The dictatorship entry on Miracleman got kinda long, so I'm doing Watchmen in a separate post. (Fear not, though. I will be cutting down that post when I put it into my diss.) Although not a would-be dictator as such, Ozymandias in Watchmen takes it upon himself to make a horrifying moral choice on behalf of humanity: kill half the residents of New York City at a stroke in order to unite the world against a (fictitious) extra-terrestrial threat. Like Miracleman's choice to rule the world, Watchmen presents Ozymandias' choice to manipulate the global, political landscape in very ambiguous terms and refuses to resolve the ambiguity.
This may seem like a half-measure. If the goal is to fully dismantle the superhero, then presenting them as unequivocally morally corrupt would seem to be the most expedient route. However, ambiguity is the opposite of the moral certainty that most superhero comics were required to portray by the Comics Code. Instead of merely inverting the moral hierarchy, and condemning superheroes, Revisionist comics tend to deconstruct the hierarchy itself, but allow the superhero to remain at the centre of the story.
Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias is the benevolent dictator of Watchmen. He is less self-assured, and decidedly less superhuman, than Miracleman, but he's also a lot less of a dictator. Nevertheless, concocts a sweeping plan to sacrifice several millions lives in a gamble to scare the world into united against a fictitious alien threat. Veidt is both superhero and supervillain in Watchmen, and thus exposes the workings of the genre by showing that the respective ideologies of heroism and villainy are actually just two positions on one scale. However, he is still locked into the superhero genre as a whole. He does not transcend it; he just occupies a more complex position within it.
Jason Dittmer's "The Tyranny of the Serial" argues that superheroes are defined by "their support for the status quo [...], and any attempt to fundamentally alter the social system [...] marks a character as a villain" (253). Of course, the irony of this dichotomy, which Dittmer doesn't expand on, is that the fundamental superheroic goal is to "save the world," as Captain Metropolis puts it, and it is logically consistent to want to save the world from such threats as poverty, violence (between states and within them), sickness, environmental destruction, etc. The supervillainous desire to change the world is, by that reasoning, just an extension of the superhero's more conservative desire to save the world from only a specific set of threats. By this logic, Adrien Veidt/Ozymandias plays the role of both the ultimate superhero and an arch-villain.
He explains that he started to conceive of his master plan at the aborted meeting of the Crimebusters, where he realised that one or two, even a whole team, of so-called "superheros" couldn't possibly fix all of the world's problems. A grander scheme was necessary. He identifies his plan, to scare the nations of the world into united against a fictitious alien threat, as consistent with the motives that originally made him decide to become a superhero. He also acknowledges his role as a villain of sorts, though, when he tells Dan that he is "not a Republic serial villain." Instead of claiming that he's not a villain at all, he defines himself a different kind of villain, one who breaks from his generic constraints and makes sure to execute his master plan a half-hour before the heroes even have a chance to stop him (i.e., "I did it 35 minutes ago.").
However, there is a flaw in his plan. Critics and reader/viewers have a tendency to assume that it would have worked if not for Rorschach's journal potentially ruining the illusion. Even if they acknowledge that The Frontiersman might or might not publish the journal--the series ends with the assistant about to make that decision--critics agree with the character in the series when they assume that only exposing Veidt's plan can possibly ruin it. Thus, the moral conundrum of the ending of the series, which implicitly asks: is it moral to expose the lies and mass-murder behind an already-executed state of world peace? However James Hughes points out in "Ideology and 'Real World' Superheroes," that when Veidt asks Manhattan, "I did the right thing, didn't I? It all worked out in the end," Manhattan points out the folly in assuming a closed narrative: "In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends." (Watchmen 12.27.X; Hughes 556). The world has to live with the kind of peace that Veidt forces upon it.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer argues, in "The World Ozymandias Made," that superhero comics maintain political and economic status quo by perpetually seeking utopia but never achieving it (Wolf-Meyer 501). He offers Veidt's master plan as a counter-example, to show how unusual Watchmen is compared to the standard superhero story. Like many, critics and fans alike, he takes for granted that Veidt's peace is, indeed, the utopia that the superhero genre in effect avoids, but I argue that although Veidt might achieve a kind of peace, he does not achieve a utopia. Even if it works according to plan, the precarious, hypothetical non-aggression that he engineers is the peace of mutual fear, of astronomical military budgets, of consuming massive amounts of natural resource to feed a global war machine, of a military-industrial complex on a scale unheard of in human history, of a society in which nothing is more important than defending the home soil.
In essence, Veidt's version of peace is, in its own way, slavishly devoted to the superhero genre. It puts the world on a fictitious path to utopia but actually creates never-ending fear of an outside threat. Thus the commentary that Moore and Gibbons offer in Watchmen is that the superhero story is a closed system out of which there is no utopian escape. Ozymandias seems to break out of the genre by assuming the position of both hero and villain, ultimately he merely relocates it slightly, from never-ending battle against crime and terrorism, to never-ending state of military readiness against alien invasion. Metacomics that bridge the fictional world and the audience's world offer a way out of the fiction; Watchmen models how there is not outside of this fiction because the genre has been fashioned quite specifically to be close and perpetual.
Posted by orion at July 22, 2008 12:44 PM