Watchmen Chapter IV: Watchmaker

IV.3.6-7 The end of the watchmaker's trade: Jon Osterman watches his father scatter watch parts over Brooklyn.

IV.6.5 The "fat man" smashes Janey Slater's watch, triggering the events that will lead to Jon's discorporation and transfiguration. "Fat Man" was the nickname of the first atomic bomb tested at Los Alamos, and also of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

IV.7.1-2 Janey's watch (strongly associated with the beginning of their sexual relationship) is the immediate cause of Jon's transforming accident.

IV.7.9 Janey can't watch Jon's "accident"

IV.8.4: "The light is taking me to pieces."

Compare another, later vision of apocalypse (James Cameron's from Terminator II: Judgement Day):

IV.9.7 "Really, it's just a question of reassembling the components in the correct sequence..." Like watch repair, right? Or like being a detective, or a reader of this kind of fragmented, artfully scattered text...

IV.10.4 Jon manifests himself above the heads of his colleagues.

IV.11.7-9 Janey: "I mean, I don't know what you are. Nobody does. You were disintegrated, you put yourself back together... They say you can do anything, Jon. They say you're like God now." Jon (next panel): "I don't think there is a God Janey. If there is, I'm not him. I'm still the same person. Nothing's changed. I still want you..." (next panel) "I'll always want you." "As I lie I hear her shouting at me in 1963; sobbing in 1966. My fingers open. The photograph is falling..."

IV.12.5-6 Jon corrects the inaccurate atom-symbol on his costume, engraving the new symbol (the hydrogen atom) on his forehead.

IV.13.1 Dr. Milton Glass is quoted as saying, "The superman exists and he's American."

IV.15.6 Dr. Manhattan produces lithium for electric batteries, putting the original Nite Owl out of the auto repair job he had planned for his retirement. Hollis Mason the eternal loser.

IV.16.5 Dali's painting of melting watches on Dr. Manhattan's wall. Surrealism and the image-product of a tormented imagination. How do these relate to comics?

IV.20.1 Dr. Manhattan as the scourge of Vietnam.

IV.20.2 Vietcong desire to surrender to Dr. M. personally. "I am reminded of how the Japanese were reported to have viewed the atomic bomb, after Hiroshima." Dr. Manhattan is the hydrogen bomb in human form.

IV.22.4-6 "You will all return to your homes." Dr. Manhattan speaks performatively. What he says is not a request, it is a prediction. The man who sees the strings.

IV.24.7 Time magazine cover for Hiroshima Week edition (August, 1985): the blasted pocket watch; time stopped. The defining moment.

IV.26-27 Dr. Manhattan creates his crystal palace out of the red Martian sand. Note how in IV.26.3, all that is visible are the tips of the vertical beams -- tips that look rather like the nose cones of missiles. This is paradigmatic: all through Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons keep trying to trick you into thinking it's the end of the world.

IV.27.8 Having brought his palace into existence, Dr. Manhattan asks, "Who makes the world?" In the standard catechism used by the Roman Catholic Church and some other denominations, the question is "Who made the world?" To which the orthodox reply is, "God made the world."

IV.28.1 "...a clock without a craftsman..."

IV.28.4 "But it's too late, always has been, always will be too late."

IV.28.6 Einstein: "I should have become a watchmaker."

IV.Doc.1 Dr. Manhattan: Super-Powers and the Superpowers, by Prof. Milton Glass (Jon Osterman's superior at Gila Flats).

IV.Doc.2 "Now we have a man to end wars."

IV.Doc.3 "I never said 'The superman exists and he's American.' What I said was 'God exists and he's American.' If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments' consideration, then don't be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."

IV.Doc.3 "We have made a man to end worlds."

IV.Doc.5 "We are all of us still living in the shadow of Manhattan." -- As Jon Osterman did as a child, growing up in Brooklyn...