Ticking Towards Midnight

When we examine the West’s history through a certain self-reflective lens, the apocalypse seems to loom in cycles.  We as a people recognize ourselves standing before the abyss, and either step back in moderation or step out to take the plunge.  As with Cromwell’s Roundhead Puritan revolutionaries in seventeenth century Britain, an ardent belief in the End of Days –and an incorporation of its prophecy into the era’s story – can spur great change in the time that remains; and as of yet we appear still to reside in that interstitial period.

Modern America, the oft-messianic frontier that Cromwell’s kin settled nearly four hundred years ago, has since its inception been at the center of apocalyptic speculation – and, many would agree, has paved the road to actualization of an apocalypse whose horror is beyond the most awful visions of St. John.  Both the Powers-That-Be and their adversaries belie this perspective in our politics and ethics, and our literature seems more enmeshed with the dilemma than the potential consequence.  It takes an outsider – a Jeremiah, in the ancient tradition – to call to conscience the scope of what society’s apocalyptic fixation has wrought upon this still-existent world.

When I first read Watchmen, the reclusive British writer Alan Moore’s comic series (compiled as a graphic novel when I read it), I was waist-deep an exploration of the murky waters of America’s unofficial history.  Moore’s universe, though also a deconstruction of the superhero paradigm, brought these elements of propaganda, industrialism, and psychological manipulation (and, of course, the profound fear of nuclear holocaust) out into the light of day.  Although Watchmen is a sensationalized perspective of the world as it might be, Moore and his collaborator Dave Gibbons conveyed these conditions in no uncertain terms as realities both inside and outside of their invented world.  “I wanted to communicate the feeling of ‘When’s it going to happen?’ Everyone [feels] it,” Moore is quoted as saying by Elizabeth Rosen.  This psychology of imminence, that permeates the Watchmen world, has been a part of Western culture (and power) from the very start.  The only difference is that we lack the super-humans able to transcend it.

Which brings me to the crux of Rosen’s analysis: that of the different apocalyptic deities she sees in Watchmen’s primary characters.  As I re-read the text, I saw more and more not three separate godheads embodied in Ozymandias, Dr. Manhattan, and Rorschach, but rather three aspects of an omniscient world savior, and the weight such a figure must inevitably bear.  Each copes with their terrible power in pursuit of a different virtue: Ozymandias, reformation; Dr. Manhattan, transcendence; and Rorschach, justice.  None could succeed, or even exist, without the others, and ultimately the triumph of all of these virtues requires their sacrifice.  It is a strange myth to have these gods, these Super-heroes, walking on the Earth (and, in Manhattan’s case, on Mars as well, or a few different places at once) and still see that clock tick inexorably towards midnight.  Moore seems to suggest that if the End has been ordained, by human action or by fate, then the role of a god is to usher it in.