THIS IS THE FINAL INSTALLMENT of a series, written on Monday morning, about why going to see Watchmen on Sunday morning reminded me of going to fundamentalist church services as a teenager.
The series is structured as 11 lists, and I ended the previous installment with list eight:
The fundamental (ahem) assumptions of the plot are...
- Humans are evil, or at best self-destructive,
- Left to our own devices we will only do wrong,
- But for some reason we are still worth saving,
- Which requires a threat of punishment from a god-like figure, and
- 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:
- It's important for people to believe in this god-figure,
- The belief itself produces better behavior,
- This is true whether he actually exists or not, and
- Therefore, the belief is good, even if it's mistaken.
When I was a fundamentalist I was influenced by the same kind of arguments that I now see posted by conservative Christians on websites. Things like: "If you atheists don't believe in God, what keeps you from doing immoral things?"
This kind of argument only has force based on a line of thought like the one above: it's not God that keeps fundamentalists from sin, it's the fear of God—whether the position is fully acknowledged or not—and consequently the actual existence of God is not, strictly speaking, required by the argument.
But, though the movie ends, in a literal sense, with this argument, I detected an even deeper subtext.
The point of view characters rotate throughout the film:
- The Comedian, until he is killed,
- Rorschach, immediately after this, then on and off until he is killed,
- Nite Owl II, and
- Silk Spectre II, through the middle and end of the film.
These are the people we identify with, and it's instructive to note their relationship to the above argument:
- The Comedian is the first victim of Ozymandias in the film,
- Rorschach defies Ozymandias until the end,
- Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II are only reluctantly convinced, even at the end.
There's a strong sense in all of this that we are not meant to be entirely convinced—that the intended effect of the film is the one it actually had on me: to leave me, when all was said and done, with an uneasy feeling that however good the arguments sounded, however noble the ends, the solution provided somehow shortchanged both the truth and human nature as a whole.
In other words, it left me with exactly the same feeling as the sermon in a fundamentalist church.
I'm glad it's Monday.
