Good Guys and Bad Guys

I was reading a post regarding the moral and ethical implications of the actions in the book and film The Watchmen.  As per usual for the internet it broke down into a measuring contest with people competing on who has been studying Psych 102 and can quote a textbook regarding Kant and other great philosophical minds.  But the idea behind the internet hissy fit was actually interesting.  And I’m being a bit rough on the post, as far as the normal internet discourse goes it was rather tame and I didn’t see all that much doucheyness.

But that debate got me thinking about good guys and bad guys as well as the character that live in the moral grey zone.  If you watch old western films there tends to be a heavy reliance on archetypes and reasonably simple moralities.  Guy in a black hat is not such a nice person.  The guy in white hat is pretty awesome.  The snake oil salesman who nobody listens to or takes seriously but is mostly harmless as the comic relief.  The female lead.  Here we usually tend to have one of three categories for a woman in older film.  The mother figure, the virginal good girl, and the loose woman.  For women in these films and many older films there were only these three roles.  Women were categorized by sex.  And their worth was weighed on their category.  Generally the character starts of as the virginal good girl and then goes one of two ways.  Be married and submit to the male or be a floozy and have sex and not submit to the male.  So essentially its societies way or keeping women in the kitchen by shaming them.  Yay, progressive Hollywood.  Women in film usually exist as the prize.  They are simply awarded to the hero.  And I’m not talking about romantic comedies I’m talking about most films.  The point of the female lead is to be given to the male lead at the end as a reward for overcoming his obstacles.  Cracked wrote a whole article about it.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html

But as film grew in maturity the moral complexities and the roles which characters could play expanded.  There was room for people to slip into the grey realms where choice and morality grew murky.  There was finer brush strokes instead of the very broad character arcs like; stay good; stay bad; be redeemed; and be damned.  We have seen moral complexity in other mediums for centuries regardless of its place or appropriateness in adhering to the cultural morays of the time of creation.  It is a natural progression of any medium with storytelling.  It happens in comics, film and video games.  All mediums generally looked down upon but are slowly gaining in acceptance as art.  Not too long ago Roger Ebert relented in his criticism of video games as art.  He didn’t buckle and state that video games are a real art form but he quit his firm position due to realizing he had his face firmly in his own ass.  It’s not a terminal condition but it does lend to people calling you and asshole.  Anyway… moral complexities have come to the new mediums.  In video games however there have been issues with it.  Part of the problem when creating moral choice in an interactive environment is that the character in a game is acting as your avatar.  It is this that forms a strong bound from gamer to character.  Obviously decent story helps but Super Mario Bros has very little discernible plot and we still formed a tight bound with the scrappy little plumber.  I think the plot goes like this.  Plumber in a pet store trips on shrooms and almost drowns in toilet pipe.  Flails around screaming about being lit on fire and smashes the glass to the turtle cases.  Calmed down by the blond girl working the cash register but letting him play with pocket change.

But right now it seems to be the latest cliché to give two available paths for your character to take.  Good guy or bad guy.  The problem with video game built around this limiting premise of a stat system based off these choices.  Act like a good guy all the time and your persuasion goes up allowing you coerce people.  Act like a flaming shit stain all the time and get better at intimidating people into doing what you want.  But what happens if you tow the line?  You choice to be a “jerk” sometimes and a nice guy other times.  No reward, no stat boost, nothing.  And I put jerk in those quotes due to a flawed system in qualifying good and bad.  A lot of the time the game doesn’t categorize the whole being a shithead or being a nice guy well.  It isn’t necessarily bad to yell at a character trying to kill someone instead of calmly stating, “hey, stop you might wound this guy and feel bad later.  Douche”  I added the douche part.  But gamers want to get levels, increase stats and up their gamer score.  So they act one way totally and commit.  So its enforcing a moral standpoint not because they feel that’s how they should act morally but how they should act to get more cool shit like a laser sword unlocked at level fifteen.  But video games, even with their growing sophistication, is still an infant form.  And it still has to overcome the image of being a past time for kids.

Back to comic books.  The morality of comic book character is often changed wily-nilly.  This is from the changing industry guidelines and change in the writers for a comic series.  The guys who writes for Batman now is not the same guy who wrote a year ago.  Their ideas on where the character goes differ.  Writers have their story arc and they pass a torch.  This isn’t always bad as the creator often doesn’t see the potential of their creation and needs a fresh mind to pull them from obscurity and bring complexity, character depth and intrigue.  The X-Men were boring with Stan the man.  It took some other writers to bring in the good stuff.  Sadly The X-men were neutered by the films.  If you have read about what the third film should have been about you might want try to make the collective soul of Hollywood manifest into a tangible substance so it could punch it in its spirit dick.  I’m kind of proud of that last sentence.

But superheroes and comic books are rife with moral quandaries.  And oftentimes we find the superheroes questionable.  And it’s often frightening because they aren’t meant to be.  It’s more of a call on the morality of those pushing the graphic novels out.  I always found Superman boring because at his core he is invulnerable and incorruptible.  Where is there tension?  We always know he will win.  Then there was the famous series where he died, sort of, and that rekindled the character for a while until they blew that too.  I always preferred Batman.  Mostly because he’s the goddman Batman and fuck you that’s why.  He is a tragically flawed but amazing character.  He has vulnerability, he has character flaws and he has a set of rules that govern his actions which make sense.  But he wasn’t always consistent.  There was a time when they totally changed how they dealt with violence in comic books.  As he wasn’t fighting aliens or magic beasts just mobsters they had to change the formula.  So they launched Batman into space for a period of time.  Not the brightest days for Batman fans.  Space Batman still give very little fucks and will straight up punch you for say a fashion faux pas.  “White after labor day?!  Wham!”  Or not…

But The Watchmen is not normal comic book with the inconsistencies placed on it by a long run and shifts in culture.  The Watchmen is above normal.  The story is engaging and the characters are thoroughly thought out and engaging.  They take the universe of comic book vigilantes and populate it with the psychology or real people.  As would probably happen most people behind the mask are unhinged one way or another.

The great thing about The Watchmen is that it lives in a world that feels close to our own.  A possibility where the only difference is there were masked vigilantes and there were shifts in normalcy due to do this.  The only series that treats their world in a similar manner is the X-men.  And the X-men was really, when it was good, just a big commentary on racism.  They ignored the sticky trouble of picking out ethnicities by instead using supercharged humans and the hatred generated by that otherness.  They delved into self loathing, divisiveness, intolerance and whole slew of other human rights issues.  But they cloaked in safe quasi-science.

In narrative fiction when the world expressed is different enough that we can’t immediately relate to the issues of the world itself there are often two tricks the author uses.  One trick which pulls you out of the world and the story is an enormous amount of exposition.  The more common tactic is person who experiences the world as you are.  With The Matrix we had Neo.  He was our gateway to the world.  We learned as he learned.  With Star Wars (the ones that still exist in my mind and don’t fill me with anger and bitterness) we had Luke a simple farm boy who barely knew anything.  With Hellboy we had that obnoxious new guy.  In the second film we had enough back story and knowledge that character was no longer needed.  Heck The Never Ending story, and The Princess Bride both had two little kids reading the story.

For The Watchmen we had Night Owl (#2) as our point of contact and moral compass.  Spoilers ahead. 

Night Owl is a morally cautious and unsure hero.  He acted like a normal man who chose a very odd life.  He is appalled at the behaviors of his fellow super heroes for different reasons and forgives certain behaviors and acts.  He is our not always correct guide for right and wrong.  With him we see the extremes of the others, he is the foil.  While he has no distinct moral convictions he is saddled with sexual frustrations, an obvious impotence theme linking his actions as vigilante to worth as a man and translating that to sexual worth (the fight scene with Black Widow #2 and himself can be seen a very odd courtship).

Each character is so convinced in their rightness and their actions.  Rorschach, Ozymandius and the Comedian have no ounce of backing up in them.  They live by the convictions and code, whether it is right or wrong.

Dr. Manhattan is outside this realm of humanity as he has transcended morality and ethics.  He is amoral (not to be confused with immoral).  He is an odd and tragic character.  He sees all possibilities, future and past all concurrently.  So his actions in his eyes are already predetermined.  He has seen them.  He’s simply around for the ride as a spectator watching his own life.  He is passive in decision making as he mostly retreats from confrontation (like teleporting to Mars) or sends it away (as he did to Rorschach).  In the comic book version of Vietnam Dr. Manhattan walks around simply willing the ‘enemy’ to death.  He simply accommodates those around him and really has no drive or motive.

Then there is Rorschach.  Dogged to the extreme.  Ruthless, and efficient.  Completely committed (in both definitions) and unwavering.  His closest comparison is the Punisher but frighteningly enough he goes even further.  So fractured by what he has perceived and so broken he hides behind his shifting mask of obscurity and takes vengeance.  Vengeance for his lost innocence.  Vengeance for being turned into a man with no boundaries.  He has one motive and one drive.  Truth and punishment.  He jauntily walks past Batman’s firmest rule (never kill or let another die by inaction).

The Comedian is a sick and twisted man who exists for himself.  He is quick to judge all around him and quick to admit his own flaws.  He kills the mother of his child in Vietnam and is more upset that Manhattan let it happen.  He is actually upset while the blood is still fresh on his hand that Manhattan with all his power chooses not to act.  He is childlike in his actions in that he never outgrew the phase of immediate gratification.  Rape is acceptable to him because simply, he wants t have sex.  And again when caught he is unapologetic and turns it against his captor with witticism and deep barbs.

Lastly there is Ozymandius, genius and playboy.  I actually prefer the way the plan played out in the comic book versus the one in the movie.  The switch is very relevant.  Yes it is understandable and easier to palate but it takes away from the reasoning.  IN the comic an alien was presented as the one thing humanity would rally against instead of Manhattan.  The reasoning being humanity needs a boogeyman, it needs a common enemy to unite under.  Dr. Manhattan, while he is otherworldly and is something inhuman, he is very much attached to the U.S.  All that rage would funnel that way.  It would aim at the government and it would aim at the science that create him.  There would be collateral damage.  Ozymandius wouldn’t mind this collateral damage as he sacrificed so many lives already but it would be messier and less clean that he would want.  There also were far more explosions in the film so that the attacks seem to affect all of the world.  I think this is partially a reaction to 9/11 as so many things are nowadays and we will find echoes of this National tragedy for decades in our narratives.  Such disasters live within the culture of its people and filter into popular media.  Look at the original Godzilla movie.  The entire thing was about the evil of the nuclear bomb and the extreme danger of science.  The scientist in that movie decided he would unleash his deadly invention but only if he died as well so it could never fall into the wrong hands.

Ozymandius is not crazy but he is morally bankrupt.  He sees his solution as elegant and he feels, as a superior being, he has the right to make that choice.  He is a very seductive form of evil.  But, as we know, truth will win.  Rorschach alone stands opposed to the decision but the others, acknowledging their failure, see no correct option but to allow the plan to follow through.  Night Owl takes his frustrations out with violence which Ozymandius accepts willingly as his form of penance, he seems oddly happy that he is struck and justified I his share of punishment.  You almost hate him more because he says that feels he should be hurt but not enough to die like the other pawns.  Rorschach, knowing he cannot stop the plan but also knowing he cannot allow himself to stand idly, chooses to commit suicide through murder (he lets Manhattan kill him).

Comic books have grown in sophistication due to the niche market they themselves in.  Fewer people buy and the higher price they command demands greater artistry.  Most of the people I know who read are intelligent adults (usually the specific demographic is the socially awkward male) and they need more than boobies and explosions to keep them shelling out every month.  I can only hope that the film craze of comic books produces more The Dark Knight and The Watchmen and less The Fantastic Four.  Jessica Alba’s cleavage can only save so much.

Ben