Watchmen and Philosophy

[Cain]

I thought this was an interesting (or certainly more in depth and thoughtful) approach to Watchmen, compared with many out there.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

By Iain Thompson in The Philosophy of Comic Books:

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To begin to imagine the impact of Watchmen on die-hard superhero comics fans like me, visualize a train-wreck taking place in twelve monthly installments. I may not then have recognized Watchmen as a deconstruction of the hero, but certainly I realized (with that combination of horror and fascination known to rubberneckers everywhere) that here my precious heroes were being shattered before my very eyes, taken apart from the inside-out, in the pages of the medium that had always loved and cared for them, and in a style that demonstrated an obvious mastery of this medium that it now set out to implode. As I sift once again through the rubble, it is,moreover, clear to me—for to reread Watchmen is to be stunned once again by the brutal clarity of this masterful deconstruction of the hero—that Moore and Gibbons knew exactly what they were doing.

REREADING, RETROACTIVE DEFAMILIARIZATION, AND THE UNCANNY

Perhaps the first thing one realizes upon rereading Watchmen is that it requires rereading.  Watchmen was written to be reread; indeed, it can only be read by being reread.

That may sound paradoxical, but upon rereading Watchmen it becomes painfully obvious that the meanings of almost every word, image, panel, and page are multiple—obviously multiple. In Watchmen, the meanings are primarily multiplied by the fact—and this is painfully obvi-
ous when one finishes the series and then rereads it—that, from the first panel (a blood-stained smiley-face, looking like a clock counting-down to midnight, floating in a gutter of blood), the parts all fit into a whole one grasps only in the end (although in retrospect the hints are everywhere).

Because that end is so unsuspected and surprising (I will spoil it in the  next section), the parts are given a new and different meaning by their place in it. This new meaning, moreover, immediately strikes home as  the true meaning of the work, thereby subverting and displacing the first reading.

Rereading Watchmen,we thus undergo the same kind of retroactive defamiliarization we experience when, rereading Aeschylus's Oresteia, we blushingly realize that on our first reading we had been taken in, along with King Agamemnon himself, by the beautiful duplicity of Queen Clytemnestra's early speeches, for now we recognize that her artful words, seductive on a first reading, drip with venom on a second. Or, to use a more recent example, we experience the same kind of retroactive defamiliarization when, viewing M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, we share the protagonist's stunning realization that he himself is a ghost, a realization which displaces and reorients our entire sense of the film. (Of course, one does not need actually to re-view The Sixth Sense—to view it twice—since Shyamalan, apparently not trusting his audience, embeds a reviewing within it, in the form of a series of flashbacks. Thanks to this rather heavy-handed move—which, to be fair, only Aeschylus never condescends to make—to view The Sixth Sense is already to re-view it.) In Moore's Watchmen, Aeschylus's
Oresteia, and Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, rereading effects this retroactive defamiliarization by undermining and displacing the familiar sense that emerged from and guided the first "reading," changing our minds about what we thought we understood by leading us to recognize that in fact we had not understood what we thought we understood.

With such retroactive defamiliarization, we experience what Heidegger called the "uncanny" (unheimlich, literally, "unhomelike"). Although this is often overlooked, we can only experience this uncanniness (this Unheimlichkeit or sense of "not-being-at-home") somewhere that we have first been at home. One's first reading of a new text, like one's first visit to a new city or one's first date with a new person, might be strange, different, disorienting, even anxiety-provoking, but it cannot be uncanny. The uncanny emerges only with "rereading,"when what seemed familiar suddenly becomes strange—and estranging; it is as if we are gripped by that upon which we have lost our grip. (Here I am using "rereading" in the broad Derridean sense, which applies to the lives we lead as well as the texts we more literally "read," since, as Derrida provocatively put it, "there is nothing but text.") When rereading uncanny works,we find ourselves no longer at home in our first reading; we realize that the first reading was not a "reading" properly so-called, since (we now realize) we had not yet understood the text on that first reading, although we assumed, of course, that we did understand it, and so we learn (or at least are encouraged to learn) to become more reflective about the course that we have been following with unreflective self-assurance. Shattering this self-assurance—with the realization that we were ignorant of our own ignorance—has been, since Socrates at least, one of the first pedagogical steps (and stumbling blocks) of the philosophical education.

Uncanny works, moreover, in that they must be reread in order to be read, teach us something fundamental about reading itself, namely, that at least some of the great works survive and perpetuate themselves not by statically maintaining eternal truths, or even simply by offering successive generations the same experience again and again, but rather by being deep enough—that is, resonant enough, meaningful enough—to continue to generate new readings, even those revolutionary rereadings which radically reorient our original sense of the work. It was by helping to effect just such a revolutionary reorientation of the entire genre of superhero comic books that Watchmen established itself as a great work, a work of postmodern deconstruction. This means that Watchmen is not only a work of rereading, a work that we have to reread simply in order to read, but that Watchmen itself has to be understood as a rereading of the history of comic books.

Watchmen gives us a revisionary history that asks (as one astute observer put it), "What would have happened to us if costumed heroes had appeared in reality around the same time they appeared in the American pop  consciousness?"

[Cain]

DECONSTRUCTION, THE UNHAPPY REALIZATION OF FANTASY, AND NIHILISM

The animating idea in the background of Watchmen is as simple as it is compelling: What if superheroes were real? What would it really be like if comic book heroes walked among us? By taking this question with deadly seriousness, Watchmen shows that previous comics in fact failed to do so. Yes, Peter Parker had his share of personal problems, but he (let alone his impact on his world) only seems real until one reads Watchmen.  If,moreover, the Spider-Manmovie did a surprisingly good job of seeming real (and so helping to suspend the disbelief of its audience), this was thanks not only to the inspired casting of the main character (Tobey Maguire had already established a Peter Parker—like screen persona in The Ice Storm and Wonder Boys), it was also because the movie seems to have been influenced by a recent re-telling of Spider-Man which is itself part of a series of deliberately realist reprisals (namely, Marvel's "Ultimate" versions of its most famous comics), a series inspired in large part by the dark realism of Watchmen. (Thus, however ungenerous the sentiment,Moore is not entirely wrong when he denigrates such work as Watchmen's "deformed bastard grandchildren.")

In effect, Watchmen makes the case that if our superhero fantasies were realized, our world would be radically altered, and not for the better. In this way it asks us, "Which world would you rather live in?" In the alternative reality which forms the backdrop for Watchmen, America won the Vietnam war (with the help of the earth's only super-powered hero, "Dr.Manhattan");  Nixon was never impeached, since an especially right-wing hero ("The Comedian") killed Woodward and Bernstein; there are no longer any superhero comics (apparently no one wants to read about them in a world with actual superheroes; in fact,many ordinary people hate these heroes,who they perceive, correctly in most cases, as right-wing pawns of a repressive government); instead, very dark Pirate comics now dominate the market (in this reality, unlike our own, no censoring "comics code" was ever imposed because the government protected the genre which had spawned the heroes
upon whom it became politically dependent); the cold war is being won by America, thanks to our super-powered being (Dr. Manhattan); unfortunately, this American "superman" (or "God") has Russia terrified about its chances of survival, so when Dr. Manhattan decides to leave the earth (humanity having become no more interesting to this him than ants are  to us), an atomic world war (and planet-destroying nuclear holocaust) seems imminent.  It is a bleak vision, to be sure, but one made entirely compelling by the unprecedented wealth of background detail Moore and Gibbons deftly weave into the story.

Moore did not need Jean Baudrillard (perhaps the greatest of the postmodern philosophers) to tell him that "the idea is destroyed by its own realization," that the "extreme" development of an idea (which takes that idea beyond its own limits, end, or terminus, into "a state of ex-termination") can thereby destroy it—as, for example, sex is destroyed by "porn,"which is "more sexual than sex"; the body by "obesity,"which is "fatter than fat"; violence by "terror," which is "more violent than violence"; information by "simulation," which is "truer than true"; time by "instantaneity," which is "more present than the present," and as, in Watchmen, the hero is destroyed by the superhero, who is more heroic than any hero, but whose extreme "heroics" are no longer recognizable as heroics.  Moore seems instinctively to know (or else he has, like Watchmen's Ozymandias, studied "a hundred different philosophies") that one of the most powerful deconstructive strategies involves provisionally accepting an idea, thesis, position, or worldview, then working from inside it to extend it beyond its limits until it is eventually made to collapse under its own weight, like a plant forced to bear  fruit too heavy for its own branches.  I would call this strategy  hypertrophic deconstruction (after Nietzsche, who recognized that "a hypertrophic virtue  ...may bring about the decay of a people as much as a hypertrophic vice.").  Watchmen deconstructs the hero by developing its heroes—extending traditional hero fantasies beyond their limits—to the point where the reader comes to understand that these fantasies, realized, become nightmares.

Watchmen begins, tellingly, with the hero "Rorschach," a hypertrophic development of the Batman archetype. Batman himself, of course, was already a later version of The Shadow, a character drawn from the notoriously gritty, "detective" genre of pulp fiction.  With Rorschach, however, Moore gives us such an extreme version of the archetypal "hard-nosed detective" character that not only Bogart but the entire filmnoir genre (even such John Woo films as  The Killer) look squeaky clean by comparison.  Watchmen's intentionally shocking first words establish this dark and violent mood: "Rorschach's Journal. October 12th, 1985: Dog Carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face."  As this notion of "seeing" the "true face" already hints, Rorschach takes his name (and his mask, which he views as his own true "face") from the famous "ink-blot test" in which a psychiatrist asks an analysand to interpret an image that has no meaning of its own, in order to gain access to the analysand's unconscious as it is revealed in the meanings
the analysand projects onto the image (Watchmen V. 18 .vi–vii). By opening (and "closing") the comic with Rorschach,Moore implies that comic book heroes are projections of the fantasies of their readers—as well as their authors.

Watchmen's development of Rorschach as a character makes clear Moore's contention that these wishful superheroic fantasies of power
stem not just from a deep fear that we are powerless to live up to our own ideals, but also from an even deeper fear that these ideals themselves are mere projections with which we cover over and so conceal from ourselves "the real horror" that "in the end" reality "is simply an empty meaningless blackness."  Thus we learn, for example, that Rorschach was driven to become a "masked hero" by the neglect, abuse, and abandonment he suffered as a foster child, that his right-wing ideology is itself a construction with which he tries in vain to please a father he never knew, and that the real evil he encountered soon after putting on his mask led him to reject his humanity for his mask and so become empty, a blank onto which others would project their own fears—becoming, in philosophical terms, a nihilist.  (As Rorschach puts it, "Existence is random, [it] has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long.No meaning save what we choose to impose").  Although Moore presents us here with one ofWatchmen's brilliantly twisted versions of the "secret origins" device common to all superhero comics, Rorschach's nihilism—his defining conviction that reality is ultimately meaningless—cannot simply be dismissed as a symptom of the personal psychological traumas that led him to become a "hero."

Instead, Moore presents nihilism as a psychological state shared by almost all the heroes in Watchmen. Initially,Moore suggests that, given the black-and-white, all-or-nothing mentality of the kind of person who would become a hero (a person who wants to believe in "absolute values" but encounters only "darkness and ambiguity"), nihilism is a natural fall-back position.  It is as if, rebounding from an inevitable collision with moral ambiguity, such a hero precipitously concludes that, since our values are not absolute, they must be relative—their absolutism having led them falsely to assume these alternatives to be exhaustive. Later, however, Moore deepens this explanation by suggesting that such nihilism is the natural complement of a thoroughly scientific worldview.As I mentioned earlier, "Dr.Manhattan" is Watchmen's only truly super-powered being; he is a hero of the "Superman" archetype, but his seemingly omnipotent power over matter comes from his own advanced scientific understanding of—and consequent control over—the physical world. In Dr. Manhattan, Moore embodies our near-deification of science—and its dangers. Thus Watchmen tells us not only that Dr. Manhattan "symbolized mankind's problems," but that his name was itself chosen for its "ominous associations," namely, the government-controlled scientific project that produced the first atom bomb, and so,more broadly, science's god-like power to control nature and its perilous consequences (Watchmen XI. 22.ii and IV. 12.viii).Watchmen thus says that: "We are all of us living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan"; this "shadow" is the dark side of science—the nihilism of a thoroughly objectified and thereby disenchanted world, a world science takes to be intrinsically value-free, and
so ultimately meaningless (a meaninglessness which nuclear annihilation threatens to realize).  Hence, when told about the murder of another hero, Dr.Manhattan's revealing reply is: "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there is no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts.Why should I be concerned?"

In the end,Watchmen not only deconstructs the motivations of its individual heroes (who become heroes to please their mothers, because of traumatic childhoods, repressed homoerotic urges, naively absolutist worldviews, fetishes for costumes, equipment, night-patrols, and so on). By presenting nihilism as the simple, unvarnished truth about life in a godless universe, Moore seeks to deconstruct the would-be hero's ultimate motivation, namely, to provide a secular salvation and so attain a mortal immortality.  If there is no God, who will save us? This is the basic question to which Watchmen's heroes seek to respond. (Thus the old hero implores the young, would-be heroes who had briefly gathered before him, even as they walk away: "Somebody has to do it, don't you see. Somebody has to save the world." Watchmen II. 11.vii.) The hero rises above normal human beings by saving them, and, through this secular salvation, he or she lives on in their memory. Ozymandias, the hero who most lucidly realizes all this, unapologetically seeks to put himself in the place previously thought to be occupied by God (Watchmen II.9.ii–iii; XII.27.ii.). His ability to shoulder this superhuman responsibility—by choosing to sacrifice millions of innocent lives in a bid to save the world from nuclear annihilation—not only makes him a hero with which most of us cannot identify, it also puts him above, and so alienates him from, humanity in general.

Although Watchmen's heroes all subscribe to the nihilistic belief that reality is ultimately meaningless, they are heroes precisely in so far as they embrace this nihilism and nevertheless seek a path leading beyond it.  By suggesting that all such paths may be either hopeless or horrific, and that the heroes' motives for seeking them are either dangerous or else unworthy of our admiration, Watchmen develops its heroes precisely in order to ask us if we would not in fact be better off without heroes. In order to suggest a response, I will now examine the perhaps surprising conceptual roots of Watchmen's postmodern cynicism in the Enlightenment, then show that the existentialists too deconstructed the hero, but that their deconstructions suggest very different conclusions.

[Cain]

FRAMING THE FRAME: SHOULD HISTORY DISPENSE WITH THE HERO?

Does the apparent paucity of real heroes in our culture suggest that we are living in a post-heroic age? If not, should we seek to dispense with heroes? Isaiah Berlin famously maintains that Romanticism's tendency toward hero-worship helped spark the flames of fascism, and so he suggests that, after the terrible conflagration of the Holocaust, for one human being to heroize another is a dangerously childish refusal of "Enlightenment," and thus an historically retrogressive resistance to what was for Kant the "essential destiny" of "human nature":We human beings must grow up, emerge from our "self-imposed immaturity," and have the "courage" to think for ourselves.

Have we indeed reached the point in history when, in pursuit of autonomy, we need to put away such childish things—as heroes? Or is the intense cynicism of the times perhaps merely a burnt shell that hides (and thereby also shelters and protects) an inextinguishable human need for something better: Hope, ideals, a future worth pursuing, and heroes to lead us there? If one takes the history of the West and subtracts all the stories of its heroes, what remains? Can there even be a meaningful history—a history worth  living—without heroes?

These are fateful questions, for history concerns the future at least asmuch as the past.We "exist" (from the Latin, ek-sistere, to "stand out") historically.As Heidegger saw, we enact the life-projects which render us intelligible—to ourselves and to others—only by projecting the past into the future and so constituting the present. History is a congealing of this basic temporality; it is time made thick. Indeed,without the historical dimension of intelligibility, our existence would be desiccated, massively impoverished; the temporal frame through which we live would be too transient to sustain the thick worlds of meaning that make us who we are. We cannotmeaningfully be without history; so, can history be meaningful without its hero stories? If the West began to confront such fateful questions as the last millennium drew to a close, this was due not only to the eschatological despair that drives millennialism and thereby betrays our (more or less conscious) belief that history is over, a thanatological belief which has been haunting the cultural unconscious of the West for almost two thousand years but which, as our technology becomes ever more destructive, is in increasing danger of being self-fulfilling.  This fateful questioning of the hero emerges even more directly in those philosophical counter-movements to millennial despair (post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-imperialism, and the like) which seek to get us beyond our destructive desire to get beyond (our limits, borders, finitude, and so on).

In Watchmen, a text now widely regarded as a major work of postmodern literature, the imminence of just such a self-fulfilling apocalypse is one of the major points of departure for the plot. Recall that Watchmen's signature image (which appears on Watchmen's first cover as well as its first and last panels) depicts a blood-stained happy-face, the blood transforming the smiley into a millennium-clock twelve minutes (that is, twelve issues) away from midnight (Watchmen I.1.i and XII.32.vii). Ozymandias—the heroic "world's smartest man"who uses his intelligence to avert nuclear holocaust in the shocking culmination of the story—tells an interviewer earlier: "I believe there are some people who really do want, if only subconsciously [sic], an end to the world. ...I see the twentieth century as a race between enlightenment and extinction."   If Ozymandias sounds like Isaiah Berlin here, however, we need to recall that Ozymandias intentionally kills millions of innocent people—"half of New York"—in his successful bid to convince cold-warring nations on the brink of a nuclear war that they are being attacked by an alien species and so must put aside their differences and band together in order to survive.  This is no mere triumph of consequentialist reasoning over the deontological ethics of the Enlightenment. Read carefully (which, I have argued, is the only way it can be read), Watchmen clearly calls Ozymandias's "less obvious heroism" into question along with the more traditional "schoolboy heroics" of the other heroes, who proved incapable of resolving a world crisis of such magnitude. Thus, in all the ways we have seen (and more),Watchmen's deconstruction of the hero suggests that perhaps the time for heroes has passed, and this, as we will see
next, distinguishes this postmodern work from those deconstructions of the hero contained in the existentialist movement that preceded
postmodernism.

[Cain]

EXISTENTIAL DECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE HERO

Existentialism, that philosophical tradition previously best known for  radical questioning (the tradition which, with Heidegger, gave us the very  concept of deconstruction), questioned, but did not overturn, the great importance Western history has  always accorded to the hero. ("Always," here that means—since we are talking about Western history—beginning with our own beginning: Our founding myths are hero stories all.) Indeed, of the three greatest existential philosophers, Nietzsche and Heidegger both found it easier to give up their own devout Christianity than to stop believing in heroes.  The third, Kierkegaard, transformed Christian faith into an heroic act, heroizing faith in provocatively contemporary terms: Kierkegaard's "knight of faith" is essentially a secret identity, an identity "the public" can never see. Wrapping this existential riddle inside the enigma of his own authorship, Kierkegaard permitted himself to describe his hero (which is also an obvious attempt at self-heroization) only while masking his own authorial identity with various pseudonyms.  This doubly-secretive strategy for self-heroization is repeated by Rorschach (the hero and anti-hero—really, he is both—who initially occupies the shifting center of Watchmen), when he chronicles, and so seeks to justify, his own (would-be) heroics in "Rorschach's Journal,"which serves as both an homage (ironic or not) to the tradition of the detective's voice-over in film noir and,more importantly, as a symbolic stand-in for the projected fantasies of the comic-book as such, and one with which Watchmen, tellingly, not only opens but closes—and "closes" precisely by leaving open (however seemingly pessimistic its suggestions on this score) the question of whether or not comic books have any future.

Why, then, do the three greatest existentialists so vehemently resist the Enlightenment suggestion that the time for heroes is past? It is important to understand that these existentialists inherited two great but conflicting traditions: On the one hand, the Enlightenment revolution (which celebrated Reason über alles and so stripped the holy halos from the heads of earlier saints and saviors, leaving only a "de-auratized," halo-free world), and, on the other hand, the Romantic counter-revolution (which sought to resacralize the world by recognizing that the sources of meaning always exceed humanity as it currently exists. See Horkheimer and Adorno, 1988). Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger recognized that the Enlightenment yielded powerful and important insights into the "transcendental" structures that make existence as we know it possible, but they also believed that the possible should always "transcend" existence as we know it, and so they held that human beings, in order to lead lives worth living, need to celebrate the romantic  imagination that creates the possible as well as the enlightened reason that discovers the actual.

It is, however, precisely this Romantic current in the existentialists'work (succinctly expressed by Nietzsche's anti-Enlightenment quip, "not only light but also darkness is required for life by all organisms") that renders existentialism vulnerable to criticism coming from those neo-Enlightenment movements which seek to move us historically beyond our need for heroes.

This vulnerability can be seen most clearly in the fact that Kierkegaard's heroization of faith stands or falls along with the fate of the hero in general. Put simply, if there can be no heroes, then there can be no heroizations.  This same vulnerability holds, albeit in a more complex way, for Nietzsche's own heroic struggle against historical nihilism, the existential mission which animates Nietzsche's work as a whole and which is at the heart of his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Zarathustra, of course, is the text that gave us the very idea of the "superman" (Übermensch),Nietzsche's personification of the neo-Darwinian idea that history is not over, since humanity too "is something that shall be overcome."  Indeed, Nietzsche equates belief in the hero with hope for the future (as the epigraph over this chapter indicates: "But by my love and hope I beseech you: Do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!"). Those individuals who would participate in the creation of a more meaningful future need to be inspired by the great heroes of the past, Nietzsche thought, ultimately so as to overcome these heroes and thereby become "overheroes"—or, better, "superheroes"—that is, even greater heroes for the future. The "superhero" (another Nietzschean conception) is someone who becomes a hero by superceding the hero who inspired him or her. (As Zarathustra says: "For this is the soul's secret: Only when the hero has abandoned her, is she approached in a dream by the superhero [Über-Held]"Nietzsche, 231.)

Under the influence of the comics Nietzsche unintentionally helped inspire, we tend to think of Superman as a type of superhero, but on Nietzsche's view, it would be more accurate to say that all superheroes are variations of the superman archetype. (Applied to the history of comic books, this overly-reductive view can be surprisingly revealing.)  The "superman" personifies Nietzsche's idea that the creation of a future worth living requires the continual supercession of the past, while his "superhero" symbolizes the component claim that in order to help create that future, we must supercede even the heroes of the past. (Thus, in the fourth and final book of Zarathustra, Zarathustra himself finally becomes the superman only by superceding the greatest heroes of the past, "the higher men," each of whom represents a different peak of past human achievement.) One of the lessons Nietzsche drew from Darwin was that to survive in a competitive environment organisms cannot remain static but must grow and develop. By helping us supercede even our greatest past achievements, the Nietzschean superhero serves the "constant overcoming"—or "will to power"—whereby "life" keeps itself alive.

Nietzsche thus believed that without the continued emergence of new heroes, "superheroes," we will have no  future—whether the absence of a future means, as it does in Watchmen, a literal annihilation of human civilization, or, as in Zarathustra, the endless repetition of an old value system which becomes increasingly worn-out and meaningless to us. Since, for Nietzsche, only a superhero should dare undertake the dangerous venture of questioning the heroes of the past, this means that past heroics may be questioned only for the sake of future heroics; Nietzsche's deconstruction of the hero never calls into question the idea of the hero as such. It is Moore who uses Watchmen's two main "superhero" candidates—Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan—to demonstrate the dangers of this Nietzschean ideal. As we have seen, Ozymandias succeeds, where even his hero Alexander the Great did not, in unifying the world, but at the cost of alienating himself from humanity by rising so far above them. Thanks to a more extreme version of this alienating transcendence, the superficially more Superman-like Dr. Manhattan becomes a "god" rather than a human being (as Watchmen makes clear), eventually abandoning our world in order to create one of his own.  Nevertheless, Nietzsche himself maintains that, however dangerous the idea of the superhero, we cannot give it up without risking the future itself.

Heidegger, the last and most complex of the three great existentialists, explicitly chose Nietzsche as his own philosophical "hero" and so, as a faithful Nietzschean, sought to overcome Nietzsche—with all the paradox (and hermeneutic violence) this notoriously involves.  In other words,Heidegger's attempt to supercede Nietzsche follows from an acceptance (and critical appropriation), not a rejection, of Nietzsche's conception of the hero. In fact, with Being and Time's notion of "authentic historicality," Heidegger formalizes an idea he learned from his appropriation of Nietzsche (and Kierkegaard), namely, that the true heritage of an otherwise stultifying tradition is best kept alive via "reciprocative rejoinders," sympathetic but critical appropriations of the "heroes" of the past in which we develop and update our chosen hero's mission or example so that it will be capable of meeting the changed demands of our contemporary world.  Not surprisingly, then, Heidegger supercedes Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (even as he critically appropriates their views) when, in  1927's  Being and Time,he deconstructs the hero, seeking to describe the structural features of the process whereby individuals and social groups constitute fundamental aspects of their own identities by "choosing their heroes."

In Heidegger's view, although the heroes we choose fundamentally shape our sense of self, initially we choose our heroes without even being aware that we are choosing them, and,moreover,we tend to choose from the same predetermined array of heroes as everyone else. By simply taking over a hero society has pre-packaged for us,we are doing what Heidegger calls choosing "the anonymous anyone" for a hero (Being and Time, 422).Whether the hero unreflexively embraced is Michael Jordan, Albert Einstein, or Marilyn Manson, such conformist (or "inauthentic") heroization helps perpetuate the status-quo sense of what matters in life, be it athletic excellence, scientific genius, or a route to rebellion already mapped out by the status-quo—and so a rebellion which, like those contemporary political protests which accept their confinement to "pre-determined protest areas," tends unintentionally to reinforce the very order it rebels against.  Nor am I necessarily
any closer to owning my own identity simply in virtue of having chosen a more marginal figure—such as John Muir, Ansel Adams, or Julia "Butterfly" Hill—as the hero who inspires my defining existential projects (here, say, "deep-ecological" environmentalism) and so my sense of self. In terms of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit, more literally "ownmostness"), what matters is not the type of hero chosen so much as the way that hero is chosen and so made my own.

For,Heidegger believed it possible, in a "moment of vision," to step back from the heroes we have "always-already" chosen, adopt a second-order perspective on those choices, and choose again, in full awareness that we are choosing a hero, and that doing so lucidly can help us own our own lives in a way that will restore our sense of the meaning, weight, and integrity of our actions.  With such "authentic" heroization, what is crucial is the "reciprocative rejoinder" mentioned earlier, whereby we critically appropriate our heroes by interpreting and updating their "mission" so that it speaks to the changed demands of our own world. In this way we keep alive what our hero stood for in our own lives, rather than simply admiring our hero from afar,worshiping them from a safe distance.When we choose our heroes inauthentically, we do not really have to do much (to "Be like Mike," apparently I simply need to drink Gatorade), and,moreover, our society will subtly reassure us that we have made the right choice (since, sticking with this example, our society continually reinforces its ridiculous overemphasis on athletic excellence).  When we choose our heroes authentically, however, we take more upon ourselves (here, I would actually dedicate myself to being like Mike, and I would also have to take responsibility for my interpretation of what that demands), and the result is much riskier (for I am likely to fail to be like Mike).  If we choose our heroes authentically, we, like Ozymandias at the end of Watchmen, will not be able to find any reassurance outside ourselves that we have made "the right choice," and like Heidegger himself (when he chose to believe in the initial promise of Hitler's "revolution"), it is always possible that we are making a horrible mistake.  Authentic heroics require learning to live with this uncertainty. Following in the footsteps of our heroes thus encourages us to follow Nietzsche's exhortation to "live dangerously," to risk an absolute commitment (a commitment in which our very identity is at stake), since only such a risk, Kierkegaard argues, can give existential weight and meaning to our lives.

[Cain]

SPARKS IN THE DARKNESS

If we look for people who made no mistakes, who were always on the right  side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have very few heroes and heroines.
- RICHARD RORTY

In the end,Watchmen's postmodern ambivalence concerning the hero places it somewhere between the Enlightenment rejection of, and the existentialist commitment to, the idea of the hero; and in this, Watchmen reflects a tension underlying our own age. For, even if one believes that there is something admirable in the desire to live without heroes, the problem remains that we have not woken up and walked with our eyes wide-open into the clear light of a post-heroic tomorrow. Instead, we as a culture have simply discovered the decadent pleasure of destroying the heroes we create. Indeed, building up sham heroes only to destroy them the next week or month—once the fare only of the tabloids—seems to have become our most popular national pastime. Concealed, however, behind this spectacle of a "star-
studded" popular culture saturated with "malicious joy" (Schadenfreude,a German word for an increasingly American disposition) is the fact that we not only degrade our sham heroes (in whose company I would include not only Joe Millionaire, American Idol, and their ilk, but almost all our precious "stars"), we also ignore or quickly forget the real heroes who emerge despite it all (Julia Hill, Rachel Corrie,Mark Bingham, to name but a few), heroes with the capacity to disrupt our cynical complacency, realign our felt-understanding of what matters, and so give focus to our guiding sense of self.When greatness as such is suspect, and quickly subjected to vicious persecution, in the end we are left with only conformity, cultural banalization, and the triumph, by default, of sad mediocrity. Although I look forward to a dawn beyond our twilight of the idols, our dusk of "stars"made mostly of paper-thin tinsel (easily torn and foresworn), I do not believe  we are entering into—or  should seek to enter—a time without heroes, a post-heroic age.

I would suggest instead that when a genre seems to commit suicide—as philosophy did (with Kant, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein) and as the super-hero comic did (with Watchmen)—this apparent suicide is usually better understood as an attempted martyrdom, that is, a sacrifice with a redemptive intent, a would-be rebirth (even if in a different form).When the greatest representatives of a genre seek to end it, this is perhaps because they sense (on some level) that no field can long survive without being periodically revitalized by such sacrifice and rebirth. It is no coincidence that many of the comics which followed Watchmen sought to respond to its challenging deconstruction of the hero, and that the result greatly enriched the comics medium as a whole.More than fifteen years later, mainstream comics continue to occupy a post-Watchmen landscape, one in which Watchmen's ambivalence about the hero has become nearly ubiquitous.  Even in the darkest of contemporary comics, however, a careful reader can still recognize the sparks from that ongoing struggle to imagine and create the kinds of heroes who will prove themselves capable of inspiring the denizens of this complex and morally ambiguous world, a struggle which seeks to
keep alive (as the dream of the hero, with all its risks, has always done) our hope for a better future. This hope  (which, really, is hope itself) we can deconstruct but never destroy.

[Roaring Biscuit!]

awesome.  that is all.

well... not all... but it needs to sink in a bit.  or possibly be reread before I'm ready to try and say something intelligent.

x

[Kai]

The Watchmen (and several other comics such as Maus) have elevated the comics medium to high art, and its precisely this level of depth and rereading and retelling that allows it.

Scott McCloud gets it, and so does Iain Thomson.

[Triple Zero]

Okay, tell me if I still dont get "it", but Watchmen is considered to be so great because it was the very first comic to have its characters deal with real human problems, or have anti heroes, or criticize society and/or human behaviour by caricature?

Were all American comics before 1986 just about men in spandex happily shooting lazors at aliens and/or commies and/or nazis? (or alien commie nazi vampries)

and it it me or does the article seem to be (deliberately?) conflating the mythical hero with the real life hero.

[hooplala]

Okay, tell me if I still dont get "it", but Watchmen is considered to be so great because it was the very first comic to have its characters deal with real human problems, or have anti heroes, or criticize society and/or human behaviour by caricature?

Pretty much.

Were all American comics before 1986 just about men in spandex happily shooting lazors at aliens and/or commies and/or nazis? (or alien commie nazi vampries)

Pretty much.

[Cain]

Okay, tell me if I still dont get "it", but Watchmen is considered to be so great because it was the very first comic to have its characters deal with real human problems, or have anti heroes, or criticize society and/or human behaviour by caricature?

Were all American comics before 1986 just about men in spandex happily shooting lazors at aliens and/or commies and/or nazis? (or alien commie nazi vampries)

and it it me or does the article seem to be (deliberately?) conflating the mythical hero with the real life hero.

As I understand it, these adult themes were more common in the Bronze Age, but taken to their logical conclusion by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, shown in the starkest possible terms.  The Silver Age that preceeded it was very much about that sort of fun/slighty crazy storylines, I think this TV Tropes link http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SilverAge gives a good overview of the sort of themes that were prevalent.  And its Grant Morrison's favourite comic era, which says a lot.

Yes, he does conflate the terms.  But I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing, since it leads into an interesting and fruitful discussion.

[The Wizard]

and it it me or does the article seem to be (deliberately?) conflating the mythical hero with the real life hero.

Besides the epic heroes of mythology have a lot of similarities with modern super-heroes. Odysseus is quite similar to Batman and other tactical heroes. Superman and Hercules also come together. Hell, look at King Arthur and Green Lantern. Super-heroes are the evolution of the Mythical hero.

[Triple Zero]

yeah I agree with that, I was lumping them in with the mythical heroes already. with real life heroes I mean people that do something actually heroic in real life. the biggest difference is that a real life hero often just performs one heroic act, or perhaps several but as a transient phase (such as a warhero), while the mythical hero usually does heroic acts as a way of life.

[The Wizard]

That's true. In real life, most people get only one shot to be a hero or to make a real change.

[Spork]

That's true. In real life, most people get only one shot to be a hero or to make a real change.

You're not a parent, are you?

[The Wizard]

I'm not yet out of high school. No.