The Watchmen, Adrian Veidt, and the Pirate Ship

Posted on January 28, 2004 by Ampersand

Eve Tushnet, discussing the much-lauded superhero comic Watchmen, writes:

The pirate comic is a story of despair as a self-fulfilling prophecy: The castaway assumes that the black freighter’s crew has devastated his hometown, and so he himself causes the carnage he feared. Veidt assumes that without his hideously gory intervention, the world will end, and so he himself causes the book’s greatest destruction. I am pretty sure that part of the point of the pirate comic is to suggest that Veidt is wrong, that his deadly plan was not the only way to prevent World War Three.

Jim Henley responds:

Like I said, plausible. But another possibility has to be considered: the castaway stands not for Veidt but for America, and the “auto-genic carnage” (to coin a phrase), for the logical outcome of America’s Cold War national security policies. If that’s the case, the valence of the interpolation changes radically. Now, something to consider: Eve talks about the “realism” of the world of the Watchmen, its tangibility. So, let us recall that the pirate comic exists within that world, being read by a kid in that world, and it was perforce authored in that world too. It’s a horror comic. So, which anxiety are writer and/or artist likelier to have that motivates the tale, an anxiety about a retired superhero’s secret plan or an anxiety about a country’s nuclear policy?

It’s possible to subscribe to both Jim’s and Eve’s interpretations for the pirate comic. However, Eve’s interpretation is very strongly supported by the text; in the final chapter, talking to Jon, Veidt explains that he’s been dreaming of “swimming towards a hideous….” This is a reference to the only other image of swimming in Watchmen; the protagonist of the pirate comic swimming towards the hideous pirate ship after murdering his own family and townsfolk. Veidt, like the main character in the pirate comic, is the destruction he fears.

The superhero as (in Eve’s term) “blood-soaked utopian” was one of Alan Moore’s favorite themes in his 1980s superhero comics; it can be seen not only in Adrien Veidt, but also in the title characters of V for Vendetta and Miracleman. V of V for Vendetta is the closest relative to Adrian Veidt; like Veidt, V is essentially a terrorist, who creates desired political change through visible acts of violence and murder.

Miracleman isn’t such a clear example, because the worse of the carnage happens mostly against Miracleman’s will, as he fights a supervillain in London. Nonetheless, in the battle Miracleman’s hands are far from clean: for example, he picks up an automobile with a terrified family inside and hurls it at his enemy, killing everyone in the car. The fight which leads to Miracleman’s leftist utopia/dictatorship ends when Miracleman murders an eleven year old boy.

To me, the bloody ends of Moore’s political fantasies have always felt like human sacrifice; to create utopia, it is first necessary to make a large-scale human sacrifice. (Similar themes are found in Moore and Campbells Jack the Ripper novel From Hell – although in that case, the sacrifices were not murdered in the name of social improvement).

Moore’s comics seem to imply that real political improvement can happen only with extremes; only violent, shocking death can create real progressive change. Not exactly an inspiring message for leftists. Still, they’re darn good comics..

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5 Responses to The Watchmen, Adrian Veidt, and the Pirate Ship

  1. Mr Ripley says:
    January 28, 2004 at 6:00 pm

    To some extent they’re indictments of the idea that such violence can create “real progressive change” –certainly in the worlds created by V. and Miracleman, we’re shown over and over that there are still displaced people, that utopia is overrated. And at the end of Watchmen Veidt’s glorious plans for rebuilding are about to be sabotaged as the story of his role in the destruction heads for publication. V. and Veidt, caricatures of the anarchist and the New Frontiersman, are shown to be driven by egoism and as such incapable of creating the ideal societies they claim to be founding for altruistic reasons.

  2. Amy S. says:
    January 28, 2004 at 11:07 pm

    I never took it as a given that Veidt would be a fallen man in the world’s eyes after the diary was discovered. After all, the diary’s writer was nuts and so was the guy who ended up (possibly) publishing it. I think Moore wanted to leave that possibility open, nothing more.

  3. Simon says:
    February 1, 2004 at 2:11 pm

    Jim’s point about what might have motivated the (fictional) authors of the pirate comic is kind of beside the point. Why, of all the inset comics he might have used, did Moore use that one? Answer: to use it as a counterpoint to the broader story. I mean, Jim might as well ask why the slob in the last panel spills ketchup on his shirt. It’s a meaningless question; but why Moore has it happen is not meaningless: it’s counterpoint to the blood on the Comedian’s button, duh. Echo of this kind is central to Moore’s writing style.

    I agree with Amy that it’s not at all clear that the publication of Rorschach’s journal will explode Veidt’s plan. But it does seem to me that Moore is saying that Rorschach was right, that Veidt’s plan was immoral, and that Dan and Laurie are morally compromised by agreeing to live in Veidt’s world.

    However, I find the moral lesson in “V for Vendetta” to be quite different. V is defined as insane, he’s not to be condoned, and yet – he’s fighting a brutal tyranny and not (as Veidt is) mere lack of international cooperation; his victims are tightly targeted in acts of revenge for harm done to him personally, and not millions of innocents; even Finch at the end comes to understand V’s acts, and Evey wholeheartedly endorses them. If there is a difference between a terrorist and a freedom-fighter, V is depicted as the latter.

    I can’t say whether I’d agree or disagree with Moore’s moral statements. These are works of fiction, and no other data is available than what Moore picks and chooses to tell us. But I do find these to be the messages he’s conveying.

  4. PinkDreamPoppies says:
    February 2, 2004 at 1:50 pm

    I’ve always been unclear about whether Veidt’s plan was revealed in the end. In my paperback collection of Watchmen, the page right after the last blood-soaked clock has the following quote (and nothing else) on it:

    Quis custodiet
    ipsos custodes.

    Who watches the watchmen?

    –Juvenal, Satires, VI, 347
    Quoted as the epigraph of the Tower
    Commission Report, 1987

    I assumed that the Tower Commission was a government group, a la the Warren Commission, assigned to investigate the incident in New York. (Am I the only one who can’t type that sentence without feeling weird?) If that’s the case, then there seems to be a clear implication that the commission’s final report exposed Veidt’s plan. I’m not sure what the people thought of it, but I’m pretty sure that Rorschach’s journal was published, and Veidt’s plan was exposed, based on that quote.

    I, too, felt that the book came down in favour of Rorschach’s view of Veidt’s plan. I wrote a letter to Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings, I’ll repost part of it here:

    I found your comment that Watchmen “as with many leftist critiques of the Cold War the Soviet Union is strangely invisible” to be interesting for two reasons. Mostly, I’m a leftist myself (most would say “far leftist”) and my initial reaction to Watchmen was that it was a critique of the left from the right. Veidt is clearly one of those on the far left who would be willing to do anything at all to avert war. Rorschach, on the other hand, is clearly of the right wing and is also clearly the story’s ultimate hero. I thought that his final words about “one more body in the foundations” was a particularly telling comment about many leftist’s view of what it takes to achieve peace. More than that, I saw it as a comment on the Soviet Union’s bloody purge policies.

    I’m not sure if it’s fair to call Watchmen a leftist or a rightist work, though, as Moore is clearly and publicly an anarchist. I imagine that he would object to Veidt’s government-like meddling in world affairs as much as he would the U.S./Soviet conflict. Just a thought.

    Most of that was written in response to some comments that Jim had made, but I think that they shed a bit of light on how Moore, who I remember as having once said that V was the character whose views were closest to his own political views, would have liked for Veidt’s plans to be viewed: as evil and manipulative, with anyone who endorsed them being morally compromised.

    Or maybe I’m just projecting. I found Veidt to be so repulsive that, against my will, I found Rorshach to be the story’s only real hero.

  5. Connor Moran says:
    February 22, 2004 at 7:19 pm

    I had always assumed that the Tower Commission was a real Senate comission from the 80’s. A quick google search reveals that to be the case. The Tower Commission was the group appointed by Reagan to investigate the Iran-contra affair. A little bit of information about it can be found at http://www.namebase.org/sources/IE.html.

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