Under the hood of Watchmen – Jeffrey Lewis’s theories

This is a very partial summary of some of anti-folk singer Jeffrey Lewis’s theories on Watchmen. They’re rendered in our words, not his, so any mistakes are ours. DO NOT read it if you haven’t read Watchmen yet. In fact, if you have read it, you might want to have your copy at hand before start. We’d be fascinated to hear what you think.

1) It’s all about William Blake’s Songs Of Innocence And Experience

Beneath the murder mystery and conspiracy plots of Watchmen, the book plays out a theme of innocence’s subjugation by – and eventual overthrowing of – experience. The murdered Comedian is Watchmen’s ultra-cynical symbol of Experience, associated with political violence, the attempted rape of Silk Spectre I and figuratively burning down the simple, innocent past when he sets light to Captain Metropolis’s “crime map” at the abortive first meeting of The Crimebusters. Though The Comedian is murdered in the opening scenes, the first half of the series concerns the triumph of his worldview. “Innocent” costumed heroes are banned by law, replaced by the amoral Comedian, the disinterested Dr Manhattan and the uncontrollable Rorschach. Violent expedience rules and the line between “good” and “evil” is hopelessly blurred. The Comedian’s real name, Edward Blake, echoes “black”, “bleak” and of course the name of the poet.

There are two unlikely symbols of Innocence: the washed-up villain Moloch and the original, most mysterious superhero, Hooded Justice. Moloch is a magician who parlayed his stage act into a life of crime in the 1930s simply because it was fun. For the heroes of the 30s and 40s, crime-fighting is a game and problems are local, small-time and soluble. Moloch represents a simple good/bad dichotomy wherein even “evil” is comparatively innocent. His worst deeds are never as bad as the things The Comedian does in the service of “good”. But though Moloch has paid his debt by going to jail, he is further punished in the “Experienced”, post-Comedian era. He’s brutalised by Rorschach, and first given cancer and then murdered by Ozymandias as an innocent part of the Veidt conspiracy. One of Moloch’s aliases is William Edgar Bright, the figurative opposite of the black, bleak Edward Blake.

Hooded Justice was a founder member of The Minutemen, another symbol of the Innocent era of crime-fighting and (we learn) the closeted lover of Captain Metropolis. He prevents The Comedian from raping Silk Spectre I but stops beating him when a bloodied Blake taunts him with the words “This is what gets you hot?” Hooded Justice refuses to unmask himself and retire after the Keene Act bans vigilantism, and it’s heavily hinted that The Comedian murders him “offscreen”. When Ozymandias kills The Comedian – in the service of a plot to restore a safe and “innocent” world – he symbolically avenges Hooded Justice. This connects with the theme of “clearing away”.

2) Occluded vision and the theme of “clearing away”

The most famous recurring symbol in Watchmen is the smiley face with a splash of blood over its right eye. It’s easy to spot examples of characters with obscured or otherwise occluded eyes and to connect it to their inability to see the world around them correctly: Dan Dreiberg, Edward Blake, even Laurie "Silk Spectre" Juspeczyk who has a beauty spot beneath her right eye. As Edward Blake's button badge and as Seymour's t-shirt, the bloody smiley is the first and last thing we seen in the book.

But approximately half way through the series, the symbol changes its meaning. The “mark” on the right “eye” of the Owl Ship becomes a portal, not a blockage, as Laurie clears away years of dust and begins to reveal to Dan his true nature as Nite Owl. When Dr Manhattan’s glass craft crashes on a Martian crater which coincidentally resembles a smiley face – replicating the image of blood on Blake’s smiley badge – it’s in a moment of clarity, not of confusion. On the cover of issue/chapter 11, the blood-splash appears in negative: it’s a hole in the snow that covers Veidt’s Antarctic dome, through which we can see the multi-coloured butterfly that prefigures Ozymandias’s brave new world. When the newsvendor and comic-reading boy are incinerated in the final atrocity in New York, the silhouette of their bodies form the splash-shape: the book’s most grotesque symbol of Adrian Veidt’s reborn world.

What ties all this together is the theme of “clearing away”. The world of Watchmen is hurtling towards destruction: “the future is bearing down like an express train”. Veidt believes that a violent clearing-away, including everything from the murder of The Comedian to the removal of Dr Manhattan, will return us to a Blakeian state of Innocence. He even prepares new, non-nostalgic consumer brands for a new era where the threat of nuclear destruction has been obviated. Rorschach cannot face a new world peace built on mass murder and in the final scenes begs to be “cleared away” himself. There can be positive clearings-away too: Dan Dreiberg, Laurie Juspeczyk and Dr Manhattan all come to terms with their true natures because of what they experience in Watchmen.

But when the blood-stained smiley returns for the final image of the book, it has become ambiguous. It’s a splash of ketchup on the t-shirt worn by Seymour, the fat editorial assistant of Rorschach’s favourite read, the right-wing newspaper The New Frontiersman. Seymour reaches for Rorschach’s Journal in the “Crank File”, which could expose Veidt’s conspiracy and return the world to its course towards Doomsday. Now the blocked right eye means neither clarity nor confusion. But the Smiley is still a circle, and…

3) It’s all about circles and triangles.

Jeffrey Lewis’s key idea about Watchmen is that it represents the conflict between human effort and planning on the one hand, and uninterruptible natural processes on the other. The first is represented by the industrialist Adrian Veidt, whose motif is the triangle. His web of companies includes Pyramid Deliveries, his life and plans are inspired by Egyptology and he takes the name Ozymandias from the Shelley poem – a strange choice considering it’s the most famous depiction of the futility of great plans in all literature. Veidt runs a Charles Atlas-style self-improvement program, he appears to be asexual, he prefers electronic to “real” music… even his real name contains triangular letters. His plan is both the ultimate villainy and the ultimate heroism, and therefore the ultimate human achievement.

The no-longer-human Dr Manhattan’s symbol is the circular hydrogen atom. Although theoretically omnipotent, Dr Manhattan perceives reality in four dimensions: he can see his own future as well as his past and so is “trapped” on the rails of destiny. He does not know if he possesses free will: is he bound to follow predetermined actions, like a conventional physical process, or able to break out of them, as particles sometimes do under quantum conditions? Dr Manhattan sees no difference between life and death and accepts natural processes passively. Although he has been transformed into a near-God, he still has possesses human sexuality and the capacity for anger and jealousy, unlike the perfectly controlled, self-mastered Ozymandias. Even Dr Manhattan’s human name, Jon Osterman, is dominated by circular letters.

Who will in the battle of man-made triangles and natural circles? Dave Gibbons draws exactly that question as Ozymandias and Dr Manhattan talk after Watchmen’s climax. Veidt meditates on a pyramid, already troubled by what he has done. There are hints that, like the protagonist in the Black Freighter comic that is Watchmen’s play-within-a-play, he will go mad. Dr Manhattan stands beside an orrery, a mechanical device depicting the natural orbits of the planets – a device which is made of circles. He is leaving Earth, he says, for somewhere less complicated. Veidt asks him if he did the right thing “in the end.” “Nothing ends, Adrian,” Dr Manhattan replies. “Nothing ever ends.” A few pages later we see Seymour’s hand reaching for Rorschach’s journal, his ketchup-stained Smiley shirt mirroring the first panel of Watchmen. The book has become a loop – the circles have won and Veidt’s triangular logic has failed.

Or at least that's what Jeffrey Lewis thinks. What do you think?