Monday, March 16, 2009

Watchmen and Architects

We are all humans and so are the super humans, and to err IS human. But in a world that exists at the end of History 'to err' is filled with complications that can only be observed and comprehended as a viewer of the film. But in order to achieve such a vantage point of being able to comprehend (the oppression that one is inflicting and is being inflicted on) the choice lies between Rorschach and Dr Manhattan. Rorschach with his moral absolutism, operates at the scale of streets, alley ways and trail along local networks, thereby clearly defining the crime and judging the criminal. But at the same time he cannot have the view of geography and time as Dr. Manhattan, whose world unlike Rorschach's clear mirrored inkblots is filled with a spectrum of colours that he himself has no control over.

His powers make it necessary for him to intervene and his interventions provide him the power; Somewhat like Rem Koolhas's interventions in the Middle East. His ability to enter and cater to a closed circuit of rich oil barons, sheikhs, dictators in the middle east, provide him the power to voice opinion through his projects, but this voice is at the expense of supporting a dictatorial regime with all its flaws. These interventions provide his parallel journalistic endeavours with fertile data and statistics that further build a complex pattern of the world. A view informed by networks within inaccessible information circles of capital and power, highly skilled labour, hired specialised consultants and finally a lot of support lobbies among various states.

But at the end when the two dialectics meet and the choice of Right to Information has the possibility to result in complete chaos, the days of the small but sternly aligned architect are over. Rorschach loses his capacity to intervene and dies a hero. I wonder what the film would be like if instead of Rorschach, Dr Manhattan would had been the narrator/ the sutradhar...

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