#Rorschach symbol from watchme movie#

If the idea of the costumed vigilante, superpowered or not, hadn't already been a pop cliché by the time she was writing Atlas Shrugged, it would fit Rand's sense of romantic symbolic imaginative power to have, say, Ragnar commit his piracy-for-justice under a colorful masked identity similarly, John Galt's science-fictional invention could have turned him into a Dr. When you think of Rand's aesthetic, it seems appropriate somehow that Rand should have invented the superhero.

#Rorschach symbol from watchme movie#

In every single war ever waged, governments make the kind of moral judgment that Watchmen's villain does, and the movie and comic, with Rorschach's help, make us wonder whether those decisions that governments-and superheroes-often make really are tolerable. The opposition between Rorschach and the villain is easy to read as that of individual, true justice versus the state's collectivist version. Indeed, given Rorschach's contempt for what he sees as the moral stink of the Watchmen world, it's easy to imagine that he might have been willing to accept that each and every person killed in the movie's central scheme might have actually deserved it (as Rand did in a smaller-scale disaster Atlas Shrugged's train wreck scene).īut Rorschach would deliver that as a personal, individual judgment-breaking what bones needed to be broken with his own hands-not from a world away with indiscriminate techno-gimmicks and no sense of actual individual guilt. A succeeds in rescuing, unlike the kidnapped girl central to Rorschach's character arc, who ends up food for vicious dogs) that 'I won't help anyone who believes he has a right to hurt you!…I only care what happens to the innocent and the good people! I treat people the way they act toward human life! I grant them what their action (sic) deserve, have earned!'īoth Rorschach and Watchmen's villain (who I'll avoid naming, for slight spoiler protection purposes) are willing to kill in the name of what they think is a higher good. A refuses to save a kidnapper dangling above certain death, he informs the little girl (who Mr. (And unlike Rorschach, he doesn't work in the slightest as an actual believable character one could care about.) When Mr. A is far more dispassionate than Rorschach-he's a purer representation of a perfect Objectivist as opposed to what a real one might actually be like. Thus, Rorschach is Moore's vision of an Objectivist superhero.ĭitko's Mr. Reality is what it is, Rand held, and an objective set of moral imperatives follow from that. A.' That's A as in, A is A, the essential statement of Randian Aristotelianism. After getting out from under Stan Lee's thumb at Marvel Comics he decided to let his Rand flag fly, first with Charlton's Question and later in his self-published 'Mr. In that conception, the Rorschach character would have been The Question-a character created by Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-Man.ĭitko was a huge fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism. In the original conception of the comic book Watchmen, the characters were going to be old Charlton Comics second-string superheroes that D.C. He lives by his objective understanding of right and wrong. Rorschach's mission, from which he will not diverge, is to give it to them, no matter what the demands of law, government, or social mores. It's appropriate in that the character is obsessed with stark duality-black and white-and ironic in that the mushy 'it's whatever you see' vagueness opposes his very definite vision of what's what in the world: There are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys deserve to get it, good and hard. But applied to his character, the name is both appropriate and ironic. The surface meaning of the name is visually obvious-his mask contains swirling black blots on white that remind one of the psychological testing mechanism.

The moral center of Watchmen, both the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the new, much-discussed movie based on it premiering today, is a curious and prickly masked vigilante who goes by the name Rorschach. SPOILER WARNING: This article contains significant plot and denouement revelations regarding the graphic novel and movie Watchmen.