe — an established cast of characters, a consistent setting, a predictable range of interests and concerns. Anything that disrupts this order is a threat, whether it is explicitly treated as such or not, and the plot will largely consist of finding the means to eliminate it. In the end the status quo is reestablished and even the characters themselves remain unaltered. In the perfect case, the cycle will repeat a week later, with no acknowledgment (and seemingly, no memory) of what had occurred before. And it will go on that way indefinitely — episode after episode, in perpetual stasis, with no connection between them and so no development.

Television has partly outgrown this pattern, but superhero comics have been slower to mature. The Marvel/DC business model — selling Spiderman and Superman stories forever — has had a distorting effect on the genre. The paradox of superhero time is that the stories require action and drama, and yet the universe the heroes inhabit and even the basic structures of their lives must retain or return to a stable form. Something has to happen, yet nothing can change. New Spiderman stories come out every month, for years and decades, but Peter Parker is eternally, essentially, a teenaged boy. Complicating things further: to sustain dramatic tension, and audience attention, it isn’t enough to just have new adventures, the stakes have to rise over time: The hero cannot simply punch out this month’s villain. Secrets must be revealed, alliances formed and broken, worlds imperiled. People must die. But at the end of the game, all the pieces need to be returned to their original position so that play can begin anew.

In a way, it makes sense that our Superman fantasies would take this form. Nietzsche proposes:

the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo —²

— from the top, from the beginning.

Nietzsche’s point, as I understand it, was to give our lives a timeless, mythic quality — and to give our decisions a kind of eternal weight. Choosing this now means acceding to it for all time. So perhaps it is fitting that our quasi-mythic hero stories would take much the same form. Professor X is forever striving for inter-species peace; Batman is eternally matching wits with the Joker. Those struggles define the characters, and the mythic nature of those stories requires that the conflicts not be resolved.³

Yet it’s not as though the characters and the stories never change. Frank Miller’s Batman is not Neal Adams’ Batman, not to mention Adam West’s — and nevertheless he is. The challenge for creators is to make something new of these stories, to reinterpret and thus change the characters, while also keeping them recognizably the same.

In terms of stories as stories that is not all bad. Why not find new and inventive ways of telling old tales? No one complains that after a million productions Romeo and Juliet are no wiser, and no older. No one is surprised that each new performance begins with them alive again and just as foolish as before. The play’s the thing — not just the script, but the production, the performance. We know at the outset that the lovers always die, but to some degree understanding Shakespeare means appreciating the variations, even the accidents — pigeons invading the stage at the Globe, as I once witnessed. There is no question as to whether Charlie Brown will kick the football, or as to what Ignatz intends to do with that brick. The interest, the drama, the art resides precisely in the tension between what we know must happen and the seemingly endless variations on how it happens.⁴

And yet, as a worldview the eternal recurrence is deeply conservative. As Orwell observed:

the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that ‘all this’, or something like it, ‘has happened before’, then science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes forever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny.⁵

The problem, I think, is that Marvel and DC — or perhaps, their readers — do not conceive of their products simply as stories, but as composing a “Universe.” The stories, so strangely resistant to change, nevertheless do interlock, as separate performances of a play or purely episodic television shows do not. Therefore time both does and does not exist, or occur, or move, or whatever it is that time does. Even catastrophic events have few and typically short-lived consequences. Heroism, sacrifice, and risk lose their meaning. Tragedy becomes well nigh impossible. It is not a coincidence, then, that the best stories are nearly always those that occur outside the continuity.
That is also, Berlatsky, suggests, where racial and other forms of diversity exist. Yet rather than view the multiple continuities and resulting indeterminacy as a way of creating a world in which many worlds can fit,⁶ Berlatsky sees it as just another way of preserving white supremacy, elevating select representatives of minority groups to esteemed but marginalized positions while leaving the overall structure in place.

He writes: “diversity is almost always presented in the form of a ‘What if’ question. What if, for instance, Spider-Man were black?” Such is the case in one Spiderman title. The white Peter Parker dies, leaving the black Miles Morales to take on the superhero role. That, however, “is only one ‘forking path’ and, in fact white, straight, male Peter Parker remains as Spider-Man in the primary Marvel Universe. . . . [D]iversity here becomes a consumer option,” not a challenge to white supremacy. So long as there is a white Spiderman, Berlatsky suggests, a black Spiderman will always be apocryphal.

That’s a depressing thought, but if it’s true I think that says more about the collective interpretation of readers, and which stories they canonize — or should I say, privilege? — than it does about the stories, or the heroes, or even the Big Two publishers.

Berlatsky describes the indeterminate variety of the multiverse in terms of “forking paths” and he suggests that such a structure exists so that we can, morally and politically, “have things ‘both ways'” — and thus dodge difficult choices and avoid necessary sacrifices. But he misunderstands his own allusion. Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” famously conveys an idea of time, not “absolute and uniform” as conceived by “Newton and Schopenhauer,” but as

an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other though the centuries — embraces every possibility.⁷

This idea, we are told, is conveyed in a novel that takes the form of “a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts,” but which in reality manifests a “symbolic labyrinth.”⁸ We get only a glimpse of the labyrinth, relating contradictory accounts of the same epic battle — but these stories, and the idea of the novel/labyrinth, and the thesis about time, are all themselves embedded in a short story. That narrative is not merely a framing device, but supplies, in fact, the plot — and the moral. Significantly, the story is presented as a confession. “Dr. Yu Tsun, former teacher of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule,” is living in England and spying for the Germans.⁹ He has learned the plans for a British offensive and, adding urgency, fears that he is about to be discovered. As a cryptic signal to his Chief, he murders a fellow scholar, the man who tells him about the novel, the labyrinth, and time.

Preparing himself for this “atrocious enterprise,” Tsun resolves to “act as if it were already accomplished. . . [and] impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”¹⁰ He remains resolute, but his deterministic outlook does not free him from his sense of responsibility. Perhaps the story of the forking paths shook his confidence, revealing to him that many futures are possible and, while all are also inevitable, by his action he chooses one — and only one — for himself. That path becomes his, even as other paths remain for other versions of himself. Subjectively — in his life as he lives it — his decision has committed him to one course and ruled out all others. He is a single point of view, within a single story — even if other Tsun’s have their own perspectives, their own stories. As he reflected, earlier in his journey, “all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men. . . , and all that really happens, happens to me.”¹¹

At the end, he is despondent, waiting to be hanged, suffering “infinite penitence and sickness of the heart.”¹²

The choices we make matter, and the stories we tell matter — but they do not matter in the same way. Some stories are better than others. One might even say that some are more true than others. Some are read once, and forgotten; others are told and re-told, taking on mythic importance or calcifying into cliché. But no story that we tell can ever rule out any other story that might be told. The best, instead, fire the imagination, tantalize us with possibilities, and invite contradiction.

Life is something else. You only get the one. And the things you do cannot be undone. We choose, we act, we live with the consequences — or the consequences come, at any rate, whether we survive to witness them or not. As time unfolds, we create, often unconsciously, a different kind of story. It’s the story that makes sense of what we’ve done and reveals the kind of person that one becomes.
______
^{1.Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus (Fall 1982) 89.}

^{2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilI, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 258.}

^{3. Albert Camus offered a different vision of the Eternal Recurrence, and another sort of superman. Sisyphus, too, is locked in an endless cycle, repeating the same set of actions again and again for eternity. And as he contemplates his fate, he is, “One must imagine. . . happy.” (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1960) 91.) But where Nietzsche implores us to say Yes “without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence,” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, in Basic Writings, 725), Camus recognizes “to say yes to both slave and master. . . was to give one’s blessing to the stronger of the two the master.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 77.) Sisyphus, in contrast, was a rebel. He is not reconciled to the world, but is resigned to his struggle: “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. . . . One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. . . . The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” (Camus, “Myth of Sisyphus,” 91).}

^{4. I am grateful to EmilyJane Dawson for raising this point, with the Charlie Brown example in particular.}

^{5.George Orwell, “W.B. Yeats,” in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: My Country Right or Left, 19401943, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968) 274.}

^{6. “Many words walk in the world. Many worlds are made. . . . In the world we want many worlds to fit.” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” January 1, 1996 [http://schoolsforchiapas.org].}

^{7.Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962) 100.}

^{8.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 96.}

^{9.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 89.}

^{10.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 923.}

^{11.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 90.}

^{12.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 101.}

Decoding Turing: Queer Superhero

Posted on March 11, 2015 by Kristian Williams

Genre Conventions

Socially awkward, personally abrasive, math-obsessed, “agnostic about violence,” and gay—Alan Turing makes for an unlikely superhero. Yet the recent Oscar-winning film The Imitation Game gives us a biography largely assembled from tropes native to that genre: an origin story involving childhood trauma and the loss of loved ones, unusual gifts bringing extraordinary power, social persecution, and grave moral dilemmas.

Turing builds a “universal machine” — an “electrical brain” that “could solve any problem.” It was not just the largest or fastest or smartest computer, but the first — an entirely new kind of thing. The British military used the device to break the “unbreakable” code of the Nazi enigma machine. But that only created a new problem — how to use the intelligence they acquired. For the utility of breaking the code depended crucially on the Nazis never realizing that the code had been broken. Each time the Allies used the decrypted information to intervene militarily, they risked losing the advantage they had gained. Turing and his team used “Christopher” to decode the messages; then they had to calculate the odds and decide which Nazi attacks to thwart — and which to let go ahead: “Statistical analysis. The minimum number of acts it will take to win the war. The maximum before the Germans get suspicious.” Their intelligence made possible, among other things, the victory at Stalingrad and the invasion of Normandy; it is thought to have shortened the war by as much as two years. They saved millions of lives, and may have literally rescued the world from tyranny. But in the process, they deliberately allowed many thousands of people to die, soldiers and civilians.

The film rather overdramatizes this dilemma. Literally the first set of messages the excited cryptographers decipher concerns a u-boat attack, and as it happens, one young code-breaker has a brother serving aboard a targeted ship. Obviously the first impulse is to rush to save him, but Turing refuses. “Let the u-boats sink the convoy,” he advises. “Our job is not to save one convoy. Our job is to win the war. . . . Sometimes we can’t do what feels good. Sometimes you have to do what is logical.” With horror the rest of the group slowly realizes that he is right. The ships go down, the brother dies. The scene is meant, I think, to call into question to morality of the whole exercise. But it serves just as well as a justification. It is because they are willing to sacrifice their own loved ones that they have the right to sacrifice others. Their “blood-soaked calculus” allows for no special cases.

Turing makes sacrifices of his own, but of a different sort. Realizing that his engagement to fellow code-puzzler, Joan Clarke puts her at risk, he breaks it off. He begins, “You need to get far away from me” — but then, realizing that he cannot explain why without revealing MI-6 secrets and putting her at greater risk, he changes tack: “I don’t . . . care for you. I never did. I just needed you to break Enigma. I’ve done that now. So you can go.” The irony here is double: The engagement is a cover story, but he is covering for her (to maintain independence from her parents), not her for him (to hide his homosexuality). And second, it is precisely because he cares for her that he must leave her.

The scene mirrors the final and most heroic scene of the 2002 Spiderman film. Over the course of the movie, a lonely nerd, Peter Parker, becomes a wisecracking superhero, defeats the Green Goblin, and finally wins the love of “the girl next door, Mary Jane Watson — the woman I’ve loved since before I even liked girls.” But Parker is weighed down by guilt. He caused the death of his Uncle Ben by a sin of omission; he directly caused the death of his best friend’s father; and he has repeatedly put the people he loves — Mary Jane and Aunt May, in particular — in mortal danger. At the end, Mary Jane realizes that Peter is the “one man who’s always been there for me.” She confesses that she loves him.

The whole movie has built toward this point. We are told in the very first scene that “this, like any story worth telling, is all about a girl.” Peter has spent years vying for her attention, and now, at last, he has his chance.

“I will always be your friend. . . ,” he says. “That’s all I have to give.”

She cries, and he walks away.

It’s a bold way to end the film, the boy getting — but then not getting — the girl, choosing heroism over happiness. By the logic of Spiderman, Peter Parker did the right thing; in The Imitation Game, however, Turing does not come across so well. He seems, instead, unnecessarily, if also somewhat unconvincingly, cruel. Joan, who loves him, probably more than anyone else does, slaps him across the face and says, “You really are a monster.”

She is not alone in the assessment. Others call him “irascible,” “inhuman,” and “an arrogant bastard.” His young colleague, debating the fate of his doomed brother, demands: “Who the hell do you think you are? . . . You’re not God, Alan. You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.”

“Yes, we do,” Turing replies. “No one else can.”

Later Turing recalls this exchange. “Was I God?” he asks. “No, because God didn’t win the war. We did.”

But what did they become by doing so? Turing offers his confession, and then poses the question to a police detective: “So tell me. What am I? Am I a machine? Am I a person? Am I a war hero? Am I a criminal?”

Like Frank Miller’s Commissioner Gordon ¹ in The Dark Knight Returns, the policeman concludes: “I can’t judge you.”

“Well, then,” Turing sighs, disappointed and resigned, “You are no help to me at all.”

Stay Weird

The parallels to superhero stories are numerous and fairly apparent. Peter Parker and Batman have already been mentioned. And with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Alan Turing, comparisons to Sherlock Holmes are inevitable. The willingness to calculate odds and sacrifice thousands to save millions clearly echoes Ozymandias’ scheme in Watchmen — at a somewhat smaller scale, admittedly, but on the other hand, in the real world, so in that sense the stakes are infinitely higher. In fact, there is a bit of every obsessed, lonely scientist — from Dr. Frankenstein to Dr. Doom — in the figure of Alan Turing. (In one scene he rants: “You will never understand the importance of what I have created here!”) And then there is the fact, sadly central to the story, that like Marvel’s mutants, Turing was a member of a persecuted minority.²

Of course it is extremely unlikely that those responsible for the film intended Turing’s story to echo Peter Parker’s, Adrien Veidt’s, or the Charles Xavier’s. And, given the late date of the de-classification of Turing’s war record, it is positively impossible that Stan Lee, Alan Moore, and company based their science hero fictions on Turing’s science hero reality.

But, while some of the similarities are superficial, others are surprisingly deep. Turing’s dilemmas, for example — accepting responsibilities that put loved ones at risk, or sacrificing many lives so that many others might live — are just the sort of decisions certain morally unlucky people have to make. In particular kinds of stories, such people may be heroes, but in others they are villains, and in some they are pitiable, tragic victims. However, the most important parallel, I think, between The Imitation Game and the superhero genre is in the treatment of difference. Each views difference as both a burden and a blessing, and celebrates as heroes those who use their gifts to serve, not merely themselves, but humanity more broadly — in other words, those who in expressing their difference also remind us of what we all share in common.

“No one normal could have done [what you did],” Joan tells Alan. “This morning I took a train though a city that wouldn’t exist were it not for you. . . . Do you wish you could have been normal? The world is an infinitely better place because you were not.”

Alan Turing was a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was not only disapproved of, but also a statutory offense. After the war, when his secret was discovered, he was fired from his job, disgraced in the papers. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of Gross Indecency — the same charge that sent Oscar Wilde to jail half a century before. Rather than go to prison, Turing agrees to a course of “hormonal therapy” — “Chemical castration to cure me of my homosexual predilections.” The film shows him shaking, stammering, losing focus. He was unable to complete a crossword puzzle, much less continue his work in mathematics. After a year of such treatment, he committed suicide.

The film suggests — or rather, it insists — that Turing’s homosexuality was specifically tied to his genius. His difference — sexually, socially, psychologically — is stressed throughout. He is unpopular at school, imperious with colleagues, insubordinate to his superiors. He does not especially like, or even care to understand, other people — and he does not care if they like or understand him. Others in society, such as bullying schoolmates and intruding policemen, treat his intellect as being suspicious in itself. (In fact, it was his intellect that leads to the discovery of his criminal sexuality. The police — responding to a burglary in which nothing was missing, and meeting there a Cambridge professor with a classified war record — initially suspect espionage.) But Turing is “an odd duck,” even when compared to his intellectual peers, and this oddness, this queerness, is what sets his thinking apart from theirs. He is maddeningly literal, unconcerned with convention, dismayed by social niceties. He is strange because he sees things differently, and it is that difference of perception that lets him attack unsolvable problems from new angles.³

Was that difference in perspective related to his sexuality, whether as cause or as consequence? We can’t say for certain, but surely it might have been. Turing, as the movie shows, developed his interest in codes at the same time that he discovered his attraction for other boys. And then, decades later, the effort to cure his homosexuality also robbed him of his genius.

The Imitation Game offers a moral, and to make sure we don’t miss it, we hear it three times, from three different characters. It supplies the last line of dialogue: “Sometimes it’s the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

Of course Alan Turing was not a superhero, for the simple reason that there are no superheroes. (“Superheroes didn’t win the war. . . ,” he might say.) Turing was a real human being. Whatever The Imitation Game may have gotten wrong about him (and I am in no position to judge), it got at least this much right: The world was infinitely better because Alan Turing was not normal. And it cost him his life.
______

^{1.– In The Dark Knight Returns, Commissioner Gordon tries to explain his relationship to Batman by talking about Pearl Harbor: “A few years back, I was reading a news magazine — A lot of people with a lot of evidence said the Roosevelt knew Pearl was going to be attacked — and that he let it happen. . . . I couldn’t stop thinking how horrible that would be. . .and how Pearl was what got us off our duffs in time to stop the Axis. But

a lot of innocent men died. But we won the war. It bounced back andforth in my head until I realized I couldn’t judge it. It was too big. He was too big. . . .”}

^{2.– Writing in the Hooded Utilitarian, Noah Berlatsky has noted that, in many of its particulars, the whole superhero concept is pretty gay: “To begin with, super-heroes generally have a secret life, a ‘secret identity,’ that they can’t talk about even to their closest friends and

relations. In other words, they are all closeted. And what’s in that closet? A hypermasculine, muscle-bound body, swathed in day-glo tights; an uber-manly man whose physical tussles with the bad guys preclude any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Out of costume, on the other hand, the hero is a feminized sissy-boy, whose painful secret prevents him from having any meaningful relationship with the leading

lady. Either way, what looked like iconic maleness starts to look, from up close, rather queer. And that’s not even getting into the whole boy sidekick thing.”}

^{3.– Turing tells his interrogator, “Of course machines can’t think as people do. A machine is different than a person. Of course it thinks differently.” But then, he notes, how astonishingly different people are

from each other, and concludes, rhetorically: “What’s the point of variation if not to say that we think differently?”}

Where Angels Fear to Tread: Constantine, Promethea, and the Fool

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Kristian Williams

Part One: Constantine

1969 ends with a surprise—the seventies.

In its last three pages, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Century: 1969 suddenly departs from the eponymous year and drops us, without warning, a decade further on. The bright, LSD Technicolor has washed out of London, replaced with a heroin gray that never even fades to black, but only to darker and sootier grays. The place seems desolate, desperate, depressed, a throwback to the Ingsoc years, but without a Big Brother to blame. The Basement, a “Beat Club,” “where the Rutles first played London, apparently,” is now Debasement, a seedy punk bar where at closing time they probably don’t bother to sweep up the broken glass. The sixties, so hopeful at the peak, seemed to promise the world. The seventies promised nothing, and delivered. Nihilism is all the rage.

Another change as well: There’s an old man, who looks like a young man. Or is he a young man, who looks old beyond his years? He sits alone, slumped at a table, dejected. He has short, slightly spiky hair—more Richard Hell than Billy Idol—and he hasn’t shaved in a couple of days. He wears a suit that was probably pretty sharp when he put it on, but now looks like he slept in it—and, over that, a dingy trench coat. We know he is Allan Quartermain, but there at the end, I would swear he is John Constantine.

He may well be both.

We’ve seen this trick before. Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary, chapter seven (“To be in England, in the Summertime”), begins by announcing the death of a Constantine stand-in named John Carter. “Who’s John Carter?” Elijah Snow asks.

“Old friend of ours,” Jakita says. “Had serious connections in the occult underground. Real player in the eighties.”

“The word,” the Drummer cuts in, “. . . is scumbag.”

We turn the page and we see him, in Jakita’s memory, slightly unkempt hair, cynical expression, trench coat. He is lighting a cigarette. By the end, we learn that Carter/Constantine is not really dead. He shows up, head shaved, the moon forming a halo behind him. When he takes off the trench coat, we see that he’s wearing a black sports jacket and no shirt underneath. Large, bold, black tattoos adorn his chest. Suddenly Jack Carter isn’t John Constantine anymore; he’s Spider Jerusalem instead.

“The eighties are long over,” he says. “Time to move on. Time to be someone else.”

He walks away, into the darkness, leaving behind the smallest drift of smoke, twisting like a question mark.

Both of these stories are, in their way, stories about stories. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen began by assembling a Victorian superhero team—Quatermain, Wilhelmina Murray, Captain Nemo, Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man—and filling their world with fictions borrowed from other fictions. Subsequent volumes in the series have followed the key characters as the years progressed and they grew old—or, in some cases, thanks to a Fountain of Youth, did not. Moore, then, does what he does best, simultaneously deploying adventure story tropes and commenting upon them.

Ellis does something similar in Planetary, where a team of “mystery archaeologists” tries to uncover “the secret history of the twentieth century,” and thus encounters alternate-world versions of superheroes, movie monsters, pulp adventurers, mad scientists, and other pop-culture figures. Here, too, the stories are critiqued even as they are told.

Moore borrowed Quatermain, but invented Constantine; Ellis borrowed Constantine, but invented Jerusalem. The transition—Quatermain, Constantine, Jerusalem—is interesting in several respects. For one thing, it is broadly in keeping with important aspects of each’s character’s story.

Allan Quartermain, whom Alan Moore once dismissed as “just another white imperialist out to exploit the natives” becomes, in the League‘s story, something more and something else. When we first find him he is a heroin addict, old and pathetic, strung out, filthy, and waiting to die. It takes a woman in danger to bring him back to his old self. And yet he doesn’t remain his old self. He grows tender, broadens, changes. He comes to respect Miss Murray as an equal, then to love her, then to love, also, the androgynous and immortal Orlando. He travels to a magic pool and comes back a young man, posing as his own son. He is no longer the “old” Quartermain at all. Alan Moore thus reinvents Allan Quatermain. And Allan Quatermain reinvents himself.

Constantine, as a kind of magical con artist, lives by his wits. He is constantly adapting, constantly improvising. The central conflict of Hellblazer is that of the individual, a mere human, confronting powers much greater than himself—heaven, hell, and Margaret Thatcher. The question the series poses, taken as a whole, is how much of a bastard can one be and remain a decent sort of guy? Or, at times: How much of a bastard does one have to be? Of course, the temptation—for John and for his writers—is always to push it too far. The challenge for the writer is to stay true to the character; the challenge for John Constantine is to stay true to himself.

Transmetropolitan poses many of the same questions, the same challenges. Spider Jerusalem is a rogue journalist, a cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson, determined to tell the truth and consequences be damned. The story he’s pursuing, or a crucial part of it, concerns the persecution of the “Transient” community, a rather cultish group who alters their genetics to become part alien. In other words, Transmetropolitan is about the relationship between integrity and autonomy, and in particular the defense of the second being required for the preservation of the first.

A theme uniting the two transitions—Quartermain to Constantine, Constantine to Jerusalem—is the idea that heroic characters are expressions of the cultural needs of their eras. Thus Jakita’s explanation for the “faintly ridiculous” appearance of the Vertigo heroes: “They’re eighties people.” And furthermore, they’re English: “England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” Thus, also, Alan Moore’s observation in his introduction to The Dark Knight Returns: “[H]eroes are starting to become rather a problem. They aren’t what they used to be. . . or rather they are, and therein lies the heart of the difficulty.” He goes on to explain: “The world about us has changed and is continually changing at an ever-accelerating pace. So have we.” However, despite advances in technical knowledge and social conscience, “comic books have largely had to plod along with the same old muscle-bound oafs spouting the same old muscle-bound platitudes while attempting to dismember each other.” Changing times, he says, demand “new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.” Our heroes have to change.

The personal tension in 1969—between Mina, Allan, and Orlando—largely hinges on their different approaches to adapting to the new times. Mina is somewhat desperately trying to adopt the most up-to-date dress and slang, an affectation that her teammates find ridiculous. It’s easier for Allan, at least on the surface, as men’s fashions are more stable (witness the iconic trench coat) and the culture is more forgiving to men as they age—not that he ages, exactly. But Mina, perhaps because of her earlier, less idyllic experiences with immortals, has picked up on something deeper. She fears obsolescence, becoming “fossilised as a Victorian freak” in a world that will grow increasingly alien. For Orlando it is different. Orlando is always changing—names, sexes, allegiances; even her history is subject to revision—and Orlando is never changing. He, or she, is a constant throughout history, always present where the drama unfolds, cynical and self-centered past the point of narcissism. Whatever tragedy he may witness, we can be sure that he will be counted among the survivors. Fashions change, ideas changes, and Orlando will take them up, or not, as it suits her. His very mercurial nature is a kind of constancy; whatever else happens, Orlando will adapt and survive. There is a stable center beneath the shifting appearances, the momentary attachments. And so, in the shadows and grime of the seventies, as they discuss Mina’s disappearance and the end of their League, it is naturally Orlando who gets up and leaves. Quatermain remains, unsure what else he could do.

Part Two: The Fool

In Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman and Paul Johnson present Constantine as an archetype drawn from the Tarot. Dressed as the Fool, he mocks, and riddles, and provokes.

The occultist Arthur Edward Waite wrote of the Fool:

“With light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him, a young man in gorgeous vestments pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world; he surveys the blue distance before him – its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below. . . . The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height. His countenance is full of intelligence and expectant dream. . . . He is the spirit in search of experience.”

Johannes Fiebig and Evelin Bürger add that the card’s number, Zero, “indicated a very personal bottom line, the self, the starting point from which everything else flows. This is the beginning and the end of that which makes you a unique person.” They advise: “You must have the courage to face the future, even if you cannot predict or determine the future in advance. You must have the courage to walk your own path and to be open, even if your back isn’t covered, and even if conventional wisdom and common sense suggest otherwise.”

In Promethea, Alan Moore, Constantine’s creator and a practicing magician himself, describes the Fool in verse:

“Indeed in blithe, uncaring bliss

The Fool steps o’er a precipice

As if he trusts the winds, so chill,

To bear him wheresoe’er they will.

Thus any venture is begun,

This reckless step from naught to one.

It’s magic’s foremost trick, I guess,

How something comes from nothingness.”

In some depictions, the Fool is accompanied by a bird (perhaps representing freedom) or a butterfly (transformation). Moore’s Promethea and Gaiman’s Books of Magic—stories of quests, in which a novice is introduced into the world of magic—both show the butterfly in their versions, or in the first case, a Promethea moth. Moore’s Fool seems to be following it over the edge.

Gaiman has made use of the Fool before. In the Sandman series, Destruction, who has long ago abdicated his responsibilities, decides he cannot stay in the home he has made for himself since abandoning his realm.

“What will you do now?” Dream asks.

“I will make the most of what I’ve got. I shall live out my days doing what I have to do, one day at a time. Life, like time, is a journey through darkness.”

A few pages later, Dream inquires again, “You are going now?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Oh, out there, somewhere. Up, out.”

We see him, carrying a stick with a bundle knotted at the end, walking up into space, until he is as small and as bright as a star. It is the Fool, stepping over the edge at last, and rising rather than falling.

Destruction, like the Fool, has a dog for a companion. “Barnabas can be a bit of a pain,” Destruction says, “and he has no poetry in his soul, but he means well.” In the Tarot, the dog represents caution, prudence, and common sense; he sounds a warning as the Fool approaches the cliff. It is fitting that Destruction, or the man who was once Destruction, when he steps into the sky, leaves the dog behind, on firm ground.

The theme of transformation—”time to be someone else”—is in fact the moral of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series: “One must change or die.” Destruction decides to change; Morpheus, to die.

Constantine’s greatest trick was probably surviving for as long as he did. He is after all, just a working-class bloke with a habit of getting in over his head. If he could be said to have powers at all, they would consist chiefly of arrogance, recklessness, a certain rakish charm, and a large measure of pure blind luck, along with knowing a little of magic and a lot of people. It is, in fact, precisely the same qualities that get him into trouble and get him out of it.

As William Blake wrote in his “Proverbs of Hell”:

“A fool who would persist in his folly becomes wise.

Folly is the cloak of knavery.”

The Fool is a knave by another name. “Not John,” Constantine’s end-of-everything doppelganger tells Tim Hunter, “But Jack . . . Jack Fool. . . . A Jack-a-Napes when I tell riddles and merry tales; Jack Pudding, when I play my pranks. . . .” And the jack in a deck of cards is sometimes also called the knave.

This knave, cloaked in folly, knows more than he says. Moore writes:

“What magic shaped the way things fell?

The Fool smiles, knows, but does not tell.”

When young Tim Hunter asks the Constantine-Fool, “I’m meant to be learning about magic. What have you got to tell me?” The reply is a feint of ignorance: “Me, good sir? What do I know of magic? Why, nothing, my masters. Nothing at all.” But as he speaks, as he tells them he has nothing to say, he is at the same moment creating and then juggling balls of white flame—literally playing with fire. Is he brazenly lying, or is he hinting at a deeper truth—that there is daring but no wisdom, that magic is a question of will rather than knowledge? Is it skill or is it luck? Constantine’s brand of magical bluffing suggests that the two often amount to much the same thing. The only trick is not losing your nerve until you see it through to the end, whatever that may be.

Part Three: Promethea

In Snakes and Ladders, Alan Moore tells of seeing John Constantine in a sandwich shop: “He looks at me. He nods, and smiles, and walks away.” (He smiles, knows, and does not tell.)

“Years later,” Moore continues,”in another place, he steps out from the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: ‘I’ll tell you the ultimate secret of magic.'” We see him, cigarette in hand, and a slight, mischievous smile. Moore leans toward him, listening.

“‘Any cunt could do it’,” Constantine says.

The casual manner is a pose. Constantine promises to tell us a secret—or more, the secret—then seems not to, but actually does. It’s not just showmanship, it’s illustrative. It is itself a part of the secret—the smiling, knowing, telling, not telling. (“What do I know of magic? Why, nothing…. Nothing at all.“) It’s a coded language, a teasing performance full of double meanings. The profanity is part of it as well. “[The] profane and scared are both one,” Moore writes. Cunt, you understand: Is it literal or metaphorical? And what is the difference?

Moore’s Promethea is another story of an artist conjuring a fictional character into reality. A young student, Sophie Bangs, is researching a mythical figure who recurs in stories throughout the history of literature. What she discovers is that

“Promethea was a real little girl who lived in 5th century Roman Egypt. Her father was a hermetic scholar. . . sort of like a magician. A Christian mob killed him. . . But the gods intervened, taking his daughter into their world of myth and fiction, The Immateria. Promethea became a living story, growing up in the realm that all dreams and stories come from. Sometimes, she’d wander into the imagination of mortals. . . . Some of them, taken over by this powerful living idea, even physically became Promethea. . . . See, anyone with imagination and enough enthusiasm for the character can bring her through from the Immateria, by thinking themselves or others into the role.”

Sophie becomes the latest incarnation of Promethea, leading her—and therefore, also, the reader—on a instructive quest to learn about magic, or at least the basics of Alan Moore’s theory of it. Some of what she learns helps to elucidate the meaning of Constantine’s secret.

The magician Jack Faust instructs her: “The vessel between woman’s thighs is the cup’s highest aspect. The chalice. The grail of divine compassion.” Later, they have sex, and he continues:

“Magicians, irrespective of their gender, are male. Their symbol is the wand, the male member, because they are that which seeks to penetrate the mystery. But once they succeed—then they become magic. They become the mystery, become that which is penetrated. They become female.”

This is all rather literal in the story. Writers and artists, their pens and pencils serving as their wands, approach a woman who is not only mythic but myth itself, who is imaginary and who represents imagination. Those who are most successful, at least one man included, then actually become her.

Later, Sophie encounters a female Aleister Crowley, who reiterates Faust’s point: “Here, magicians become magic itself. The penetrator becomes the penetrated. Male becomes female.”

Sex is magic, magic is creation. Magic is about transformation, change. But it is also about unity, and the unity of opposites in particular—illusion and reality, male and female, virgin and whore, sacred and profane. Something doesn’t just come from nothing: the emptiness contains everything within it already. Zero means nothing, but it is also the number of infinite potential. Transformation is also a revelation, and the revelation transforms. Magic is a system, a system of meanings, perhaps of essences—but it is an unstable system, a destabilizing system. That is why it is transgressive. That is why it is dangerous.

And in a sense it is dangerous whether it exists or not. Magic may not be real in the way that toothbrushes and parking meters are. But stories are real; symbols are real. They may only exist in the mind, or in the culture, but they have real effects. Tampering with the symbols, Moore argues repeatedly, changes consciousness, changes the meaning of things. If this idea is even remotely correct—and for these purposes it makes no difference whether we conceive of the process as “magic,” as Moore does, or simply as “art”—then the project of re-imagining our heroes takes on new importance, and greater urgency. It’s not just about having better comics, but about finding new ways of seeing the world, and new ways of being in it. Changing ideas changes the world. It’s just a matter of imagination, and having the nerve to take the first step.

When Sophie next encounters Crowley he is dressed as the Fool, sitting at the bottom of an ornate staircase reaching to the heavens. At the top, he tells her, one can “behold the vision of God, face to face.” Crowley, the gloomy Fool, waits uncertainly, despondently. “I’ve always been sitting undecidedly here,” he says. But also, he says, “I’ve always been there,” up above. “You go ahead,” he tells Sophie. “Good luck with God.”

God turns out to be the moment of creation: “Something from nothing. One from none. . . . Always here. Always now. . . . One perfect moment, when everything happens.” Implicit in that moment is the unity of all Being. “All one. All God. . . . We are each other. And we are God. . . . And God is one. And one is next to nothing.” There, in that bliss of oneness and that barely-there heaven, along with everything else, is (again) the Fool—the familiar image this time, the one taken from the Tarot. Satchel over his shoulder, dog barking behind him, his next step will take him over the ledge. Perhaps there is some slight resemblance to Crowley.

And from that ultimate height, one finds another edge. Looking down one sees the universe, arrayed like the Kabbalah. Sophie steps over, and falls back into our world.

We Can Be Heroes: Donnie Darko and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Kristian Williams

Adult Eyes

I spent my adolescence in Midlothian, Virginia, a suburb of Richmond, and graduated high school in 1992. At the time, I would have told you that my life was boring and lonely. Looking back now, with adult eyes, I think I likely misunderstood the situation. I was in fact, very busy, and on the whole I did things that I enjoyed. And while I was never what anyone would call popular, I had several friends — good friends, lasting friends — so much so that two decades later I am still close to some of them, though we live thousands of miles apart and see each other rarely. The problem was not that I was bored or lonely. The problem was that I was alienated.

I felt unnatural, out of place, lost, confused, disoriented, like a stranger who didn’t quite speak the language, like I was always, somehow, in the wrong before I even had a chance to act. Others treated me that way as well. They looked on me with suspicion, sometimes hatred, occasionally disgust. I felt oppressed, not only by the suffocating atmosphere of conformity, but by the very normalcy of the people around me.

And I wasn’t the only one. I was practically surrounded with other weirdos, other kids who felt trapped, and resentful, and sad. One of those other weirdos was Richard Kelly.

I didn’t know Kelly, and I don’t remember meeting him, seeing him, or hearing stories about him. But when I saw his film Donnie Darko, the sense of familiarity was unnerving and uncanny, like my internal experience was being projected onto the screen.¹ It was only later that I learned why Donnie’s Middlesex so closely resembled my Midlothian; it was Kelly’s Midlothian as well.

I had a similar feeling, slightly diluted, watching Stephen Chbosky’s film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower.² The resonances are less intimate and more generic — in Darko, Drew Barrymore’s character, Donnie’s English teacher, is obviously modeled on my eleventh grade English teacher; whereas in Wallflower, the points of contact are more about The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Smiths — but the sense of connection is real nonetheless.

Both these movies are about alienated youths. Both are set in the suburbs of mid-sized Eastern cities, Richmond in Darko and Pittsburgh in Wallflower. One takes place in the late 80s, the other in the early 90s. And both are, in a weird way, almost (if not quite) superhero stories.

Some Sort of Superhero

Donnie’s heroism begins in a very small way. Gretchen, the new girl at school, is being harassed by the local bullies and Donnie happens by.

“Do you want to walk me home?” she asks.

“Sure.”

It’s the beginning of a friendship, a romance. He asks why she moved to Middlesex, and she tells him that her stepdad tried to kill her mom, stabbing her repeatedly. Now they have a restraining order and had to change their names. Her stepfather has “emotional problems,” she tells him with a kind of resentful scorn.

“Oh, I have those, too,” Donnie replies, too eagerly.

Donnie suffers hallucinations, which turn out to be premonitions. He has an imaginary friend, Frank, “a six foot tall bunny rabbit” with a skull for a face, who Donnie sometimes sees when he looks in the mirror. Frank tells Donnie that the world will end on Halloween. Frank also tells Donnie to vandalize his school, leads him to find and take a handgun, and has him set fire to the house of a cloying inspirational speaker. (When firefighters arrive at the house they discover “a kiddie porn dungeon”; the guru is arrested, and Donnie escapes.) Later, on Halloween, Donnie saves a senile old woman from some hooligans who break into her house, but Gretchen dies as a result. Then, by arranging himself to be pulled into a time vortex — he sacrifices himself and saves the world.

“Donnie Darko?” Gretchen says, incredulously. “What the hell kind of name is that? It’s like some sort of superhero or something.”

Donnie smirks. “What makes you think I’m not?”

Psychos Together

Less bleak, and more solidly realistic, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a sweet movie, even a bit sentimental. It’s as much about friendship as loneliness, as much about belonging as alienation.

Charlie is a freshman, friendless, “the weird kid who spent time in the hospital.” He’s shy, he’s lonely, he’s bullied. He thinks that “high school is even worse than middle school,” until he makes friends with a pair of seniors, Sam and her stepbrother Patrick, and they bring him into their circle. “Welcome to the island of misfit toys,” Sam says.

After that, Charlie spends the rest of the year hanging out, suffering through a bad-idea-from-the-start first romance, taking drugs, reading A Separate Peace and A Catcher in the Rye, helping Sam study for her SATs, going to Rocky Horror, and basically doing normal high school stuff — normal, anyway, for weird kids in the early 90s. Of course Charlie isn’t really a normal kid. His best friend killed himself a few months earlier, and since then he’s been seeing things, hearing things, and always just about two steps away from a breakdown. Most of the year he keeps it under control. His friends help to keep him sane.

But then one day in the cafeteria —

A jock trips Patrick, and another calls him a “faggot,” and soon there is a fight. Kids gather around to watch, in the appalling way they do. What we know, but they don’t, is that one of these jocks is Patrick’s lover.

Three football players pull Patrick off their friend. Two hold his arms, and a third punches him again and again. Charlie is rushing toward the fight when everything slows down, becomes distorted, and goes black. A moment later, all the kids are staring at him and everyone is quiet. The bullies lay on the ground, obviously hurt. Charlie looks down and sees that his knuckles are almost black with bruises. The other kids look at him with a kind of amazed horror.

“I can’t really remember what I did,” he confesses later.

“Do you want me to tell you?” Sam asks. “You saved my brother. That’s what you did.”

But Charlie doesn’t feel like a hero. He feels like a monster, a freak. “So you’re not scared of me?” he asks, nervously.

Sam looks at him then with a combination of pity and gratitude. She looks at him with love. “C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go be psychos together.”

Tear Us Apart

Alienation and friendship, the heroic and the monstrous — these things are tied together. Love is most precious precisely where alienation is most acute. And sometimes, perhaps, our friends are just those people who can see what is heroic about the parts of ourselves that are most monstrous.

Also, for both Donnie and Charlie, it is love for their friends that inspires their heroism. Charlie spends most of a year being bullied by older, meaner kids, but he only hulks out when he sees his friend is being hurt. Donnie deeply hates the place he lives and the people around him. He wants, at least subconsciously, to destroy it all — to “burn it to the ground.” In the end, he is the hero, the savior — but he might not have been.

Donnie is also identified, earlier in the film, with the adolescent vandals in Graham Greene’s story “The Destructors,” which his English class is reading. In the story, young men break into a house and destroy it, in part by flooding it with water. Donnie, then, in a kind of psychotic sleepwalking trance, breaks into the school and opens up a water main, then attacks a statue of the mascot with an axe. Discussing the Greene story in class, Donnie is asked why he thinks the boys trashed the house. “Destruction is a form of creation,” he quotes (with echoes of Bakunin).³ “They just want to see what happens when they tear the world apart. They want to change things.” Donnie can sympathize. Throughout the movie he is at odds with various types of authority — teachers and principals, parents, his therapist, the creepy pop-psych-Christian motivational speaker — as well as school bullies, his sisters, and sometimes even his friends. His whole suburban, Republican, private school, country club, psych med world is suffocating and oppressive — and yet he acts to save it.

Donnie can only be reconciled to this world through his death. But that is a choice, which he could make or refuse. He can save it if he chooses, and life will continue much as it was, but without him. Or he could end it all, simply by doing nothing.

I think that Donnie embraces his role, not (or not just) as an elaborate form of suicide, and not to save the world in a metaphysical sense, and surely not to save the world in the narrow social sense in which he inhabits it, and probably not even to save his family — but to save Gretchen. It is not until she is killed that he races toward the wormhole and when he reaches it, and finds himself in bed, weeks earlier, waiting for the mysterious accident — a jet engine that crashes into his room — to kill him. He offers a victorious laugh. Donnie Darko does not die for our sins; he is not trying to save the world. He dies for the love of one girl, which is more heroic in its way. He trades his life for hers. “Love will tear us apart” plays in the background.

Tunnel Songs

In Darko, the soundtrack is almost a kind of narration. Echo and the Bunnymen and The Church weave together themes of fatalism and free will (“Leads you here despite your destination”; “Fate/Up against your will”), while Gary Jules and Micheal Andrews (with their cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World”) also incorporate those feelings of banal desperation:

“All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
…

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello teacher, tell me, what’s my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me

And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had”

All three of these songs — given their desolate tone (“loveless fascination,” “So cruelly you kissed me”), their nocturnal imagery (“the killing moon,” “under the milky way”) , and even the name of the band Echo and the Bunnymen — seem like they could have been written for the film. I suspect that is because Richard Kelly managed to convey cinematographically the sullen, gloomy mood of 80s New Wave, and to remember the way such music does — or at least did — serve as the soundtrack for the lives of a certain type of adolescent, touching their deepest feelings, echoing their secret thoughts.

Music is a plot point in Wallflower. Charlie listens to The Smiths’ lullaby/suicide note “Asleep” almost endlessly, and puts it (twice) on a mix-tape for Patrick. It conveys a sense of depressed, lonely surrender (“Deep in the cell of my heart, I really want to go”), followed by the dream of “another world. . . a better world.” The song reflects the duality of alienation and rebellion, as does another featured prominently in the film — David Bowie’s “Heroes.” The three friends — Charlie, Patrick, and Sam — listen to “Heroes” while they drive through a tunnel, late at night. Sam stands up in the back of the truck, arms out, the wind in her face. It feels like flying. It feels, as Charlie puts it, “infinite.”

Later, after his breakdown, Charlie receives a note from Sam. “I know you will come flying out of the tunnel,” she writes, “and feel free.”

Both of these songs — “Heroes” and “Asleep” — find a kind of victory in defeat, but the emphasis is reversed. Where Morrissey is resigned, Bowie is defiant:

“Though nothing will drive them away

We can beat them, just for one day
We can be Heroes, just for one day”

Dangerous Gifts

It’s no secret that superhero stories are often a kind of adolescent fantasy: the weak become strong; the outcasts, triumphant. But they are only fantasies, and in the real world the pressures of adolescence are less likely to result in mutant superpowers, and more likely to produce psychosis. It may be that the kind of psychosis we see in Donnie Darko and Perks of Being a Wallflower is just a hypertrophied cinematic portrayal of normal adolescent alienation, that to represent the depth and the gloom of the feeling, we need to connect it to madness and violence, which do, after all, often feel so closely related. If so, then these movies are a darker, more fearsome reflection of the superhero fantasy. Our adolescent selves may long to be like Spiderman or the X-men, but we feel like Donnie and Charlie. In fact, we long for the former because of the latter. The fantasy is a response to the fear.

Darko and Wallflower pull this transference back in the other direction. Here the outcast is the hero; the weakling and the freak really do save the day. Charlie does it, in part, by incorporating the fantasy into his reality (“Don’t dream it, be it”); he addresses his journal to an imaginary friend. Donnie does so by fully entering the fantasy. He follows the rabbit; he goes through the looking glass. What he finds, as a result, is more real than his wealthy suburb and his private school — at least it is more real to him.

The metaphysics of Donnie Darko are complex. It is not simply a time-travel story. Instead, as explained (or at least theorized) by a book Donnie’s teacher loans him, The Philosophy of Time Travel, most of the story occurs in a “Tangent Universe,” which has spun off from the normal universe. It is, as the book puts it, “highly unstable,” and when it inevitably collapses, rejoining the standard time stream, it risks “destroying all existence.” Though the mechanics aren’t entirely clear, this catastrophe can be averted, through the intervention of a figure called “The Living Receiver”:

“The Living Receiver is often blessed with Fourth Dimensional Powers. These include increased strength, telekinesis, mindcontrol, and the ability to conjure fire and water. . . . The Living Receiver is often tormented by terrifying dreams, visions, and auditory hallucinations during his time within the Tangent Universe.”

Donnie easily recognizes himself in this description, and he does in the end take on this role and save the world. He dies, the Tangent collapses, and the events of the previous month are erased. The world does end, but only this other world, which no one recalls. Or, put another way: The world does end, but only for Donnie. He is a sacrifice, and no one knows it. The clock turns back. Gretchen has never met him. But some of those he saved suffer nightmares, visions. Is it guilt for his death? Or has his alienation somehow spread out, touching the community as a whole?

Secret Identities

Like superheros, all adolescents lead double lives. It is almost as though they inhabit two only partly overlapping worlds. There is the world of their parents, and school, and church, debate club and organized sports. And then there is the world of their friends, with drugs, and swearing, and cutting class, staying out all night, loud music, teen drama, bullying, and fights. It’s the second world, from the kids’ perspective, that is the real world. That is the world where things happen, where it matters. Sometimes those worlds are at war. And sometimes the first is just a prison to contain the second. But sometimes the first is a mask that the second wears, not to protect itself, but for the benefit of the adults it fools. It provides an illusion that our children are safe, sane, and happy — and when the illusion fails, we ask ourselves sadly what is wrong with them. Donnie’s therapist tells his parents: “Donnie’s aggressive behavior — his increased detachment from reality — seems to stem from his inability to cope with the forces in the world that he believes to be threatening.”

But maybe there’s nothing wrong with these kids, or nothing special. Maybe it’s just the world we’ve given them.

Toward the end of Wallflower, Charlie has a more serious break. He remembers his aunt, his “favorite person in the world” abusing him as a child, and it is tied, in his mind to her death in a car accident a short while later. He blames himself: “I killed Aunt Hellen, didn’t I? . . . What if I wanted her to die. . . ?”

When he wakes up, he is in the hospital. He tells his psychiatrist: “There’s so much pain, and I don’t know how to not notice it. . . . It’s everyone. It never stops. Do you understand?”

She might, she might not. What she tells him is, “We can’t change where we come from but we can choose where we go from there.”

It’s a happy ending. Which is to say, it’s a good start.

_____________

^{1. I am writing specifically about the director’s cut: Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut, written and directed by Richard Kelly (Newmarket, 2004). The basic argument would still apply to the theatrical release, but some details I mention might be different.}

^{2. Here I am writing about the film, not the book (which I haven’t read). The Perks of Being a Wallflower, written and directed by Stephen Chbosky (Summit Entertainment, 2012).}

^{3. “. . . destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.” Graham Greene, “The Destructors,” Complete Short Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 2005) 10.}

Watchmen vs Fail-Safe: A Short Response to Kristian Williams

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

Kristian Williams’ recent article on “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a worthy read but it does require some suspension of belief concerning the narrative logic of Watchmen.

Right at the outset, Williams ask his readers:

“Why are our reactions to these characters so different?”

The characters in question are Ozymandias from Watchmen and the President of the United States in Fail-Safe. Williams suggests that the answer lies in

“…their different attitudes toward that responsibility. The President is uncertain, reluctant. He looks for alternatives; he asks for a reprieve. Ozymandias is perfectly confident, perfectly clear. He is entirely resolute, unwavering in his agenda.”

“…the President, unlike Veidt, does not feel that it makes him good. He has not, in other words, lost his sense of humanity, and when it comes to questions of character that sense may be more important than mere morals.”

In this I’m afraid Williams is quite wrong. The reason we judge Ozymandias is because the nuclear holocaust in Watchmen is imminent but not inevitable—an existential threat which our world still lives under. In contrast, the nuclear holocaust in Fail-Safe is a virtual certainty requiring decisive action (possibly within minutes). Ozymandias’ response to the threat of nuclear war therefore mirrors the policy of preemption which characterized the disastrous wars of the Bush administration. This is anathema to liberals of Moore’s ilk but sweet music to all others.

More importantly, our antipathy for Ozymandias is made absolute by the nature of superhero narratives. These are narrative which contain palpable gods where none exist in reality. This is a decisive flaw and shatters any suppositions that the world of superheroes mirrors our own; for there are always alternatives to human action in such comics. This is something which Jeet Heer alluded to in his dissent concerning Watchmen‘s canonical status some years back.

The destruction of humanity is not a certainty when a god (albeit a fickle one) is on your side. This results in the (apparent) narrative confusion which underpins the central plot of Watchmen where the smartest man on earth—with presumably the best intentions—arranges for the departure of the single person who can prevent the destruction of mankind. As Williams indicates, it is Ozymandias’ actions which trigger the departure of Dr. Manhattan and hence the possibility of a nuclear conflagration. Like Prometheus he has seized the mantle of the gods for man, and his fate is just as inevitable. The deck, in a sense, has been stacked against Ozymandias.

One possible apology for Ozymandias’ seemingly illogical actions would be to propose true far sightedness on his part. He is afterall still a man and of limited years. Foreseeing the departure of that solitary god at some point in the distant future (well beyond his own lifespan), he preempts this departure to fashion a final solution to the nuclear problem. He foresees no other human being capable of this act of calculation. It is not manifestly true that “he wants at least as badly to be the one who saves [the world].”

Williams seeking to magnify Ozymandias’ hubris further suggests that

“…he leaves the remaining Watchmen alive, though they also know his secret. His brilliance requires admirers. They are no less likely to reveal the truth than his servants were, but they do not share in the victory… He leaves them alive, because he has proven himself superior, and they have accepted it.”

But I feel this is in error. Ozymandias leaves them alive eventually because Dr. Manhattan intervenes quite decisively to save them. It is impossible to say what he would have done following his defeat of them and the customary (for such genre pieces) explanations concluded. He certainly had no compunction about murdering the Comedian and assorted other obstacles who were similarly helpless and “did not share in his victory.” No one doubts Ozymandias’ arrogance but this is always overseen by cold arithmetic. One might say that the very name he has chosen for himself suggests an awareness of his own human frailty. When Williams states that:

“Moore, by invoking Shelley, recalls both meanings. Veidt’s works, which we witness directly in the chapter following, are indeed dreadful. And the peace they produce, Moore’s allusion suggests, cannot last.”

…he fails to mention that it is not only Moore who chooses this name but Veidt himself. And surely the smartest man in the world would be quite familiar with the various readings of Shelley’s poem. This might be a case of authorial failure—the choice of a name at odds with a character’s behavior throughout Watchmen. If taken in context, however, it suggests both vanity and doubt on the part of Veidt. Is it so hard to believe that Veidt would choose a name for himself which would call into question the very edifice which he has built? Or is he the megalomaniacal pulp villain proposed by Heer in his dissent?

* * *

There is another problem with elevating the morality of the protagonists of Fail-Safe over those in Watchmen. The comic posits a world controlled by self-centered failures if not madmen. Fail-Safe, on the other hand, attributes the destruction of humanity to human error, not human intention. In fact, it elevates—for quite obvious reasons—the President of the United States to a bastion of morality.

In contrast, an examination of the respective attitudes of Kennedy and Khrushchev to this same question would suggest considerable doubt as to the balance of morality and concern for the fate of mankind. All will be familiar with the standard narrative of Kennedy’s finest hour but at least one other version of events suggests a man willing to play “roulette with nuclear war”:

“Premier Khrushchev told President Kennedy in a message today he would withdraw offensive weapons from Cuba if the United States withdrew its rockets from Turkey.”

These were Jupiter missiles with nuclear warheads…These were obsolete missiles, already slated for withdrawal, to be replaced by far more lethal and effectively invulnerable Polaris submarines. Kennedy recognized that he would be in an “insupportable position if this becomes [Khrushchev’s] proposal”, both because the Turkish missiles were useless and were being withdrawn anyway, and because “it’s gonna – to any man at the United Nations or any other rational man, it will look like a very fair trade.”

“The two most crucial questions about the missile crisis are how it began, and how it ended. It began with Kennedy’s terrorist attack against Cuba, with a threat of invasion in October 1962. It ended with the president’s rejection of Russian offers that would seem fair to a rational person, but were unthinkable because they would undermine the fundamental principle that the US has the unilateral right to deploy nuclear missiles anywhere…”

One might say that it is the author of Fail-Safe who is deluded as to the true nature of man and of his elected leaders; and that it is Ozymandias who represents the true calculus of nuclear poker. As Chomsky relates in a recent interview:

“The Kennedy planners were making very dangerous choices and pursuing policies which they thought had a good chance of leading to nuclear war, and they knew that Britain would be wiped out. The U.S. wouldn’t, because Russia’s missiles couldn’t reach there but Britain would be wiped out…right at that time a senior American adviser said in an internal discussion that the British shouldn’t be told, that the U.S. can’t trust the British.”

If we find Ozymandias obviously evil, it is because we recognize ourselves in him. And if the President of the United States in Fail-Safe seems less reprehensible, it is because he represents nothing less than a righteous wish-giving pixie in a fairy tale.

Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Kristian Williams

It was August in Arizona and the heat was punishing. To escape it, a friend and I went to see a movie — Hannah Arendt. The film centers, not (as one might expect) on Arendt’s relationship with Heidegger, but on her coverage of the trial of SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann and her argument that, in his case, evil consisted not of malice or personal cruelty, but of allowing himself to be converted into an instrument for “an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth.” Here was evil, not as a Miltonian Lucifer, but as a Weberian bureaucrat. It was not romantic, it was banal. It was not rebellious, it was obedient. In fact, one might say that Eichmann’s evil was his obedience. He was responsible for so much, because he took responsibility for so little.

The next day, we drove a small distance from Tucson to visit the Titan Missile Museum. We were issued blue hard hats, and we toured the underground bunker, read the plaques explaining the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction, and watched as children simulated the launch sequence. Finally, we peered down into a silo, staring at the nose of a (now disarmed) ICBM. It was like staring into the barrel of a gun, but a gun pointed at the entire world. The tour guides were good-natured old men, who (I was later told) had all worked in some capacity on the construction or maintenance of the base. And the tone was a weird blend of duty-bound righteousness and nostalgic kitsch. The attitude was, “We saved the world from Communism, by God; now you can buy hammer-and-sickle patches as souvenirs.”

I left the base feeling a kind of sick dismay. I was reminded of my childhood at the twilight of the Cold War, the spy movies, my G.I. Joe’s, and 99 Red Balloons on the radio. I remembered the playground debates about whether it would be better to live in an irradiated wasteland or be incinerated instantly. I thought about how much my life was shaped, without my really understanding it, by these missiles, less than a minute from take-off, and the similar missiles, equally ready, somewhere in the USSR. It seemed to me, not only evil, but actually insane, and what was worse, a system of insanity — or two parallel systems, relying on innumerable men to maintain them. Maintaining them meant, in effect, preventing war by deliberately keeping us at the brink of extinction. The entire world was held hostage by two forces whose only demands were that we remain their hostages. It couldn’t possibly last. Standing at the edge of the silo, looking at that long, blunt rocket, I was sure of it. The idea was to save the world using a system designed to destroy it. It couldn’t work.

But of course it did. Mutually Assured Destruction worked. Neither side dared use their weapons knowing that the consequences would include their own annihilation. Or maybe neither side ever intended to use them, and it was just a shared paranoia that kept us at the edge of destruction for an entire generation. Either way, Communism fell, the Cold War ended, neither superpower fired missiles except within their own territory. Peace is our profession; exit through the gift shop.

False Alarm

Things did not go so well in Eugene Harvey and Burdick Wheeler’s novel Fail-Safe. An off-course airliner triggers a scramble of jets, which are then recalled once the plane is identified. The whole incident should have been routine, but a mechanical failure results in one bombing group — nuclear-armed and heading to Moscow — getting an irreversible go-ahead.

As the planes move toward their target, several small dramas unfold simultaneously. Presidential advisors argue for and against launching a full attack before the Soviets can respond. Military commanders try desperately to contact the crew and persuade them to abort; they then send the nearest fighters after them (pointlessly: with insufficient fuel, they crash into the Arctic Sea); they finally provide the Soviets secret technical information to aid in their defense. And the American President and the Soviet Premiere confer and reason together and negotiate to try to avoid Armageddon. (The President is unnamed throughout; he is played by Henry Fonda in the 1964 film, and Richard Dreyfus in the 2000 television production. The Premiere is identified as Khrushchev.)

The technical and the military solutions fail, and in the end it comes down to the negotiations. The problem is that both world leaders are trapped by the logic of the overall system. If the Russians hesitate in their response, it would leave an opening for a full offensive attack, should one be coming. And if the Russians counterattack, the US must also launch its missiles, for exactly the same reason.

Neither side can allow an attack to go unpunished, without exposing themselves to worse. The theory of Mutually Assured Destruction demands that the threats on both sides be credible. Nobody can afford to deescalate.

“‘I am trapped, Mr. President,’ Mr. Khrushchev said. His voice was riddled with despair. ‘I am perfectly prepared, Mr. President, to order our whole offensive apparatus to take action. In fact, I intend to do precisely that unless you can persuade me that your intentions were not hostile and that there is some chance for peace.’ . . .

“‘I am aware of that,’ the President said. ‘But I will do anything in my power to demonstrate our good will. I only ask that you not take any irrevocable step. Once you launch bombers and ICBMs everything is finished. I will not be able to hold back our retaliatory forces and then it would be utter devastation for both of us.'”

In the end, the President offers a solution. If the bombs reach Moscow, he will order a near-simultaneous attack on New York — “four 20-megaton bombs. . . in precisely the pattern and altitude in which our planes have been ordered to bomb Moscow.” It will prove to the Russians that the bombing was accidental, meet the need for a proportionate response, but avoid the escalation toward full war. The President reasons: “We will each have lost our largest city. But most of our people and our wealth and our property and our social fabric will remain. It is an awful calculation. I could think of no other.” The Russian Premier soberly accepts the offer, and that is just what happens. Having destroyed Moscow by mistake, the President destroys New York deliberately, and the world is saved.

Staged Attack

New York is similarly lost, and the world likewise saved, in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel, Watchmen. As the US and USSR lurch toward nuclear war, the super-genius Adrian Veidt — a.k.a. Ozymandias — launches a faux inter-dimensional alien attack against New York, thus terrifying the superpowers into uniting against the common enemy and initiating a new era of global peace.

Veidt seems to have understood, as all sane people should, that if we continuously prepare to kill one another, eventually we will kill one another. But his genius lay in his solution to the problem. Rather than appeal to reason or morality, he instead mobilizes the fear that leads us toward Mutually Assured Destruction, directing it instead against an outside threat. Fear then becomes the motive for peace rather than for war. Our belligerence is directed against a fictitious enemy, so the outbreak of real hostilities is impossible.

In terms of measurable outcomes, Ozymandias’ success is greater than that of the unnamed Fail-Safe President, and comes at less of a cost. Ozymandias achieves lasting peace by destroying a single city — in fact, only half of New York — while the President destroys two in their entirely. In the novel, the President and the Premier pledge to pursue disarmament (the movie adaptations are less explicit). But the President is a tragic figure, an imperfect human being doing his best in an impossible situation. (“His face was slack, softened by despair. . . . His eyes were dark, but the pupils glittered like small pools of agony. . . . ‘We do what we must,’ he said slowly. . . . [T]he President’s face reflected the ageless, often repeated, doomed look of utter tragedy.”) Ozymandias, in contrast, comes across as a megalomaniac willing to sacrifice millions to his own self-righteous ego. Or as the Silk Spectre so concisely put it, just before trying to shoot him: “Veidt. . . You’re an asshole.”

Guilt and Grief

Why are our reactions to these characters so different?

One is tempted to suggest that it reflects a difference in responsibility. The President, by this account, is a hapless victim of circumstance; he responds as well as he could to a situation he did not create. Veidt, on the other hand, deliberately provokes the crisis to which he responds. But the President himself rejects this interpretation. In the televised version, when the Russian Premiere offers what little comfort he can — “Who can be blamed? Can you blame a machine?” — the President refuses his consolation and insists on their shared responsibility: “Men built those machines, Mr. Chairman. . . . Men are responsible for what they do. Men are responsible for what they make. We built those machines, Mr. Chairman — your country and mine.”

The difference between the President and Ozymandias lies, I believe, not with the fact of their responsibility, but in their different attitudes toward that responsibility. The President is uncertain, reluctant. He looks for alternatives; he asks for a reprieve. Ozymandias is perfectly confident, perfectly clear. He is entirely resolute, unwavering in his agenda. Upon seeing his plan unfold, Veidt is triumphant. “I did it!” he shouts, arms raised like a victorious athlete. The President expresses no such satisfaction. He feels, instead, guilt and grief. Ozymandias tells us, in his sanctimonious way, “I’ve made myself feel every death” — but we don’t believe him. He even kills his servants, who have remained loyal throughout and doubtless guarded many secrets before. “Do you understand my shame at so inadequate a reward?” he asks the dead men rhetorically. And it should shame him — but of course it doesn’t. It is his unbelievable egotism that motivates him, not the need to cover his tracks. Veidt eliminates his accomplices so that he need not share his “secret glory.”

Interestingly, he leaves the remaining Watchmen alive, though they also know his secret. His brilliance requires admirers. They are no less likely to reveal the truth than his servants were, but they do not share in the victory. All they accomplished, he points out, was “failing to prevent earth’s salvation.” He leaves them alive, because he has proven himself superior, and they have accepted it. That was his dream all along, not only to unite the world, but show himself worthy of conquering it. His attitude toward humanity has been, always, one of superiority and contempt.

Truth and Consequences

Another difference: Veidt, while hungry for the admiration of his fellow heroes, can only act in secret. The President must acknowledge what he has done. The public may judge it right or wrong — rightly or wrongly — but they will judge it. “‘We must sacrifice some so that others can survive,’ the President said and his voice was weary. ‘I do not know how the Americans will take my action. It may be my last. I hope they will understand.'” The President accepts responsibility, accepts that he will be judged for his actions. Veidt’s plan depends on its secrecy, not merely in its execution, but in perpetuity.

Rorschach dies because he would not accept the noble lie. He knows that this refusal means his death, that it could mean everyone’s death: “Not even in the face of Armageddon,” he declares. “Never compromise.” He accepts death. He could just as easily swear himself to secrecy and then break his oath — except that he would not. It would violate his code of ethics. Torture and even killing on a mass scale do not — he praises Truman’s decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki repeatedly throughout the book — but the lie would. “People must be told,” he says, and he will not lie to save them from truths they will not face. And so he dies with a secret that may yet unravel all of Veidt’s plans: he does not tell the other heroes that he has sent his journal, including his theories about Veidt, to the press — albeit to the far-right conspiracy-mongering New Frontiersman. In the end, Rorschach does, as he promised at the beginning, refuse to save the world. (“All the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’ . . . and I’ll look down and whisper ‘no.'”) He dies then, if not happy, at least “without complaint,” knowing he “lived life free from compromise.”

Time and Luck

Ozymandias denies the judgment of humanity, and appeals only to the near-omniscient Dr. Manhattan for approval. Veidt says:

“I know I’ve struggled across the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity. . . . but someone had to take the weight of that awful, necessary crime. . . . I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all worked out in the end.”
“‘In the end’? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”

Veidt, finally, looks disconcerted. He suffers, not from grief, but from a moment of self-doubt.

What worries Ozymandias is the question of moral luck, irremovable from his justification for his actions. For Ozymandias’ justification relies importantly his success. Reasonable people may disagree as to whether it is right to kill millions of innocent people to save billions more. But if killing those innocents fails to save the rest, then no amount of good intentions will excuse murder.

Dr. Manhattan, by insisting on a permanent uncertainty, suggests that since success is never final, the justification must remain forever deferred. Moore, subtly or not, pushes the argument one step further and suggests that, since time defeats us all, victory can only ever be temporary, and thus serves badly as a foundation for moral argument. He named this character “Ozymandias,” after all, deliberately invoking the Shelley poem by that title:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Moore titles Chapter XI, in which Ozymandias tells his dying servants his life story and similarly reveals his plot to his superhero peers, “Look on my works, ye mighty. . .”. He quotes the entire inscription at the end of the chapter. But the inscription, here as in the original, carries a double meaning. The king Ozymandias declaims, “Look on my works,” referring to his conquests, his rule, and perhaps also to the statue memorializing both. The traveler and the poet, however, note that this boastful phrase has survived not only the king and his kingdom, but his dynasty, its memory, and even the sculpture itself. All that remains is a ruin, surrounded by a wasteland — the true works of power. Moore, by invoking Shelley, recalls both meanings. Veidt’s works, which we witness directly in the chapter following, are indeed dreadful. And the peace they produce, Moore’s allusion suggests, cannot last.

Sideshadows

There is another reason Veidt might doubt himself, and this would be the reason he seeks Dr. Manhattan’s counsel. For Veidt’s justification does not only rely on the contingent outcome of his actions — what in fact happens — it also relies on a counterfactual claim about what would have happened had he done otherwise. Veidt, partly guided by his own intelligence, but also convinced by the Comedian’s apocalyptic taunting (“Inside thirty years the nukes are gonna be flying like maybugs. . . and then Ozzy here is gonna be the smartest man on the cinder.”), determines that — absent extreme measures — nuclear war is “inevitable.” His theory seems justified when the Russians invade Afghanistan and both superpowers prepare for a direct confrontation. But that crisis was in fact precipitated by Veidt’s own plan, which necessitated removing Dr. Manhattan and disrupting the uneasy balance of power. (Also, let’s remember that in the real world the Soviet Union did invade Afghanistan, without unleashing a nuclear holocaust — though those events did, eventually, lead to an attack on New York.)

That Veidt himself seems to be harboring doubts is indicated by his confession that “By night. . . well, I dream about swimming towards a hideous. . . No, never mind. It isn’t significant.” What the reader can recognize, whether Veidt can or not, is that his dream is a reference to The Black Freighter, a pirate comic written by one of the creators of Veidt’s Lovecraftian alien. The story, excerpted intermittently throughout Watchmen, tells of a young sailor racing to warn his town of an impending attack from a ghostly “hell-ship.” He commits numerous horrors along the way, including the mistaken murder of his own family, only to realize in the end that no attack was ever planned and the demon vessel was only seeking to claim his soul. He reflects:

“Where was my error? . . . My deduction was flawless, step by step. . . . [But g]radually, I understood what innocent intent had brought me to, and, understanding, waded out beyond my depth. The unspeakable truth loomed before me as I swam towards the anchored freighter, waiting to take extra hands aboard.”

Between these scenes from the pirate story — the murder of the family before, and the realization of the monstrous futility and horrified guilt after — Veidt tells his servants his own life story, and kills them. Obviously Ozymandias is identified with this nameless sailor, and Moore implies that the catastrophe he averted may well have only been one of his own imagining. If this is so, then Veidt, too, despite the pride he takes in his clear-sightedness, became yet another victim of Cold War paranoia, committing atrocities to avert exaggerated threats. His plot then, and the mass murder it entails, are not only wicked, but pointlessly so.

Veidt turns to Dr. Manhattan, not only for answers, but for solace. Manhattan, however, is unconcerned with human affairs. He does not offer judgements, only predictions. “I understand, without condoning or condemning.” But perhaps by refusing to give Veidt the comfort he seeks, by leaving him to wonder, Dr. Manhattan is silently offering his own verdict.

Collateral Damage

Moore’s judgement is less ambiguous. Watchmen follows, alongside the adventures of the retired superheroes, the lives of some ordinary people: a lesbian couple, a news vendor, a young boy, a psychiatrist and his wife. Their conversations, their domestic tensions, and their jobs, run together and produce simultaneous crises, intersecting just as Veidt attacks New York. When the blast occurs, these minor characters have been confronted with an incident of quotidian violence — a couple’s fight, the sort of thing that must happen thousands of times every day in a city like New York. They die, all of them. Pages of silent gore follow.

Both Watchmen and Fail-Safe narratively bring the destruction closer and closer to the reader, but in Fail-Safe this effect highlights the sense of heroic sacrifice, while in Watchmen it only shows how detached the “hero” is.

Fail-Safe steadily draws the destruction toward the reader by drawing it toward the protagonists. Moscow, a foreign city, is destroyed, followed by New York, an American city. We know already that minor characters have family in New York, but then we learn that the President — who orders the strike — will also kill his wife in the process. And General Black, who drops the fatal bomb, not only kills his family as he does so, but commits suicide himself.

The 1964 film ends by breaking out of claustrophobic halls of power, where nearly all of the drama has unfolded, and transporting us suddenly to the city streets, where nothing special is happening. Director Sidney Lumet explained: “There are ten close-ups of the most ordinary street activity going on in New York. What was important to see was that ten little pieces of the life we had there ended at that point.”

There is no doubt that the President and the General feel the effects of their actions, and thus so does the audience. The emotional weight of the climax is provided by this sense of connection. The horror of the Watchmen, in contrast, is largely a result of Ozymandias’ cold detachment and pure utilitarian calculus. Our perspective, unlike his, is invested in the fates of individuals who perish in the attack. The newspaper vendor, the little boy, the psychiatrist and his wife, the cab driver and her girlfriend — they all die. Veidt does not know these people or care about their stories, but we do.

The notion that these people matter — even in the context of a superhero story, even in the face of Armageddon — tells us what we need to know of Moore’s opinion.

And in the end, we matter, too. In the final frame, we see a hand, reaching for — or hesitating over — a book. It is Rorschach’s journal, in the offices of the New Frontiersman. So much depends on what happens next: Will it be read and understood? or burned with the rest of the “crank file”? Will peace last? or will the lie be exposed, putting the world back on course for war? Yet the image must also remind us of our position as readers, of the book we hold in our hands — and also, of the relationship between the world we inhabit and that of the fictional story. There are no superheroes, there are no extra-dimensional aliens; but there really are nuclear bombs, and powerful people who lie to us, and secrets that cost lives.

The last line of dialogue can be read as a plea, from writer to reader, urging us to draw our own conclusions and to take responsibility: “I leave it entirely in your hands.”

The Price of Goodness

Both Ozymandias and the President are larger-the-life figures — superhero and tragic hero, respectively. Adolf Eichmann, in contract, was perfectly ordinary, entirely unexceptional. In Eichmann, Arendt said, we find, “not Iago and not Macbeth,” but discover instead the “banality of evil.”

Both Watchmen and Fail-Safe also feature this theme. The bureaucratic logic of the arms race ticks along, and innumerable people do their small part to keep it moving, if only by showing up and doing their jobs. That element is in the background of Watchmen, and the foreground of Fail-Safe, but it is present in both. In these stories, however, we also discover something besides the banality of evil, something different but equally disconcerting — the cruelty of good.

“Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity,” Oscar Wilde observed. “It is their distinguishing characteristic.” Of all the characters in Watchmen, Ozymandias is the least connected to other people. Rorschach has his friendship with the Nite Owl, Dan Dreiberg. Dr. Manhattan loves — in his fashion — Laurie Juspeczyk. Even the Comedian shares a moment of tenderness with the Silk Spectre. (“[He] was gentle,” she says ” You know what gentleness means in a guy like that? Even a glimmer of it?”). And he tries, in his way, to connect with their daughter, experiencing a sense of dejected loneliness when that effort is cut short. The only people Ozymandias calls “friends” are in fact his servants — whom he murders with barely a twinge of guilt. He does seem momentarily regretful when he kills his pet lynx in a skirmish with Dr. Manhattan — but even that is soon eclipsed by his glee at destroying half of New York.

Undoubtedly, Veidt is an egotist and a megalomaniac, but the fuel for his self-conceit is, even more than his intelligence, his devotion to goodness — which is identical, he seems to believe, with his devotion to his own goodness. His altruism and his egotism are not in conflict, they are two sides of the same coin. Veidt’s motives, while self-righteous and even self-aggrandizing, are neither selfless nor selfish. Of all of the Watchmen, none of the others have motives so pure, and none of the others commit crimes of such magnitude. He sacrifices millions to his goodness, and it is his goodness, he believes, that gives him the right.

Bad Morality

Adolf Eichmann, Lieutenant Colonel of the Nazi SS, was likewise driven by a sense of — as he termed it — idealism. Arendt explained:

“An ‘idealist,’ according to Eichmann’s notions, was not merely a man who believed in an ‘idea’ or someone who did not steal or accept bribes, though these qualifications were indispensable. An ‘idealist’ was a man who lived for his idea . . . and who was prepared to sacrifice for his idea everything and, especially, everybody. . . . The perfect ‘idealist,’ like everybody else, had of course his personal feelings and emotions, but he would never permit them to interfere with his actions if they came into conflict with his ‘idea.'”

It was his sense of duty, as much as his dull careerist ambition, that kept Eichmann at his job, fastidiously arranging time-tables, making sure that enough cattle cars would be available to transport Jews to the death camps, and that enough Jews would be available to fill them.

Clearly something has gone wrong here, where the demands of duty drown out any sense of compassion, where one’s idealism comes at the cost of one’s humanity, and when conscience calls for murder. Eichmann was suffering from what the philosopher Jonathan Bennett has termed “bad morality.” Not merely as a Nazi, but as a citizen of the German Reich, Eichmann (wrongly) conflated the good with the law, and (correctly) identified the law with the Führer; and thus, anything that opposed the Führer’s will offended Eichmann’s sense of morality.

Arendt noted the astonishing fact of Eichmann’s conscience, but did not consider what this perversion of morality might tell us about morality itself. For Eichmann thought he was doing his duty, and the evil he enacted would not have been possible were it not for a value system that placed duty above all other considerations. In this sense, the SS officer was not mistaken when he described himself as a Kantian:

“[In] one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant’s precepts: a law is a law, there could be no exceptions. . . . This uncompromising attitude toward the performance of his murderous duties damned him in the eyes of the judges more than anything else. . . , but in his own eyes it was precisely what justified him. . . . No exceptions — this was the proof that he had always acted against his ‘inclinations,’ whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his ‘duty.'”

As Arendt added later: “the sad and very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted Eichmann to adopt his uncompromising attitude.”

Bennett, reflecting on the moral conscience of figures such as Heinrich Himmler, Jonathan Edwards, and Huck Finn, argues that it is best if our moral principles remain, to some degree, unsettled and revisable, that we alter them according to our experience, with special sensitivity to our emotional responses:

“[One] can live by principles and yet have ultimate control over their content. And one way such control can be exercised is by checking one’s principles in the light of one’s sympathies. . . . It can happen that a certain moral principle becomes untenable — meaning, literally that one cannot hold it any longer — because it conflicts intolerably with the pity or revulsion or whatever one feels when one sees what the principle leads to.”

I think that Bennett underestimates the problem his argument poses for morality, however. For morality, as it is typically understood, consists of a set of rules the very purpose of which is to supersede our inclinations.

If we revise our principles in light of our sympathies — as, I believe, Bennett is right that we must — then mightn’t we also revise them in light of our anger, our lust, our fear, or our greed? If we judge our principles by our emotional responses, are we to judge them by all of our emotional responses, or only those that we judge to be good? And how should we evaluate our emotions, except by reference to our principles?

Or perhaps, the entire question of principles is misplaced, of secondary rather than primary importance. Huck Finn resolved his personal dilemma — whether to turn in a runaway slave, when his (bad) morality said Yes and his human sympathy said No — by abandoning moral concerns altogether. Bennett observes: “Since the morality he is rejecting is narrow and cruel, and his sympathies are broad and kind, the results will be good.” Bennett then goes on:

“But moral principles are good to have, because they help to protect one from acting badly at moments when one’s sympathies happen to be in abeyance. On the highest possible estimate of the role one’s sympathies should have, one can still allow for principles as embodiments of one’s best feelings, one’s broadest and keenest sympathies.”

Here, it is not merely that sympathy may correct for erring principles. Sympathy is instead primary, and the principles are simply an effort to generalize about those characteristics that make us our best selves. Thus it may be better — and more reliable — to nurture “sympathies [that] are broad and kind” than to hold the correct principles, or to adhere to those principles one does hold. It is a subtle shift, but a crucial inversion: Virtue is not developed in the service of abstract principles; principles are developed as as abstractions from and supports for the virtues. The emphasis is not on questions of moral law, but on character. The resulting outlook is not strictly moral, but broadly ethical.

Sacrifices

Whether Ozymandias and the un-named Fail-Safe President suffered from their own bad moralities is an open question.

Ozymandias’ attack provides a test case for utilitarian reasoning. It follows from a system of thought in which the best results can justify any action. Conversely, the dilemma the other heroes face upon learning his secret presents a hard case for the Kantian: Is it better to let the world perish than to become complicit in a lie? “Will you expose me, undoing the peace millions died for?”

The Fail-Safe President, while pragmatically choosing the lesser of two great evils, reaches to the Bible for justifications. “Do you remember the story of Abraham in the Old Testament?” he asks General Black. “[K]eep the story of Abraham in mind for the next few hours. . . . I may be asking a great deal of you.” (In case there’s any question as to how far to push this allusion: the general’s first name is also Abraham, and the final chapter is titled “The Sacrifice of Abraham.”) Yet the point of the Biblical story (as Kierkegaard explained) was not that Abraham was right to sacrifice Isaac, but that Abraham stood outside of and above the universal, the ethical. He makes an exception of himself and, as such, he defies moral justification. The President of course does no such thing, and he never considers himself as anything more than an ordinary human being who happens to bear extraordinary responsibilities. He does not place himself above judgement, or beyond ethical categories. He and General Black, therefore, are tragic heroes but not knights of faith. They resemble less Abraham than Agamemnon, and New York — which is not spared — is not Isaac but Iphigenia.

Whatever the basis of action, the problem remains that doing the right thing will not always be a pleasant business. It may require sacrifices, and we may need a certain hardness of will to make them. That steadfastness can easily blur into a kind of cruelty, toward ourselves as well as others. Right action might thus carry an ethical cost. It may deform our character, especially when it becomes the central focus of a life, leading to complacency, self-righteousness, and an unyielding and even callous attitude to others. There is an additional sacrifice that one makes when one loses innocence to some moral purpose; but it requires a special kind of selfishness to preserve one’s own sense of goodness at the expense of another’s well-being.

Despite their similar actions, Ozymandias and the President appear as very different figures — suggesting, perhaps, that the content of their morality may be less at issue than their relationships to it. For the President, the crucial thing is that the war be averted; in the moment of crisis, the responsibility can only be a burden, and success is followed by guilt and grief. For Ozymandias, saving the world is his greatest challenge and his greatest triumph — and that is its cardinal significance. He wants to see the world saved, but he wants at least as badly to be the one who saves it. He willingly assumes that responsibility, and his victory is followed by joy, pride, satisfaction (and only later, doubt). Both men do what is right — at least, as far as possible, in their own judgment — but the President, unlike Veidt, does not feel that it makes him good. He has not, in other words, lost his sense of humanity, and when it comes to questions of character, that sense may be more important than mere morals.

[Editor’s Update: Ng Suat Tong has a response to this piece here.

Selected Bibliography

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

Jonathan Bennett, “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn,” in Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Fail-Safe [film], dir. Sidney Lumet (Columbia Pictures, 1964; DVD, 2000).

Fail Safe [television movie], dir. Stephen A. Frears (Maysville Pictures, 2000).

Hannah Arendt [film], dir. Margarethe von Trotta (Heimatfilm, 2012).

Eugene Harvey and Burdick Wheeler, Fail-Safe (New York: HarperCollins, 1962).

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (New York: DC Comics, 1987).

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in Poems, ed. Isabel Quigly (New York: Penguin Books, 1956).

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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