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Yeah, I did read those posts, but I wasn't sure how seriously you were trying to make that point. I think it's a pretty massive stretch, a bit of a desperate attempt to excuse a very bad decision on the part of the director. Or scriptwriter, or whoever was responsible for it.
OK, maybe, but I think that depends on how much intelligence we are prepared to credit the director and scriptwriter with. I accept that my suggestion is a way of finding an excuse and rationale ~ I'm not sure how plausible it is.
I don't think I ever read it that way to begin with. It's been a long, long time since I first picked the comic up, obvs, but as far as I can remember I took it as read that Rorschach was a loony right from the off. This goes back to the discussion you and I were having in this thread a few months(?) back about the choice of font and how its scratchiness always suggested, to me, an unhinged lunatic. It's also fairly clear that Rorschach's internal monologue about Veidt comes from a bad place because it's so random, so laughable.
See also Travis Bickle. It's funny how similar the two are, how similar their respective introductions are.
It's not that they're too appealing, just that a lot of the audience don't read into the work deeply enough.
I've thought about this more, over the last couple of days, because I do wonder how and why Rorschach was and remains quite sympathetic to me, as a character ~ and why he has that appeal to a lot of readers and now viewers (and I believe he really does).
I think part of it does depend on when you read the comic.
I was 16 and to someone that age, a comic book that deals with what seem "serious" issues (politics, death, sex, time), quotes literary sources and knows about what seems serious, grown-up music and lyrics (I actually started listening to Dylan and Costello because of this book) and gives you a sort of beginner's guide to aspects of philosophy is really thrilling and flattering ~ these two cool older guys, Moore and Gibbons, are treating you like an adult.
If I picked up the book now, I don't even know if I'd finish it. It looks crude and clumsy ~ the art and colour are often a bit horrible ~ and having read one chapter again last night, I suspect the writing, characterisation and ideas are also a lot less sophisticated than they came across in 1986.
However, I now feel an affection for and investment in the book because of its importance to me as a teenager, and the influence it had on me. So I'm more forgiving of it than I would be if I came to it cold now, and my attitude towards it is bound up in how I felt about it when I first encountered it.
As for Rorschach, I suggest that readers encountering him when the book was first published would have engaged with the character through a framework of expectations including the noir hero (Bogart, Chandler's novels and so on), quite possibly Travis Bickle, but maybe most importantly (as it was a DC superhero comic by the author of Swamp Thing), BATMAN.
A masked vigilante who climbs buildings and investigates a murder, finding clues the police missed, and narrates with a hard-ass, articulate but cynical attitude, fits pretty well within the 1986 reader's understanding of Batman.
I don't know how true that would be now, for a comic reader or cinemagoer encountering the book for the first time ~ or how true it would have been over the last 20 years ~ but I reckon that for much of that period, for a lot of readers, Rorschach's early appearance signifies "here is a tough, cool-looking vigilante who pursues a rough justice, like Batman." The evolution of The Question into a kind of Batman companion and surrogate in the JLA cartoons (and no doubt in other formats) just supports that interpretation.
And that is where I think Moore was being quite clever with his intentions for Rorschach, because as I understand it, he wanted to show how a driven urban vigilante (mask, martial arts, gadgets, mission to find a killer that the police have given up on) would actually be a repulsive, antisocial, friendless, smelly, twisted human being that you really wouldn't want to know.
So I believe Rorschach was meant to set up expectations by using an archetype of the hard-ass, cool-as-ice vigilante, and then undermine it by saying, here's what that guy would actually be like; kind of pathetic and messed up.
Unfortunately for Moore's intentions, I don't personally feel that side of Rorschach outweighed the other side (hard, driven, cool-looking, uncompromising). Even in the late stages of the book, Rorschach still gets the staccato, hard as nails dialogue, he still gets to face down his enemies even when he's outnumbered, he still has a great visual look about him, he still sticks to his principles and comes across (to many readers, I think) as stubbornly heroic.
Part of the problem is that Gibbons' depiction of Rorschach (and here is where I think the film does it more successfully) never really gets across the grubbiness and stink of the character. Yeah, people say he smells and has a creepy voice, but his mask is always a pristine black and white.
Another issue is that when he shows Rorschach as the short, ginger-haired Kovacs and delves into his origins ~ a sequence presumably meant to undermine the coolness of the street-vigilante archtype, by revealing Kovacs' platform shoes, runtish stature, pathetic half-used bottle of cologne and strikingly ugly face (I believe the book puts it this way) ~ I think we actually come to sympathise with him more.
A lot of people who read superhero comics have experienced bullying. Kovacs is a kid who was bullied and fought back, in the way a lot of comic-readers might have fantasised about. He's the social reject who made himself into a figure of some stature, someone with a reputation.
And his weak, pathetic aspects, I think, just give him a vulnerability that makes him (again, this might just be me) seem hurt, broken and more forgiveable. If he'd remained the hard, masked vigilante for 12 episodes, I think his bigoted ranting would be harder to take than it is once we've seen him crying and snotty, being beaten up by cops as he yells desperately for his "face", because it's the only face he can bear looking at. I think seeing him as an abused, lonely kid encourages us to understand and accept his messed-up adult attitudes and relationships, more than we would if he'd remained masked, enigmatic and costumed.
Maybe I'm soft ~ and being soft on a character with that kind of belief system is, I know, a problem ~ but when Rorschach holds out his hand to Dan, saying "I know it is difficult sometimes", I find that one of the most moving parts of the book. |
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