Since it blasted onto the scene in 1986, recent television series on HBO, Watchmen has gained fanfare and accolades as time has gone on, with many praising the perceived open-endedness of the complex and morally ambiguous parable contained within as among the most influential storytelling devices of the twenty-first century.
But even with Moore's famous moral ambiguity, there’s a definitive moral statement Watchmen is making at the end that’s often missed in the adaptations as well as the continuing discussions across the fandom and culture at large. This meditation on moral ambiguity has a message, something Moore believes the reader should probably be taking away from his tale of woe, and it's not as ambiguous as one might believe.
The climax of Watchmen involves two morally-ambiguous hero-types, Walter Kovacs, the psychopathic Rorschach, and Dan Dreiberg, the erstwhile and recurrent Nite Owl, confronting corporate mastermind Adrian Veidt, Ozymandias, at his fortress on the South Pole regarding his involvement in a conspiracy to kill off former masked heroes. Taking place in an alternate 1985, the political climate in the story reflects the then-contemporary Cold War fears of bilateral nuclear destruction, so the scene is set amidst the background of military escalation between the United States and the USSR, including a lengthy sequence of President Richard Nixon absconding to his subterranean war room as red warning-lights flash everywhere. Adrian, having engineered a dramatic murder attempt on his own life, has spent the day reminiscing on his adventurous past while quietly murdering any of his staff who might implicate him in his elaborate squid-plot. Adrian’s superlative tendencies strike a chord towards obsessiveness, certainly an elitist if there ever was one, but not the kind of mad scientist he reveals himself to be.
Adrian explains that, having predicted this catastrophe, he has engineered a solution that will end the war between the hostile nations and usher in an era of peace. He then describes how he hired a bunch of artists and scientists to build him a fake giant squid using a dead psychic’s brain, and that he’s just teleported it into New York City where it exploded and killed three million people. His reasoning, which turns out to be correct in the immediacy, would be that a mysterious alien threat would act as a necessary third-party force that could unite the world against it, eschewing conflicts of political hegemony in favor of an unknown yet clearly destructive threat.
While the basic concept of this third-act twist is maintained in the 2009 film and faithfully represented in the 2019 television series, neither quite manages to attain the gravity that Moore and Gibbons do in the original, and this extends to the larger storytelling trends not only in those works but among those who try to imitate Moore’s style as well. This goes back to the storytelling techniques used by Moore in the comic, and the strength with which he was able to accomplish the final act of the allegory in a synthesis of thematic undertone and careful narrative structuring.
Watchmen, among other things, contains many aspects of the anthology series which nurtured the art style used by Gibbons, and many aspects of the narrative pay homage to the anthology format. Almost every character, no matter how incidental to the plot, are presented as fleshed-out people with their own personalities and challenges, and are often given their own small moments in stray s and pages that focus off the main story of costumed adventurers. These include notable vignettes of circumstances and characters that have little direct bearing on the story, including the famous fake pirate comic Tales Of The Black Freighter as read by street urchin Bernard.
In many ways, the world of Watchmen centers around Bernard and the corner where the newsstand he takes the comic from sits, and it is this attention to world-building that grants the story as a whole such power. Many of the interactions and random banter that take place on this corner serve to grant nuance to the greater moral questions and often reflect aspects of the main plot, sometimes in a decidedly unfavorable light.
Two of the characters who vignette in these corner scenes are Josephine and Aline, a lesbian couple who end up breaking it off towards the end. In the scene leading up to the squid’s attack, Josephine, a taxi-driver for Promethean Cab Co, confronts Aline, begging her to take her back, and assaults her in the street upon rejection. And as it happens, several of the characters who featured in the background throughout the story all randomly converge on this corner including Malcolm Long (Rorschach’s psychiatrist) and Detective Steve Fine, now suspended from duty (likely for a hint of iration for Dan leading him to let the costumed adventurer off with a warning when he could’ve arrested him on the spot). When these two witness the assault, they rush in to end the violence before anyone gets hurt. “I’m still me,” Fine says when his partner Bourquin advises him to stay back.
And, just as they’re breaking up the fight, they and millions of others are killed in an instant by Adrian’s fake alien squid monster.
There’s a lot of nice touches to this sequence as it plays out. The reader finds out that the locksmith Dan employs to fix his door every time Rorschach breaks in is the cab company owner’s brother. The reader sees the nameless watch-seller on the sidewalk panic when he sees the off-duty policemen approach, unaware they’re just there to stop the fight, and might realize that most “lawbreakers” are simply like this random character, simply trying to get by as best they can, bending the rules a bit too much, but not necessarily harmful or evil. And of course, you learn that the newsstand owner and the boy who sits there reading the story-within-a-story pirate comic (without buying it) have the same name, Bernie.
And when this quietly powerful street scene is then juxtaposed with Ozymandias in his Antarctic hide-out revealing his master plan in an increasingly unnerving rant to Rorschach and Nite Owl, the reader is being led to understand that, truly, Adrian, “the world’s smartest man” is intrinsically no better than any of those people on that corner, and his sacrifice of any one of them is a gross and obvious evil. He doesn’t really have this right to judge the actions of not only those people, but anybody, really, because intelligent though he may be, nobody appointed him their savior. His callousness gives the impression that he simply doesn't have the imagination to understand people beyond their most basic conception.
The comparison is even more devastating than that. A man of unparalleled intellectual might, a self-made billionaire and corporate tycoon. A hero who spends his days promoting charity. But who is this person? What is he even talking about, these great big forces going on in the world that most people don’t even perceive? Is it something he got from the dozens of televisions screens he spends hours every day watching? Is it something he learned from his years in business? What gives him the right to feel that he can do this?
And is whatever knowledge he thinks he has really worth more than the spontaneous coming together of those people on the street to stop Josephine’s violent attack on Aline? The implication is that it isn’t.
Adrian saw himself as humanity’s watchman, a man uniquely suited to battling the nebulous self-destructive tendencies of mankind. The climax reveals what this really was: the psychotic actions of an intelligent man blinded by arrogance, motivated by fear and possessed of a condescending apathy for the plight of the human condition. This is the power of Watchmen: it systematically deconstructs the very nature of what “heroism”, the very idea of a savior figure, is and, when exhibiting this archetype, ultimately destroys the concept of moral relativity that prefigures this symbol, particularly that of a masked hero.
Because, ultimately, even with every single alarm bell on earth going off, the chance of human beings actually making the decision to end the world in a nuclear holocaust is astronomically low. There’s always going to be some people who, if they see another person threatened with violence, will step in to end the conflict. It is that inherent goodness that will likely save the planet every single time.
What this implies, far from saying the ends justify the means, is that Moore is squarely in the camp that Adrian, intelligent though he may be, is a monster. And his method of displaying this to the audience in Watchmen, rife with moral ambiguity though it is, was truly marvelous in its innovation: he simply kept these characters, normal everyday people, far enough in the background that the reader knew it wasn’t their story, but close enough that the reader understood that it could be. And then he showed the audience what it means when a self-declared "hero" decides it wasn’t their story and that those people didn’t matter. Moore made them the heart of a poignant narrative, and it's a point some people seem to miss.
