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Watchmen and Sunday Morning Services: Lists 1 through 4

Submitted by Ken Watts on Mon, 03/09/2009 - 12:45

I WENT TO THE MOVIES on Sunday morning: to see Watchmen. It was surprisingly like being in church.

Spoiler alert: If...

  1. You haven't seen the film,
  2. You want to see the film,
  3. You haven't read the graphic novel, and
  4. You are one of those people who don't want to know the story before you see it the first time,

Don't read on, because I'm about to talk about the plot.

I don't, of course, mean that anyone...

  1. Took a collection,
  2. Prayed,
  3. Sang hymns (other than "Hallelujah", "The Times, They are A-Changin'", and "The Sounds of Silence"),
  4. Did responsive readings, or
  5. Held an altar call.

But there was a sort of underlying theme—a resonance of world-view—that reminded me of...

  1. My fundamentalist youth,
  2. Wednesday night prayer meetings,
  3. My fundamentalist guilt,
  4. Sunday morning sermons, and
  5. Those fundamentalist altar calls.

The story, and here you would be wise to review the first list above before proceeding, begins with the murder of a super hero.

He's one of the Watchmen, a league of super heroes:

  1. The Comedian—the murder victim, whose symbol is a smiley face.
  2. Doctor Manhattan—a former nuclear scientist, who gained god-like powers in a laboratory accident,
  3. Nite Owl II—a kind of bat-man figure,
  4. Ozymandias—super-intelligent and extremely fast,
  5. Rorschach—a masked PI type, with better fighting and gymnastic skills and even more disenchanted than Phillip Marlowe, and
  6. Silk Spectre II—wonder-woman without the powers—a sort of female batman.

Because of public outrage at their vigilante behavior, all but Doctor Manhattan and Rorschach have officially retired. Manhattan works for the government, making the U.S. into an invincible super power, and Rorschach still freelances, illegally, as a super hero.

The world they live in is a United States which also resonates with the world I went to fundamentalist services in:

I'll get to that list in the next installment...