We Watched the Watchmen: A Roundtable
Yesterday’s Always Shinier: Nostalgia in Watchmen
Dan Swensen: something that’s been on my mind a lot lately is the theme of nostalgia in Watchmen. I think it’s a rather subtle theme compared to the others in the book, but it’s incredibly pervasive. I want to add up front that I am doing this mostly from memory, and I apologize if it’s inaccurate and / or really obvious to everyone. Also, since I have not and will not see the film, this is exclusively about the comic.
First, the broad strokes. The Watchmen are in retirement. Some are dead. Many are older, or second-generation heroes emulating their predecessors. The villains, rather than enduring, have moved on, rehabilitated, become institutionalized, or are dead or dying.
In particular, a few images stand out:
The sign outside Hollis (Nite Owl I’s) shop that reads OBSOLETE MODELS OUR SPECIALTY.
Nite Owl and Rorshach reminisce: “What happened to those times?” “You quit.”
Dr. Manhattan, for an entire chapter, reminisces about his life that was; in his strange disconnection from time itself, he seems as nostalgaic about the future as he does about the past.
Even Rorshach, as he walks down the street, he laments: “Love, like Coke in green glass bottles. They don’t make it anymore.”
These moments are everywhere in Watchmen, and Moore sets them up and tears them down with equal aplomb. Much as Watchmen itself is a cynical commentary on the nature of the “classic” comic-book hero, the theme of nostalgia is a kind of meta-commentary, running in threads through the entire story. Captain Metropolis is a kind of personification of this nostalgia, ridiculed by the Comedian for wanting to “play dress-up and fight crime.” (Obviously, the Comedian is aptly named here; he gets the joke of this notion of heroism, in a way that no one, except perhaps Veidt, ever does.)
Veidt, on the other hand, is the deconstruction of nostalgia personified. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the annotated “Nostalgia” advertisement near the end of the book, in which Veidt literally takes the whole notion of nostalgia apart piece by piece. Veidt is symbolic of a new and frightening brand of cynicism, of morals so utilitarian that they’re indistinguishable from villainy. Veidt even seems aware of this, and actively works against it: he dismisses Nite Owl’s attempts to stop him as “high-school heroics” and says with contempt that he’s “not a Republic serial villain.” And yet, his behavior is often indistinguishable from same; he kills his own men, explains his final plan to the heroes, and is motivated by sheer megalomania. (How the ghost of you lingers…)
There are many more images of nostalgia than this in Watchmen; too many, in fact, to comfortably fit in one post, but I think it adds a poignant counterpoint to the themes of apocalypse. Even as the clock runs towards midnight on the world, the characters are looking backward to a bygone time, wishing for a return to those glory days — except, of course, for Veidt, who looks to the future in a purely terrifying way.
Matt: I hadn’t actually considered the film from this perspective. A lot of those elements are in the film, but apart from the opening credit sequence, I don’t think the film plays them up. I think the film’s emphasis is more on the march of time, which is related to nostalgia, but not quite the same thing. The street-level heroes find themselves outmatched the the problems facing humanity as a whole, and only Ozymandias is thinking on that scale. The others aren’t equipped for it; of course, Manhattan thinks on an even larger scale, but his whole anomie shtick is wearying and rather backward. In the world of the film, I think he’s a scarier figure than Veidt, because Veidt might be detached, arrogant, and misguided (not to mention evil), but he’s still plugged into shaping the future. Manhattan is so philosophical about existence itself that he doesn’t give two sheets to the wind about anything, unless it pertains to the hot chick with whom he occasionally has unsatisfying group sex. In any case, it’s more about change — for the better or worse, who knows? — than about a return to the past. The past informs the present, but most of the characters are just scrabbling to make do, so past and future aren’t really present concerns. At least, that was my impression.
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