Watchmen and Sunday Morning Services: Lists 5 through 8

Submitted by Ken Watts on Tue, 03/10/2009 - 14:12

WHERE I LEFT OFF last time:

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 superpower, 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:

  1. It's still trapped in the cold war,
  2. Richard Nixon is still president (in 1985!),
  3. Our biggest enemy is Russia, and
  4. The world is on the brink of nuclear war.

So here's the big spoiler, but it's necessary to get to the point of this post: It turns out that Ozymandias is the murderer. He has decided, in his super intelligence, that the only way to save humanity from itself is to:

  1. Manipulate Dr. Manhattan, to get him to leave the planet,
  2. Create nuclear explosions that destroy several major cities, and the people in them, and
  3. Leave evidence that the explosions were actually caused by Dr. Manhattan.

As a result...

  1. The world believes that there is an exterior, common, God-like, threat (Dr. Manhattan),
  2. The nations come together, and form alliances, to guard against this threat, and,
  3. World peace is assured for the first time in history.

Dr. Manhattan, after tracking Ozymandias down, is convinced that this scheme is necessary and good. He then kills Rorschach, who is determined to tell the whole world what really happened.

After that, he leaves for another galaxy, so that the threat of his return will keep everyone in line.

The point-of-view characters at the end of the film: Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II, end up going along with the scheme.

So why does this remind me of Church?

The fundamental (ahem) assumptions of the plot are:

  1. Humans are evil, or at best self-destructive,
  2. Left to our own devices we will only do wrong,
  3. But for some reason we are still worth saving,
  4. Which requires a threat of punishment from a god-like figure, and
  5. Only under this threat of punishment can we manage to behave like, well, human beings.

The list above is identical for Watchmen and any fundamentalist sermon.

But there's another list of more subtle agreements between this plot and conservative Christian theology. Here, what is explicit in Watchmen is often implicit or even denied by the religious right:

I'll get to that in the final installment...