T w e n t y S i d e d

This post has been a long time in coming. I have a copy of Watchmen here, a gift from Davis V. S. I’ve been trying to set down my thoughts on the book for months now, which is made difficult by the fact that I’m still not sure what to make of it. I actually don’t know how I’m supposed to interpret the actions of the villain and so I’m not sure where to begin my analysis. The story was a strange and painful voyage, and at the end I felt like I was the only one who didn’t know why we’d made the trip.

Spoilers from here on.

In the book, Ozymandias staged a massive event that made people think that aliens were invading Earth. It killed “half of New York”, and tormented or crippled millions more.

His plan is based on the following chain of reasoning:

1. A nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union is inevitable.
2. Staging a massive event that kills millions is the only way to avert it, by getting people to lay aside their differences to face a common threat.
3. This event will give him incredible power to re-shape the world and prevent the war in the future.

My own response to Ozy’s pitch meeting in Antarctica:

Was the USA / USSR war REALLY inevitable?

In our reality opinions differ on just how likely a nuclear exchange was. But the story takes place in the fictional reality authored by Moore, not ours. Moreover, it was a reality authored in 1986. When Ozymandias says that the war was going to happen, we have no way of knowing if he was really telling the truth. Was it going to happen, as he said? Or was it not going to happen, and he was mistaken? Or was he just outright lying?

Only Moore knows the answer. (Assuming he had a specific answer in mind.)

Was the mass-death really the BEST way to avert catastrophe?

Wars happen for reasons. If Ozymandias knew a war would happen, then he must also have known what the cause would be. Given his intelligence, wealth, and power, it seems like he could have found a less convoluted plan to avert the war. If he can stage an alien invasion using the cloned brain of a deceased psychic and then arrange for every single person involved with the plan to killed by killers who were in turn themselves killed, etc etc… then he ought to have no problem getting control of (say) the White House. He could either worm his way into office directly, or (more likely) gain control of an existing politician and steer him into power.

Even easier than that would be for Dr. Manhattan to simply poof the nukes out of existence. Dr. Manhattan is the most powerful hero in the world. Actually he’s one of the most powerful heroes to ever appear in a comic. He can fly, teleport, make copies of himself, destroy or re-shape objects at will, see the future, observe the world on a subatomic level, enlarge himself to massive proportions, and he’s completely indestructible. (He got his powers by being vaporized and re-constituting himself. What could you do to a guy who can just will himself back into shape after you blast him into particles?) His only weakness is that he’s neurotic and dysfunctional. He doesn’t seem to “get” people anymore, even though he still has all of his memories of what it was like to be a mortal human. He’s got powers to rival Zeus, and at least as many sexual hang-ups. (Okay, he has that weakness to Tachyons, but they aren’t even worth mentioning. Imagine if kryptonite didn’t kill Superman, it just slightly reduced his powers and muddled his thinking a little. And you needed huge emitters and satellites to power the brain-muddle field.)

Ozy proved he was more than capable of manipulating him, so convincing him to do something that was a natural extension of what he’d already been doing (“peacekeeping” operations of dubious value) should have been easy for the “smartest man in the world”. It certainly would have been easier and less risky than the plan he enacted.

How was his plan supposed to work, long-term?

We don’t know the causes behind the war that Ozy was averting, but I can’t imagine any solution lasting more than a generation. Ozy talks like he’s bringing an end to war, but that terror event can only go so far. Unless he’s going to keep staging these events, he’s just delaying the inevitable. The kids born after 1985 are going to have little meaningful memory of the event. It will just be history to them. If Ozy is trying to work against the grain of human nature then his efforts will only work as long as people are afraid of the aliens. That’s an exceptionally unstable form of power, and it doesn’t age well. (This is to say nothing of the fact that the USSR might simply see this as a chance to prevail over a weakened USA.)

But are these holes in Ozy’s plan a deliberate thing on the part of the author? It’s not a plot hole at all if we take the view that Ozy’s true goals differ from his stated ones. He mentions that he wanted to be the next Alexander the Great, which is a pretty big tip that he’s not a humanitarian at heart. If we view that as his goal, then the holes in the plan are only holes in his cover story. Certainly he seems to relish in his victory more than seems appropriate. Only a depraved man would celebrate the deaths of so many, even if he was saving more lives than he was wasting.

So at the end of the book I couldn’t decide if it was the story of a depraved megalomaniac, an arrogant and opportunistic man, or a misguided man who felt he was making sacrifices for the greater good.

And for all I know this ambiguity is deliberate. Maybe we’re not supposed to be able to know what Ozy was truly thinking. (Because that other characters also don’t know.) Maybe it goes back to the theme of the book, “Who watches the Watchmen?” Once you have superheroes running around “saving” the world, you’re going to have a mess.

Case in point: Just over a year ago I proposed a modest set of super powers and asked people how they would use them. Some pointed out that without the ability to sense / divine trouble, you’re just a really useful workhorse. But a few people proposed taking extreme actions, like murdering people they thought were “screwing up the world”. These people genuinely thought that if they just killed all the “problem people” they could make the world a better place. This is proof enough to me that having a handful of people with super powers would be extraordinarily bad for the rest of us.

In any case, the main question of what Ozy was really thinking really ate at me after I finished the book. I felt like I couldn’t really process the tale until I could sort Ozymandias, and the ambiguity around him made this impossible. This is not to say it’s a bad book. It really does deserve its reputation as one of the greatest comic works ever. I’ll take deep, thoughtful, symbolic, and ambiguous over “Captain Macho Posturing vs. Baron von Plot Exposition” any day. It’s an amazing book, and the fact that over 20 years have passed and we haven’t seen its like again is a little disappointing.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.