America Is a Dangerous Vigilante, Heroes Are Sociopaths: The Not-So-Mythical World of 'Watchmen'

By Michael Dudley, AlterNet. Posted March 12, 2009.

Grady Hendrix, writing at Slate, observes:

Watchmen made the point that superheroes, realistic or otherwise, were beside the point. Its costumed do-gooders are retired, impotent or insane, and they generally do more harm than good. Their adversaries are virtually nonexistent, and when we do see them, they look more like Vegas magicians than world-class threats. When the villain's master plan is finally revealed, the heroes are helpless to prevent it from coming to fruition ...

The film simplifies the multilayered complexity of Moore's and Gibbons' vision, but is remarkably faithful to it, even to the point of lovingly re-creating its imagery. While it sanitizes the notoriously gory climax of the novel, it does however amplify to a sometimes shocking degree the rest of its violence.

As well, we see our "heroes" variously shoot, stab, cleave, deep-fry, torture and disintegrate their suspects and assailants. While set ostensibly a generation ago, the film's depiction of extrajudicial violence seems right at home in the era of Abu Ghraib.

Yet Watchmen's several lingering views of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center underscore just how far removed its brutal cynicism about heroism is from the role heroism has played in our post-9/11 political and media cultures.

Eager to promote an unquestioning patriotic meta-narrative, our politicians and news media have made a regular national ceremony out of dubbing ordinary people doing admirable and dangerous work as heroes. Susan Faludi, in her recent book, The Terror Dream, showed how this cult of heroism not only fueled regressive gender politics but helped to thwart asking the real questions about how the federal government had failed to protect the country before the 9/11 attacks and the rescue workers in the weeks and months afterward.

Since then, the practice of hero worship has become so prevalent, the Los Angeles Times' Rosa Brooks recently pointed out, that the overuse of "hero" actually leads to the devaluation of genuine acts of heroism.

At the same time -- and more ominously -- it all too easily accommodates a drift toward totalitarianism. Umberto Eco, in his influential 1995 essay, "14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt," confirms this relationship, stating that in an "Ur-fascist" society, everyone is educated to become a hero.

The consequences of this hero culture and self-idolatry, according to Chris Hedges (author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning), are distorted domestic politics and a "culture of atrocity" when America goes to war:

We make our [soldier] heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation's idolatry of itself.

Watchmen warns us of the dangers that lurk within the ideology of heroism. The film's villain has, under the mantle of heroism and with all noble intentions to meet the greater good, doomed millions of people to die. The United States, too, is shown to be seduced by this power, using superheroes to do even more effectively what it has actually done in the post-Cold War era: attack other nations unilaterally, violently and with impunity -- acting as William Blum puts it, as a rogue state.

But the assumption and use of these powers is seen to come to naught. Ultimate power of course not only corrupts but is too easily abused, turned against oneself, or indeed, lost altogether.

Watchmen tells of the terrible consequences that can ensue when an individual or a nation assumes unwarranted and unlimited powers; for with the donning of the hero's cloak of righteousness, everything becomes permissible.

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