| |
|
And Rorschach sounds so like Moore reading the dialogue himself it's spooky.
I must disagree. Rorschach in my head sounded like the character in this trailer ~ that is, a gravelly, Batman-style badass ~ but Moore's reading of Rorschach's lines on a television documentary I saw last year surprised me a great deal, and suddenly helped me understand why he was frustrated and dismayed that so many readers of Watchmen seemed to celebrate Rorschach as a coldly appealing, hardnosed vigilante, the true hero of the piece.
Moore's reading of Rorschach's journal was not gravelly and bad-ass at all. It wasn't even an attempt at an American accent. It sounded like the guy who sits next to you on the bus ~ the bus outside a Northampton shopping centre, to be precise ~ and starts muttering to you, snuffly and slurpy, about how society's been poisoned by hookers and immigrants, and what he'd like to do about it. (In fact, Moore went on to write exactly this kind of dangerous-weirdo-on-the-Northampton-bus character in Big Numbers).
Sure, I like my version of Rorschach better, not least because I was sixteen when I first encountered it, but I think I was missing Moore's point, and I think the film is doing exactly the same thing. Rorschach is meant to demonstrate that this kind of obsessive, uncompromising vigilante ~ The Question, in real life ~ would be a stinking, prejudiced misfit, just as Nite Owl is supposed to suggest that someone who tried to be Blue Beetle would be a slightly geeky, dedicated but shy hobbyist. |
|
|
